Tuesday, October 04, 2011

Escaped from Britain

I'm a sucker for novelty things. Which is probably why right now I am drinking Newcastle's Werewolf Ale. It claims to be a blood red ale. I poured it in a glass to check and its definitely just brown. And by way of taste, it's maybe a six out of ten. I wouldn't recommend it unless you are one of those people who collects different beer bottles to display. It does look awesome.

There's this documentary called "Conan O'Brien Can't Stop" that I watched the other day. It's just about Conan going on his tour he did while he was contractually obligated not to be on TV. He was such a dick to Jack McBreyer (Kenneth from 30 Rock) when he came by backstage. It was hilarious. But in that he did this quick little rock show with Jack White in New York and I found out that Jack White has a studio in New York where he just does random rock shows with people all the time. And you can go to it. It is now a goal in my life to go to that studio and see a show.

But speaking of Kenneth from 30 Rock, what is up with that dude? Let's just go over a few lines he's had in the show. I'm paraphrasing, so sorry if they aren't 100% accurate, but you'll get the idea:

1. "Who said I've been alive forever?"
2. "When I first started working here an 8-year old Shirley Temple taught me how to roll a cigarette"
3. (While watching Liz, Jack, Tracy, and Jenna through a telescope) "Look at them Jaccob, look at their capacity for good. I just need more time with them. I just need more time!"

There are a couple others I forget. I'll bet if I put in a minute of research on the internet I'd uncover a host of theories about Kenneth. Ehh... too much work.

I almost bought a house. It turned out to be a lemon upon closer inspection. I feel like I dodged a bullet there. Not just in getting a crappy house but in getting a house in Reno. I'm not really sure I want to stick around this town anymore. My last post was about dealing with getting dumped. But now that I've had some time to reflect on it I think it's going to be ok. We weren't really right for each other. And despite nearly hooking back up with her at a wedding recently I've gotten comfortable with the idea of not dating her anymore. And she was sort of the last reason I had to stay in Reno. So I think I need a new plan. I'm leaning toward wandering. Which doesn't seem like a plan, but I mean getting an RV and becoming a gypsy for a while. I was thinking the only way I could do that was if I had some sort of goal in mind when I went out there. Going out on a purposeless journey seemed a bad idea. But now I'm thinking the new scenes every couple of days, the solitude, the general life living of it would be great for me to get motivated to finish a novel. Not that I couldn't write a novel sitting in an apartment in Reno, but I'm hoping the change of scenery would be good for motivating me. Also it would be a good story for trying to sell the book. "oh yeah, while I wrote that I was just living out of an RV driving aimlessly around the US for half a year." And then they can act like I'm some sort of Dharma Bum of the new millennium. Even though, you know, I wouldn't be. But they could sell that idea. It sounds way better than "wrote it while attending a college to get a masters in creative writing." That's so boring.

Yes, my life is boring right now. I need to get out in the world a little bit. I think now is my time.

This might sound like I just came up with this idea but I've actually been thinking about it for a really long time. Pretty much since I got back from Maine. The fact is I've been scared about going for it. I've been sort of stuck. But I need something in my life. A loafty goal being carried out with an aimless aplomb.

In that Conan documentary he said he took over for David Letterman when he was 30 and I thought, "I'll be 30 in less than three years." I keep sort of waiting for life to happen to me. But I'm getting to an age where I need to make life happen to me. And really this is the only idea I've got.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

I'll tear up this town

I got dumped a few nights ago. Part of me was looking forward to it, I wanted her to take control so I waned to be the dump-ee and not the dumper. I've decided that wasn't a great idea. Even when its what you want getting dumped hurts a lot.

Now I have to figure out what I am going to do from here. I'm torn between being bitter and angry for a while or just trying too hard to to find a replacement for her. I wonder if I can't do both.

Though I am leaning towards being bitter and angry.

I listened to the "Footloose" song for six hours straight once wondering if it would drive me insane. I'm not really sure if it did.

But I gotta cut loose. Foot loose.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do. But I'm going to do something. And I'm sure its going to be something I regret. No matter what course I take I can see myself making an ass of myself. And I'm not okay with that. But I'm going to have to do it if I want to move forward. At least it might be moderately entertaining, perhaps only from an outside perspective, but it will be entertaining.

Been working, so hard, been punching my card.

I don't understand what I'm feeling. I probably never will. But I have to get past this, because I'm not dealing with it very well. I don't know I'll make it through this one.

Everybody cut foot loose.

