Entertainment For the Braindead – Run
I’m a sucker for haunting female indie vocals and lyrics about being a terrible person.
Her work is fully downloadable for free under a creative commons license.
Listening to the album Hydrophobia right now and it’s beautiful.
How To: Interact with a Depressed Person
Via http://http://www.robot-hugs.com:
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I’ve been largely AWOL from gchat and facebook this past week, which is atypical for my internet-addicted ass.
This weekend, I got a few text messages from my usual buddies wondering what I was up to and if I was okay.
I am not okay and don’t have any advice for them to give me, but It was nice to know that people notice when I’m not around. (Just for the record, I’m only a little bit of a creep and/or weirdo.)
I’d also like to note that I’m happy to see webcomics lightening up serious topics and getting more exposure and understanding for mental health issues like anxiety and depression.
And to my depressed internet, buddies out there, also hibernating for the winter: Surround yourself with friends (if you’re up to it) and love yourself.
A Perfect Circle New Song 2013 – “By and Down”
A Perfect Circle released a studio version their first new song in 9 years: “By and Down.”
I was hoping this would be the first track of a whole new album, because the music gods know that rock really needs some help these days, but alas, no word yet. A Perfect Circle is releasing a greatest hits album titled Three Sixty in November, with this track as the only new addition.
(A “Best Of” album seems obsolete to me in this digital album age, but who knows, maybe it’ll attract the attention of a younger generation who missed some good fucking rock in the early 2000s.)
It’s not as aggressive and powerful as some of their older stuff, but still the best thing I’ve heard in Alt Rock in a long time.
A Perfect Circle – “By and Down” (Full Studio Version)
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Not much of my high school iTunes library stands the test of time, but APC’s The Thirteenth Step remains one of my favorite albums ever.
So I hope this track is the first of many more to come from APC.
Vietnam War Poetry
Depression has been kicking my ass recently, if it wasn’t obvious already by my normal political commentary having been replaced with long, introspective ramblings about love and sadness.
[Corey Booker is a Senator, and this is one of the few times I really wish I was still a resident of New Jersey. Oh, and apparently the shutdown is ending. Good week for Democrats.]
Here’s a poem that I didn’t write, but saved a long time ago and still like.
—
khe sanh rivers
by shotgunmessiah. Sep 16, 2003
sometimes when i remember how it was
I’m drinking cheap liquor from a tin cup I
had from the war and I can’t hold it
steady and it falls in the floor, spills out and
runs in the cracks in the wood and
it reminds me of that time in Khe Sanh when it
rained all day, pissing down in the muddy streamers
and collected in little pools and
wore tributaries in the mud and when it
stopped
there was a little girl skinny and naked with
just a rag wrapped around her waist and
she huddled in the waste and shit of the village
when I walked by she looked me with
these huge eyes driven deep in her face and
she held out her hand and said probably the only
word she knew “water” and again
“water” so I give some water in the tin cup I had
and she holds it and stares at her own big
brown eyes and then she crouches down
in the mud and carefully pours the water out
into the ground and flows in the rutted cracks
and makes little rivers
and when they ask me what it was like
I say “follow me” and take a cup and
fill it with water and
I go outside and pour it out in the ground
and they say “what does that mean” and I
point at the water trickling dirty through
the cracks and I say “that’s what it means”
“that’s what it’s about”
and they say I’m crazy and they
go away and leave me dripping water
on the cobblestones and laughing and
there was a little girl in Khe Sanh
who knew the truth even though
she was blown to hell the next day
Notes on Sadness, Death, and Depression
I know the seasonal sadness is kicking in because everything feels like a chore.
I have a ticket for NY Comic Con Thursday and I don’t really want to go. I had plans for a Mako Mori cosplay, but I don’t think I can afford to get my hair relaxed at the moment.
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It’ll probably cost around $100 in this city. I’m having trouble justifying dropping that amount on credit for hair, but I also already have my ticket and already have most of the outfit.
Decision-making is hard.
My ex said he like me because of my “emotional nakedness.” He was ER doctor. He wasn’t into unnecessary suffering, so he would often talk families into pulling the plug on their demented, elderly who were dying and in pain. He’d come home after his 14-hour long residency shifts, and he’d be too tired for sex so we’d spoon on his couch while he talked about who he “killed” that day. I loved him a lot, but it didn’t work out because he wanted to have babies.
