Australopithecus

My skin is turning a grey color, much like an old sick man’s skin does, right before he dies. Too much of me is like an old sick man, it’s really strange. I have an old man’s skin, knees, back, hearing, and memory. What’s next, libido? Maybe. Probably. Definitely.
This night obviously belongs to Lavos. But what about tomorrow night, or the night after? Or our children’s children?
I was talking to my mom earlier about my current life. I had just gotten home from my first class, and she tried to get on my case about getting a job, as she usually does whenever we make eye contact. And I finally realized the truth about why I haven’t gotten a job, that really should have been obvious from the start. I don’t care about it. I don’t care about any of this. My entire life to date has been me, pretending to care about school, and pretending to care about graduating or working or driving or… anything, really. The truth about my life is, I really don’t give a shit about much. I know I’ve said that before but it has never really clicked in my mind until now.
People ask me what I want to do with my life, and I answer, “I don’t know.”
Well, I guess the honest answer would be that I don’t care. I don’t care what I do with my life, frankly I think I would be unhappy with any career or calling. The only thing that has kept me in school is a desire to not disappoint my parents, and a fear of whatever invisible consequences my dad has in store for me if I drop out completely.
I don’t understand the minds of people who care about things. There is very little that actually matters to me, and most of it is stuff that really shouldn’t matter to anyone, like how my shirt fits me, or the symmetry of my coffee table.
I don’t really have a whole lot more to say about this. I told my mom (and later Katie,) that I am contemplating perhaps looking for an internship at a graphic design or publishing company or something. That might hold my interest a little better than nothing, which is what I am currently doing.
It is kind of depressing to realize that the big monumental reason for my lifetime of shining failure is exactly what the guidance counselor told me in fourth grade: that I just don’t care about schoolwork. But, I guess she was right. I don’t care about much of anything (except maybe being redundant, har har) and I don’t see anyway to change that.
So that’s where I am now. Nowhere, that is. I don’t want to do anything with my life but sleep, watch tv, and of course, make sweet sweet whoopie; and I can’t really think of any reason why I should do more than that. Except surviving, but that really only pushes you so hard.
Of course, throughout all of my violently inactive life I would want to continue drawing. I love to draw, and I always will, that’s a given. And of course, there will always be reading, and to a lesser extent, writing. But those are just the exercises of my mind, in spirit I will always be lying there lazily, thinking about how well my shirt fits and dreaming up new ways to organize my coffee table; and all will be right with the world.

I got in a fight with my father today, which is extremely rare. I think this counts the second actual fight that we have ever had. It was so stupid, too. He was trying to pull the refrigerator out of it’s space in our kitchen so that he could try to re-hook up the ice-maker thing. Of course, he didn’t try to do this until he was five minutes late for work. So he can’t do it, obviously, because of his sciatica; and he calls me to help. I tell him that pulling it out at all is pointless because Pastor Thom (who was installing it for us) had said it doesn’t work yet, though I could not recall exactly why (Or if, in fact, it was actually true. It just came to mind.) Anyway, he is in a pretty foul mood already and starts arguing with me about doing it anyway because we need to fix it. This causes my temper to flare up, because I have one of the worst tempers in the world, and then we start yelling at each other until I drop the words, “This is a waste of time.”
At which point he explodes and starts saying all this stuff about how horrible it is for me to say that him trying to improve his House is a waste of time. Also, that my time isn’t exactly precious because I sit around all day doing nothing (True enough, one point for Dad.) to which I replied that his time was precious because he was already late for work. Then he said that I don’t care about the house and I don’t do anything to help or something and I said, “I am glad to see how you feel about me, Dad. I am done talking now.” And went into my room.
Not only do my Dad and I very rarely have fights, but they have NEVER been as pointless and heated as that kind of fight. My Dad prides our family on being too intelligent for that, our fights are usually more like chess games (well, when they aren’t just petty, “NO! I don’t WANNA!”s).
Anyway, it was thoroughly depressing. He came to my room and apologized, and I said, “That’s fine.” I didn’t apologize myself, though of course I should have, because I am a mean and angry bastard.
He also lost his hat. He’s not really having a good day.

