it’s funny what can happen

i’m done running away from places. i want to live in portland. i guess it’s mostly the pink boxes.

i’m not going back because of tonya. i’m going back partly because of dawn though. and partly cuz i do like the place (though the weather sucks).

i’ll have a nice apt with a view. my room with a view.

i have been afraid of living alone for so long. and yet the fifteen minutes or so that i DID spend living alone was nice. i think i would like to do it again for a while.

new jersey is nice but it’s very expensive. i would rather spend my money on other things than the pleasure of living there. and i love my dad and brother and they love me. but just a short visit convinced me that we do better from a distance. so be it. my dad and i would tweak each other into some terrible hyper place if we lived next to each other.

i will do some shows and do some good work with dawn. i’m psyched.

i am excited about the apartment.

sorry for those of you who follow our ebay stuff. but i will be more comfortable and it will all be worth it. we have some great material.

hope hi. i’m sorry i couldn’t stay. mitchell i never even saw you while i was there. i slept nights. HAHAHAHA. if you don’t know mitchell then don’t laugh. i don’t care.

james pleeeze take care of yourself.

others

more others than i realized

i will miss seeing my cousins. they are all in new jersey.

i will write more later. i’m still on the road. twin falls idaho. stopped because it started to snow. less than 600 miles to drive tomorrow. i will try to start early. more in a couple days (comcast is supposed to be in on friday).

watch for my new lemon drop article called i don’t do phone sex but maybe i should have. or maybe i sort of did. but i don’t now. or maybe it’s called i was tonya’s partner.

man a lot of people want to tell you what to think.

sigh

i don’t have it in me.

maybe i’ll start keeping the mikam website as an active blog in case someone wants info on shows and listings and material and doesn’t need my life and shtick.

later

howard

click me if you dare.

you know what he did with them

and i think *i’m* unstable

and have an odd diet

hehehehehe

i have seen michaelangelo’s david

i have eaten food prepared by alain senderens

i have seen the mona lisa

i have seen and heard nils play guitar

i have done this and more.

i have seen the bordeaux cover.

i have had the world’s craziest woman jump off the george washington bridge. to HURT me. and may the cosmos forgive me but i loved her then and i love her now and i will always blame myself. and i walked into the medical examiner’s office and i looked at her and i made sure and i identified her. yes i did.

and i REFUSE i fucking REFUSE to quit. That’s why the woman wrote to me about McLeod. To REMIND me. (though she doesn’t know that.) Because sitting here in this house all I want to do is QUIT.

i get my apartment in ten more days. february 1.

and i will wait.

and i set up all my utilities.

and i have no money. but i will.

and i have to work. so i will.

and i will be without my “fucking fairy tale.” and that’s how it will be.

but i will build a life. and i will enjoy it. and i will stay healthy and still eat. and i will stay alive and not be bitter. i will build a business. make friends. or perhaps enemies. chase money. chase women. though please may i find women who do not remind us of the words of the knight protecting the grail….

“He chose….poorly.”

So be it. I will wait. And I will build.

And poor Dawn. I haven’t worked hard in ten years. And she’s going to be the first to get to see it.

(and YES YES YES this time i am going to get the goddamn motorcycle license and ride).

should you care, have some pictures. for those of you with visual tastes.

314px-David_von_Michelangelo


i have to stop making promises. cause i made one. and i really do not want to keep it. but i said it.

so i will do it.

i can’t believe i am staying here because i made one person one promise. but i am.

i am not very sure that there’s much after this. this life may well be it. i don’t know.

but i know i made one special person a promise. actually two. one is that i would call if. two is that i will build something with her. and no it isn’t tonya.

and i’m going to keep those fucking promises. even though it’s 4am, i am the most alone person in the world, and there’s only one thing i want to do.

home.

i am in new jersey now.

i want my apartment. michael set it up for feb 1. i’ll see if they’ll let me take it earlier, but i’m not counting on it.

i miss dawn. more than i EVER would have realized. sigh.

i miss tonya. but it’s soooo mixed up i don’t know how to describe it. i hope we stay friends.

i want to work. i want to make friends. i want to be calm and sane. hope it happens.

talked to a couple of people and approached a few more. i hope the people who were my friends aren’t too pissed off at me.

someone wrote to me about the McLeod/Shackleton/Endurance letter. I have to answer. Kind of neat.

now i’m going to rest and try to get rid of this cold.

ok someone said i couldn’t do that.

and that i should go and fuckin’ undo it.

and it was a bunch of shit.

and other nice things.

i fixed it.

and i will remember being told this.

forever.

