Just woke up.

From a dream.
I was in the basement of Our House, which was a large sort of cabin raised off the ground by strong wooden pillars. It was sort of in the woods up in the foothills of somewhere. You had to drive a ways to get there, and then it was down a winding dirt road, but it was a comfy sort of place if a bit run-down. I lived there with a bunch of my friends and my dad. I think it was semi-temporary. Like we were just staying there for awhile, but it felt pretty settled in.

I was alone in the bottom of the house fiddling with some plumbing or something, trying to get something to work better.
It was sometime in February (month of my birthday) because a car drove up, and S.U.V. actually, and in it were my father and several of my friends. They were all drunk and stoned on absinthe. It was the kind of energetic good time which makes me feel awkward and alone.
They wanted to to take me to the art museum. Some very famous paintings which I happened to like were on display there. So because this excited me, and because my friends were there, and it was for my birthday, I went with them.

In the car on the way to the museum, everyone was in very high spirits. They were all continuing a conversation I hadn't been a part of starting, and were very erratic due to the drug, so it was difficult to know what they were talking about. It seemed to be a play. I kept to myself, and only drank a little of the absinthe when offered. I tried to enjoy their company, and I did somewhat. My dad was driving, and it was easy not to interact with him, because he was so engaged in the conversation.

We arrived at the art museum, and my dad led the party on into the wing where they displayed a "TV Art History" collection, which was a bunch of awful, tacky shit that reminded me of watching Nick at Night and all the stupid '50s and '60s television culture bullshit. It reminded me of trying to understand him by watching the brainless TV shows he watched as a child. It reminded me of trying to be like him. It upset me.

Disappointed that none of my friends were interested in something with more depth of character, I departed and sought the temporary exhibit on my own. I tried to leave inconspicuously, so as not to rain on their high, but a few noticed me leave. I tried not to care and went to try and find The Scream.

When I finally found the room Edvard Munch was in, I saw my dad already in there, discussing something with a curator. The curator looked annoyed, and I didn't want to get sucked into anything stupid, so I left without getting a good look at The Scream. Disappointed, I no longer had much interest in the rest of the exhibit, to I went and waited in the car.

They whole party had soon returned, and I noted that rather than discussing anything they'd seen inside, they were still having the same conversation about a play.
The car was off again, and I wondered why no one seemed disappointed that my birthday party at the art museum had been cut short. They barely seemed to notice.

We stopped at a Plaid Pantry for snacks. Finally I learned that the play was some hippie bullcrap version of The Jungle Book, and that my father and some of my friends knew several of the people involved. It was opening tonight, and they had all decided to get wasted and go.

"So, none of this has even been about me at all," I said, knowing that everyone was too fucked up on the absinthe to really understand what my problem was. I myself was feeling just off enough to have absolutely no tolerance for this shit. While my dad was in the store, I grabbed my other pair of shoes(?), got out of the car and started to walk home, which was not far off.

It had begun to rain. When I got home it was raining for hard, and loudly. My footsteps on the tin plank which bridged a small ditch between the driveway and the area beneath the house alarmed the already spooked pony(?) which lived in a pen below the house. I tried to comfort the pony, but it didn't like the noise of the rain. I gave it a carrot, which seemed to calm it down, and started to head inside the house when I saw the S.U.V. again. It was parked in the driveway. It was difficult to see inside because of the rain (though I was dry under the house).

I approached the vehicle tentatively. It didn't look as lively as before. I got close enough to make out that the driver was not my dad, and went closer. The driver, a friend of mine, told me that my father had been trying to acquire a reproduction of a painting from the exhibit of classics from the museum for me. She said that when he noticed my disappointment he had tried to make up for it by getting something by...she didn't know the name. Ed, Edward...Munsch (she pronounced "Munch" like "munchies"). I asked if it was Edvard Munch and she got excited and said, "Yeah!"