Right. So the general shitty tone of the night seems to have been set, and I don’t really think I can shake it. What’re you gonna do though, right? The answer is nothing. That or pop perk. I’ve had a headache all day, might as well dull the pain both physically and mentally, right?
The answer here is, “Sure, John. Do what you like, we don’t mind.”
I picked up my old habit of doing crazy black sketches with a uniball pen. It is so fun, but it’s annoying because, as fun as the pictures are to draw, there isn’t whole lot you can do with them afterwards; and sometimes I get my best stuff out that way. Depressing, no? You’re right, it isn’t.
You can tell my creativity is lacking tonight, stringing thoughts together right now isn’t exactly going well for me. But then again, it never really is.
I want to take a shower, because I didn’t take on today and I feel all gross. I probably won’t, though. I’ve been very lazy lately. Laziness begets laziness.
God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son.”
And what does Bobby Dyls have to say about this? I will cut this joke off right here, as it is past it’s prime.
A young man I know, who’s name shall go unspecified, has recently uncovered an ancient Egyptian brand of nicotine known as Rah-o-dyn. Evidently, if you smoke it you become a GodKing. He decided to take a little toke, and now he is ruler of the promised land. Who’da thunk, huh?
This isn’t quite a page, but I don’t really feel like typing anymore. There wasn’t much Journally about this entry anyway, so I’m already breaking the rules.

My bed-room just had it’s nightly nocturnal emission, spurting a gooey mess of John all over the computer desk, leaving tiny wriggling organic jet planes wriggling into the interior of the internet and impregnating cyberspace with it’s cozy seed. How is that for graphic?
I was trying to go to sleep and I found my pillow plagued with loud thoughts. I thought to myself, “Perchance I will whisk my pillow away and build a home for it in the stars.”
Then I came online. Nobody was here, so I decided that I would make my second “journal” posting, as promised. I am, after all, supposed to put one up every night. I still haven’t figured out exactly what I want the tone for this thing to be, though. It’s mainly a challenge for myself, to see if I can organize my thoughts and put them somewhere instead of just letting them stew and boil away into nothingness in my head.
I’ve been thinking a lot about things, lately. Things like love and time and death. All those things that I really don’t have a whole lot of control over. Things I have NO control over, to be exact. I was thinking about love because I don’t know what it is, I was thinking about time because it seems to be kicking my ass, and I was thinking about death because my imagination is morbid and I am pretty much always thinking about death.
I have a lot of friends, and I have a girlfriend whom I care for a lot; and I say that I love them. I say it all the time. And… I do believe that I do. The thing is, I still end up feeling lonely, despite the love I feel that I have for them, and the companionship that they so willingly offer me. I could pine for any woman in the world, I could be jealous of any friendship in the world. I often do, and I often am; but it’s not because I lack those fulfillments in my life. I am lonely because, although on the exterior I have an unlimited supply of warmth and comfort from all those people that I know and care about, on the inside I do not have myself. I do not know who I am, I cannot connect with my own mind. If I do not have the love of myself, how can the love of others ever entirely fill that space?
That’s what makes people get greedy. People like Me, inside our chests is this huge black hole that wants to suck the love out of anyone it can because it’s own love is in short supply; that’s something that can make us clingy and it can destroy relationships and lives. I guess you can just chock that up to another lil’ problem made to torment the lives of Man, though. It seems everybody has it, but nobody knows how to deal with it.

