David

I was twenty-one so it was 1998. I remember meeting a friend of a friend, but I'm not certain why I needed to meet him. Best friend at the time had started a new job and she really liked her co-workers, I remember that. So, I went with her to one of her co-worker's house to pick something up, or drop something off. He came out to meet us and they talked about whatever and I was introduced and he had dimples and a cleft chin. This was David.

This was maybe a year or two after I'd come to terms with my sexuality. This was when I was at my awkward best.

I remember talking about him non-stop. He was just so pretty. It was the first boy I'd met who'd made want to know more about him, to maybe kiss him. Maybe. When he gave me his phone number it was a pretty special day, let me just tell you. I remember using up the break in between classes to call him up and talk on the payphone in the student union. I remember he liked the Disney villain Malificient and thought Bruce Willis was hot. All it ever came to, as always, was my immaturity and a PULP FICTION viewing at his house, where his parents looked at me like an escaped felon, and a group date to see Grease. He held my hand the entire time.

I wrote about him a lot at the time. I used to write a lot then. And I wrote about how I wanted him and how he made me feel and how beautiful I thought he was. I remember all of it. I still have that notebook. I just remember him smiling at me atop that hill where his house was in San Pedro.

(Unfortunately, my memories of this boy are tied to the fact that my two brothers read everything I wrote about him and told my parents and then, well, everything turned out the way it did. This created a huge rift between my family and me that lingers to this day. That day, when talking with my father, was the worse moment of my young life. It was the last time he ever struck me.)

But every once in a while, I tell someone this story, all the details I remember, and it makes me happy because I remember this unassuming boy whom I adored to no end, and it was the first instance I felt I was normal. If you're straight or gay, you wouldn't understand.

It always makes me happy to think about him.

Earlier today, while online on my phone, talking with strangers on a hook-up site, a man sent me a message and we started talking for a bit and he was nice and playful and cute. He's attractive. And he reminded me of someone I used to work with. But that wasn't right. It lingered with me for the entire afternoon when I realized who this stranger online reminded me of David. The stranger's smile wasn't familiar but it wasn't a strange one either. A couple hours ago, as I'm making my way from Orange County, it hit me: was this David? Something clicked into place. While this man and I were flirting online in the way guys do online (read: being explicit), I needed to log off but I thought, fuck it, and gave him my number. On the freeway, I kept checking my phone for a text or call. I realized he never told me his name, and he didn't give me his number. Playing coy, my plans was that the next move would be his...

...BUT NOW I WANT TO KNOW IF IT'S DAVID!!

Isn't that crazy?

What if it is?

Most likely, it isn't. And like with certain strangers on the internet, I will probably never hear from him again. I latched on to a weird set of circumstances that have made my heart go all a-flutter, and when I never hear from this man, I will forget about him in the way we do sometimes. A stranger on the internet called me hot and I'm having fond memories about him already.

But that's okay.

I will still remember David. Not because he was the love of my life. But he was one of the very first.

Read: Damned

Madison Spencer is dead. DAMNED is the story of her time in Hell. Is all this obvious? Perhaps: there IS a devil on the cover.

But what follows is walk through a thirteen year old girl's life that ought to have been great, ought to have been the type of life contemporary thirteen year olds yearn for: super-rich and super-famous and, sadly, super-liberal movie star parents; houses in every possible continent, access to drugs, and Hello Kitty condoms. But Madison isn't happy. No, not until she meets her parents' new pet adoptee, Goran.

After she dies, Madison takes you through Chuck Palahniuk's version of Hell that's complete with the Swamp of Partial-birth Abortions, Shit Lake, and...well, you get the idea. Also, Hitler shows up because why shouldn't he?

This is Palahniuk at his nihilistic, most acerbic best. He's not reached this height of humor and cynicism and truth in a very long time (TELL-ALL read like a warm-up exercise, RANT was a bit too loose, SNUFF wasn't what it could've been, HAUNTED tried and failed at clever). What he does in having Madison guide us through Hell isn't to show how frightening that prospect is, but rather how easy it is to being damned. Through her monologues, Madison discovers along the way that we're all so close to eternal damnation, even taking all the vitamins and recycling everything isn't enough to save anyone. Surely, according to her, nearly everyone's already earned a trip to Hell by age five for peeing in pools - there's a limit, you see, to how many times you're allowed to pee in pools before you're damned and it's two.

But all through Madison's adventures through Hell, it isn't that we're learning along with her the rules of this place or why people wind up here, but more about what we tell others and ourselves to make us seem less likely to die as sinners. We want to win when it comes to our eternal afterlife, never realizing our afterlives are already decided. But this isn't a religious book. Not really.

