What I learned from madmen

Things don't make sense and that could cause you to become a madman. See - I'll explain it to you a little, but one piece of background. So I can't sit through an hour long television show- it's too boring! And I consider it a valiant act of nearly supernatural will that I'm able to sit and do a job for 8 hours in a row. A boring one at that. But, hey, the thing is - I leave my work at 4:30 - and not a moment later, but the bus doesn't come till a little after 5 and never sooner - but rather than just work to the bus schedule I fly out of that room and have to be GONE! OUT! Cripes man, it's summer!

So anyway I walk around little painesville a little to see and end up waiting on the bus at a different stop - the one with the madmen. In America we like to put all of our social services right downtown so that the madmen and the handicapped will always be paraded around in front of everyone, for all to see. That is the American creed. What's more, we assume that public transit exists only for these people. The goddammed madmen.

Now. I'm not by any means a hateful person, but I get kind of surly about the madmen when they're unable to stop spitting (! true fact a guy sat there and did not stop spitting a long, gross drool of spitting for 1/2 an hour) Or when they are smoking a cigarette and ask me for an extra one. "Nah man, fuck you." I had to tell that guy fuck you because he was one of those really talky and sociably madmen. In fact later when the dirtbag kid showed up to also wait and start talking about how he became a registered sex offender the cigarette madman, not the spitting one - became exercised on the topic of love. Meanwhile ladies are going to some kind of aerobics class and are leered at, people wearing clothes younger than 5 years old are crossing the street to avoid this scene. The madman - he understands about love.

He is in love. He has a girlfriend who he is going to see. Hoping to break the code of public transit he shows me the direction he has - which is a torn off piece of a newspaper advertisement. It unhelpfully has five numbers (?) scrawled on it. I tell him he needs to take the 6 knowing that I will take the 1. But he talks and talks about his girlfriend.

Now - once, once I used to hear this kind of talk from madmen and creeps and general fuckups, from upsetting people who had found love and romance for themselves. I thought- 'how come them and not me?' I really did, I admit this with shame. And then I got smart man. I looked at it and said - you know - of course that guy has a girlfriend, of course he has love - it's all part of whatever the hell is wrong with him. He was very talky and said every brain problem that he had to the man who did not stop spitting who in turn did not look up or acknowledge having heard.

I said - of course that guy has a girlfriend, of course the fragile damaged and mostly broken people in the world who are paraded in front of everyone by the concentration of social services in the downtown for the edification of the working people - of course that guy is coupling up at every first chance. Because bereft of any valued achievement - indeed when the only valid achievements you're in fact capable of are to act like everyone else without difficulty sometimes - you end up with the lowest common denominator of western acceptance. You find love.

We like it when someone has money and sometimes romanticize it. We like it when people act a certain way - usually according to their gender stereotypes. We like it when people accomplish something useful or heroic - just like everyone else. We make movies and write books about people who uphold the social norms and add value to society according to its values. And then we make a million movies and write a million, million songs about love - because if you're selfish, unstable, helpless and can't do anything at all - you can still find love. So if you have that, romantic love - well you're participating! You're in the world, just enough. I've seen enough of hobos and helpless men and hopeless women - to know that they seek love. Not a job, not a way forward, not a means of expressing themselves or participating in the world - instead - they want and usually seem to find - love. So I'm telling you - I don't buy it.

It's a broken virtue for helpless people, a broke down idea that keeps the madmen in line. I believe that. I'm trying to persuade you to believe that too.

And I'll say this for you guys especially

I had Myspace to meet girls
I had Facebook so people would remind me about funerals and birthdays
I got this Google thing because it seemed sensible (what has happened to me?)

But the internet is important and valuable to me because it has the Livejournal.  Heck, for years it Was the livejournal and not much else.

And the Livejournal means more than fuckall because it's got you guys.
I hope you know that - you should know that-  I mean it.

(no subject)

so my telephone broke in a way that...  well it broke in a way that ten years ago you wouldn't notice - now it operates like an old timey telephone in that it rings and I answer it - and that is all.  I guess I could dial a number - if I knew anybodies.  Even my old folks don't have the same number.  I can call my old car dealership I guess - the one phone-number I always remember.  

It's been a weird year for phones.  It's been a weird year for a lot of things. 

I think.  I think that this week young Agatha will face death.  I think before the month is out her great-grandmother will die.  And that is very sad, and not at all sudden.  I always liked her - best of that branch of kind-of family.  Thelma.  They call her mother-  when her first grandchild came she said she was too young to be anyone's gramma - so she told her grandkids to call her mother.  So close to 90.  I liked her -  I mean she always got dressed up and put on her makeup or perfume or whathave you to meet me at the door - which was lovely.  I think I'll try and go and find out about it.

I was thinking about what I might tell young Agatha about these things.  But I don't know.  I thought about what I think about death.  At first I remembered that I didn't know my grandfathers - they both died in my memory.  My grandmothers - I remember, but they were distant in serious ways - linguistically, geographically - they had their own realities in the end.  Both of them - I wasn't close with them.  I didn't have a feeling.  I was thinking - nobody I really like has ever died - then I remembered my poor uncle and his son both in a month of each other last year - my poor cousin on the heroin - his own kids running and playing at his funeral.  Maybe they didn't know him.  I didn't, not really.  His dad I knew-  well enough.  Sad - well.  Not for me.  I"m starting to think I don't have a good understanding or mechanism for facing death.  Because I looked at my aunts and cousins and my uncle's poor wife there at the wake - and they were all tears and horror - it was really, really sad - and for them I felt a terrible sympathy - I wanted for them - I wanted for them a better feeling that I had no way of conjuring, and so I sat and was quiet and when people wanted hugs they got them, when they wanted words I tried.  

But I never thought of how sad it will be not to see them anymore.  I didn't think it was sad.  I mean, not in a callous hateful way - I mean, it isn't sad.  People go - it's not what happens.  Isn't it?  Never again - I might not have the concept ironed out.  Maybe I just don't have the skill of missing the absent.  Bad at noticing details - like a dirty room - it upsets people-  other people - not me, who knew the room was dirty?  Symmetry?  Why?  It matters man - to a lot of people - and it's just something I don't see - like ultraviolet light or radio frequencies.

I wonder why.