The Escapist

Yesterday I found out that another of my brothers (I have three of the fuckers) is an alcoholic. The other night he got followed home from the bar by police, paramedics, and firemen… He got out of his car in front of his house and vomited. They took him to the hospital.

And what did I do with this information? This knowledge that my little brother (the one I like the most) spends 3-4 days a week getting drunk in bars? I called his cell phone and mocked him for one minute and 48 seconds before he hung up on me.

Apparently he’s an angry drunk who screams at people for “disrespecting” him and trying to hide his car keys from him. Oh, yes. He also likes to drive drunk.

I should be worried about him, I suppose… But if he’s not going to be responsible for his own actions, why the fuck should I worry about him? I just think it’s funny. Not “funny-ha ha” of course, it’s “funny-you’re a waste of oxygen just like Matthew and you’re going to end up dead in a ditch.”

I guess that makes me a horrible person… But fuck it. Daniel deserves to be mocked.

I’ll eat your fucking digital hearts!

(I’ve been getting a ton of spam since my two posts yesterday. I think that’s a sign that I need to update my list of words that trigger a small electrical shock to the genitals of an actor from a herpes commercial every time I get a comment telling me to buy insurance.)

What do YOU plan to do on that wonderful Day of Hate?

I was thinking of setting my neighbor’s dog on fire.

Subject: [Malks] Saint Harlequin’s annual rant

Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2000 00:35:46 EST From: “Saint Harlequin Grimaldi”

To: malks@thehub.com.au

It’s that time. Let’s talk about love, shall we?

What the hell IS love, anyway? Encarta Dictionary has eleven noun and five verb entries for the word. I love my mother. I love my cat. I love my best friend. One word, all these uses! And the emotions are only superficially similar towards each. Five hundred thousand words in the damned language, and we reuse one too many times. Typical. But for our purposes, love can be defined as; “The emotional state in which another’s well-being becomes more important than one’s own”.

But the love discussed during this time of year is a deeper, more abiding, more passionate variety, geared towards coupling.So what IS this Love thing, anyway?

Some people point towards beauty and joy and utter compassion, towards majestic, sweeping emotions seen in DeBeers diamond commercials and such.This, they reason, is this great thing that the poets wrote of. This is this great thing that Shakespere created passion and tragedy from. This is Love.

These people are absolutely right.

Some people point towards lighter, happier emotions, towards lighthearted romantic comedy and happy carefree times. Shakespere also created, they explain, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, did he not?

They’re also absolutely right.

Whatever you want to consider it, though, here’s the sad fact about modern society. We’ve become a society about compartmentalizing things, of buying things presanitized for our protection. And we NEED protection, don’t we, boys and girls? We NEED protection against the fact that it’s a hard world, that there are people out there who will hurt us, that the world owes us nothing, nothing whatsoever, and even our so highly self-appraised society or societies guarantees each and every human being NOTHING MORE THAN A NAME AND A COUNTRY OF ORIGIN. We need to be PROTECTED against the Bad Men, yes, protected and kept safe and clean and pure, and the only way to do that, because WE are the Bad Men, is to tell us how to feel and when. It’s almost February 14th. This tells us it’s time to allow ourselves to feel Love.

Bah.

Bah and humbug, I say. Spittle and shit all over your protection, and see if you can protect yourself from THAT. I don’t WANT to be protected from Love. I want it to EXPLODE and be DANGEROUS and MESSY and I want to see people swept under and drown in the outpourings of my emotions, and if I get swept under in theirs, SO BE IT, I took my chances by waking up in the morning.

So bah on your St. Valentine’s day. I will not wish anyone a happy Valentine’s day, nor will I accept any happy Valentine’s days from anyone. I will not allow myself to be compartmentalized.

I have felt Love. I didn’t show it on Valentine’s Day any different than I showed it every other day I felt it. February or October, I’d show it the same way, through tenderness and care and attention to my partner’s happiness and well-being.

But there are those of you out there who WANT this compartmentalization, who WANT to be protected against your own emotions. So be it. So, in the interests of fair play, I offer you once again………

SAINT HARLEQUIN’S DAY!

That’s right! The Patron Saint of Bitterness, Rage, and Hate has procaimed February 15th as his day! It’s a day for SANCTIONED HATE!

As you all may recall, I, Harlequin Grimaldi, have long since declared myself the Saint of Hate. (Saints, for the record, are the cosmic middlemen. If you have a lost cause, pray to St. Jude, and he’ll plead your case to the Boss, and so forth.) I represent the bitter, the lonely, the hurt, the hate-filled, the enraged, the ugly, the too intelligent, the too nice, the “like a brother”s, the “such good friends”, and all other unwanteds, undesirables, undatables, and unfortunates littering the world who remain in a seeming perpetual state of being single. Poor souls, how we suffer this time of year, watching our friends who have this great thing, this Wonderful Emotion, this Love, deserved or otherwise.

And the bitterness grows, doesn’t it? They look at us with pity, we return the gaze with contempt. We pretend to not want what they have, but we do, we do, and the jealousy grows. Or we remember times past, old loves, having none current to entertain our affections, and we remember the fights, and cheating, the lies, the bad times, the bad blood, the bad breakups, and all the agony afterwards.

Now is our time.

So go on! Kick your pets! Kick your neighbors! Kill the mailman! Let the HATE flow. Lower your inhibitions on it. Speak openly of your hate and your pain. It’s YOURS, it’s UNIQUELY YOURS, there are many in the world with similar hate and only one with YOUR hate, you are FREE TO USE IT.

And use it you should.Why? Because it’s THERE, and it’s REAL, and because you are YOU, and because you are ALIVE. Try it. One day. February 15th. If you like it, try it a little more the next day. Let it FLOW, let the REALITY of the emotion consume you. If you escape being lost in your bitterness (and it took me YEARS to do so), you will never, ever see the world through the same eyes again. You’ll see the REAL more acutely, you’ll see what’s prepackaged and what’s REAL, and you’ll never, I predict, be quite willing to settle for anything less than dangerous reality again.

So go. Release your hate. I’ll hear your prayers.

This is my sig. Bite me. **Saint Harlequin Grimaldi**

Some brimstone-baritone anti-cyclone Rolling Stone

Preacher from the East

Says dethrone the dictaphone, hit it in its funny bone, That’s where they expect it least. ****************************

– A mass of disjointed and drugged thoughts who had something to say and didn’t do a good job of saying it.

Interesting saints and patronages; Saint Dymphna (insanity), Saint Maria Goretti (teenage girls), Saint Agatha (volcanic eruptions), Saint Bona (flight attendants), and Erasmus (abdominal pains). There is no saint of stories or storytellers. I claim this patronage into my fold.

This is a day of rememberance and rage. Harlequin died several years ago, but his hate lives and grows thanks to the wonders of the internet.

Remember. Feb. 15th. Piss on a stranger.

I’ve been compulsively refreshing my Twitter page ever 5 minutes for the better part of 3 days.

I need sleep.

Cant. Stop. Clicking!

I feel like I’m stretched very thin.

I’m not sure why I feel that way; it’s not like I do much of anything. Work is still work. Mind numbing and generally feeling like a crappy way to make a buck, but they’re pretty good about giving me time off when I need it for school.

School’s a different matter. I’ve been in college for over two years now, and I’m getting tired of it all. That’s really not a good attitude to have, but what-cha-gonna-do? I’m only taking 3 classes this semester and it feels like I never have any time where I don’t have an assignment due, or test coming up. It’s aggrivating.

After school and work, I’m exhausted, and after Lisa’s full day at work and 2 hour commute, she’s even more tired than I am. She gets home around 7:30 most nights, and if I’m lucky, she’ll stay awake until 11:30. Aside from weekends, I average about 4 hours a day of awake-time with my girlfriend. And that really sucks.

***

Wow. What a whiny little shit I am. On to something fucked up.

Last night I had a dream that I was positive was really happening at the time. It didn’t feel like a dream, you understand. I was doing my Japanese homework (I had actually fallen asleep on the worksheet I was filling out and my drool ruined 4 answers.) and suddenly I really needed to piss. I don’t mean “man, it would be a good idea to empty my bladder soon” sort of need. I mean “Oh god! my crotch! It burns with the fullness of eternal suffering and awkward yoga positions!” sort of need.

Sp I run to the bathroom, barely in time, and proceed to urinate like my life depended on having a panel of judges score my arc on it’s asthetic value. But wait. It gets weird(er)! I can’t stop. I just keep pissing, and needing to flush the toilet every two minutes to keep the bowl from over flowing. After two hours of this, I still can’t stop, and my groin is burning like I’ve gotten 38 previously undiscovered STDs all stabbing me in the junk with pitchforks. The pain is so bad that my knees are buckling, and I start to back away from the toilet, still pissing, working harder to keep my aim centered on the bowl. I make it out of the bathroom and I’m pissing around a corner because that’s just how shit works in dreams. I backup all the way to where my cell phone is pugged into the wall. It’s been hours and I still can’t stop urinating. The stream of piss is hurling itself along almost completely unaided by me at this point, and I need to call 911. I want the Fire Department to come over and use one of those giant wrenches to turn off the flow going to my dick. I pick up the phone, and then I wake up. I’m holding my cell phone and it’s alarm is going off.

Like I said; fucked up, huh?

Ever since I upgraded to Wordpress 2.6 I’ve been getting a ton of comment and trackback spam.

It’s enough to make me want to set a hobo on fire.

Does anyone else have this problem? Not the burning hobo thing, the assloads of spam.

This day is annoying me. I crave violence and cajun food.

Maybe tonight I’ll drive into Austin, go to Pappadeaux, punch the first person I see holding a neon colored drink, and order a huge platter of boudin.

Or maybe I’ll just do my homework and drink heavily.