Thursday, August 11, 2011

Happy Happy and Other Poems

There are individual moments in a life that are probably unimportant yet seem to carry a lot of weight. For example last night I was talking with my girlfriend while we half watched a monster movie and she said "you seem like the type of guy who will never get married." And I saw her point, I did, I don't really project the married guy vibe, or at least I don't think I do. But I said, in response, "sure I will. I used to think about getting married a lot. A few years ago, at least, I did, before I gave up on the idea of happiness."

That response might have changed the direction of my entire life. I can't be sure, I'll probably never be sure, but it might have. Because that moment was probably the first time I'd ever discussed the prospect of being married with a girl I was dating. And, sure, the first time its all theoretical. But who knows? A year from now it could all be coming true. All because I didn't reject the idea out of hand. A simple response to a simple statement and suddenly my whole life could change.

Chances are that response will have no repercussions on my future. But I always wonder if it will.

Marriage doesn't make sense to me anyway. Not the joining together part, not the monogomy part, those make sense to me. Its the living together I don't get. I've lived with many different people in my life, but they were family or roommates or random people who crashed on the couch for a month or two. But I've never been expected to share a room, much less a bed, with any of them. And I struggle with the idea of doing that every night. I struggle with that a lot.

I'm a loner. Always have been. But not, well, at least I hope not, in the creepy way. Just a guy who prefers to be alone. The mere presence of someone else can change the way one acts, the way one behaves, the way one interacts with other people. And in many ways that is good for me. If someone else is around I won't just wile away the day watching TV and playing video games. If I feel like someone might see me I try to be more productive. On my own I am happy to do nothing, with someone watching I might actually try to get something accomplished.

I'm not as good on my own. Not as good as I could be. But I still need to be alone. I need to have my solitude. But I don't want to always be alone. I need people. I know I do, its just hard for me to always be around people.

I love Arynn. I really do. And I want to stay with her. But we both know eventually it will have to go further or it will have to go away. And marriage will come up again and again if I stay with her. And although I said that I wanted it before, and I wasn't lying about that, I'm not sure if I want it now. Life, I suppose, makes one make those choices.

On a side note, while I'm here, my website has gone down. www.tin-god.com is no longer functioning. It should still be functioning, I just haven't figured out what went wrong or how to fix it. But I'm working on it, hopefully it won't be down forever.

Wednesday, August 03, 2011

The Things Your Offering Me

I should start writing again. I haven't been for a while. For a few years I really was writing all the time. And even then I felt like I wasn't doing enough. But lately I haven't been doing any. I've sort of given up. Not on the idea of being a writer, just on actually trying for a while. Hopefully that will change soon.

I've been learning about how I work and how I manage to motivate myself and I find that if I don't have anyone actually expecting any work out of me I don't actually do any work. I'd rather sit around and watch TV. It's what I'm good at. And I do love TV. But if someone expects something from me then I get a lot more work done. I lack proper self-motivation, perhaps, or perhaps everyone is working because they feel like someone else is expecting them to. Whether it be a friend or family member or wife or husband or boss or employee or even a deity, everyone might just be working because they feel like some one else wants them to. This is, of course, in reference only to the sorts of jobs you don't get paid for. Obviously going to work and receiving a paycheck is motive enough. I'm talking about the sorts of work that we do, or want to do, in order to make ourselves somehow bigger than we already all. Writing, if I am ever successful, would make me bigger than myself. But I just don't have the motivation to really get much work done anymore. I just don't feel like I have anyone to impress anymore I guess.

Hemingway wrote A Farewell To Arms when he was 30. I've got three years till I'm 30. I know I'm not the next Hemingway, but if he could write a book that almost immediately made him a massive literary figure when he was 30 I should be able to complete a novel by then. But then I am very lazy...

I get frustrated when I can't just complete a task in a short amount of time. I have trouble following through. I need to work on that in me. At least now I'm more aware of it. Maybe I can make some progress in getting better at that. Although that is a big project, and the problem is completing big projects. Sort of a Catch-22. But I might solve one problem by solving the other. So instead of being a situation there is no way out of it is a situation that has a clear course of action. I just have to quit failing. It's tricky, but its not impossible.

I don't really know why I'm blogging about this. I just figured it was time to throw another post up here and I sort of just rambled. Again. I ramble a lot. I'm glad not a lot of people read this. Most of the time I can't imagine that there is any redeeming value in any of these posts. But I like making them. Perhaps they are useless to everyone else but they do help me think.

Monday, June 27, 2011

The way you look sometimes

I've been slacking in my writing lately. Tin God goes un-updated. This blog lays forgotten. And its not like I've been working on anything. I suck lately. I just find it so easy to get distracted by other things.

