Don’t Know What It Means

I wasn’t a very happy teenager. I don’t know when I started being unhappy, probably seventh grade, but then it stuck with me, that unhappiness, down a long dark way and then, back out again, but still with me. I don’t know when I finally wasn’t just operating at a baseline of unhappiness, but eventually it happened.

The times, then, that I was happy felt like deep breaths of fresh air. Like the thing that would have to sustain me when I went back into the dark.

We watched that Wonderstone movie… Burt Wonderstone…. ? Obviously, it wasn’t that great (though not that bad). It suffers even moreso than a lot of movies from “boy meets girl, they fall in love, even though it makes no sense.” But Jim Carrey plays this Cris Angel-type magician who looks like some kind of evil Kurt Cobain.

And it’s hard for me to describe how much that portrayal both pissed me off and had me in awe. It’s like, somehow, in that one performance, Jim Carrey is exactly the kind of Nirvana fan Cobain hated, the guy who likes all their pretty songs and he likes to sing along, but he don’t know what it means. But man, fuck those dudes.

I can’t help, though, wondering sometimes if I was those dudes. Sometimes you need a song before you’re the kind of person the song was intended for. You need the song to work on you, even if you don’t know it yet.

I remember hearing Nirvana for the first time and feeling like it was a transmission from an alien place where I might be understood, if I could get there, if only understood by myself.

I don’t really have a point. I just thought Carrey’s performance was brilliant and uncomfortable.

An Office of One’s Own

I’m still trying to settle on the problem of how to write here at home when the Butcher is here. And I’m thinking of actually setting up the den like a den. Using it as an office. Which would mean cleaning it out somewhat and putting the drums away. But would also mean, I think, moving the desk so that I could look out the window.

I need to be making a list of thing that need to be done at work, too, when it comes to moving offices. One thing I like about how my office is set up now is that I don’t feel like being at my computer means having my back to the world. But it then means, when people come to talk to me, I have to look at them around my computer. I’d like to find some way to both have my computer facing out and be able to meet with people without barriers between us.

It’s weird to think about how I want to inhabit a space. Mostly, I just let the Butcher figure out how things in a room need to go and settle in to whatever he’s figured out. I guess I could do that for the offices, too. Ha ha.