I turn 25 in a month, and I’m thinking about going up to Ithaca for my birthday. I had my best birthday up there when I was 21. I want to relive the upstate experience, which mostly involves being drunk and communing with nature.
I had the SAT scores and leadership cred to get into Cornell, but I didn’t apply. Instead I went to Cornell’s bastard sister school, Wells, because I wanted to surround myself with people I was better than. It was a decent strategy until I got horribly depressed and failed a literature final and then dropped out.
I applied to CUNY after that, for the very flippant reason I was dating a guy in NYC, but then Wells withheld my transcript because they mistakenly believed I owed them money. That eventually got worked out, and now I live in NYC, but I still haven’t gone back to school.
I miss driving, but I do not miss car insurance premiums.
I was once involuntarily hospitalized for marking a “5” on a 1-5 survey in a medical study. The question was something like, “How often to do you think about death?” I tried to explain to the doctors that mostly I got lazy towards the end of the survey and there were legitimate philosophical reasons for thinking about death, and they wrote down in the report that I was “being defensive.” I shut up when I realized things were going poorly and then they said I was, “guarded and evasive” and being “purposefully vague.” I lived a lifetime of Kafka novels that week.
While I was there, one of the many horrible things that happened was when they strapped a schizophrenic, Korean girl named Jacqueline down, just for calling a nurse a “bitch.” They kicked me out of my room so they restrain her to my bed. The entire time she kept screaming for Eddie; she had a tattoo of his name on her ankle surrounded by roses. It’s kinda sad and romantic—being in love with a made-up person.
American society is supposed to be civilized but we are still really barbarians.
Poem For Sunday – “Something for the Boys” by Heather Bell
(CC) Creative Commons, attribution, noncommercial, 2005. Candice Hall.
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Something for the Boys
1. i sure as hell wasn’t east of eden, more like west of grant boulevard in a city that should be burned down. He was test-driving my new car, i was thinking how people are kind of “exit only,” and i’m always the stupid kid jiggling the handle outside for hours.
2. i don’t know if people wear hearts on sleeves anymore. it seems a stupid idea anyway. when you’re drunk and fucking you’re most likely naked too.
3. in the parking lot of walgreen’s an orange cat hit his car’s hood and i jumped, frightened. he was smiling a little when he said he didn’t love me anymore but let’s be friends! let’s get our prescriptions together! let’s be the regularly scheduled program! and still drink pepsi and go to church! in the parking lot of walgreen’s i kept thinking about that cat. like, what if it was homeless. and needed me.
4. i collect magnets on my refrigerator and coffee mugs from displaced little towns. so far i have one mug. and two magnets. i also collect love letters. i have almost the same amount of letters as the amount of blowjobs i have given and handjobs i have given and times i have worked like a drug mule for the united states government. which is not very much.
5. he told me he wanted proof of this love thing i was always talking about. i said here’s your proof you asshole and i flicked him off. some people will just never get it.
6. i just want to love someone like a jew about to be led away to crucifixion.
7. mama tells me its like archeology. at the top is mostly used condoms and old beer bottles. don’t mistake dirt for beauty. unless you want dirt, she says. some people want that, she says. some people do.
8. my most recent finding sleeps in my bed like a roman arch. he told me he might want to live by elephant head road. i think that sounds fine to me. i wonder if you hear them at night, the thunder of their mating so clumsy and outrageous. he says maybe maybe doll baby and trips over our suitcases, laughing.
9. i start collecting postage stamps for all the places we will go. a couple years ago i was dating this guy who had a box in his room labeled “human remains,” but when i opened it there was nothing inside. i’m so glad i no longer know that guy. postage stamps seem much easier to keep track of.
10. i wake up suddenly at four am just to make sure the man i love is still breathing. he finds me in the closet hours later ripping up the love letters, laughing, calling them communist propaganda, mosquito nets, pornographic material. i say look at these, these chain letters. don’t you hate chain letters? so do i. so do i. no one ever replies unless they are really desperate or really in love.
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From Heather Bell’s Poetry Collection: “How to Make People Love You.”
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This is the Ambien Blogging Chronicles.
I may regret this in the morning.
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