DAMNED, similar to Palahniuk's other books, is about being happy with who and what you are. About not giving a whit about what anyone else says. About self-determination and self-reliance. DAMNED is about forgetting everything everyone else thinks about you and being the only you the world deserves. Madison can only be that once she dies. Even despite the fack her parents tried and tried to be better than any other parents, they failed in nurturing the person Madison needed to be in this world. But it was only by dying and going to Hell that she sees this, that we see this. When everything is demons and death for eternity, it's easy to see that who we are in Hell isn't who we are on Earth: who we are in the latter is not us.

Palahniuk brings us back to self-destruction as self-realization. Realizing that people who're still alive and their terrible superiority complex over the dead is only transitory and only death is certain.

The imagery in the book reminded me of Chris Weston's Hell in LUCIFER and his work in THE FILTH, how I imagined it as I read: I'd love to see his version of the Sea of Insects. Palahniuk doesn't go into lots of detail with his Hell, but when you read his topography, it's hard not see a certain...aesthetic. What do you imagine when you read the Great Ocean of Wasted Sperm?

And, finally, as Madison confronts Satan himself, Palahniuk manages a pretty nasty trick on her that I want to spoil so badly but wont. Because in that exchange, when I wanted a suave manipulator akin to Neil Gaiman's and Mike Carey's LUCIFER, I got a more "real" Satan: a Satan for the post-Hollywood world.

I laughed along with this book not because of its outlandish scenery but because it's more honest about what life is on Earth than I was taught in Catechism. It's honest when Madison says that we all think we're better off than the dead because we're simply alive. It's honest when she says that everyone, like her parents, obsessed with remaining youthful will end up as worm fodder. But unlike FIGHT CLUB, DAMNED doesn't say there's worse things than death. Madison is our avatar through our own stories, regardless of age, full of ridiculous experiences that we allow to define ourselves in the bigger picture, the bigger picture being life.

Free Life

Went to the movies today. I shouldn't have because payday's next week and there's insurance to still pay. But I went and had a big ol' cry there due to the movie not necessarily because I was/am terribly sad or anything like that. Still, right? Anyway, afterward, I spent another $5 on a coffee and a shortbread raspberry cookie thing because I left a voicemail for my best friend and was still a little shaken. So strange how things affect me. Or not. I think I'm made of metal and then I'm melted.

Honest: for a long time - almost two years now - I've had a terrible idea not everyone I know and don't know would like to hear and that is going of the meds for the extra cash.

Just right now I was thinking, suppose I'd never had to go to the doctor four years ago and I never discovered I'd HIV, where would I be now? I don't know and neither does anyone else because that never happened. But, what if, you know?

I wonder how we got to this point where this is even worth considering. Years ago, if someone mentioned this to me, I'd tell them they were insane, and here I am thinking this. But is it that bad? No, not really. I could use five grand right now and I know lots of us could as well but that isn't going to happen. or, if I did indeed stop the the meds for the money, I think it would be easier to just spend it on something wholly necessary.

The family is in really bad form right now. Not only financially. Not a lot of us are happy. I'd go even a little further into it: I don't think a lot of us are content or satisfied with what's happening, any of it. Who is, really?

So, I'm at the movies and guy in the movie says he just wants it to stop, the disease he has. And that's where I am and I think using the family trials as the reason for it to stop is kind of a cop-out. Isn't it? Is it?

What if I decided to stop treatment, would you hate me, shun me, support me, or say nothing? Is this one of those cry for help things? Do I mean a slow-speed suicide? What is it?

As I've written many times over the last few years, I want it to stop, all these pills every week; the way in which everything my family says around me is tinged with sadness and fear; the way in which whenever I mention being sick all I get is silence; thinking the pretty girl I want to ask out from work will just walk away when I tell her; the way my mother looks at me sometimes. And the way I see myself daily. I just want it all to stop so I can be normal again.

Haven't had a fit like this in a while. I don't really know what normal means.

But, as I said, there's lots of things to take care of for the family. I hate my living situation but without me they can't keep the house nor put food on the table nor even enjoy a smoke every now and then. Silly to even type all that. But it's true. And me, without them, I don't know really where I'd be. So the family must come first. And I'd be no use to them dying in a hospital or dead in the ground.

Way the world works is my life is the only thing I've a say over. That's it.

Way to return to the blog. I should not be allowed to go to the movies unescorted.