distillation of the fifth day.

It’s at these fragile moments that I realize just how much of my life has been spent in the midst of forced conflicts. I can count no less than fifteen good years spent at war with the frailty of various addictions, chasing the light of selfish daydreams in various tints and tones of delusion, and competing with the shadows stretching out from the feet of those around me. I’ve been foolish in epic quantities; I have a bulging disc in my neck that causes crippling migraines, patchworking of self-inflicted scars on my thighs and forearms, and the quiet emptiness of a man who feels as though he’s coming off of the high of his personal peak.

This is, of course, the sum of the week speaking though me; crisis reduces even the surest mind into a sock-puppet state, where you’re left flapping and babbling about your latest affliction and fascination. These last few days have been an unkind reminder of consequences, and a kind of crude experimentation in feeling the things that you’ve lost, while leaping at the flickers of what you’re likely to lose… in this case, swimming eyesight and brief bouts of nervous shutdown. Mornings filled with the flexing of numb fingertips, the gauging of whether or not to head back to the emergency room, and the specters of the yet another Hauser family legacy—the loss of the mind, the paper crumpling of one’s mental functions, exploding arteries and collapsing faculties—riding shotgun on the passing of time, while you set the weight of one moment against the one that preceded it.

Am I seeing double, or just imagining that I am?

Has the pain in my neck migrated upward?

Is the lack of memory or trigger-tug mental response a splinter effect of fatigue, or am I really losing my fucking mind?

I don’t know. Despite growing up in a household of healers, we’ve never done well in contending with medical realities. The recognition of what a lifetime of half-a-pack puffery and an outright rejection of anything resembling a commitment to personal longevity might as well be emblazoned on the family crest; the violence and suddenness with which our previous generations have succumbed to their ailments a constant in the ongoing storytime of our lives.

And for the sake of the record, even writing this feels like the extrication of something cruel and barbed from beneath flesh. I’ve never done well at admitting weakness, and at the times that I feel like I’ve taken on the complexion of something that’s been folded out of old newspaper, it’s the fear of being afraid that really takes the heat out of my guts. I look forward to a firmer tomorrow, but in the interim… being able to bleed a bit of this out of my system is quite a blessing. It feels like these words allow me to take something back for myself, amidst the ups and downs of the mood: feeling as though I've got it in me to lay waste to another world one moment, and then quietly wishing that I was sifting through some dire diagnosis of having six weeks' worth of life left, just to take the bullshit uncertainty out of the equation.

Anyway.

I guarantee amusement for the next entry, coincidentally. The travelogue—this waste of bandwith’s ultimate purpose—isn’t far off, and my fingers feel as though they’re sharpening up already.

the rondeau of the little monsters

Now, just to get the clock of my conscience cleaned before I bother getting into the finite details of what’s sure to be an exercise in spastic verbosity: it would be a total dose of horse-pie pate’ to claim that I ever wanted a sister, when I was growing up. I’ve always had the classics earmarks of an only child, perpetually festering in the third or fourth step of acceptance that this is simply not the case:

3) Recognize that the world does not, in fact, owe you anything. Come to grips with the fact that there one needs not buckle in accepting that a nuclear family is not a natural prelude to a total fallout, and that there’s something intrinsic and beautiful about sharing the things that you call your own.

… to which I would simply thumb my fucking nose and scream something vaguely negative. This was standard operating procedure for the better part of the last twelve years, high-pointed by an episode in which I took a scalpel to my younger sibling’s guts in the middle of a crowded pizzeria, drove her to tears, and then sneered something about her “needing to know where I was coming from.”

And, yeah. For those of you wondering, there are no shortages of these slide-show moments in my life, and I have a shit’s-whit hesitation in laying them out flat, like a go-nowhere hand of cards. Vanity’s overrated, and I would argue that attempting to spackle over the inherent cracks in one’s own ass only works if you’re keeping the right kind of company. For the misanthropic, the surest currency is to damn the torpedoes, unzip your jeans, and let your shame hang right the hell on out.

