Aimless Thoughts: Delirious Coda

        I’m sitting out on my deck right now, at eleven P.M. on the Saturday after 9/11 and Friday the Thirteenth. Mid-September nights feel how July nights used to. One major political party, representing one half of the seats in Congress, refuses to acknowledge this fact. The other refuses to do anything. They’re both run by the big industrial companies, of course, and bribery just keeps getting easier.

        Sometimes I miss being close to that industry, though. I remember sitting outside in Little Detroit, listening to the factories churn death into the air all night long. The paper mill stench will never leave my nose, the industrial background hum remains in my heart years after it left my ears. I’ll take crickets and owls any day.

I’m uneasy about this place. I don’t want to stay here forever. It’s too small for me and her to spread out in. It’s been a great bachelor pad, it’s got features good and bad that I’ll cherish forever. I’m glad I knew this house, I’m glad I’ll know her a while longer yet. Sometimes less glad than others. Today I found a dead mouse in the guest bedroom, which used to be a garage. Things like that would’ve felt like omens to me, years ago. Hell, maybe they still do.

Not long ago I took a stroll through my yard. Around the edges it gets wildflowers, old native beauties nearly lost to our freakish desire for lawns. It’s also very concave and water pools in the center for days after rainfall. My feet are mucky right now. I’m watching the lights go off in town through the space between trees - some clear nights, you can literally see the light pollution flicker off. I have nothing important to do. Thank God for that.

My life is, as you’re probably well aware by now, just about normal. I’ve got dorky hobbies and a loving girlfriend and a scraggly little house and a normal job and some great friends. I don’t have any connections to crime or the government, nor scientific knowledge that could change the world. As a writer I’m right in the middle of the pack: I can put a sentence together, but any truly unique insight into the human condition eludes me. Probably always will. There is an artistic statement to be made in blogging, of course. Capturing the kind of regular life popular media tends to shy away from is a statement with some potency, and I think I do occasionally capture the moments of my life pretty well. Still, I can rest easy knowing I’ll never blow open a conspiracy or change literature as we know it. I have nothing important to say. Thank God for that.

Although in all truth I have done a little in the way of obfuscating the full story. My real life, fully uncensored, is a lot to take in. Basically everyone in my family, and most of my close friends, suffer some severe mental illness. We've dealt with a lot I'll never talk about, no matter how many interesting stories there are in that part of my life.

Hell, I've just come up on five years since my last suicide attempt. I actually did have half an essay written about that. Didn't feel like finishing it. The day rolled around and me and Lily just lazed around in our living room watching cartoons. It’s the closest I've ever felt to closure.

It got me thinking about the things I don’t say when I write. Take Delirious Recollections, for example. A couple of my friends have told me they loved it, they thought it was one of the better tales I’ve ever spun. But go read it again. It doesn’t have an ending! The trip isn’t over by the time that article is. We’re not even three hours into our drive back home. Hell, most of the stories I let end don’t feel complete. They’ve only wrapped up narratively, but none of their themes have been driven home as far as they could’ve been. This is all by design. It’s a complete work created to be an incomplete look at its subject matter. That’s been kind of the deal with Aimless Thoughts: capturing moments before I forget how they felt, and knowing that I’ll forget the moment they’ve properly ended.

I have something of an obsession with unsatisfying endings. So much so that I seriously considered ending this post right here and now, leaving that sentence alone as the final paragraph. It would’ve been hilarious, and maybe it would’ve been more interesting. But unfortunately, no, I have actual things to say. I have to show you the man behind the curtain, the moments between the interesting ones. I don’t know why I have to do this. I just do. 

For one, the “mostly accurate” transcription of getting high isn’t as accurate as I let on. The scenes I chose to present were accurate, sure, but there are entire chunks of what happened that night that I left out on purpose. Mostly for the sake of pacing or because I couldn’t clearly recall what anyone had actually said.

First is the fact that I was actually really fucking talkative while I was enjoying the high. We had Futurama playing and I wouldn’t shut up about different aspects of the show I enjoyed. Lily also tells me my rants were frequently recursive - I looped and lurched into the same points of interest time and again until I reached something resembling a conclusion. Anyone who knows me well can tell you this is exactly what talking to me sober is like, especially when a favorite topic comes up. All being high did was make me forget my place a little more often and give me enough confidence to rant to my girlfriend in ways I usually don’t. She thought it was cute. I’ve been rambling to her more lately.

Secondly, I cut a scene from the freakout. We went out to the living room and sat on the couch immediately after I calmed down and finished my chips. She turned on Scary Movie 3 and I fell asleep immediately. There was no way to convey that sequence in dialogue without completely destroying the pacing.

I’d also like to mention that I actually didn’t eat any of the baking chocolate while I was high. I just laughed about it and set it aside. But the next day I had a chunk with breakfast and really enjoyed it. They let me bring it home with me. I’m eating a chunk right now.

