homemade tattoo

Being poor isn’t romantic. It isn’t some kind of soul building exercise.

It’s just horrid.

I feel this way pretty often. Tonight, it hit while I was jerking off in my room. I had to turn the fan on loud and put headphones on while doing it. Soon after, I found myself listening to The Plimsouls and wondering where did I steer off in this direction?

She was crying yesterday. It made me feel sad. And it made me just feel. I told her things I’d not told anyone else. At least not face to face. I didn’t feel quite as lonely that night. Until later, when I got nauseous and felt as if I was going to either die, pass out or throw up everywhere. Thankfully, I did none of those things. Instead, I just felt really terrible and moaned a lot.

The ability to cover up the way I feel sometimes eludes me. I have no poker face. But I’ve known that for years.

Today, the boss pissed me off. So I snapped at him. Like a little bitch, I’m sure he thought. Hell, it’s what I thought. Soon after it was forgotten. But it bothered me that I let it come out like that. I’d done so well getting out of that mode. I know what it means. I need to leave. I need to run. I need to find something new to sink my life into.

Yet, all I can think about is scrounging up the cash to buy four tickets to a concert in Nashville in a little over a month. Take the girlfriend and have some fun. Get drunk. Do stupid things. Maybe even get a homemade tattoo.

I want to take myself serious, but I don’t seem to have the ability to. It drives me somewhat crazy. And that’s the problem. It should make me mad. Insane. Fucking nuts. Instead, it causes bother.

Lately I’ve been wondering why I don’t remember my dad being around. Except when we went places. I don’t remember him even being at my high school graduation. But I know he was there. I just blacked him out. Put a little black bar over his eyes in my memory so I wouldn’t remember him? Of course, I don’t remember anyone else being there either. Maybe they were. Maybe they weren’t? It’s just another layer of lost.

I wish I could afford to get my teeth fixed. I don’t know how much longer they’ll be in my head. They don’t hurt much. But I stopped taking the supplements that seemed to hasten their demise. Of course, that has hastened other demises. Fuck, getting old sucks. Especially when you haven’t taken care of yourself.

Only me to blame, though. Jack Lelane is laughing at me.

And so are you.

The sky was a burnt orange color when she came outside. I was sitting in my usual place on the front stoop. It was light blue with pieces of the shitty concrete falling off into the lawn of mostly weeds. I loved dandelion flowers. Almost as much as daisies. They both grew everywhere. I know my neighbors hated me for that. But they only lived there for three weeks a year, so fuck ‘em.

She grabbed one of my busted up beach chairs. This one had dolphins on it at one point. Every day I used to comb the beach, looking for the discards of tourists. Koozies and beach chairs. The occasional umbrella or cooler. The stuff people buy for a day then toss on the ground next to a trash can is remarkable. I would take pictures and publish a book on it if I thought it would sell. But who really wants to see 100 pages of pictures of plastic shit? One day some hipster kid would find a copy in a thrift store and it would be popular for a moment. He’d blog about it (or whatever form of on-line communication exists at this point) and it would become a phenomenon. They’d seek me out on the internet, only to find me on my stoop. Wishing their parents had bought the book in the first place so I wouldn’t be living in a shitty, wood-paneled renter in Atlantic Beach, North Carolina, drinking Shiner Bock’s out of a beat up old pint glass that I got at the Chevron station next to the General George Patton Museum in California.

We looked at each other and smiled.

“When we leaving for Nashville?”

“In the morning, honey. In the morning.”