the sanest days are mad

hello! i’m at work, on a day i’m not normally scheduled, my boss is over three hours late but i don’t mind getting paid $12 an hour to sit on my sweet queer ass, printing out stuff from the ACLU web site to mail to various prisoners whose various rights are being violated, getting jittery and jumpy on too much coffee, too much hydrogenated oil. whoo hoo!

lately i’ve been more skittish in traffic than usual. i think it’s because now that bikey is fixed i can go a lot faster than usual, and that coupled with the pot-holey roads of pittsburgh, plus the general indifference of most drivers, seems like disaster is inevitable. i’ve been more afraid and unsure. i feel like being a biker in a city is not unlike endlessly being around a guy who lunges at you like he’s going to punch you and then laughs in your face when you cringe. endlessly, the implied threat of violence, with the ever-present possibility that it could become real.

my boss is here & i gotta go.

hi guyz! my tattoo is healed up enough to post a close-up picture, here it is!

jay kay. that is actually a picture i found on the interweb, on a bad tattoos website, that rendered me helpless with laughter for like ten fucking minutes.

here is the real deal:

also, here is a fake sparrow tattoo that ray drew on my arm. i want to get a real one that is sort of like this, as a memorial to my dead homegirl axi. so ray tried to draw one and got this semi-hilarious result. look at the expression on that bird’s face!!

so i was googling my name without quotes (i normally google it with quotes) and came across this link:
http://www.bebo.com/Profile.jsp?MemberId=8145183923

in case you are too lazy to click it, it is the online social networking profile of a woman whose last name is capewell, and her baby is named ocean!!!!! of course, the baby could have its father’s last name. but it is entirely possible that it’s named ocean capewell!!!!!
so. fucking. weird. my last name is pretty unusual, i’ve never met anyone with it who is not directly related to me. and the idea that someone would name their baby ocean? with my last name? WHOA. my mind is officially blown!

dear internet, i am feeling like shit about many aspects of my life right now, but the one i would like to enlighten you all on is my haircut. holy shit, i have not given myself a haircut this bad in years and years. for the past 6 years or so i’ve been pretty good at cutting my own hair (the first 2 years of self-haircutting were pretty bad), and even when i didn’t get the intended result it still looked decent. not this time. HOLY SHIT, do i look bad. in a few weeks i think it will have grown out to something decently cute, but not in time for my quick little jaunt to new york next week! all my new york friends and family will think i’ve gone to seed in pittsburgh. oh well. i mean, usually i don’t care, but this is really bringing me down for some reason. i nearly wept about it on monday. what the fuck? i hate feeling this shallow, but i can’t help myself sometimes.
on a lighter note, here are two amazing things that happened at work this week, one from each job.
job #1: i was sitting at my desk, writing a letter to a prisoner, when my boss called me from his office. usually when he calls me from his office it’s for some incredibly petty reason, so i rolled my eyes and answered it. instead, i was pleasantly surprised: “who,” he asked me, in his dignified oratory style, “is marilyn manson?” i laughed and told him.
later i was in his office doing work. “why did you want to know who marilyn manson is?” i asked. mark, another lawyer who works there (who is middle-aged, pony-tailed, unshowered and manic-depressive, in a manic upswing that day), went on this huge speech that basically boiled down to: “i was at a club with my buddy the other day, and i saw Judge _______, and he was dressed like marilyn manson! and i tried to explain it to [my boss], but he didn’t get it, because like, i’m an old guy, so i figured you’d be able to explain it better.”
“no wonder we lost our case before him!” sniffed my boss. “mark knows all of his secrets!”

job #2: so i call people and try to get them to take non-profit research surveys. in this day & age of caller ID, that means i listen to approximately one hundred outgoing voice mails every day. 80% of these are robots; the other 19% are generic messages. and then there’s that 1% of interesting “OGM”s (as we call them in the biz.) yesterday i got this AMAZING one, recorded by a very put-upon-sounding man (names have been altered slightly):
“hello, you’ve reached the home of stephen the boss, pavlinska the queen, and igor the slave. please leave a message.” i laughed and laughed and felt slightly better about my cubicle-ridden existence. (i know s&m/non-conventional relationships are not really laughing matter, but you have no idea how boring this job is [unless you've worked there, or somewhere similar])

i’m at work and i felt the need to stop what i was doing and tell you all this: i am transcribing a cassette memo (yes, my boss still uses dictaphones like it’s 1978 or something). there was one sentence that i was having trouble with. it sounded like he said, “the big jerk of the XXXX family is named eugene.” i rewound it over and over, but that’s all i heard. my boss is known for being wacky, but could he really have said that? finally it hit me–he was saying “the PATRIARCH of the xxxx family is named eugene!”

my brain automatically substitutes the word “big jerk” for a mumbled “patriarch!!!!” is anyone surprised? i’m not.

i played the one song i have by xtina on my ipod, on the bus, in your honor. i looked out the grimy window and was sad that the world has lost yr aesthetics & hilarity. i haven’t seen you in five years and honestly i probably never would have seen you again if you’d lived to be a hundred, but i had a lot of fun with you when i knew you & i hope you are in some sort of amazing well-decorated faggot heaven. goodnight, christina faguilera.

