Monthly Archives: August 2003

Coring The Apple

I’m exhaust­ed but I’m not tired. I must sleep but I can’t sleep.

Sometimes I wish I was strong enough to gut myself. I’d make a line across my stom­ach, prop­ing myself against a wall, and try to pull my intestines out to see how far they’d stretch. I’d make a hole on the left with the tip, curved for bet­ter con­trol, and drag to the right with the edge. To enlarge the hole, turn the knife blade fac­ing away from you and place between your index and mid­dle fin­ger as a guide. I’d cut my arms open and tear out the flesh to make sure I could­n’t sow myself back togeth­er. Sometimes I just draw the lines on my stom­ach, mixed in with all the writ­ing, and imag­ine that the cold­ness of my pen is the chill.

For some rea­son, it helps.

Jealousy Revisited

Jealousy is not a famil­iar emo­tion to me. I’m nev­er jeal­ous of what some­one has, sim­ply because I dis­like com­par­ing oth­ers with myself in terms of what one may earn/deserve. It’s only in my rela­tion­ships which any sort of envi­ous emo­tions sur­face, and even then, such an oner­ous emo­tion hap­pens rarely to me.

Historically speak­ing, I’m gen­er­al­ly over-con­fi­dent, and such a mind­set cre­ates very wor­ry-free rela­tion­ships. It’s when I don’t have this con­fi­dence that my mind starts to won­der. In a way, this is my inse­cu­ri­ty get­ting the bet­ter of me. It feels so odd to have to fight off this emo­tion, to have to con­stant­ly remind myself and keep my feel­ings in check. It’s almost an extreme test of how far I’ve come in my goal to be a cere­bral per­son. When I try to calm myself down I can feel my mind evening out, like a melt­ing can­dle, lev­el­ing out from heat.

So far, my jeal­ousy has been eas­i­er to con­tain than I would have believed. Maybe I’m los­ing my inse­cu­ri­ties bet­ter than I know, and I’ve come fur­ther as a per­son than I real­ized. Because of my inex­pe­ri­ence with jeal­ousy, I do salute any jeal­ousy I expe­ri­ence as a mark of true love.

Perhaps some jeal­ousy is a good thing.

Ryan's BBQ, Southvale Visits, Cigar Smoking

I did end up going to Ryan’s bar­be­cue, expect­ing to only know about four peo­ple, but actu­al­ly know­ing about half the peo­ple there. Aaron and I bought a twelve of Vex, which does­n’t taste like much but at 7% and only $10 for a six it was good enough to get us going. I was able to try some Bitburger which had a nice clean taste. Re-expe­ri­enc­ing some Smithwicks, how­ev­er, left my mouth with a ter­ri­ble bit­ter taste. The bar­be­cue was a great time, although after flame cook­ing my sausages, I’m afraid I won’t be able to go back to my Lean Mean Fat Reducing Grilling Machine. After cook­ing my steak on a camp­fire grill last camp­ing trip, I’ve been unable to look at broil­ing or elec­tric-grilling my steaks in the same way.

By 9:00 pm I was at the Southvale apart­ments, feel­ing com­plete­ly drained. Wheaties made us a pot of cof­fee while the oth­er kept drink­ing. Aaron, Wheaties, Trolley, and I fired up a game of Ghettopoly. I got my piece of choice, the pimp, and was own­ing the south­west cor­ner prop­er­ties like a…fat kid on cake. Eventually, the crack hous­es and projects on my best prop­er­ties won the game, since the vicis­si­tude of unlucky dice rolls gave me the cash mon­ey for some maneu­ver­abil­i­ty. A great time.

At one point, Aaron and I shared a Cohiba on the bal­cony. I was sur­prised at how light and smooth the cig­ar tast­ed, although it had a very tight pull, which made smok­ing it a bit of a chore.