Mick Shadeland

introspection is a good thing, right? paying attention to one's own thoughts and emotions. finding heads or tails- one or the other, but *something*.

introspection never bothers to hide itself from me. i get miles of fair warning that a sober check of my faculties and persona is in the offing. recovery from surgery. the end of a semester. poolside, 6 states away. insomniac pacing. for the first time in memory, though, it has set upon me quickly. i've been ambushed. but also for the first time in memory, i've looked in and liked what i saw.

introspection spawns long pages in my journal and primes a confession under the patronage and auspices of st.guinness. but here, now- this seems enough. may the day i proclaim myself sated never come, but this peace on the path is not unwelcome. i am dumbstruck at the differences from past to present. anticipation? excitement? i had to look them up to make sure i had them right.

hot damn. i did.

15 july 2008- the long-foretold arthritis in my roboknee is starting to set in. aching today. blah.

down a man at work. didn't get all my stuff done yesterday. needed to take a break.

however, i made chili. vegetarian chili. with cornbread. booyah, bitches.

no fanfare, no flash photography, please- but i'm back.

so, like a moron, i got bored. friends came, ate, played, left. poured another drink. chatted online. made a webpage which will probably never go live. poured another drink. cleaned my desk. i should know better than to do that. i found her number. google. it's still connected. i drive past her house going to work. she does independent film now, too. her website made me laugh. things in common, compatible. poured another drink. took out contact lenses. email her. canceled email. twice. no condition to email. mind keeps moving, thinking, remembering. looking back. same questions, no answers now either. empty. alone. it always hurts, but now it hurts just a little bit more.

so i don't feel like being asleep. i don't really feel like being awake either.

i do want to be with you, you faceless face, you nameless name. eyes i can look into until something breaks the reverie. eyes that make me smile like it's going out of style. eyes that speak, eyes that communicate. the eyes really are the portal to the soul- not in some kind of supernatural, meta-whatever way, though. the eyes are a barometer, a measure of the person. do you really care? do you really care? do you really care? can i see it in your eyes? is the trust well-founded? can i see it in your eyes? do you really want to be with me, you faceless face, you nameless name? can i see it in your eyes?

so i'm conceited. i like the way i look when i have snowflakes in my hair.

the freezing rain just turned into snow.

maybe for the first time, the apartment seems empty. there were people here today, even if they were only here because the shop was inaccessible. sitting around, playing games, listening to music, laughing at each other, and enjoying each other's company. i like that. i want that to happen more often. but now, it's empty.

and now, after everyone's been here and gone, after we've gone separate directions out of the cafe, after everyone's scattered and unwinding, it hits me. i'm not pretending i'm alone in this. in a way, it's not as bad as being at mom and dad's- the alone-ness here isn't accompanied with the alienation of family and familiarity. here, i know exactly what size and shape the hole is- unmuddied by the desire to get out, unfiltered by dependence-induced self-loathing. here, it's crystal-clear. here, it's obvious. but right now, it's empty.

i can only sit here and smile.

SUNSHINE AND RAINBOWS AND MOTHERFUCKING BUNNYRABBITS!!

:(

why do i do this? why do i do this to myself? there's no reason i should be sitting alone, in the dark, singing along as elliott smith covers big star. beautifully. there's no reason i should be singing along to rhp songs. no one needs to do this to themselves.

giving into love and sharing my time,
letting someone into my misery.
i told it all, step by step.
how it ended on the island,
and how i'd swim across the sea,
and it crosses my mind that i may wake to a knife in me.
no more breath in my hair
or ladies' underwear tossed up over the alarmclock.
blood dripping from the bed,
to a neatly written poem,
heartfelt, the last line reading:
there is no more mystery, is it gonna happen my love?
there is no more mystery- is it gonna happen my love?
it's all in my head, she said, a morning-after nightmare.
you're building a wall, she said, higher than the both of us.
so trying living you life instead of hiding in the bedroom,
show me a smile and i'll promise not to leave you.

it happened under a rainy cloud,
passing through the dark south.
we went into a big house,
and slept in a small bed
i didn't know you then, as well as you of me,
we talked of =our sad lives, and we went off separately.
and we went off separately.
i found your overseas souvenirs,
holiday greeting cards,
and some long-forgotten highschool fears.
it's all in my head i said, banging a piano.
iv'e not been so alone, i thought, since kicking in the womb.
i drank so much tea i wrote my letters in [something]
around the room i walked and walked, pretending you were with me.

not wanting to die out here, without you.

the hurting never ends, like birthdays and old friends,
we forget that it's flesh, blood and bone, it's human.
trading phone lines, prayer lines,
unwilling to face
that love is found
on the inside, not the outside.
and like a medicine bottle, in the cabinet i'll keep you.
and like a medicine bottle, in my hand i will hold you.
and swallow you slowly, as to last me a lifetime,
without holding too tight, i do not want to lose
the thrill that it gives me to look out from my window
and scour the houses from my world in the bedroom.

