The Sisters

The Sisters is an 1884 oil on canvas painting by Abbott Handerson Thayer. It depicts Bessie and Clara Stillman, and was commissioned from Thayer by their brother, the banker James Stillman. It has been cited as one of Thayer's best works, a composition of grandeur.

After studying in New York City and Paris, Thayer took a studio in Brooklyn in 1880, and traveled often, summering for the next few years in Nantucket or Pittsfield, Massachusetts; in 1881 he went to Hartford, Connecticut to paint Mark Twain, and in 1882 he spent the winter in a cottage owned by Henry Ward Beecher in Peekskill, New York. In 1883 Thayer rented a home at Cornwell-on-Hudson, and built a studio on James Stillman's property. It was there that he painted two portraits of the sisters, one of Bessie alone, completed in 1883, and the double portrait, which he worked on until January 1884. Together, the paintings are quite different from his previous portraits, which had featured more opulent wardrobes in keeping with the fashionable style of the Paris Salon— an art reviewer had found fault with the "poor taste" of the glamorous finery of Thayer's 1881 Portrait of Mrs. William F. Milton, and thereafter the artist avoided ostentatious dress.

Dressed in black and set against a muted green background, the sisters are seen in a doorway. Bessie stands in front, her arms down and hands clasped in front of her. Clara stands directly behind, and wraps her left hand around Bessie's waist while resting her upraised right hand on the entryway's frame. The sisters are noble in comportment and remote in expression. The unusual positioning of their figures implies a complex and intimate relationship.

Though the overall impression is successful, the painting has been faulted for lapses in execution. The drawing of Bessie's right forearm is meager, Clara's left hand is weak, and the brushwork throughout is labored. Commissioned portraits were expected to be more highly finished, and although The Sisters was given a place of honor at the Society of American Artists exhibition of 1884, it received harsh criticism for the perceived "flimsiness" of its details. Technical faults notwithstanding, the nobility of its composition has been compared to the portraits of Thomas Eakins.



For their elegance and restrained tones, Thayer's portraits of the mid 1880s, and particularly The Sisters, have been cited as influential to the work of his younger colleague Dennis Miller Bunker.



The moral of the story is that no matter how skilled you are, there are people out there who make it their business to tell you how much better your work could be. And while this article remembers the name of the artist, it has trouble remembering the names of any critics.

It's very easy to tear something down. It's also easy to point at something that has already weathered the storm and say, "this is what greatness is." It's far more difficult to have the confidence and drive to actually create something new. That's why everyone's a critic, and not one of them has ever made something better.

This was a pointless tangent, but I liked this painting, and was extremely annoyed by the blurb. Also proof that hipster as a concept has been and will be around forever. Psh, I liked him before his brushwork was labored. Tch, I've seen better left hands from Matisse, myehhhhh

UGH! I JUST MADE UP FAKE 1800s HIPSTERS AND I HATE THEM!

What To Write...

You may have noticed that I haven't written anything in a while. It's not been for lack of material. Some of the things I haven't covered are:

- My thoughts about my relationship with Felicia, which is well over a year in length
- Matt enlisting in the army, and the process of moving out of my first apartment
- Any real detail into my short time in Rockridge, and moving out of my second apartment
- Moving to my current place, or anything about the place itself and the people who live there
- Any fiction writing development (to be fair, I pulled all this from IC a long time ago now)
- One of my heroes, Patrice O'Neal, died
- I had an idea to write about five music albums and how they've affected my life

I think since the last time I've written a serious piece on here, Alyssa has left the country and come back, Andrew has left the country and come back, Matt has left the state and come back and left again, Roper has moved to SF, Dalder has joined and left my company, and I think Travis has actually left the country at least twice, maybe even three times and come back and left and come back. Lucio has moved in with his girlfriend and is essentially a father now. Everyone's lives have gone through fast changes, big changes. I always wanted this place to be somewhere that myself and the people who are a part of this site could ponder their lives, and frame events in the way they understand them. I think that's difficult to do, by design, and not on just one level. Writing is hard. Being interesting is hard. Not feeling like you're wasting your time, other people's time, it's very hard to overcome that feeling, for me at least. Every update I've written here has been with two thoughts in mind: one, I hope people gain something from this, and two, I don't think anyone is gonna be interested in the slightest. Ostensibly, the idea of this site is to catalog my life and your lives so that we can go back and gain some insight into ourselves. But I don't think that dynamic is present when any of this is actually written. I have always and continue to write with at least one person in mind, with the goal of engaging that person and making their opinion of me higher. That's not what the point is supposed to be, but that's what my brain does, by default: it aims at someone or a group of people, and tries to impress them.

I'm a strange person, and I continue to become stranger. And more so than just being due to natural tendency, I think I'm a product of my time. Communication is changing, becoming something else, and it's changing us too. I am a born recluse. I always have been. I grew up playing with action figures and talking to myself, entertaining myself, comforting myself. And I only stopped doing one of these things, and it was only seven years ago. I was the kid who at six realized that I had irrational fears, of monsters in the closet or under the bed, and the way I dealt with them was by hashing out an elaborate system of protecting myself. I can't control that Jason is sitting in my closet, waiting to stab me, but I CAN control that he can't stab through my blanket, and can't move if my eyes are closed. I created a logic system for illogical thoughts. I used to think (after seeing an episode of Ghostbusters) that my little Ghostbusters car was possessed. So I threw a towel on it, flipped it upside down and jammed up its wheels. Problem solved. I decided at a fairly young age, after seeing so many movies with the theme of "person who doesn't believe until it's too late," that if someone I trusted like my mom said a ghost was trying to kill us, then instead of wasting time going "ghosts aren't real, stupid," I would try to formulate a plan to deal with it. I was 100% ready to try to help my mom kill a werewolf. My method of communication has always been primarily with myself. I have always been self-reliant in that way. Maybe this is why I want to be a writer. I've been actively feeding my own imagination every day that I've been alive.

But even I feel the need to express outward, to a point. Anyone who has spent more than five minutes around me knows that. Once that point has passed, I'm content and I don't need anymore. Used to be if I hung out like two or three times a week with people, I was satisfied and didn't need to see them anymore than that. And if this were still 1987, I'd probably be like most other people: a little bit strange, but forced to communicate on a physical level with people, so it'd stay there. I'd be socially inclined, in the same way that before video games brought all the entertainment into my room, I wanted to throw footballs and play tag.