& mercury is in retrograde so this is not the time to be feeling good about your life, your body, or anything involved. everything is annoying. everything is taken personally. everything is an insult. so you’ve been sick for over a week because you can’t afford to adequately heat your house? that’s what you get for being a fuck-up. you get sicker because you have to walk for miles in the snow every day? that’s what you get for being a fuck-up who can’t drive. you don’t have health insurance, it’s your own goddamn fault. you can’t write a grant; you can’t write a book; you’ve mortally offended the mentally ill man who is a client at your law firm and now he won’t stop calling and you’re not answering the phone because you do not give a fuck.
& your favorite ex-con at book ‘em got sent back to prison for no real fucking reason. for having a few glasses of wine with xmas dinner, which isn’t allowed at his halfway house, and you think about how he used to say, “my only goal in life is to never go back to prison,” and he said it real proud, like he thought he was going to do it, and you wonder what he’ll be like when he comes out. if he’ll even try at anything anymore. and you can’t tell this to anyone and have them understand how devastated it’s made you because everyone you are currently close with has not had to eat shit every day of their lives; and that chasm is the widest, the most uncrossable.

my dad’s wife no longer even tries to conceal the fact that she hates us. i baked muffins & burned them & laughed like a psychopath, laying on the floor. nobody saw me except for jill and she thought it was funny. this house seriously has already driven me crazy! i wrote an intense entry but i made it private because i’m tired of going there. i’m tired of a lot of things. but i don’t want to talk about it.
my sister & i just got giggly watching old my little pony cartoons mixed to songs like “you can’t touch this” and “i’m too sexy” on youtube. peepz seriously have too much time on their hands! then jill got depressed because it looked like the ponies were having too much fun & we aren’t. she has a point.
so much more to say but time to go to my mom’s house and be awkward with her new boyfriend. the pope said that gays and trannies are bringing about the apocalypse, so i think i will pointedly not go to church this year. that’ll show him!

not even back 24 hours and the poison is already reaching my brain. most people love me because i shake things up; not my dad’s wife. to her i am an inkblot on the kitchen counter. not even the strongest spray can get rid of me entirely. my dad, brother and sister are all happy to see me cuz i’m a blip in the routine but my dad’s wife just sighs a lot and mutters to herself. i asked to use the oven to bake vegan apple-cinnamon muffins & from the reaction i got, you’d think i had asked to smoke crack or something! seriously, people, it’s muffins! home made muffins! how much more wholesome can you get? but she went away for a while so now the house is full of the scent of delicious baked goods plus the sound of queer rock & hip-hop that makes liberal use of the dreaded f word.
as much as it sucked, i am glad my ass was kicked out young, so i didn’t get complacent like so many of my friends. being on my own as a teenager caused lots of trouble, emotional scars, serious nutritional deficiencies & a drinking prob, but it also made me very self-reliant & with the knowledge that i can survive just about anything. it saddens me how many of my friends who are my age & older are still rotting away with their parental units cuz they’re scared. fuck being scared! did you hear me? FUCK BEING SCARED! being scared is a luxury. being scared is a cop-out. being scared is for the weak; and although i have many, many personality flaws, being weak (usually) isn’t one of them.
on a completely diff note, the muffins are done! so i must go!. (update: i burned them and laughed like a psychopath)

the other night i had a dream that i made a giant kale salad & left it with tiffini & eric v. while i went to a cupcake shop on gay street in manhattan (the cupcake shop doesn’t exist in real life). anyway, when i came back tiffini informed me that eric found a stem in his kale (and any kale lover will tell you that the stems are awful! chewable, indigestible, and they should be removed before cooking/eating, duh!) and threw it down and screamed, ”THIS RUINS EVERYTHING!” ha ha ha ha ha ha.
i’m working on my third zine this year! i have not put out three zines in a year since…uh…1997 maybe? and that was when i was fifteen and had no job and very few friends & i looked at school as a place where i could just read and write my own shit all day. i took easy classes that i didn’t pay attention in & just wrote wrote wrote. and read and gossiped and drew and watched a movie whenever the teacher showed a movie. i hated school and it made me miserable, but by looking at it as an extended, sucky picnic, or a writer’s colony, or a roving office, made it somewhat bearable. i couldn’t do anything at home because it was too chaotic and my flow was always disrupted by some insane fight or parental breakdown or some other thing. not that school wasn’t chaotic, or that nobody fought, but it usually involved me a lot less. you know?
anyway, working on zine #3 of 2008, on top of working & writing a novel & living. wow! my extreme productivity this year is due almost entirely to the insane fear of dying that has taken over my life. or, more specifically, the insane fear that i will die before i say what i need to say. but, again, i worry if i say too much, i will say what i’ve been put on earth to say, and since it will be accomplished i will be killed immediately. what a catch-22, right? (incidentally, “catch-22″ is the name of a bar my dad used to drink at all day. isn’t that a depressing name for a bar full of alcoholics? he still drinks there all day, but the name has been changed to “the coach”.)
why did it take me so long to discover pavement? (the band, not the material we walk on) they’re so good!