I need to do something with my life. I'm tired of the direction my life is going. Which is downward, in a slow spiraling sort of way. I thought by four years after graduating from college I'd have figured something more to do with my life than fuck around and work a few days a week. Not that it's been all bad living like that, but I need something more out of life. I think I'm going to go back to school for a while. At least I'll feel like I'm accomplishing something, even if it doesn't end up gaining me much.

Lately I feel, I don't know, maybe better, maybe numb. Normally I feel shitty and depressed most of the time. Now I just don't really feel happy. I guess that's an improvement. But I've also lost a lot of ambition. I just don't care most of the time. The Buddha teaches us that true happiness comes from the freedom of desire. Or something. Perhaps no longer really wanting to have a better more productive life has brought me a sense of peace. Yet obviously I still want to make some thing of myself, as evident by the last paragraph. I am not free from that desire. Maybe I'm just not desiring as much. Or something. Hell I don't know.

One thing that has been different though is that I've been staying off the internet a lot more. Not really intentionally, but since I got my iPhone I've been able to check email/facebook in a couple seconds and then I don't really feel like going and getting on my computer at all. Normally I'd check a couple things on my computer then waste three or four hours screwing around on various sites or playing games. Now I use my home internet mostly for Netflix and Hulu. And that means that I run out of things to do at home and end up going out more. I guess that's good.

Of course the other difference is that I'm still dating Arynn and she's a distraction. And I'm happy when I'm with her. And I spend time organizing things for us to do together and cooking for her and cleaning my apartment more often so that when she comes over it isn't a complete dump. Of course having a relationship adds some stress to my life.

Here's the thing about my relationship, I don't have a hell of a lot going on on a day to day basis. And, sure, I get lonely hanging out with my dog all day and milling around the apartment. But I'm used to being alone a lot of the time, that's sort of how I like it. Yet I get so incredibly pissed off when she cancels on me or leaves me hanging and forces me to be alone more than I was planning on. And she's busy, I get that, but she also has some weird, I guess the word is issues, when it comes to working. We were at an event and she drove me and my sister and brother-in-law there and they were already in the car waiting for her and I literally had to drag her away from helping people clean up. People we were paying to clean up. Who also told her not to help because it was their job. And the other day we had plans for her to come over and watch True Grit, which she had been going on about wanting to watch for over a month, and she left me sitting on my ass for two hours at my apartment waiting for her to come over before I finally said "fuck it, I'm going out with my friends, you can come if you want." And she got mad at me for not inviting her properly. And her reason for being two hours late? She was helping her mom with some housework. HOUSEWORK! I mean, shit, that's admirable that she's helping out, but she does live with her mom (she's lived in other countries and has only been back in her parents house for a few months, just so I don't give the wrong impression). I had to move back in with my mom twice after college, and I had to help out with stuff around the house to earn my keep, but at the end of the day I'd say "I'm going to go drink and play poker with my friends, I'll finish tomorrow." Of course, Arynn answered her phone during a movie at the movie theater once because she knew if she didn't her mom might start calling every single person Arynn knew in an attempt to find her, and then she would start calling the cops. Her parents both do that shit. It drives me fucking insane. The first month we were dating she'd constantly be lying to her parents about where she was because she knew if she told them she was at a boys house they would start freaking out. Did I mention I'm 26 and she's 27? That she lived in Japan for two years, she was married for a while, and she doesn't drink or do any sort of drugs? Did I mention she was 27 years old? Fucking insane, right? I mean, I can get her having issues with her parents now that she's living at home again, but what the fuck is their excuse? My dad will sometimes have a few beers, realize there is nothing on TV and give me a call to see how I'm doing. My mom and I used to only talk once or twice a week. I know its different for every family, but they are obsessed with what she is up to, and it takes a toll on her, I can see it. It takes a huge toll on my relationship with her too. And between her two jobs and her parents and her, as someone put it today, menagerie of pets, she really doesn't have time for a relationship. Which is why I broke up with her. But that only lasted about 20 hours. And we got back together and she promised to devote more time to me but that hasn't proven to be a promise she could keep. I mean, she's made that promise a lot. And you can say that I shouldn't be so annoyed because I got shit all going on in my life, but when I met her I was pretty much only in Reno on the days that I had to work. The rest of my time I was keeping vigil at the side of my mom while she lay on her death bed. And I was going through some shit, it was fucking hard, but I decided that I met this cute sweet girl and I was going to find time, despite what was going on in my life, for her. And I was coming up once a week to see her and still coming up for work and then the rest of the time I was with my mom. And a part of me still wishes that I could have been there with my mom more of the time, but I'm glad that I put that out of my mind and just made things work with me and Arynn because that was important to me. So its kind of frustrating to me when she ignores me to help her mom with some housework and then gets mad at me for not understanding that she has to help out around the house. Kind of incredibly frustrating. "fuck that," I say, "is your mom dying of cancer right now? No? Then get the fuck over her and watch a goddamn movie for two hours." My god. Everyone has their priorities I guess. Still, when she called me in a panic the other night I was over at her house in literally the amount of time it took me to drive there and help her out. It was a medical issue with one of her dogs, and I was glad I could help, but I do wonder how long it would have taken her to get to me if I was in the middle of a mid-level crisis and needed her help. Hell, a couple of weeks I was fucking depressed. I mean, really, really depressed. I'm not sure why exactly, but there was just a lot of shit piled up in my head and I wasn't processing it very well and I barely got off the couch for three days. And I didn't ask anyone else, save her, for help. Because I don't ask people for help usually, but I just needed my girlfriend to come over and be nice to me and it took her a couple of days. That was about two days before I broke up with her. I'm a good boyfriend. I suck at a lot of things. But I work hard at being a boyfriend. I take her out, I buy her things, I listen when she talks, I remember what she's told me, I try to find ways to entertain her that she'll like. She doesn't like me drinking and smoking so I don't drink or smoke around her. I'm not saying I'm a great person, I'm not an evil person, but I am selfish and full of vice. But I push myself to be better when I'm with her, and I push myself to be around her as much as possible. And the fact that she has trouble finding a few hours a couple times a week to spend with me really pisses me off.