But communication has evolved on a level that has allowed everyone to compartmentalize, to make bite-sized this entire process and change the parameters by which you are satisfied. To allow people like me to hole up, throw out some lines, and feel semi-relevant to humanity. It used to come out through this site. Check the archives if you need a refresher. This was my long-form twitter a decade before that was a word. But then came social media. Now I can pull out my phone, something I didn't even have as a teenager, and throw out all the mental garbage that before I'd collect and refine into an opinion before unloading in person. The space between thought and expression is about five seconds, where before it could be anything from five hours to three days. In the old timeframe, many thoughts and opinions would be shelved or changed entirely within that span. No more. Now it's thought, grab phone, everyone hears it. This is not good or bad. It's just change.

It's impossible to say how I would be in an earlier time where this wasn't possible. I really can't speculate accurately beyond what I feel like I'd be. And if we all turned out like we thought we'd be, it would be a different world entirely. But the expression format of our time has become social media. I don't know where it goes from here, I can only say what effect it has on me now, the original point that I've spent ten hours to get to. Twitter challenges people in a way that I think many fail to grasp. That is, how do I express myself efficiently, while still putting forth something of value? Twitter has taught me how to get my point across more efficiently, in text. But it's also taught my brain, because of the standards I've always held myself to, that it has to be interesting, funny or thought-provoking. That sounds like I'm kissing my own ass, but what I'm really saying is: it's a product. It's a pitch. It's self-advertising. It has empowered my insecurity. It used to be that I'd write 8-12 paragraphs of shit, trying to impress or make the reader feel like, wow this douche is smart. Occasionally I'd try to make points or really frame out how under-equipped I am for emotional and intellectual cartography. Eventually, I'd work around to a point, and I'd write enough that I'd feel like everyone could find at least some part that was good or relevant or worth reading.

There is no time for that on Twitter. Twitter gives you time enough for a reaction. It's the Omega-13 device of social interactions (yes I did). You don't have the space to question your own point, to bring things around full circle, or to allow yourself room to be wrong. Twitter is the worst part of arguing condensed into a pure form, but while you are using it, you think it's a tool of discourse. You can't hear anyone's point on Twitter unless it's something you already agree with. You can't break down anything in a meaningful way. You can't organize your thoughts, or have any discussion at all. You have enough space for, "I'm right, you're wrong, and an idiot." It's expression in the same way a youtube or Kotaku comment thread is expression: everyone talking all the time, to no one's benefit. But more importantly, it crystallizes your insecurity. Your expression is zero sum. You get one sentence, maybe two, and if you're off the mark, the ENTIRE thing is shit. And you are only summed up by whatever you're posting now. If you were funny or smart yesterday, and you retweet something unfunny or hacky or worse of all, the reader doesn't agree with it (God forbid), that person can and will just unfollow you. It's the social equivalent of saying something and having the person you're talking to, that you may even be friends with, walk away completely and never return.

This is perfectly suited to every human being, ever, and I don't exclude myself. Everyone by default thinks they are right, generally speaking. Fairness is summoned, not pre-existing. But there is no value in being alone and right. I agree with every statement I've ever made on twitter, regardless of what other people thought. So what? What did I gain by expressing it? Hooray, I'm the king of my own world. So is everyone else. See, I'm not on twitter to share. I'm on twitter to express. But it used to be that expression wasn't possible without more than one person, it was a two-way street. There were people to challenge you, to present different opinions, to be wrong and right and smart and stupid. Twitter is great, if all you want to do is present constant sermons to the Church Of People Who Agree With You. I've been doing that for months now, instead of writing here, or hanging out. Because my brain feels like I'm socializing, on the level I always have been. Meaning, I will post something snarky on twitter, tell myself that people are listening, maybe get a snarky reply back by someone who agrees with me, and then not feel the need to go out and interact with them, friends included. I mean, I already have, right? And what has the net result been?

For the past 6-8 months, no one knows shit about my life except on a rudimentary level, and I feel almost completely disconnected from almost everyone.

Part of this is just because that's how life is. The 20s are a time of change, total, radical, absolute change. I'm 25 years old as of writing this. I'm only halfway through the shitty transition from teenager to man. And yet, even though I've undergone so much of it myself, I don't feel connected to it. I feel myself losing not only a connection, but just an edge in general. I lose a little confidence and self-respect regularly. But have I done anything wrong? Like I said, absolute change. There's no way for me to not feel out of my element, and no one out of their element feels strong. I feel like I'm playing a video game with no pause button. So my character is just standing there, while everything else around him is waiting for him to show up and trigger something.

Maybe this is an art vs. contentment thing. My relationship with my girlfriend is so fucking great. I really cannot overstate that. To the degree that I burn 100% of my energy and attention on just being immersed in it. A question I've asked myself many times in the past three months is: what is more valuable, being stagnant and happy, or sharp and insecure? Meaning, writing a book, expressing myself in a meaningful way that garners attention or respect from peers, is that more valuable than literally having a person who's entire existence makes you feel like, "wow, being alive is kind of awesome, actually"? Why do I feel the need to be relevant to strangers? Why is that in my head? Is it a mortality thing? It's the reason that spurs everything I've written, be it fiction or twitter joke. Does this create a moment of value for someone that justifies my existence? SHOULD someone worry about justifying their existence? Why do I need to make something to feel okay about being alive? What is the difference between being an artist and being insecure? Because I'll tell you, the only way the 'justifying' angle even pans out is if I feel like what I put out is good, and that can be shattered by a negative opinion. And most of what I write doesn't even stand the test of time for myself. I'll read old writing and be disgusted, calling it hack shit and rewriting it completely. What is the value in this?

Most importantly, is there a resolution to this problem that doesn't involve just giving up completely and going through the motions? Is there a way to not become just another dead-eyed adult that shrugs instead of has a meaningful resolution? This is the shit I'll be laughing at in my 30s, assuming I don't drop dead of a heart attack or something. These are the musings that replaced my teen shit that I laugh at now. See, I'm doing it right before your eyes and my own. I'm already downplaying the value of my thought process, marginalizing it without gain. There's just no feeding this stupid monster, there's no getting ahead of it. Maybe that's what the dead eyes is, not surrender but willful removal of one's self from his own games. That's the rub, and what makes the question loaded: the insecurity is not either/or. It's present, and feeding it success or personal happiness does not diminish it. If my book got finished and published, my insecurity wants me to believe that that would be the solution to my problems. I'd say, "look, validation. I will now exist forever. I couldn't possibly ever feel insecure again!" But there is no quantity of books or blog posts or overstated twitter opinions that will make that go away. Even if every woman on the face of the earth simultaneously decided that they needed me to go on living, there'd still be that feeling. Validation is temporary. There's some way to navigate this, I just haven't worked it out yet. Maybe I won't. Life isn't long enough for us to figure everything out, and if it were, we'd squander it anyway.