Tomorrow I plan to go to apply for jobs at Wendy’s, and at Jersey Mike’s. I need a job really badly. I think of the two I would prefer to work at Jersey Mike’s, because it is a far smaller chain and I think it is an individually owned and managed franchise. I don’t want to punch in to another international corporate powerhouse, or allow my name to be stamped on the employee roster of the Beast and be forever denied entry into the break-room of righteousness.
This is my attempt at being honest and uncensored, and it is just coming out as a whiny and hackneyed attempt at depth. That is okay, though, I will press on. If at my heart I am just a whiny hack who craves depth, then so be it. I will just have to accept my whiny hack-dom and move on.
Having my hair short makes me look like a nazi. I probably should have gone to a barber or something to get it cut, but I was trying to get it over with before I lost my resolve. I have finally come to terms with having short hair, now. It is a crazy thing, but I think it actually works as “Me”. What the hell do I know, though?
Tim raised an interesting point the other day. He said that adults (which I now resemble) can sport a larger array of hairstyles then kids can. That is probably why I don’t look as bad with this as I did when I was a younger lad. Or maybe I do look as bad, and I am just better at lying to myself. Either way, it’s a good time.
I left my cinnamon at the apartment. I will have to go back and get it tomorrow morning, if I want to have a cappuccino or anything. I had to use this other cinnamon this morning that really sucked, it was “chopped” and not “ground”, and it had a built-in grinder on the bottle that didn’t really work well, so I was chewing tiny bits of spiciness in my coffee. No fun, no fun at all.
Originally I was just going to write one page per night, but now I am going to revise that into just a minimum, because I feel very loquacious right now. I am pretty doped up, you see. I take Percoset when the pain in my legs or head (or both) gets unbearable; though I am also guilty of taking it if I get very emotionally distraught and feel like avoiding the inevitable contemplation of suicide by getting a little dopey. Personally I think the benefits outweigh the costs, but I am sure there is a host of people who disagree with me; which probably would include myself were I not currently “under the influence.”
My nostril hair has been growing at an alarming rate recently, and we no longer have the barber’s scissors that we used to, so I’ve just been pushing it into my nose and hoping it doesn’t pop out in the middle of some awkward social function. It inevitably always does, though, which is all right. My appearance has never been anything of much merit anyway.
In any time of great stress, my face suffers this thing I have come to know as, “Massive Skin Death.” It means that the skin on my face both dries out horribly AND somehow grows a mess of pimples and blackheads. Which means that I can do one of two things. I can continue to fight the acne that has been my constant opponent since the tender age of nine, sacrificing ENTIRELY any kind of comfortable life I may have previously had until my body naturally fights things off or summer rolls around and my skin starts to turn all spicky again; OR I can NOT fight the zits, and leave my face to it’s own devices with the most minimal amount of washing until the natural oils can build up and repair it. The latter, of course, gives my arch-nemesis Acne another foothold from which to bombard me, but it also restores comfort to my life in a pretty speedy manner. That is to say, maybe 8 days.
This time, though, I have been trying something different. I have been cutting back my acne battle a bit, using the “pore-cleansing and emasculating” gel that I have every other day as opposed to daily, as well as postponing shaving until it is absolutely necessary and using a lot of hydrocortisone, which fixes EVERYTHING. It isn’t a quick process, though. It means I won’t have to wait until my natural spickiness comes out in the summer months, but it is going to take a couple of weeks for things to get back to normal.
And this is only the first step in the process I like to call, “John’s Cycle of Stress.”
Among the next 7 steps are (in no particular order) an increase in insomnia, oversleeping, lack of appetite, increase in appetite, increase in masturbation, hallucinations of talking hornets, and finally: temporary blindness (after shooting myself in the face with wasp-killer).
Har Har. In all honesty, though, I can feel myself beginning to slide into the spiraling and poorly built escalator that leads into the winter of my discontent. Or whatever.

Dante, huh? Gotta get me some of that.

This is when I begin to lose my train of thought, and my high. A mind is a terrible thing to waste, you know. “Shatter my brain.” Said the rice-a-roni silkworm.
There are things I write sometimes that don’t seem to make any sense, even to me. That line just now? That was one of them. All these people think all these things, and every one of them is wrong. It is a very large question then, it seems, what exactly is the truth? I think the truth, in a nutshell, is that no matter how much we think about it, and no matter how certain we are of what’s right, we will Never, in this life, know ANYTHING for real. That is the only truth I can really glean from my very short and shallow dive into the human experience. Don’t take my word for it, laws no. All I am saying is that there is too many conflicts on this earth for any person to have anything exactly right. By “things” I mean… philosophies, and… what not. Who knows, man? Fuck that, man, it’s all in your interpretation.
Alright. I guess this is the end of the journal for tonight, as I can no longer think of anything to write. That’s what I said I was going to do, though, right? Empty my brain. Even though it doesn’t make any sense. Pointless it may be, but I feel better.