I can’t be with Tonya anymore.

It makes me sad. I thought we would be together for the rest of our lives. But I was wrong. She does not want me. Or she doesn’t want me in the way I want to be wanted. Or I don’t want what she is or does. I don’t know how to express it properly. But we aren’t meant to be.

I will move back to New Jersey. I took an apartment.

I’m supposed to be coming back to Portland on Sunday but the snow in New Jersey will probably cause a delay.

I want Dawn to move to New Jersey/New York and keep working on the stamps and covers with me but that isn’t going to happen. That’s too bad. I like Dawn and she’s REALLY smart and she’s REALLY capable and I will miss her.

My Dad’s girlfriend told me how I have to do this and that and so on. But for now I’m going to make a nest and work on rebuilding a business and on trying not to want to die. I’m already a step further than where I began a few days ago.

A few days ago I merely wanted to die. Now I want to not want to die. A small step, but a start.

I doubt at this point that I’m meant to be with anyone. At least Tonya did not leave me as … uh … harshly ?? … as the last one did.

later

me

do you know the story of ernest shackleton and the trans-antarctica expedition?

you can read a condensed but accurate version at www.coolantarctica.com. as the webmaster Paul Ward correctly says at the beginning, it is “one of the most incredible adventure stories of all time.”

i bring it up because…oh jeez i don’t even know how to put it. the cosmos brought a piece of it into my life. and the cosmos will require me to sell it. but first i was required to understand it. it should be in a museum, perhaps. but the important thing to me is the utter STRENGTH and DETERMINATION that mortal men could have. believe me the ship Endurance was named correctly. even though she did not endure, the men who shared her story DEFINE the word endurance.

a brilliant but brittle poet wrote a great poem about the disintegration of…society?…culture?…belonging, perhaps. i re-read the poem again tonight for the first time in decades. i was brought to it by the story of shackleton and the endurance. part of their story was so striking and powerful that it worked its way into the poem.

“Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?”

in actuality shackleton and his two colleagues thought there was a fourth. thought it strongly enough that they walked with the fourth and they lived. the brilliant poet though, perhaps did not really believe it. he sensed the importance but dismissed it i think. thought it false hope. thought it a dream invented. followed it with visions of falling towers and collapsing cities.

you don’t even have to read the poem to know what he really thought. he didn’t think anything walked with you. just read the preface. if you’re tonya’s friend c.m. then you’re smart enough already to know i mean ts eliot and you’re learned enough to translate the latin and greek.

here’s my translation

I myself saw the Sibyl of Cumae, with my own eyes, hanging in a jar. And when the boys said to her, “Sibyl, what do YOU want?,” she answered, “I want to die.”

poor Sibyl. she knew everything. knew the savior was coming. now she’s a tourist attraction on route 66 in nero’s rome. and she wants to die. and the brittle poet so learned so empathetic so knowledgeable so full of intelligence agrees. he gets it.

FUCK HIM AND FUCK HER. they’re both dead now and GOOD FOR THEM.

i had someone else die recently (? I guess it was recent. it’s no guess that she’s dead) who was a big part of my life. i don’t know exactly when and i don’t know exactly how. and i know her family disapproved and i would bet my very self and soul that she died by her own hand.

she helped save my life. i miss her. i thank her for all she did. i get her pain. but FUCK HER TOO.

that’s why the cosmos gave me SHACKLETON.

that’s why they gave me something that brought me to Able Seaman Thomas Frank McLeod.

he lived through the experience that was the trans-antarctica expedition and then went BACK with shackleton on the next trip, on the Quest. he’d have eaten eliot for lunch. the powers that run the universe brought his attitude into MY hands. today. they made me get it. TODAY.

these people who want to die fuck them let them die

pussies

i will have to be dragged screaming. i will fight to live to be to feel to learn to exist to DO. to lose if need be. to fail and succeed and know and forget and ALL OF IT EVERY GODDAMN BIT I CAN WITH EVERY SECOND I HAVE LEFT TO ME. and i will fight for ONE MORE SECOND and one more after that.