The Last Straw

Hello, my name is B and I live with F at address, in apartment x. I apologize in advance for being forward, but I'm writing this letter to you because I'm at a loss for how to proceed. I've called the property manager, R, 5+ times with no answer, no callback, no indication that he has any interest in returning my calls. He has been dodging or completely avoiding F for some time. I certainly don't expect 24 hour, prompt callback service. I'm not an unreasonable person, and my stepfather is an apartment manager as well, so I understand that it's a lot of work, all the time. But at this point I've left multiple messages on his phone, as has F, and he has thus far ignored us. If he is not the person to communicate with when we are being threatened by our roommates, then we have made a mistake, but our understanding is that we were to forward any grievances to him. He is either unable or unwilling to address this living situation issue which has now officially gotten out of hand.


Since C and N have been spoken with, the situation has not improved. It has rather drastically headed in the other direction. The aggressive behavior began on the day they were given a rules sheet and notified that disobeying the rules would constitute a fee and/or eviction. When N read that notice, she stood outside our door and yelled, “I hate you, you fucking bitch” repeatedly through the door at F after I left for work. On an almost nightly basis since, they have had friends over to party, drink and do drugs until upwards of 4 in the morning, but always at least until 2AM minimum. As I write this letter, I can hear them through the wall, speaking about the merits of smoking pot. The living room is a complete disaster that F and I have long given up on trying to spend time in. There are usually between 5-10 strangers in the house at any given hour, and when I leave at 7:30AM to go to work in the morning, there is always at least one person sleeping in the living room, but it's not uncommon to see up to four on the floor. Recently, either N or C has taken it upon themselves to invite a couple of their friends to live with us without asking anyone about it. I state this because I have seen not one but (2) males who have been sleeping on a bed they set up by the front door every day for well over a month now. I do not know either of these people, and yet they have unfettered access to my home, 24/7. I can only conclude that they have keys to the residence that were made for them by one of the girls, because I've seen them come and leave with keys multiple times, and never in the company of either girl. One of them has recently become physically and verbally abusive towards me and F. He pushed me in the hallway as I was walking to my room without provocation. This is not an exaggeration. We do not interact with these people, and their increasingly aggressive attitude towards us is NOT the result of an argument, altercation, or verbal exchange. I will be forced to call the police the next time this happens. This is not acceptable behavior and I shouldn't have to fear for my or F's safety in our own home.


To review the rules and how they have disregarded them:



“No smoking inside the house or outside the house within 20 feet.” This rule is broken on a daily basis. I have lost count of the amount of times I've smelled pot, and they smoke it openly.

“No graffiti anywhere in the house or outside the house” this is a minor issue that doesn't really affect me personally, but I have observed that our mailbox has been vandalized by one of the girls. I know it was them because they wrote the phrase “Mokesnap” [look it up if you want to know what it means] which also appears in sharpie on a pillow they keep in the living room.

“No party any time during the weekdays or weekend after 10PM” This rule has been broken with a degree of severity that has affected my job performance. They usually begin partying LOUDLY at or after 10PM, and as has been stated above, these parties can and do last until 4AM on a regular basis. I wake up at 7:30AM. That means that for some time I have been getting three hours of sleep OR LESS, every single day of the week. This is an EXTREME source of stress for myself and F.

“No guest sleeping over without approval from management.” this has been covered above, but they have gone well beyond simply breaking this rule, as we now have TWO (2) males who have made a home out of the living room, in addition to the described occurrence of multiple individuals being found in the living room, presumably just falling asleep where they were sitting when they finished partying. These “guests” are exclusively male, and universally hostile to myself and F.

“No drug use or smoking pot anywhere in the house.” This is their drug of choice, although I have no confidence that they are not using other drugs as well.


None of the rules that were sent out to the house have been observed, and indeed, most of them have been broken on a daily basis. The closest they have come to their cleaning obligations is mopping the kitchen floor. I've seen this happen twice since the rules were handed out some time ago. The rest of the kitchen is routinely chaos. The stove is filthy. They leave dishes for days at a time on a consistent basis. The refrigerator is completely stuffed with their food, leaving no room for any other tenants to use. The bathroom is routinely a scene of disarray, and more than once we've had to clean up puke on and around the toilet from one of their guests who has drank too much. As was previously covered, it's not unusual for them to leave laundry sitting in the washing machine for days at a time, resulting in an odor that drifts directly into our studio, in addition to preventing us from doing our own laundry. To add to matters, they have now on quite a few occasions left candles burning near flammable materials such as paintings, envelopes, papers, etc. all night. With their given state of intoxication in the morning, it's only a matter of time until we will have an incident involving fire. They frequently leave all windows open completely to vent the smell of pot out of the living room, giving access to our residence to anyone walking by on the street.


This has all been going on for well over six months.


I'm at a loss for how to proceed. F and I have already submitted our thirty days notice to move, because we can think of no other solution to this problem. And this is not the solution we wanted to pursue. We both enjoy living here. We attempted for quite some time to assist the process of either their eviction or pacification, but the problem has only grown steadily worse. We've been told that N will be leaving “soon,” but this problem involves both of them. If only one of them is evicted, she'll just continue to spend time here in an unofficial capacity, like the men sleeping in our living room.


R doesn't answer my or F's calls, and he made an offer to F to “deal with this situation” by trying to make her “resident manager,” responsible for finding new tenants, presumably so that he wouldn't have to deal with it. To my knowledge, this includes covering the rent for any rooms that she fails to find tenants for. Needless to say, we have both found this so-called “solution” to be insulting. We should not have to take on an additional financial or physical burden to avoid being terrorized in the place we live. If this is a communication error and we have misunderstood the implications of carrying the “resident manager” title, I apologize. I hope you can understand how we might perceive that as being told to “solve this problem ourselves.”


This is not a letter I wanted to have to write. It's actually the last thing I wanted to have to do. I really like living in this house, and with the right tenants, it's a really easy space to keep in excellent, presentable condition. I feel like I just finished moving in, as well. I am an extremely forgiving person and I have made effort after effort to make this situation work. I don't like fighting with anyone. But this situation has become untenable, and I fear that if F and I don't find an alternative, we will be subjected to even greater abuse and consequences. Just to be clear, neither myself nor F ever expected this problem to “go away tomorrow” at any point in time. We understand that the eviction process is arduous, especially in the state of California. However, the complete lack of enforcement of the established rules has emboldened N, C, and the countless people they invite into our home into becoming more and more aggressive with us and the stated rules, and we have run out of patience.