I was in the car and it was driving, presumably to the play. My dad was in the passenger's seat, as it turned out, and I began to cry, the drug impeding my ability to manage my emotions. I cried and began to yell at him, ignoring the awkwardness of the others in the vehicle.
I yelled explaining why I hated the TV history exhibit.

Explained that it reminded me of all the boring shit I used to try to entertain myself with when he would drag me around to people's houses or wherever. How as long as there was a TV I could at least do that, but how often there was little more than the grains in wood to entertain me. How I used to watch Nick at Night at my mother's house and wonder if it were possible to understand how he thought and why he behaved the way he did, if I understood the background culture he grew up in.

As I continued I became more upset and louder. I was aware that my friends did not want to be around this, but the driver wasn't stopping. Maybe it was my dad now, I'm not sure. I screamed about why I had wanted to see the paintings. Wanting to see someone else's loneliness distilled to solid form.
I asked how he even knew which painting to get. I asked if he knew why I liked The Scream so much.

I told him because it looked like how I felt, that each brushstroke shines like a gem, and all together they become mottled and hideous, that it is at once repellant and engaging, and both of them because I understood how the painter felt, exactly.

That's all I remember from the dream.

Autobobots wage their battle to destroy the evil forces of...the Decepticons!

In Taiwan there's two kinds of pirated merchandise. The kind the fell off the back of a truck, but at least it's got the right paint scheme. And the kind made of grade G plastic on a factory mold made by shamelessly reverse-engineering an official product. The kind of crap that catches your eye for a second with a recognizable shape, until you realize you're looking at a yellow and green Optimus Prime, called a "Transformable."

When I saw this I sang, "Transformables! ...Not what you'd expeeect!"
Which I still find funny.
Also I've been watching the Transformers - Animated series on Veoh. It's an American children's cartoon, so, awful, but I've been enjoying it. The pilot was three episodes long and Starscream ran around starscreaming it up, so that was fun for a nostalgic kick. A few episodes later the Dinobots got a chace to poke their heads out of retirement, and that was fun too. Grimlock makes me laugh. I'm looking forward to seeing what the show does with Megatron.

I worked the first day of a month of subbing for Mr. M today, and I feel less confident now than I did before I went. My wife says I did well, but I didn't feel like I did. I taught four classes today, and almost every time I said anything at all, they stared at me blankly. I kept running up against the end of the reading material with nothing planned to do when they were done, because I hadn't expected them to finish so quickly, and I would have been pleased and impressed if the problem had been that the work was beneath them. Unfortunately it was very clear that the students had little to no concept of what they were reading.

There was a thing about a narrator sharing a toad with his friend, and I had to explain what a toad was, and then what sharing was, and it is very difficult to explain abstract concepts like sharing and Circque du Soleil, and why the Beatles-themed circus show is called "LOVE" in allcaps.

So we read this thing and it says, "The Cirque du Soleil is a different kind of circus!" And I'm like, "Okay so do you know what a circus is?" and they're like, "No."
And I just sort of go...uh...fuck. But actually no, I think that might have been my best class today.

Anyway, I feel like I just blundered, badly, through a day of teaching and they're going to notice that I only have one work outfit, and when I ask the boss if she has anything permanent for me, she's going to want me to go away.
I don't think this is very realistic, but that's how I was feeing until this morning when I decided, "I can totally do this," and then I did it, and I'm thinking about doing it for a week, and then I think about doing that all over again three more time, and I think "I can't do this." But I'll probably be fine again tomorrow.

I feel like I'm actually getting worse at driving the scooter. I think I'm the only one who gets worse at doing things with practice. That reminds me of a Metalocalypse quote.
"I am slowly learnink hows to unplays the guitars."

I keep falling asleep and I really should go to bed because I have work tomorrow and I didn't get enough sleep last night. Two in a row sounds like a bad plan.