i take able seaman thomas mcleod over the sibyl of cumae. every fuckin’ time.

there’s a story how shackleton advertised for crew. it’s apocryphal. melanie and sydney if you’re reading this and don’t know the word, your grandfather (your dad’s dad) would have told me “look it up,” but, to simplify a bit, it means it’s FAKE and it never really happened. but it should have. the story goes that the ad read:

“MEN WANTED: FOR HAZARDOUS JOURNEY. SMALL WAGES, BITTER COLD, LONG MONTHS OF COMPLETE DARKNESS, CONSTANT DANGER, SAFE RETURN DOUBTFUL. HONOUR AND RECOGNITION IN CASE OF SUCCESS.”

that’s life. it’s how it works. it’s difficult. dangerous. doubtful.

fight for it. it’s worth it. do the difficult thing always because, unfortunately, it’s ALWAYS the right thing. i don’t know why. i just know it is.

it’s 94 years later. or 95. or 93. that’s how long Able Seaman Thomas McLeod of Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides Islands, Scotland struggled on this one small piece of his 91 year long life. and i suppose there’s some asshole out there who would point out that McLeod and colleagues failed and did not succeed. that asshole would be wrong. he succeeded. and he has earned “Honour And Recognition.”

thank you to whatever force put his story into my hands tonight.

Bay City Blues has been changed around and I would like to invite everyone to visit us and talk with the world’s hottest girl. Her name is Tonya and we should have made it her place and only her place a long time ago.

The day that a girl, now gone, told me that OUR PLACE should not be about one girl was the very day I should have started to make it exactly that way. The day I meet someone else like Tonya will probably never arrive.

Erika is still with us because…well because we can’t bear to do anything about her. We like her.

I have to go get ready now as I have a long day of looking at material ahead of me. I think maybe I should eat some breakfast first and have more than coffee today.

I’ll see all of you later. I don’t have a lot to say here today except that I love Tonya and that I hope you all come visit our site and meet her.

OH one more very important thing.

If you are making a website and need a webhost … DON’T USE LUNARPAGES. Lunarpages is the worst webhost that I can imagine. They suck. I hate them. They are overpriced. They provide horrible service. They break down. They take services away without warning. They are the WORST and I don’t think anyone should use them.

howard

i read that in hong kong over 94% of emails are spam

they claim that hong kong gets a lot from china but china is really only like a quarter of all the world’s spam (”only” around 24% or so. damn). lot of mine is from china. i would be about average in hong kong. about 90% plus of my email is spam

but how can you not like something that reads like this:

“I hope you have driver license, because with our pellets you will sure drive her crazy in bed…”

I mean really. it’s poetic. artistic. well not exactly. but i mean for some chinese dude (or girl i suppose is possible) to come up with this is actually kind of remarkable. it is sooooo close to being cool in english and it fucks it up in a way i can’t even describe. it’s awesome to me. i love words.

go to Bay City Blues Phone Sex. Jason’s going to make it cool. Tonya is there. Go see Tonya. She’s my honey. She’s an artist she’s going to make great art maybe she’s making it now.

Don’t go anywhere like that if you’re Sydney or Melanie. Or more precisely, don’t tell your mom. Your dad could probably handle it but there’s no real need to tell him either. NO No that’s all a joke. I really mean it don’t go Melanie and Sydney.

Sometimes I make an effort to put Melanie’s name first. I’ve always thought that people say “Sydney and Melanie” and always say Sydney’s name first. But I’m not there enough to know if I’m right. Am I right?

The phone sex place will be / is / different and becoming/changing/altering into something more. Like life it changes it evolves. People want to know what I’m doing. I was rude on the phone to Lynn cuz she called me and was all oh i was just thinking about you and i wasn’t in the mood and didn’t buy it. but i dunno what people want to know even. and she called me from a blocked number which EVERYONE who knows me knows that i hate.

I think maybe the weirdest was she’s going “do you recognize this voice” and the truth was hell no i didn’t have a clue. sigh. life moves on i am my mother’s child to the core of me. i let people disappear i let them go and they are gone they never existed i have to do that now with the dead one and i am i can feel it

mom was so cold michael is lucky he doesn’t remember or he doesn’t see. i envy him.

later

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