But, uh… right. Back to the tilling of childhood dramas and traumas.

right? (c.1990)

My sister has alternately been my best friend, my only friend, my biggest source of embarrassment, my biggest source of pride, and—somewhere in the midst of all of that—one of the greatest accomplishments of my life. Not to imply that I take credit for the woman that she’s become in any shape or fashion, but that she did so despite having someone like me hanging over her shoulders like a lead apron; in a family that’s run hot with happiness and frigid with self-loathing, that’s a serious fucking bulls-eye. In times of perceived plenty, we’d be attached at the hip and ready to go guns-for-guns with the state of the world around us… in the opposite years, I’d drop her without hesitation or mercy, and selfishly get caught up in some form of addiction or star-humping delusion. And in as much, I can sum up the single point of division that splits our personalities: if the tables were turned, I still wouldn’t be taking her calls. The grudges I hold are like scars, and once-fucked, I’m satisfied to never be shy again, in terms of my feelings.

because responsible older brothers take their ten year old kid sisters to vegas bowling alleys at 2AM. (c.1997)

But Exene’s done one better, in that sense. She doesn’t see the world through some rose-tinted fog, or employ naiveté’ in dealing with the day-to-day assholes whose sole purpose is to hammer-punch us in the back of the head until we begin wondering why the fuck we took that job or made that friend in the first place… she’s as callous a bastard as I’ve ever been, except she understands that you simply can’t endure in the long-term without making some kind of inroads at accepting it. She sees the worst in those around her—something we’ve inherited in a lifetime of accepting the checks and sins of being reared by a bloodline of artistic elitists—but she doesn’t blanch, even when faced with the worst of that. In as much, I admire her more than she’ll probably ever know, and have spent the better part of my current existence trying to make sense of how we split apart, and enjoying the quiet moments before she goes off, gets married, has kids, and succeeds wildly at… whatever the fuck it is that she’ll eventually set her mind to. The Hauser-brand internal clock makes no provisions for what “should” be done, and eventually tick-tick-ticks us to where we need to be… a day late, and a half-dozen bucks short.

en francais: buffoonerie par example' (c. 2011)

In digression and summary, this explains why Exene is a constant in the sporadic misadventures and misfired memories that will constitute the rest of this verbal sloggery. I can’t do what I do without her, and if it strikes you as weird that a thirty-X, semi-reformed loser would make it a point to fly his sister halfway around the world just to hang out in weird and stupid locales… then I’ll nod and tell you that I understand.

But a bit under the dried-out surface of my smile, I’ll probably fight a twitch of pity. Honest as it is.

INT. MEL'S HOME OFFICE - DAY

A saggy, delicately-jowled thirty-something dressed in a bathrobe slumps at his desk. Unshaven and hollow-eyed, he stares at the empty blog site window on the computer screen before him; contemplative, or perhaps tentative. After a moment, he begins to sloppily type at a rapid-fire clip.

MEL.
(as typed)

If we’re laying out the brass tacks, then the first mistake that many bloggers make is the hedgy belief that anybody out there has the time or predisposition to come reading their bullshit. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, in the critical sense; we’re all more or less guilty of this fundamental delusion, since it’s pretty much the pilings upon with the glory that was The Internet was founded. A nonstop economy of thread-thin attention, paid in sparing amounts to arsed-off avians, titties and the accompanying ass, and the occasional practical—nee functional—bit of recreational nothingness.

Naturally, the word-katas being utilized in this little corner of digital pissantery is nothing different. If anything, it’s simply picking up the worn reins of a bad decision made fifteen years ago; an alter-ego created by some go-nowhere kid who ran briefly with the elephants of ur-virtual industry, and who enjoyed a brief time in the shallow and phony glow of the time when pop culture commentary sites roared, and nickel-a-click banners were laid out like Burma-shave signs alongside the pitted ass-shoulder of the information superhighway.

That all feels like it was a lifetime ago, and—to be fair—it certainly fucking was. It isn’t until you try to climb back onto the carousel pony that you realized just how many hard spins you’ve let pass you by. As it turns out, age brings humility, and life… that daily knuckle-dusting that so many of us take for granted… goes from being something to be tossed out like so much stripper-side fliff, and instead transforms itself into a series of increasingly weird and desperate compromises.

Which isn’t nearly as dire as the Poey choice of words would imply… it’s just a different tint on the crude and familiar. And something which—as it turns out—might just be worth sharing, even if it’s with the voices making the laps around the inside track of my skull.

And so, for my next trick: you’ll see how a guy who did nothing of import for the first thirty years of his life, and who went nowhere and sought nothing but to left the fuck alone can become a self-mocking paean to the glorious nature of getting older, a semi-capable traveler, and a teacher of your children.

I guarantee no enlightenment or nutritional value, and management will tender no refunds… but the bar’s open late, and we’ve always got a good joke on hand. Please, enjoy your stay.

END PROLOGUE.