it's all in his head, she read, in the girlfriend's self-help book
it's all his own making, a war with himself,
like two sides of a wall that sepatartes two countries,
he shuts out the world and wants only to love you.

not wanting to die out here, without you.
not wanting to die out here, without you.



so where are you? goddammit, where are you?

i've also just spent the last half-hour trying in vain to find someone i know on lj who's listed tech in their school thing. nobody i know but joe. nobody *for sure* anyway. a few a year or so behind me. maybe people my brother would know. or my sister, geez. '98 was too hung up on itself for any of them to have some stupid journal to write feelings and stuff down in. we were 13 or 14 when cobain blew his head off! we don't write anything down in some pussy journal! we take it out on ourselves like any REAL angry, fed-up kid would!

more lucid this time. it's still really late at night, though. my throat doesn't feel any better. i don't feel any better. but it's still warmer here in the shop with all the computers running than in my room in the basement. i can't wait to leave there. just a few more days. get the apartment painted tomorrow, i hope. will already volunteered, and i think jen's in too.

i need to kick the cs habit- or at the very least cut it back to time when i'm irrevokably stuck in the shop- considering how much work we've got in the theater. in my head, i saw it working out as one of us staying here in the shop while the other worked next door, therefore keeping someone here to make money. somehow, i kinda pictured me doing more cleaning and shop-watching, though. i don't want to drop this on joe, but he's certainly got more gusto than do i. maybe it's just my lack of motivation to do anything. god, half the time, i don't think i'd get around to painting the apartment if mis amigos didn't volunteer themselves for slave-labor.

i know this isn't the time for this kind of realization, but i still have no motivation in life. i'm still being a selfish teenager who wants things done for me. i want to operate finished products, not muck about in the process of making them finished. that's why i never went out and got a job in spanish. that's why i got bored with chem-labs and ended up half-assing them. that's why i can't make up my mind about every other major decision: not because i don't have a well-developed sense of responsibility- but because i don't have the motivation to actually make the choice.

i don't want out of anything i'm in the middle of, but i want out of this mindset. i don't want out of my responsibilities, but i want out of the messy details involved in carrying them out. if this is a revelation or surprise to anyone, we need to talk. now.

the nyquil is finally starting to hit me. the nin is managing to avoid sucking. i might be on the edge of losing a hard drive. my extremities feel sluggish. my fingers are moving and typing of their own volition. They just keep typing, as if they knew what i wanted to say. i DID, however, just have to go back and conrrect some typos.

This is such a pop album. yeah, it's dark and depressing. yeah, there's screaming and yelling. yeah, it's angry. but there's a self-assured swagger abou it that only says to me that it's a pop disc at its heart. that or modern rock puts up with entirely too much bullshit.

i need to go to bed. this is the third time i've caught myself typing nonsense. while looking straight at t eh screen.

bleh. there's a fly in the shop riight now. little bugger needs to go away. :(

no reason i should still be up. our main server is wonky right now. it's moving hella data over the network to somewhere out in the intarweb, but i'm not awake enough right now to check where it's going or what proggie is even pushing it. eff networks, man. fuck networking, fuck dns, and fuck every spammer, spoofer, cracker, and 1337 d00d on the planet. i shut it down. i figured that we'd be safer with the server off than pushing unknown data all over our network. gah. anyway, i have dns routing through our secondary server, but the website is still down, obviously. i think the AD system and all the authentication will work from the backup, but i'm not in the mood to push the system any harder right now. i just wanna go to sleep, but i don't dare yet, not with a down server. at least it's not one of the big ones.

my 15 minutes to rest are about up- wish me luck.

god i feel awful. headache, stomach ache, sore throat. i, from this point forward, swear to eat no more than one piece of pizza in a sitting. this stuff is gonna kill me. chinese food- man. chinese buffet too. :( also, outdoor activities will include warmer clothing. bleh.

on a completely different note, i can't remember part of the layout of the old school 35. that bums me out. i loved that place. it's a spanish church mission now- ips sold it off like 10 years ago. i can't remember how we got from the lockers/bathrooms up to the gym. i know there were the dual stairs that led down from a landing with a door to the parking lot, and i THINK that's where the vending machines were. were there stairs off that landing that went to the back hall? did we have to go up and around, by the front doors to get there? surely we didn't go outside and back in. i can place most everything else. hubble, chaja, grossling, conway, ott, madon, seet, and grimes upstairs & clockwise. amstutz was the only 6th grade teacher i knew downstairs on the main floor, and he was under our illustrious mathemagician. art, shop, music, the girls' locker, the library, the janitor, the boys' locker, and home ec. all downstairs. bui-math was in the shop room, then the art room. since there were so many young'uns needing the gym/auditorium/cafeteria for gym class, we had to eat lunch in our homeroom or next hour class. they put the school lunch dispensery on the stage, under grossling's room- you'd get to it from a side door in the middle of the back hall. if i ever went out the front door to that building, i don't recall doing so.