Thank you for your time and the opportunity to live in this home for the amount of time we've had, for it has just as many positive memories as negative experiences.

Should have just taken my phone call, bro.

Amazingly, after sending this letter, I got a call promptly at 10AM this morning, with "R" screaming that he will be in my house with the owner, he will not apologize, and he will tell her I am a liar and not to do business with me.



So I called his boss and told her exactly what he just did.

Osama bin Laden Is Dead

Cue three months of Twitter jokes.

John Ruskin

John Ruskin is a painting of the leading Victorian art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900). It was painted by the Pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais (1829–1896) during 1853–4. John Ruskin was an early advocate of the Pre-Raphaelite group of artists and part of their success was due to his efforts.

The painting depicts Ruskin in front of a waterfall in Glenfinlas, Scotland. Ruskin and Millais spent the summer of 1853 together at Glenfinlas in the Trossachs. Ruskin was especially interested in the rock formations and undertook his own studies of these.

The painting of Ruskin was started during this visit and finished in 1854. The last stages of work on the painting were undertaken in Millais' studio in London. By that time Ruskin's wife Effie had fallen in love with Millais. She left Ruskin and sued him for an annulment of the marriage. She and Millais were married the following year. Millais found it very difficult to be in the same room as Ruskin. As soon as the portrait was finished he broke off contact with Ruskin. Ruskin himself temporarily moved the portrait so that his father would not see it, since he was concerned that he would damage or destroy it.

The moral of the story: never make friends with an artist.

Ron Bennington On Addiction

It's Twosday (Welcome to the Pot Talk Tangent)

"That's just how I am. It's how I comfortably process information."

How long before you analyze that statement?

That aside, to try and answer one of the questions posed "how much power does she have to change how anchored to that perspective she is?"

The power is always there. Whether it's worth it to change the perspective is a different story.

I'd argue that you get older, you get more set in your ways simply because it's easier. You have an established identity, you have habits that are yours, and you feel comfortable with it. Since the teenage years, you've carved out a familiar road in the landscape of the mind. This is your consistent intellectual state.

Suppose you meet an obstacle. Can you plow through it? Or is it easier to bypass it? Or is it so vast a canyon that you'd just rather not deal with it? These challenges can be co-opted, confronted or ignored. Every synthesis takes time and energy that I may not want to expend.

In the end, it is a matter of will (internal or exteral doesn't really matter).

I just want to throw out as a disclaimer that this post does major offroading from the last one, and is only tangentially tied into what I was talking about before. The following is more of a metaphysical discussion I've been unintentionally having with myself in the past few days.

It's more complicated than that. Life is not a three fork road. The outcomes of your choices are just as profound as the choices themselves, and the scenarios themselves. If you take one road, can you take other later? Can you even understand them later? I think people get stuck in their own decisions on a subtler level than what you guys are talking about. I'm not talking about opinion or personality. There are traits that we all have that make us who we are. It would be pompous and silly of me to say, "I'm always going to be who I am today." But there are certain traits, certain ways of being that we all become comfortable with, that we assimilate for long stretches of our lives, sometimes permanently. Not to nerd it up but there's a great line in Dragon Age from Sten that I feel applies here:

"Age by age have men stood up and said to the world, 'From what has come before me, I was forged, but I am new and greater than my forebears.' And so each man walks the world in ruin, abandoned and untried. Less than the whole of his being."

The problem is not that you have an array of choices. It's not that life has insurmountable moments. It's that each decision we make seems to be metaphysically a step away from everything else. Every experience is colored by the fact that it's opposite to every other possible experience in that same realm. And you're shaped just as much by your perception of your choices as the choices themselves. For example, suppose you find out that your girlfriend wrecked your car. You could choose to be angry. You could choose to be forgiving. You could choose to be indifferent. You could hit her. You could try to make her feel better about it. The choice you make in that moment is who you are, but it also decides who you aren't, and who you can't be. You can't, in one life, do and be all of those things with every person and every situation. Having an identity by definition is putting yourself into a container. And how much of its actual flexibility is illusory?

It's very easy to look at your parents and say, "look at the limitations they have that I do not." But those are the words of a limited man. My sister was once complaining about feeling like she was becoming her dad. This is something I of course can identify with, but like me, she couldn't be further from the truth. I said, "If you got locked in a closet, you'd think 'boy it sucks being stuck in here.' If your dad got locked in a closet, he'd think 'boy the world sure is small.'" In the course of trying to escape becoming what you perceive to be 'just like your parents', it's easy to distill the world into those two states of existence, being them and not being them. The challenge of life, or so it seems to me right now, is having an identity that isn't a cage and isn't a sandcastle, and also realizing this. You wander and stop so you can try to understand yourself. But if you don't keep moving, you don't grow. There's no way to get where you're going without missing everything that isn't along the way. When you think about it, there's so little you can accomplish for your own soul in one life. Every person you've ever met in your life, you'll never be, and you'll never fully understand. We've met and will meet people that we agree with, that we share commonalities with, deep personal experiences that we won't have with any other person. But I'll never be you, or have you as a part of my being. Our uniqueness is what makes us interesting, what gives purpose to be exposed to each other in our lives. The fact that I'm not you is why you find me exciting, and vice versa. But uniqueness and growth have a border. It's not a close border granted, but a border nonetheless. The closest I think we can ever get to being each other is emotional understanding, rational understanding. We can't have intrinsic understanding. Not without breaching what makes you unique. An identity to an extent will always be a cage. The most we can aspire to do is enlarge it. When you erode an identity from a cage to a sandcastle, then you make yourself insignificant. You didn't really exist. Your time was wasted. How comfortable should you be with your cage? No matter the size, it's always going to be smaller than the world it exists in, it's always going to sit exactly where it is, no matter how much ground it covers. Is this all a part of a longer journey then? Is all this just a step?

Ron Bennington mentioned something really interesting on the radio the other day. He said the two things all people should experience are a birth and a death. Him and Opie were talking about when Opie's son was born, how it seemed that this weird energy entered into the room when the baby came out. Op said in the first two minutes it was like a stranger entered the room. He thought, with resentment, "Who the fuck are you?" to his own kid in those first moments. And then the feeling completely passed. Ron said he had a very similar feeling. He looked into his own son's eyes and realized that so much of the cement was already dried. This was a personality already made, and the most he could ever do would be to guide it. He said the same thing about death. How, holding someone in your arms as they pass, you can feel their energy leave, that all the power and energy of who they are becomes free. He said after that moment, when you look on the body, you can see its emptiness, you can feel that the person is gone and what's left behind is just the shell. It's strange to think how little we know considering the breadth of knowledge we have. It just seems like we're passing into this weak form, this primitive shell, and through that weakness we gain understanding. But we gain so little understanding. An ancient man has a tattered shred of the universe in him. Most of us will end up with so much less. It's hard to understand what's important in the scale of things. It's hard to know how to feel about yourself and your place in the universe. How many times do we ride this ride? Is it just once, and then oblivion? What do we take from it? What do we give back? It's all a little too heavy.