This is the first post in a series of 1 page long nightly posts, created in order to get my thoughts in order. Read 'em, if you like.

Begin!

This begins paragraph one of page one of chapter one of a more candid and in-depth not-currently-online diary that I am composing in order to pass the time here at my family’s new location; which, until I get a car, is isolating me from all other branches of humanity.
It is twelve-thirty AM, which means several things. Foremost among them is that, after a long day of existing, my left knee has decided to hurt like a crank-addicted-son-of-a-bitch. I, therefore, must wear a slightly too tight knee brace that makes the crank-addicted-son-of-a-bitch joint a bit more bearable, but not much.
The point of this writing I have just decided to undertake is to allow my brain to speak out in the most uncensored and honest way possible, thereby freeing myself from all the pressure of containing thought, and shackling everyone else into the blood spattered chains of my overactive imagination. Thus beginning now, there will be no re-writes, no corrections—and except for the changing of minor spelling errors, this journal will remain as is. What comes out comes out, and I will not apologize for it. Read on, if you will. But beware, the footing is tricksy.

My mother’s leg has recently swollen up to roughly the size of a cumbersome 1986 Buick, which worried everyone in my family, mainly my father. My father, as a nurse, knows a good deal about medicine and what-have-you, and was able to identify her swollen leg as a “Possible DVT” (or “DBT”, I was never quite sure) which can cause a heart attack, stroke, or other serious complications if left unchecked. She is making an unexpected trip to the hospital tonight to get it looked at.
I didn’t expect to eat any cookies tonight, but here I am, eating cookies. That is my interesting life, man, I get shocked if I unexpectedly eat cookies. I mean, it is no one’s fault but my own; but seriously, who would have expected COOKIES? Of all the god-danged things in the world: Cookies?! Man, I am one cuh-razy cat, but Aye n’Aye been in Babylon, too long.
See, that’s the kind of thing that happens to me. I get sidetracked while walking on this great and glorious highway of life, and I go down these mysterious dark boulevards, in which hide hobos of pestilence, and prostitutes of devastation. Those prostitutes aren’t your normal prostitutes, these prostitutes know how to share. They allow each and every human being a fair share of their devastation, as long as each of us, in turn, doles out a dose of devastation to the nearest long-haired housecat. You see, long-haired houscats are actually the only thing preventing the earth from sinking into the murky waters of apocalypse. Housecats, and the ineptitude of the vile devastating prostitutes. Devastalicious. Desticious.
My challenge to myself grows ever longer. I now plan to force myself into typing one page a day, at 11 font, single spaced. I think that is a good idea. It is nothing compared to what Dickens would write daily, and I’m ten times better than Dickens, right?
Who cares though, honestly? Dickens can kiss my ass and call my Aunt Francine De Nixioux de Monoie a porpoise here to save the day, for all I care. Then again, she is an aquatic mammal. Which raises the eternal question: What exactly is a mammal? I know what a “mammalian” is. But we don’t talk about those. I would giggle, but nobody is around to listen to it.
I used this Night-Time Pore Clarifying Gel, from Neutrogena, tonight. I love that stuff, but it seems to dry out my skin pretty badly, I am ambivalent about continuing use, unless something changes soon, OR I am able to find a better set of skin to replace last year’s model. This thing is getting pretty wrinkled, and lord knows how long that could be! My hands have become to create a language all their own, and fly back down to their meadow, to rest in the arms of the sacred middle-aged woman, whose lifesaving housecats know no boundaries against the vast forces of darkness.
Night One: Complete!