I know I've said it before, but times are hard that things are dire--I must work on having a positive mental attitude! I MUST banish negative thoughts.
Ommmmmmmmm.
I wish there really was a gypsy woman I could see. Someone who could read palms and tea leaves. Well. . . I DO have books on such things. You've seen some screen shots of them before. Maybe I should check my horoscope.
Step one--I must lose weight. But there is much involved with such an enterprise, all of it mental. I used to be a mentalist, I think, back when I had the studio. Such things.
For all the joking, this all comes from a very real place. I'm going to use some terms here that many won't like. You can cancel me now if you like, or you can skip the rest and wait for tomorrow's post. The rest of you, just hang with me with an open mind and maybe you'll see what I'm about.
Since I was a kid, I kind of felt like a King of the Retards and Knuckleheads. Hold on, hold on. . . I know, but hear me out.
Yesterday, I didn't get to the gym until very late in the afternoon. I spent the day doing what I do best--nothing. I didn't feel like going at all. I had a kind of food and alcohol illness, I think, having too much of many bad things.
When I got there, the place was pretty empty. I walked on the treadmill, then went to the floor to do a little workout. But I was slow and sweaty and smelled like old pizza. It is a gym, so of course there are mirrors everywhere. I looked like shit. But I struggled on.
Toward the end, a guy I've seen here for about twenty years walked in. He's a real knucklehead, a New Jersey fellow with D.R. roots and a street thug look. We hit it off straight away. I didn't see him for years, then one day he reappeared. He'd been sick, of sorts. He told me he had a liver disease. He'd had hepatitis from sharing needles, he said. Now he was trying to get healthy.
I didn't see him for a long while again. When I saw him yesterday, I came up behind him and said, "You big guys think you can come in here and do what you want, eh?" He turned around coming out of some fog.
"Yea. I just got some bad news. The little guy is back."
What he meant is that his liver cancer has returned. He's had chemo twice, both times successfully, but it has been twenty-one months and now the MRI shows some bad news. I gave him what I had. I told him to keep his chin up. I also told him we are all headed in the same direction and one day when we don't want the news. . . blah blah blah.
It set me back on my own ass, but he was glad to have someone to talk about it with.
I've always gotten along with knuckleheads, and yesterday got me thinking. Sitting with mom yesterday, I related the story. And then. . . .
"Ever since I was a kid in school, I have stood up for people. I was kind of the classroom lawyer in elementary school when it seemed someone was getting the bad treatment. Oh, I'd say, you can't do that to Bobby. The kids were like sharks when there was blood in the water, and they were especially cruel to the slow kids. I got into fights when they would pick on them.
Then in junior high school, there were new kids and new victims. There was one girl who had cataracts, I guess, something, and she had to wear those big, thick glasses that made your eyes look double size, big heavy glass lenses that always slid down the bridge of her nose. Technology now, you know. . . nobody has to wear such things, but she wasn't just half-blind, but she was poor, had bad hair, bad clothes, just overall a sad sack. Nobody would sit by her in class, but I didn't care, and once, on a school bus trip, there were empty seats and aisles all around her, so I sat next to her. Now here's the thing. When we left junior high, the last days before we went to the big high school, she wrote me a letter. I wish I still had it. It was a real heartbreaker. She said that her life was lonely and that I was a bright light and that she had always looked forward to seeing me. . . it was a real masterpiece for a girl in the ninth grade. Once we got to high school, though, I didn't see her much. Skip ahead. When I graduated from college and was living in your house without any money, when I was working nights at the factory, I would go to the library to check out books since I couldn't afford to buy them. And there she was working as a librarian. No more thick glasses. Normal hair, normal clothes. God, that made me happy.
There was another girl I'd been in school with since the second grade. Sherri. She was taller than anyone else in our class, and smart. She and I were always the last ones left standing in the class spelling bees. But the kids shunned her and thought she was a tall goony goon. As always, I was nice to her.
Skip way ahead. Senior year in college, like a lot of kids, I was home for Christmas break, and people were getting together. I saw some kids who had gone to the mouse resort, and one of them said, 'Remember Sherri? Holy shit. . . you should see her now. She looks like a model in a magazine. She is b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l! And you know what? She was asking about you!'
And the universe being what it is, I never saw her ever again. Why? God hates me, I guess."
O.K. Knuckleheads and Retards. They aren't. There is a sliding scale for each, I think, that we are all on somewhere, just like autism. I have always felt like the Pied Piper, though, able to attract them. All those knuckleheads and retards at the old steroid gym, I got along fine.
Alright. I haven't done a very good job with that, so yea. . . I'm a combo of the two. But I mean well. But go ahead, cancel me. You won't be the first.
Last night in bed, these things kept running through my head. I was feeling bad, and at four o'clock, I got up to go to the bathroom. And then, looking in the bathroom mirror, I thought I need to change the way I'm thinking. I've been depressed for far, far too long, barely able to move, slow, stupid, sitting on my mother's couch from four or five o'clock until bedtime, going nowhere, doing nothing.
PMA, baby. Everything I do will need to be productive. No more wallowing in self-pity and bad food and liquor. Move, baby, move.
If I had time and gave a shit, I'd throw all that away and start over, but I don't have time. I have things I must take care of.
Like seeing the gypsy woman. Maybe she can help. I don't believe in the mysteries, but. . . maybe. . . .
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