The Shop Girl

The Shop Girl (La Demoiselle de Magasin) is a painting by James Tissot in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario. The painting depicts a young woman standing inside a shop selling ribbons and dresses. In one hand she holds a wrapped package of newly purchased items. With the other she holds open the door to the store for the viewer to depart. The shop is filled with piles of ribbons. Outside a busy Parisian street scene is visible through the shop windows. A well dressed man stares in through the window and is greeted by the other girl in the shop.

The painting was created in the period 1883–1885. It was created using Tissot's distinctive style of dry pigments and small brush strokes—not impressionism, but still a major departure from the Academy style. It also reflects some of Tissot's main interests, such as the materialistic world of objects and clothing of the late nineteenth century. The painting also employs Tissot's favourite technique of this period of placing the observer directly in the painting, with the shop girl holding the door open for us. It was first exhibited in 1885 at the Galerie Sedelmeyer. It was a part of an exhibit Tissot titled Quinze tableau sur la femme à Paris (fifteen paintings on the woman of Paris). It was his last major exhibition before Tissot embraced religious subjects and spent the rest of his life painting scenes from the Bible. The painting was purchased by the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1968.

Regina Haggo sees this painting as a depiction of barely contained lust. On the floor a fallen ribbon makes a clear heart shape. To Haggo the position of the heart on the floor makes clear this is a baser form of desire. The women are modestly clothed, but Tissot emphasizes their figures, especially the breasts of the woman raising her arms. In this period a woman working outside the home was considered morally dubious. The leering man and the vantage of the viewer can suggest that more than just the clothing is for sale. The man outside may be flirting with the shop girl, but Haggo notes that Tissot emasculated him by having a women's torso overlap his own.

It's Tuesday

It's funny to think that the way I write on this site now will be considered part of an era by me later, and probably viewed with a similar level of distaste as I currently feel about my scribblings as an 18 year old. I was just going back and deleting old entries that are (or were, as extensive editing goes) directly taken from my Assassins story. The more invested I become in my writing, the more vulnerable it feels, the more obligated I feel to protect my characters and their story. Anyhow, some of the posts that incidentally mentioned Assassins were absolutely cringe inducing. It's been said a thousand times by many including me, but it really is amazing how your perspective ages nothing like wine. Perhaps the most simultaneously amusing and sobering aspect is just how unaware you are of how embarrassing you are. Almost everything I wrote as an 18 year old was legitimately how I felt, or if it wasn't, it was how I wanted to be seen, which is in the same vein. The most embarrassing things I've ever written and expressed were pushed out of my heart at the speed of honesty. My perspective of it was totally different. I'll give you an example:


The Seams
April 17, 2005

There are times when I need to speak my mind but I won't. Those times are few and far between, granted, but when they happen they bug me that much more. Then there are times when I do speak my mind, and people invariably get hurt. And I'm not sorry. I'm never sorry. I'm so remorseless you have no idea. I am the embodiment of a complete lack of attachment. And yet I scratch desparately for love. Do I even want that? Or do I just want to not be alone? I ask myself that sometimes, and the answer is both. And one is overriding the other. It's hard to play the altruistic loner. Damn hard. To not settle. To not change to be more appealing to people. To wait for someone who actually meshes with you. It's so easy to just lie and be something you aren't. So easy, you have no idea. I do it every day. EVERY DAY. It's a weakness. The problem is that it drives me insane. I cannot stand the person I am, because no one else can. No, I don't mean that in the way it comes out. This is not a large tragic wail from someone with no friends and no one to lean on. This is one of those little pains that you let bleed out from within. I have friends. I won't lie about that. I won't try to factor them out of the equation to make how I feel seem more dire and apocolyptic. What I'm saying purely concerns that small crack in my life. The one that has fissured into a crevasse. My grades are ass and I don't care. I alienate a friend or two on a regular basis, and I'm upping the ante.


That was me being 100% real, totally genuine. I read it now and want to tag it #whitepeopleproblems. I think immediately, "this is something my sister would write." (She's 16 currently, for the record.) My perspective is blissfully closed. This at the time for me was like an intimate confession. I was sharing something that I just didn't trust people to get, MAAAAAAAN. I wasn't playing the dramatic asshole. I was the dramatic asshole. And there are volumes of this. It's far from an isolated case.

What fascinates me most about it is my complete inability to self-analyze my behavior, my complete obliviousness to just how masturbatory this thinking is. It's a lot scarier to me, the difference between acting this way and thinking this way. Anyone can have a dramatic moment, a moment where you feel boxed in, where no one gets you and you feel like you don't have someone on your side. Thinking this way consistently implies something different entirely. I really was the persecuted artist in my own head. Even though I didn't state it, I really did feel like there was only one Bryan mold, that I exploded out of, and the world wasn't adapting to me. I didn't have to state it, it's laced in every paragraph.

It's pretty funny up until the point where you realize that you could be a more advanced version of the same guy. Is it as noticeable? For me personally and for most people, it isn't. In early adulthood we learn a little grace, a little concealment. Everyone can of course name at least a couple examples from their life of people who lack this, but I think it's fair to say for the most part that as we grow up, our threshold for this overt level of self-indulgence shrinks. Or it mutates into an entity we no longer recognize as self-indulgence. That's a scary thought too. Because honestly for me personally, that selfishness does want to be felt still, sometimes. Just because I recognize it doesn't mean it vanishes. It's important to remember that your mind is the most powerful propaganda machine for your desires that ever will exist. If you want to hate yourself, you'll see irreparable shortcomings in every moment of your day. If you want to feel superior, you'll see those same irreparable shortcomings in others. Your mind will always, at the end of the day, try to achieve the most amount of sentiment, opinion and feeling that is most pleasing to it. Aiming it in the right direction is the everyday subtext struggle.