it was in madon's rotation period that i discoverd alt-codes, and made exhaustive lists thereof. it was while playing in conway's room when i was supposed to be working on some kind of big project or something that i discovered multiple partitions on the hard drives of the dos/x386 boxes. i immediately had an undiscoverable place to put my games- none of the teachers really knew how dos worked- not well enough to catch me anyway. i actually got my class kicked off of the computers in ott's room once. i'd renamed a mostly empty text file to 'virus.hak' and copied it to all the student machines. i might've said something like 'you're machine is mine now, loser', or something. something like that. somebody freaked out when they saw it on the drive and, sure enough, we lost computer privleges for a couple weeks or something. the only real viruses that went around were bootsector viruses. ripper and stuff. smalltime. in chaja's class, we had the laptops. joy oh joy! one could, at the price of one's arm, leg, and rights to the firstborn child of the same, take these laptop computers home overnight or over weekends and holidays, ostensibly to do homework. pish. admittedly, some homework was done, but not until after playing endless hours of scorch, tankwars, secret agent, and DUKE FUCKING NUKEM. me and joe and ben and pj would fall all over ourselves getting over there after last period to sign them out and still make the bus. lamers then, lamers now- 12 years later. god. half a lifetime ago. no wonder my memory's fuzzy.

bah. reminiscing doesn't help with me feeling like poo. it just makes the pain inside balance out the pain, well... i guess that pain's inside too. the pain in my soul to the pain in my body. music was better. we were the last of the pre-intenet 'tweens. the teachers liked us as a group. we were the smart kids, recognised as the smart kids, separated so we could thrive as smart kids. i'd gotten a horrible case of poison ivy two or three weeks before school started, and that scarred me fairly deeply, both physically and therefore emotionally. i remember going to the state fair that year and people looking at me in horror and disgust. what the hell could *I* do? on top of that, or maybe because of that, acne hit me hard that year- i guess it's in my genes something fierce. dad lost his job spring '93, so we had just about zero money for anything when i was in 8th grade. i remember mom getting so mad at me when i bought a $15 baja jacket from a school fundraiser. my joys in life were saving up all week so i could buy a $.45 chocolate chip cookie with my lunch on friday and listening to that terrible, debasing 'hard rock' alt-radio station. my rebellion extended to covertly purchasing several audiotapes from such base and defiling bands as nirvana, rem, and pearl jam. it wasn't mozart, john denver, or the goddamn beegees, therefore it was evil. my father almost bit my head off when he heard me listening to led zeppelin, pink floyd, and david bowie when i was in COLLEGE. i still got dragged out to see fucking disney on fucking ice and the circus and the fair. no matter how much i tried to talk my way out, or out-stubborn my parents, i always ended up going. the only time i can ever remember my mother trying to guilt me into doing anything was when she'd go and buy advance-sale tickets- she'd already bought them, therefore i can't waste the one purchased especially for me. i called her bluff and offered to buy it off of her or find someone else who WANTED to go. fucking happy family outings. all the fuss would usually just put my father in a bad mood, and invariably ended in one of us kids getting yelled at or beat for something inane and otherwise essentially harmless. back at 35, i ogled jessica and jana and julie and melissa. and of course, pam. i was akward, frustrated, lanky and ugly and out of proportion, but that was the order of things. that was what i cried myself to sleep to some nights. that was what i woke up to every day. that was what i would pray that i wouldn't have wake up to, but mostly i would pray that i just wouldn't wake up anymore.

it was still the best year of my life.

still here. still don't want to go home. it's not that i want to be *here*. i just don't want to be *there* anymore. god, we need get this thing signed. i need to move in upstairs.

there are so many reasons, but none of them are any good. so many reasons. right now, i'm telling myself that i want to finish stuff here. whatever.

i shopped up a new spray. i is a dork. :)

it seems like all my friends are really down on themselves as of late. there's something in the water, something in the air that's souring attitudes and relationships. it's rubbing off, and i don't like that one bit. i wish, i hope nothing but the best for everyone, and it's my sincerest desire that things all work out and everyone snaps out of their respective funks.

it hurts inside when i can see how good some of my friends would have it if they stopped being selfish and realised how much the people around them care about them- individually, as people, faults and all. if i didn't like the people i associate with, i would leave. i would leave and disappear. but i don't disappear. i care enough about each of them, each of you, enough that i'm still here, still around, still going through my days with all of you around me.

you are my family. you are the people i care about. you add perspective to my life. and i can't thank you all enough for that.