22.Apr.2003
i'm a beautiful loser
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no, really.
subtitled: cabin-fever insanity
The only thing I adore about being bi-polar is the ineffable (word of the day, people, take note, and use it ad nauseam) feeling of five-in-the-morning invincibility; I am on top of the world. The crash is ineluctable, but the ride will be opulent, glamorous, sexual, and brilliant.
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I spent a large portion of the day obsessing over a testosterone-driven flesh-monster and various diets low in amino acids. I rang Jubal and lamented Cadbury Cr�me Eggs gloriously clogging the back of my throat, and cursed all things pulpy and orange-juicy.
I decided my life should have more substance. I want to reach a point where I can pack everything I deem worthy into some type of transportation and re-locate somewhere meaningful. I think about this constantly. I do nothing to assist the rampant thought-process. I still want to wake up in a different bed.
Speaking of which, I ran into someone (who recently located to Oklahoma City) I met a year and a half ago through this forum. She knows people with which I attended high school for those brief moments years ago. I'm thinking about the Wreck Room and streams of alcohol from adjacent clubs and possibly Apoptygma Berzerk. I crave heat as I teeth-grindingly suffer another bout of touch withdrawal.
--
For my brother, who delights in all things pertaining to Am�lie, I picked apart pieces from the soundtrack, specifically La Valse d'Am�lie, and conjured it on the upright piano in my living room.
I called him.
"Hey," I said.
"Hey - what are you doing?"
"Come over," I requested.
"Why?"
"I have something for you."
45 minutes later, he was sitting on the miniature divan in the living room, denouncing the hypocrisies of modern-day Catholics with children spawned at the mother's tender age of 15 and a half, seconds after I inhaled through my frenetic trebles of a score to a movie I've not seen.
--
Somewhere uncomfortable, I read pieces of Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers, and endeavoring to wrap my cerebrum around it fails and succeeds simultaneously. I can't find the protagonist. Leonard, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so preposterously whinge-tainted? Why must you obsess over Native Americans and the idea of a goddess relinquishing your mental disenchantment and free your bowels from incessant constipation? Why can't I put the damn thing down?
I'll tell you.
Henry Miller's worded rivulets, making young Jewish girls' ovaries incandescent, and Allen Ginsberg's expeditions from letters and sea-journeys, and James Joyce's eyes, burning with antipathy and adoration for every Dublin street, decided to fuck themselves into Cohen's type-writer. This is a train-wreck. This is Edna O'Brien lifting her lackadaisical, Scotland skirt and coercing an intangible taste. This is me in 1996 discovering a literary direction upon which the newly-fed elitist in me would regurgitate Keats.
This is Longfellow's face twisting forcibly into a sneer, Browning's groans of disdain not far behind, and the Bront� sisters moving toward me with pitch-forks, all while Ballard grins and defiantly douses Palahniuk (Paul-uh-nick) with his gin and tonic, the authorial, amalgamation-party in my head, and I'm sitting on a couch with Remarque, running my fingers through his hair while he recounts dead Frenchmen stories to no one in particular, and those psychosexual thrill-beasts above tug on my DKNY trouser-socks with their incisors, and I'm squirming deliciously and uncomfortably.
And, because of this, I can't put it down. Sentimental value? Bi-polar issues? Unquestionable infatuations with imagery pregnant with horribly sexual and maddening situations stemming from 1996?
Yes.
When poets become novelists, my literary uterus sheds. It's inevitable. You have no idea what I'm talking about. That's fine. You should be sleeping, anyway.
The point is that this book turns me on, but goddamn it, Cohen, why have you forsaken me?
Here, class, is where RavieSlave falters to banal insanity. Take note of the burgundy hair.
I think I've missed my non-sequitur self a great deal.
--
At any rate, I spent the better portion of yesterday trimming my fingernails and avoiding amino acids, all while counting Pall Mall Lights cigarettes and attempting to remove my cog in the proverbial wheel. What I'm going to do today is change my life, even if the mental revolution merely sparks itself dim in my brain alone.
I would have hoped you had ceased reading by this point.
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time & machine