This house is near the top of a mountain. That means that no matter how pleasant it is in town, after a half-hour drive, we arrive at our chilly mountain home. Our house, as has been mentioned, has no insulgoddamnlation, and NO heating whatsoever! We have one surly cheap plastic space heater. It's basically a toaster someone pumped up on steroids and then cut in half. It's two heating coils mounted into a chintzy plastic frame with faulty wiring. It's a peach.
But it does manage to keep hypothermia at bay.
Okay I don't think we'd get hypothermia.
Oh, also, one of the two staircases which lead between the 1st floor (kitchen, shower) and the 3rd (bedrooms) likes to have condensation on the walls and cieling, which drips down and makes the stairs kind of slippery. Sometimes also, the kitchen floor is slimey, as is the upstairs bathroom. The shower room is perpetually nasty, and one of two refrigerators does not work at all, nor has it for some time, as I understand it, yet it is FULL of ROTTING food. Sometimes while we're cooking, we'll be washed over with the unmistakable aroma of Dumpster.

But enough bitching, I feel confident that we'll be able to move soon to a reasonable apartment. This will be a happy thing. Life will also be more livable when we get someone to show us where we can buy high-quality organic meat and produce. I miss cheese. The only decent pizza places we've found wouldn't last a day in Portland, let alone New York, and they were overpriced. We found a Mexican place which was delicious, but underfilling and also overpriced.
A burrito, as in...a burrito. What you, as a Portlander (if you are one) must surely think of as..."a burrito" was roughly equivalent to $9 US. The burritos at this place were very tasty, but also very small. The 300 元 burrito was almost the size of anything you'd get from virtually any taqueria on America's western coast. But that is far too much to pay.

Ahem. But enough bitching, I said....

Here's something that happened to me:
I gave myself food poisoning like a moron by eating some fried rice that had sat out all night. I tried to cook the death out of it first. "But I failed. Miserably!" (Police Chief Brian Irons, RE2)
First I felt fine. Then some hours later I felt like Satan had made a summer-home in my bowels. Some more hours later I was weeping and vomiting into the toilet, cutting an exceptionally pathetic figure of pantslessness...it probably would have been funny if it weren't also horrifying.
Puking my guts out and screaming my abdominal pain into that Lovecraftian abyss of a toilet, I suddenly found myself making words!
Having hit the absolute bottom of self-esteem and comfort, while at the same time feeling unconditionally beloved by my wife, who held me while my organs staged their violent coup, I found myself screaming things like, "I hate you Dad!" and "You're evil!" and "I have emotions!"

So...that was interesting. I mean I've known for a very long time that I'm angry at my father. But I realized then that I hadn't allowed myself to actually experience the full ferocity of my anger. I could talk about why, but something that became a reoccurring theme that night was that the more I rationalize, the less I feel. It's a way I've been using to cut myself off from my emotions, and that coldness makes me feel dead.
All the slime and spite and evil selfish hatred for the world that my dad pretends he doesn't feel he poured into me and in my guts it became a virulent toxin, poisoning me for most of my life. If not all of it. It took an ocean of distance and some time, and someone that makes me feel safe, loved, and known, but finally my body rejected the darkness and shoved it out.
The combination of totally unchained, top-of-my-lungs screaming and pure bile may have scarred my throat a little, and my voice sounds deeper, or at least drier to me now.