These are the symptoms of a greater issue. I hesitate to say disease, because who is to say that being a young adult is any different than being a teenager? We're all victims of our eras, subject to the cruel lack of growth that our short time has afforded us. I think it's a mistake to point at a mile marker and tell yourself you've reached minimum safe distance from teenage foolishness. I can, as a 24 year old man, look back on my mentality as an 18 year old and point out how childish it was. I can say, look at how I've grown, and how time has allowed me a perspective that is wider, more understanding and (hopefully) much less susceptible to that young manner of thinking. But I'm sure a 34 year old version of me will say the same thing about the times I'm living now. You're never there, at the end of the road. Because the road and the perceived distance are fluid, and they just change the more you look at them. And that scares me a little bit. How do you to avoid always having that feeling, that you're the same sort of closed perspective thinker that you were as an 18 year old boy or girl?

I think the main struggle of your teenage years is establishing your own identity. We all do it to different levels of aggression, and I think those levels reflect just how embarrassing that era will be later. I know now that I wanted desperately to have and to know my own identity. It's why I started this blog. I had very legitimate moments of despair in social interactions, when I felt like I was being someone that I didn't want to be. I resented others for putting me in that space, even though that's a commonality of life. I forced myself into behaviors that reflected who I thought I wanted to be, even if I wasn't, and tried to take pride in them. I was obsessed with the concept of truthfulness while being an unapologetic liar. And much of that embarrassment is fully documented here. I can and have read it as I've gotten older. As my identity has become more and more established, as some of the concrete has been poured and dried.

How much of that has to do with time? This blog is 8 years old. Have I grown because of all that time? I think it's fair to say that people can squander their time as far as growth is concerned. I have known and do know people that, if they have grown at all, it's been largely imperceptible. Is time a requisite for growth? It seems like the answer is yes. Which is one of the joys of life, no matter how I may fret about it in the above paragraphs. It is undoubtedly rewarding to feel like I've come a distance as a human being. I didn't go to college, I don't have a career, I don't have the classic signposts that people point at to show how far they've come. But I can very clearly feel that I've grown emotionally, I can feel myself constantly taking form. I can put my back to the wall, drawn a pencil line on the wall where the top of my head meets it, and say "See how the years have always taken me higher." I've always worried though, about how much of me is from me, and how much of it is just "this happened to you, so now you're like this."

I guess that's really the kind of thing that really vexes me, and always has in one form or another. How much of me did I choose, and how much of me is unwittingly chosen for me? I'll give you a good example. I was talking to my mother last week about teenagers giving birth to kids. I couldn't understand why a teenager would go through with it. My mom got pregnant with me when she was 18, so she was one of these teenagers. She thinks one of the big problems of why this happens and why the kids turn out crappy is because of how the parents of the teenager act. When she had me, she largely had to rely on herself to take care of me. She was living at home, but she had a job and the most my grandparents ever looked after me was once in a while. The majority of the time she had to find someone else. This really tempered her perspective on this issue. I asked, "You can understand though why a parent would want to help their own child, right?" I probably asked that question three or four times before I got an answer that wasn't a defense of her ideology. She kept saying, "but if they'd do _____ it would be much better." I tried to re-frame the question to be more clear, "Do you see how your own experience has tempered your ideology?" I only really got half of an acknowledgment. She can't change that the experience happened to her. She can't change how deeply it informs her opinion. But how much power does she have to change how anchored to that perspective she is?

This is what scares me: that as I grow older, and I have experiences that inform my opinion, I will lose sight of the validity of other opinions, or be unable to acknowledge the possible weaknesses in my own. It's terribly easy to label things as right and wrong in your head, and while that's something we need socially, I worry about how we abuse that without even realizing it. I couldn't really make my own mother see what I was getting at. She had gone through two decades of experience, and to her that was THE answer. Obviously I'm not saying she's right or wrong. But I think that life is quite often too complicated for those sorts of labels. Will I be able to maintain that distinction when I'm 34, or 48, or 62? Is it more advantageous, or just easier, to be limited in that way when you have children? I know explaining an abstract thought is like pulling teeth with wet hands, but does that also change how you think? This I believe is the struggle of early adulthood, at least it seems to be mine thus far. To be able to observe my behavior of the past, understand it, and resist lapsing into it again in one form or another. Because no one is better at tricking you than yourself, and no one has more to gain from it.

A Binary Choice

I decided recently to delete my Yahoo email account. The account security for Yahoo is, well, shit. There's no SSL encryption for anything beyond initial sign in, and of the three email accounts I've had in my life, it's the only one that I've ever received spam FROM MYSELF from multiple times, even after changing the password. Not even Hotmail is that bad. I don't talk much about this, because I haven't talked about what started it really, but suffice to say it's a story for another time.

Deleting a years-old email account is a bit of a process. Not just in figuring out how to physically remove it (Yahoo makes the process itself unintuitive for what I feel are fairly obvious reasons), but in how and what to keep from it before you go. There's receipts, notes, registration information. Things you can't just delete, without possibly causing yourself a headache later. There's also something else, that is much more nostalgic than you'll probably initially realize: old correspondences. They're a funny thing. In the time that you write them, they're just another method of communicating with someone, and these days, an especially dated one. In a world where text messaging, Facebook and Twitter exist, it's generally much easier and faster to communicate through one of those methods. But those methods all have something in common that email writing does not: an emphasis on keeping things brief and to the point. Facebook and especially Twitter are great for making jokes, quick observations or sharing links quickly. What they aren't good for is being conversational. Or at least, what we view as conversational now. I think society is moving away from that kind of interpersonal communication. As the value of privacy is evaporating and changing, so too is the value of interpersonal secrecy and intimacy. We're sharing more of less of ourselves every day.

When you go back and read an email from a couple years ago (and everyone has one of these), you can find yourself taken aback by it. Long form communication tends to age like wine. It shares more about you and about the person you're corresponding with the more time goes on. Reading a lengthy email from say 2009 is not just a reminder of the frame of events of the time, it's also a codex of your personality from the era. I've mentioned before how time alters radically your perspective of your past behavior, how giving yourself that emotional distance and opportunity to grow sheds light on how you weren't grown, and weren't objective with yourself. You can look back on something you said and break down your intent, your execution, and all of the complex machinery of your personality. It's part of why writing a journal is, to me, extremely important. Every step forward merits a look back. I want to, need to understand myself, and through the exercise of expression, hope to be understood. I think it's the closest you can be to enlightenment, and our only real foothold on immortality.


Sunday, July 5th, 2009 was about the worst day of my life. I got a call from Alyssa sometime in the early to mid afternoon. She was crying. She told me that Travis' dad had passed away, finally succumbing to his long bout with cancer. I immediately felt like shit. I felt like shit because Ken was a great guy. I felt like shit because I didn't spend enough time to get to know him, that my link to his life was much smaller than it should have been. I felt like a piece of shit because I never visited him in the hospital. I could explain the reasons all day. My grandmother died of brain cancer when I was a small child. I don't know how to interact with sick people. I was a major social coward at the time. What matters is that I didn't, and I knew I didn't. For awhile I told people that I had planned to soon, even that day, but that wasn't true, and the latter part was even more selfishly to hype the story up, make it better fiction. I try not to do that, but I do sometimes, and it disgusts me.