As for coming home: beyond what I already wrote, next to nothing happened. I got tired later on and came close to falling asleep at the wheel. In Madison I took Lily to Shake Shack. She’d never been. We got into a brief quarrel about parking somewhere we could see the car because we were in a big city. I assured her this wasn’t the part of town where bad shit happened, and I also assured her I’d lock the car.

I left the fucking car running the entire time we were eating. 

Home life was rocky at first. Like all couples, we both have our own needs and they’re not always in sync. We’re both ridiculously particular, too. Potentially both autistic. It took us about a week to find compromises that worked. It’s still pleasantly surreal living with somebody I chose to love with, whose company I really honestly love.

One of the real sons of bitches when it came to trying to get her settled in is that, ages before I had our trip planned out, I’d bought two tickets to see King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard in Milwaukee. On the fourth. We basically had three days to settle in before the concert. Then it was back on the road. She’d never been to a concert or a big city before. She’d also never met my dad, who was also coming to the show. She enjoyed herself at the concert, we both had a ton of fun. If you look on my YouTube channel you’ll find a video of Ambrose running straight past us at one point. But basically everything else we did in Milwaukee was laced with stress. 

The day after the show we went to the Public Museum. I was excited to show her around my old childhood favorite, the place that just about inspired this whole series of posts. We walked in and were greeted by some phenomenal posters advertising the Museum’s planetarium. A particular show caught her eye, a guided tour of the Wisconsin night sky. She seemed genuinely excited by the concept. I told her we probably didn’t have time. Not long after, she completely shut down.

I spent too long trying to badger answers from a woman who was in no condition to give them. That’s, unfortunately, how I deal with stress. I need to rationalize shit and if that means bothering people for answers that’s what I’ll do. The fact she wasn’t answering only got me going worse, asking even more frequently what was wrong, if there was anything I could do. My tone grew more aggressive, another really shitty tendency of mine when I’m anxious.

We sat down in a dimly-lit food court near the main stairway. I finally realized she needed me to shut up and she told me she felt like I’d been ignoring her. Last night we’d been talking about food and agreed on getting pizza delivered to the hotel. Only, by the end of the show I’d completely forgotten and took her to a burger joint in walking distance. Earlier in the day I’d spent more time than we’d agreed upon in places I wanted to visit, meaning she couldn’t go to either of the places she thought looked interesting.

Late last year my friend Jason told me he found it hard to say no to me, even when he didn’t like whatever I was saying. I kept thinking about that as me and Lily sat in the food court. I think I have some positive qualities. I’m not sure any of them can ever make up for the fact I’m a habitual control freak who consistently ignores the feelings and ideas of people I’m meant to love and

Hey how the fuck did we get to the butterfly garden?

Apparently I asked her if she wanted to go to the butterfly garden, because it was the only other exhibit she seemed remotely interested in. It felt like the best olive branch I was capable of providing. Half an hour of subtropical climes and beautiful bugs did wonders for her and, honestly, for me. We even bumped into a guy who was at the show and talked briefly. Lily loved Converge/Witchcraft; I wouldn’t shut up about their extended Magenta Mountain. He was seeing them again at Red Rocks, which sounds like a fun time.

I’m not going to elaborate much on the rest of our trip to the museum. It was, well, about as pedestrian a trip as it could’ve been. I almost hate how conclusively the butterfly garden calmed our nerves - at least insofar as it makes for a less interesting story - but the truth is we really did have a great time after that. It’s not like we talked out our differences in the gardens; we did all that after we got home. Butterfly gardens are just really chill, serene places. Especially in a grungy old city like Milwaukee.

The Streets of Old Milwaukee were as funky as ever. The movie theater was playing a behind-the-scenes documentary now instead of the usual silent film. That taught us about a taxidermy cat they’d snuck into a very thin alley between buildings. Cool stuff all around. We loved the vintage candy store. I think I’m now addicted to those violet mints. She also didn’t get to see the Crossroads of Civilizations, another exhibit she would’ve loved. But she had a lot of fun in the rainforest exhibit, and we both enjoyed the utterly gorgeous diorama a couple rooms over of a T-Rex goring a triceratops. It’s all part of one big wraparound exhibit going from prehistoric oceans to the modern rainforest. Hailing, of course, from that wonderful period when all educational media seemed to be concerned with was dinosaurs, rainforests and gore. The new Public Museum is looking pretty nice from what I can tell. It’s not gonna have anything close to whatever the vibe of that exhibit is.

    I don’t really know what this post is about, even less so than Delirious Recollections. It’s about decrepit places I love despite it all and I guess it’s about my girlfriend offering me the same kind of patient, understanding love. Loving me is complicated, that’s the theme this September. Between this and DR I’ve now bared most of my worst traits. It’s been therapeutic and awkward and weirdly creatively satisfying. I hope somebody gets something out of it. Just please don’t let the lesson be, ‘people will love you even if you suck’ because I did demonstrably hurt her feelings pretty bad and I don’t want to offer any pretenses of forgiving myself for that. I think a better lesson would be, ‘people who give a shit are gonna be patient if they believe you can improve’. That’s a good place to end this. Goodnight.