Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   the burden of being human
Thursday, December 26 1996 My mother Hoagie and I rendezvoused at the new Pawn Shop on Staunton's Greenville Ave. The purpose: to get me a new watch. Don's fragant Raputian pesence presaged my mother's as I waited for her arrival. The watch I wanted was silver with golden detailing, for $80. It was expensive, but seemed of high quality (the next day the glass face came out in the bathtup, go figure).

I continued on the Charlottesville. I'd made arrangements with Jen Fariello to paint the Rising Sun Bakery's outdoor sign. But for various reasons, I never reached her and she never reached me. Instead of painting the sign, I did other things.

I was distracted by Matthew Hart's familiar Vomit Comet parked outside Theresa and Persad's place just off Wertland Street. I heard talking within the aparment, so I invited myself in. In the apartment were Matthew, Deya, Matthew's friend Jshyanina (sp?) (an Argentine who attends James Madison University; he and I had visited her back in the spring) in addition to Theresa and Persad. They were discussing such things as Saturday night's accident (there is still a knot on Deya's head). When the relicts were displayed, I finally got to see the mouse-sized matted yellowish wad of Jessika's hair that Theresa had salvaged.

We also discussed the Swami Satchaninanda and Yogaville, the ashram where Theresa and Persad once lived and where they met each other. In the Glossary it states that Theresa once kissed the Swami's feet, but she denies this. She found my mocking of Yogaville mildly irritating and threatened to abduct me on Sunday to make me see the place for myself. Matthew and I carried the mockery one step further, confering upon each other the title of "Swami" and hoping that any minute someone would ask to kiss our feet.

They all went off to visit Jasio and I tried to track down Jen Fariello again with no luck. So I watched teevee for an hour or so and returned to Theresa and Persad's, this time bearing what remained of my cheap vodka. We listened to a used Arab pop CD I'd bought, simply for the novelty of it. The singing was good, though the music it was set to was emblematic of the cheesier fraction of the 80s. Persad couldn't stand it and soon was playing some more of that goth stuff he always plays. Morgan came by and thus we also listened to a little Sex Pistols. Morgan wasn't feeling too good and he never drank any of my vodka or even the 40 he purchased for the evening.

One of Theresa's female friends came by, yet another goth that no one knew existed. She's a girlfriend of someone named Glen who may be the very same person as Monster Boy (see the Dec. 20th entry). She didn't speak much, but whenever she did it was about precious Glen.

I made another solo pedestrian tour of the Wertland neighborhood, mostly because Theresa and Persad's place inevitably becomes like bubble gum that's been chewed for too long. Some black pedestrian dude coming out of the hood from the east appeared at my door and asked to use my phone, and I allowed him to. He proceded to verbally abuse his girlfriend. She was jealous and wanted to know was he calling from another girl's house, so I reassured her that he wasn't. Then the dude tried to interest me in purchasing cocaine. I left my house a little too early, because I caught up with him on Wertland and the dude tagged along with me. I went to the Orbit (which was closed) to lose him (I certainly wasn't taking him back to Theresa and Persad's place!) and somehow he managed to get sidetracked by some plump nurses just getting off the late shift at the university hospital.

At Theresa and Persad's place, Ray came by with his new appropriately insipid if beautiful bleached blond girlfriend. All Ray's friends are disgusted by how very pussy whipped he is these days. The story is that he lies around at his Dad's place all day fucking this girl. I wasn't abiding any of Ray's bravado tonight and mocked everything he said. He was utterly lacking in retorts. Tonight he seemed ridiculous.

her expectations are childish and unrealistic
When I left for the night, I was joined by Deya. She mentioned that Jessika had told her that I've been acting "weird lately." Being particularly weary of the meaningless word "weird" I said that "Things are always weird with me and Jessika." But no, according to Jessika via Deya, I was even weirder than normal...in this case acting jealous! I admitted that I'd acted jealous (since I have the burden of these musings, I'd admitted in print too), but that that was hardly an unusual human reaction to the scenario Jessika had handed me: we are presumably best friends (or so she told me) and she's always asking me to come over, so on my ONE FRIDAY NIGHT IN FOREVER off, I decide to visit her, only to see her accept, while I am still there, a spur-of-the-moment invitation to spend the night with some guy I've never met. That Jessika regards my behaviour following this as weird brings up what might be her fatal flaw, the flaw that makes her an impossible friend: she holds her friends to impossible non-human standards. I don't know what conception she has of what my sex drive, my angers, my fears, my hatreds and my jealousies should be. But in all these categories, her expectations are childish and unrealistic. And when I fail to live up to these expectations, I can expect judgment. Her use of the word "weird" carries a heavy connotation of judgment. Further bedeviling her impossible standards is the fact that she is utterly hypocritical in applying them. While it is "weird" for me to be jealous, when she is the one who is made jealous, more than a simple apology is demanded. When I do some kind of petty sexual advance while drunk or asleep, it's a crisis. But she herself has been known to lose all sexual subtlety while drunk, especially while in blackout. I told Deya that I have decided that it doesn't pay for me to put any effort into a friendship with Jessika. I announced that henceforth I will be nice to Jessika if I see her or on the off-chance she comes to visit me, but I will never again go visit her or attempt to look for her. I'm not going to be a sucker for punishment.


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