I'm emotionally a stoic person. It's hard to make me cry. I take pains to make myself impenetrable in many emotionally charged moments. I've heard it's a very old school thing to do. I don't think it's weak to cry, but I feel like it's my job to have the strength not to around others. I don't look down on people who do, but I don't want to allow myself to falter in that way. Alyssa was a mess, so it seemed the only right thing to do was let everyone know in her stead. So down I went, through my phone, calling everyone who knew Travis or could be tangibly linked to pass them the information. I must have called 20 people.

I don't remember now if I called or texted my girlfriend of the time, Stephanie. I must have called her and gotten her machine, because I do vaguely remember sending her two texts. She had only met Travis a handful of times, and it was really more of a courtesy than anything. She didn't have to say anything. There wasn't anything to say. She couldn't have made Travis feel better. Regardless, I felt like she needed to know.

The version of this story that I've told has me calling my girlfriend last, with the perfectly lined up conversation that followed. Bam, bam, misery in a precise measure. The truth is life isn't that neat, and honestly no one expects it to be, but something can be lost in the retelling. Truthfully I don't remember how long it was after I called and texted Stephanie that she got back to me. Maybe I called her again or maybe she got me. When I picked up the phone, my intent was to tell her about Ken's passing. When she picked up the phone, her intent was to tell me that she wanted to break up with me. It didn't happen as dramatically as:


"My best friend's dad just died."
"I think we should see other people."


When she said the words, "I want to break up with you," they felt like they came out of left field. Of all the things I was ready to hear, that wasn't one of them. I probably felt the same way Courtney had felt years before when I similarly broke up abruptly. I was at a loss for rational words. I couldn't believe the insensitivity of what I was hearing. My friend's dad just fucking died! I remember emotion taking hold of my tongue. Specifically, anger. I couldn't stop saying, "Really?" and "Are you fucking kidding me? After what I just told you, are you fucking kidding me?" She had mentioned before that many of her previous boyfriends she had broken up with abruptly, but she wasn't going to do that to me. That got brought up and referenced heavily. It was the emotional equivalent of throwing pillows at her from the couch. Largely ineffectual, basically pathetic, and without an instant of me being on my feet.

What happened after that is mostly a blur to me. I remember talking with Alyssa. I remember Alyssa talking with Stephanie. I remember doing what I'm famous for: breaking something more by trying to frantically put it back together. I remember utter despair. I called Paulina, and said, "One of my best friend's dad just died."
"I'm sor-"
"And my girlfriend broke up with me when I told her."

And then I remember San Francisco, an entire bottle of Jameson, hitting the pillow at 4:08AM and a whole lot of running away from emotion.

I left for work at 7 that morning from Paulina and Eric's apartment. To say I was hung over would be inaccurate. It would be far more accurate to say I had unwittingly endured a prolonged braining from a sledgehammer somewhere between when I hit the pillow and when I woke up. The cab driver was Russian, distant. I was happy he didn't want to have a conversation. I way over-tipped him, got in my car, flicked on my GPS, and was on my way. Windows down, radio blasting, anything to keep myself focused. I drove straight as an arrow out of San Francisco.

First time I ever made it to work early. I left less than twenty minutes later.

The more I tried to put it back together, the more it fell apart. At the time, I couldn't understand. Part of me didn't want to. Part of me didn't have the space to even be able to. We both had problems, clear signposts that this moment had been coming. She had a bad knee, multiple surgeries bad, and wanted to play basketball. She said she had been pushed by her dad to play, hard. I didn't know much about her family. I knew it was bad. I knew she had a brother. I knew she lived with grandparents. I cared about her, and I thought that the best way to express that was to discourage her from playing basketball. I saw it as an illness. She had been pushed and pushed and pushed into doing this and that seemed to me to make it self-justifying. It was feeding a dysfunctional part of her. And her knee wasn't going to last forever. Should I have told her this? I am glad I did, but I don't think it was my place to become the antagonist, which is exactly what I made myself. I didn't stop to think, what else does she have? There were many tiny ways we weren't connected. I took on the role of Person Who Is Going To Tell You How It Is. Oblivious to the fact that no one likes that person, let alone loves him or her.

When it was obvious even to me that it was unsalvageable, things started to darken very quickly for me. I became more moody, more withdrawn. I didn't want to be around people. I didn't want to interact. I just wanted to hit the reset button. I didn't want to accept that I was as hurt as I was. I jumped back into dating, or at least tried. I went on a couple of awful dates, then went on one sorta nice one with a girl named Davida. She wasn't particularly attractive and she lived too far away in SF, but I unloaded some of my growing bile on her and she was cool about it. At that point, that was good enough for me. We decided to meet up at the Castro theater to see a movie. I've already told this story. I cracked trying to tell this story to Travis while we were getting food and ended up screaming, "fuck every girl I've ever dated and fuck me for being stupid enough to date them."

Early November 2009 rolls around, and a friend of mine came back into town, one I hadn't seen in quite a long time. I had asked her out about a year before in what was simultaneously the most embarrassing and adorable thing I'd ever tried. And it worked. We went out and were out for probably 8 hours, just talking and talking and talking. She was fucking amazing. I couldn't believe that I had managed it. But then she told me she was a polyamorist, and I decided I was better off staying on the friend level, because knowing myself, it would just drive me nuts.

A year later, I didn't give a shit. We went out to dinner and for the first time in months, I actually had a completely positive social interaction with a girl. I told her about all that transpired the past year and I felt better about it. It didn't come out as bitterly as it wanted to. Just talking to her made me feel better. I felt like I wasn't alone on a planet of hostile girls. I felt like she cared, because she did. We talked again, for hours, about everything from fiction writing to the golden rule, in any shop that would hold us until closing. Somewhere between 1 and 2 in the morning, we were sitting in my car, while I said, "Holy shit look at the time." She asked if she could kiss me.