It was my wife who asked me the question which caused me to realize that the reason I'm so upset is that I loved my father, and still do. That's exactly why I hate him so god damn much. He and others are why I have a baseline fear of men in general. I realized that I thought of all men as sleazy misogynist pricks (television in the '90s did not help), and I was terrified that people might see me that way, or worse, that I might be one and delude myself into being unaware of it (like my father). My father is why I'm afraid that people will hate me if I'm attracted to a woman. Because I always hated it when he displayed his attraction, because he's fucking skeez.
I'm constantly nervous that (most) men are going to start competing with me over whatever. I don't want to fucking compete with you, you troglodyte, leave me alone! I don't want to have to be better than you or worse than you or whatever. I just want to mind my own fucking business.
My dad couldn't observe anything I did without judging it against his own tastes. If I was watching a cartoon it was stupid, if I was listening to some music it was derivative, if I was playing a video-game, the music was stupid, the voice acting was stupid, and the characters probably looked stupid, or moved wrong. If I was playing a racing game, he was unimpressed if anywhere was off-limits, like the bay, or inside buildings or whatever. If I was playing a game based on New York or San Fransisco, his two favorite cities, and I showed it to him, that street isn't next to that street, what's that supposed to be, and wow it sure is small.
If I ever did anything exciting, it was usually met with a story about how he had done something similar but far more impressive in his youth. I honestly believe that he does not think he ever intended to put me down. But he's a vile evil subtle fucker and I don't care.
It may sound like I'm overreacting, because I'm not actually talking about the really insidious shit, because it's so subtle and manipulative, that it would take a fucking book just to set up the contexts and situations in which he oozed his hatred into my subconscious. Fuck! And my conscious mind, while I'm at it! Sometimes he wasn't subtle at all, like whenever he was in a bad mood for WHATEVER reason I usually didn't get to know (because to talk about his emotions would be to admit that he was less than 100% super cool chill-out dude all the time)(though in retrospect I think it was around the time he was having marital difficulties with his...third? Wife.) he would just endlessly push all my buttons until I ran out of patience and screamed at him, which gave him what he wanted, which is to act like he's so rational because he's not screaming, and I must have some kind of bizarre problem to just randomly flip out like that.

Looking back, I think he must have been aggravating me in order to create someone who was acting the way he felt so that he could project his rage onto me, making an externalized sort of mascot for his own anger, which he could then easily dismiss as a force outside himself, all the more easily dismissed because I was like, seven. Or eight. Or five, or thirteen or fifteen or twelve or seventeen or twenty-two. Younger than him, anyway. He's always had a big thing about years equaling experience, and therefore wisdom. What an asshole. Anyway, that's just what I think were his motivations. It doesn't really matter, because the result is that I was miserable and rarely had the freedom to feel emotions which were genuinely mine. I mean my anger at him for being a prick to me for the sole purpose of being a prick to me, that was mine, but as soon as I expressed it he would dismiss it and shut me down, because that's what he was trying to do with his own anger.

God, where was I? Oh yeah, so I got food poisoning and puked, and puked, and when there wasn't anything left in my stomache, all this childhood shit flew out of my throat instead. When it was all out I felt amazing. Weaker'n shit, but really blissfully happy. It took me about a day to recover enough to move around the house, but when I did I discovered that I was no longer afraid of the dark. I wasn't like, phobic before or anything, but walking into a totally dark or very dim room would often start a slow panic which could only be alleviated by light. I find this is no longer the case (unless I have reason to believe that I may walk through spider-webs, which isn't all that common). I'm not certain why, but the sensation is that there is no longer anything in the shadows not to see. A day after, I began rationalizing my cathartic experience, and I started to feel the sense of freedom I'd attained labor as the cold, greasy chains snaked their way back into place. At the time, I felt something come in the door (I was alone downstairs in the kitchen, which is near the door we use as our primary entrance) and near the kitchen. I realized instantly that it was the thing in the dark, it was my fear, returning, and I made a decision feel instead of rationalizing. I faced the fear thing, the shadow, and forced it back out the door.

We've heard that this place is mildly haunted, but this was absolutely an internal thing, a part of me manifesting itself in my imagination. The anthropomorphization of my fear. It was handy to have something to tell to fuck off. Except that wasn't really what made it leave again, it was that I admitted it was there, allowed myself to feel it without being ashamed of myself for being afraid of the dark (not calling myself immature), it was like shining a light into a dark corner.

I've also been able to write more freely since the catharsis, and I feel the love I already felt for my friends more...I'm not sure how to describe it. More definitely? Intricately, purely?
"That was quite the cocktail." (Solid Snake, MGS)

I don't know, but it's something, and I want to hang on to it for as long as I can. Forever being the goal.

Uhhhhh...that's all. I guess? Yeah. For now, anyway.