I know I ranted for a while there, and probably no one gives a fuck, but if you are reading this then you are reading a blog, and honestly, what do you expect from a blog? Eventually there is going to be a post or two complaining about a relationship. It happens. And I feel better, so that's really whats important here.

Thursday, May 19, 2011

It was a ray gun, and it was 1984

I lost the high ground a long time ago. I'm a liar, and a fraud, and sometimes I wonder if I even really have an identity anymore. I was walking down my street with my dog and I walked past the kid that lives next door to me. He looked awful, so incredibly sad, and I can hear through my walls his white trash mother yelling at him all day and yet I see him slowly wonder back to that environment because that was the only place he could go. I didn't do anything, I didn't try to help, I didn't make eye contact. Maybe it isn't my place, but it would have been, it could have been, a while ago. When I used to care. I just don't care anymore. And that is why I'm a fraud, because I believe I still care but I just don't anymore. And that is why I'm a liar, because I tell people I still care.

I gave up a long time ago. I feel like I'm going through the motions of life anymore. And I barely bother with that. I hide out in my apartment and avoid people as though they were plague ridden. I guess I never expected much more out of myself. I'm not real good with people. I'm a loner, I've been one since I could remember. I was talking to someone at the dog park this morning. He had a Chow, my dog is half Chow, and we were talking about how independent they were. They fetch for a few minutes while they are puppies and then they realize that there really isn't any point in it. But they are loyal. They find a master and they stick with them. Chewy spent the vast majority of her life without me being around, but when I am around she won't go more than a few feet from me. And she'll fight dogs twice her size if she thinks they are messing with me.

It makes sense I would have a dog like that. I'm loyal, and I don't give up on people once I've formed an attachment. But I'm losing interest in the rest of the world. I've made my connections, I've formed my bonds, and anyone outside of those bonds doesn't really count anymore.

It's a simple life philosophy and one that I can live by. It doesn't make me a good person but at least I know that I am there for the people that matter to me. Which brings me to my problem. Of course I have a problem. I don't even bother to write a blog anymore if I don't have a problem. It's sad but true.

There is a girl in my life right now. And she is gorgeous and smart and a little neurotic and super sweet and I love her. I do love her. I fell hard after our first date. And so far that's been a good thing. But life is starting to interfere. And I might need to move back to my hometown, some 60 miles away, to live in the house that I grew up in. And I might need to do this because I can't really afford to keep paying rent when I am also paying a mortgage on a house that I technically own half of. And by technically I mean legally. Aside from my girl I have no reason to not go back there and live there for a while. My job is a joke. And if I wasn't paying rent it would negate the lack of a paycheck. Plus I think I have enough contacts in my hometown to allow me to meek out a living if I wanted. But it seems to soon to ask her to move to with me.

Maybe it isn't. She probably won't say yes, but I can ask her. And maybe it will just be very temporary. Of course it may not be. I love her though. And I think she loves me. And maybe. Maybe maybe maybe. Maybe she will want to follow me out there. Maybe. Maybe maybe maybe.

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Don't Stop. Make it Pop.

In February I posted a Facebook status that read something like "I think something good just happened to me. I'm not sure."

I am sure now. Something good did happen to me.