On Sat, 11/14/09, Luz wrote:
Subject: My Saturday morning babel or what I'm really thinking
Date: Saturday, November 14, 2009, 10:58 AM

Hi Bryan,

So I'm going out on limb and going to share a bunch of stuff with you. For starters I'm very attracted to you. I think you are very smart, witty, funny, cute, and very good looking. Every time we've hung out I've so enjoyed our conversations. I appreciate that it's so easy to talk to you and that you are so open about what's going on with you. On that note I want to be open with you. As I said last night, I'm in an open relationship. It is a very big part of my life. My boyfriend, Dustin, is my partner, my friend, and my lover. The fact that our relationship is open is a cornerstone of our relationship. I share this with you because I want you to know that, while Dustin is significant to me, having experiences outside "the box" is equally important to me. Ok what I'm really getting at is I'm really excited to see you again and I'd so love to jump your bones, but that's not the only thing I'm interested in. I'm hoping we can have is a really great friendship. Friendship is the most important thing to me. What I heard from you last night was that you've been through a lot recently in your relationships (romantic and otherwise), that you've been hurt, and felt mistreated. Now you are trying to heal from that and change certain patterns. I want to support you in that. Do you have an idea of how I can do that? Another way to ask that is, Do you know what you want in regards to us? I appreciate honesty and I know that what is true today may not be true tomorrow, so changing your mind is perfectly acceptable. My greatest fear is that this letter with cause you to go way again, like the last one did. I share this fear not because I expect you to do anything about it but because voicing my fears makes them less scary. If all this is too much please just let me know. I'm sorry if I'm coming across as rushing things or pushing. I'm just not into beating around the bush. I feel that by sharing my feelings and desires I actually have less chance of getting hurt even though I'm opening up and being vulnerable. Ok that's my Saturday morning babel. If you want to talk about any of this in person, give me a call. I'm available to day until 4pm and then after 9pm. I'm pretty much booked all day tomorrow (babysitting), but could talk on the phone. I await your reply (I'm not going to hold my breath but I am going to check my e-mail every 10 min) :p

Hugs, Luz



On Sat, Nov 14, 2009 at 2:21 PM, Bryan wrote:

Haha, I appreciate your deep level of concern about possibly pushing me away with your interest. To be frank, I can't see how you could possibly do that. I similarly am as attracted to you as I ever was, I noticed that right away when I sat down that the only difference was you had more hair. As far as jumping my bones, what am I going to say, no or how dare you? My bones are all in favor of being jumped XD How that will affect the friendship, I couldn't really say because I've never had this kind of experience before. But I would theorize that, knowing myself, it really shouldn't change anything at all. I know intellectually speaking that it would be wrong to change my stance on what I require from you after that happens, as I said last night, my biggest fear in a relationship is being trapped by this person in such a way that I can't grow anymore. So to try and do that with someone else would be highly hypocritical. As far as conversation about any of this nature or just anything in general goes, you should know that I am basically Captain Honesty. I have no problem talking about any of these things in a straightforward manner, and I really appreciate it when other people do the same. So no worries, your babel (I find it funny that you say Babel instead of babble) is perfect perfect perfect. I don't find what you are saying to be pressuring or rushing in the least, my mind in the past few hours has been in the exact same place as yours, ("So I guess this is happening, wow!") Communication is without a doubt the most important thing, so I really appreciate that you are sharing all your thoughts and importantly, your fears here. And you have nothing to fear in this case. I will also be honest and say after last night's experience, that there is a very large part of me that thinks interacting with you like this really is the best thing for me. I legitimately respect you and am attracted to you, and I know that the feeling is mutual. That's more important to me than anything else in this field of my life right now. So fear not!



On Sat, 11/14/09, Luz wrote:
Subject: Re: My Saturday morning babel or what I'm really thinking
Date: Saturday, November 14, 2009, 2:36 PM

(Big grin) You rock! So when do you want to hang out again? I'm going to my grandfather's birthday party soon. I should be home around 9pm. We could hang out then. I do have to get up early tomorrow, though. I volunteer at a church daycare and tomorrow is my day. I'll be there from 10-12. Then I'm babysitting my friends kid from 5-11pm. So tomorrow is kind of full. If we can't hang out this weekend then let's try to find some time this week. Tue, Thur, or Fri evenings are best for me. Let me know what works for you.

Hugs, Luz

PS: I just finished reading Snow Crash for the third time. If you've read this you will understand the "Babel" reference. If you haven't you should. I think it's pretty great!



Sat, Nov 14, 2009 at 2:38 PM, Bryan wrote:

Oh I totally got the Babel thing, I just wasn't sure if you were doing it intentionally. I loved Snow Crash. Yeah, gimme a call after your party, I don't think I have any kind of plans today now that I think about it. :)



I received these emails two years ago. At the time, I thought that it was simply a case of God throwing me a bone for once. I read them now and I realize that I was at a crossroads in my life. There's very few times were such a thing as a "crossroads in your life" legitimately happens, and as in this case, at the time, you may not even recognize it. I had been hurt in just about every relationship I'd ever been in. Hurt by others, hurt by myself. By inexperience. By being a bad match. I was ready to give up. I was considering moving to San Francisco, quitting my job and drinking myself to death. I'd get a job as a bartender and just fuck girls. I was considering my buddy Rick's advice and just selling everything and moving to another state. I wanted desperately not to be myself anymore. I'd just be someone else, someone impenetrable, someone who'd drink and fuck with impunity. A dead end motherfucker. I had a choice: grow up, or grow worse. And through the unlikeliest of sources, I turned my back on the low road.

I look back on my breakup with Stephanie with a different view now. She was a young girl, all of 19. She wasn't trying to cut my heart out. Just trying to find her own way to comfort. Everyone fucks up, often when trying to do the right thing. It's important to remember that. Legitimate hatred is a rare thing. Today, she's probably just about my age when I started dating her. She's got a long way to go, as I did. As I do.



I'll always be grateful to Luz. She's the kind of friend you only get one of, if you're lucky. The kind that utterly defies explanation, and deviates from social norms with love. It's easy to say we'll be friends forever but there's no telling how the future will go. Maybe I'll die in a car accident tomorrow. Maybe Luz will move to Romania and change her name to Svetlana. Nothing changes the fact that she kicked me in the right direction when I most sorely needed it.

I'm with a girl now that I love to death, in a relationship that has been 10,000 more rewarding than any of the previous ones. For the first time in my life, I feel like I'm with someone I'm meant to be with. I have never been happier in my entire life, and for not anywhere near as long. I've always felt like I was on the outside of something, that I wasn't where I needed to be emotionally. Finally, I don't feel that way anymore. For the first time in my adult life, I legitimately love someone I never would have met drinking whiskey in fucking Texas. Luz may not have introduced me to her, but I met her all the same due to the choices I made and the experiences I lived. There's no way to place a value on that. No adequate way to express the value of it. 'Thanks' is volumes away from enough. But I'll say it anyway. And include a picture of my sexy face: