Jason Porath

Erin got pissed at me today for going on a group outing to Vegas for Theo’s birthday, and for drinking. Also made jealous, snarky comments about me having money, probably a reference to my unwillingness to spend money awhile back.

Remember, this is why I broke up with her.

(I need to go to bed, so not writing any more of this right now, but this just came to me, figured I’d post it)

Sharon came to, blood on her teeth, on her hands, on her son, at her feet.

“Sharon-?”

Richard stood nearby in the doorway to their son’s room. The same dried burgundy stain ran down his chin, over his torn shirt, across his chewed-up skin, ending at his heart. He walked over to Sharon and, wrapping an arm around her, sat down beside their dead child.

“Rich? What-? Oh god, Roger. Roger. What happened to Roger?”

“Stop. Stop. Sherry, stop. Close your eyes and listen to me. Don’t look at Roger. I need you to close your eyes. Can you do that?”

“Okay.”

“Something terrible has happened. What do you remember last?”

“I… I just got home. I just walked in the door. Just now. I guess I went upstairs to see you, and I-”

“Blacked out?”

“I guess. I don’t know! What happened? What happened to Roger?!”

“Roger is dead.”

Sharon began to weep. “Oh god… I knew it, as soon as I came to, I knew it… oh god…”

Roger embraced her tightly, cupping his hands over her eyes as she disintegrated into a sobbing mass. Richard softly stroked her hair for minutes that seemed like hours. Sharon turned to look at Roger, but Richard kept his hand over her eyes.

“Rich, what are you doing? Let me go! I need to see our boy!”

“Stop, Sherry. I need you to keep your eyes closed.”

“What? Stop it! I just want to see him one last time!”

“No, Sherry, I need you to rest your eyes. Because you have to see for the both of us now.”

“What…?”

Sharon stopped struggling, and Richard slowly let his hand down. Two dry, shiftless eyes met Sharon’s gaze with a lifeless stare. She waved her hand slowly in front of his face, but they did not move.

“Are you blind?”

“I got bitten awhile before you, and because of that, I came to sooner. I saw Roger, and I saw you, and I just cried, and cried, until I had no more tears left. None. There wasn’t any water left. My body just wasn’t making any more. I started having a hard time moving my eyes, until they finally just stopped, and my sight faded out.”

“…bitten?”

“…like I said, something terrible has happened.”

John Wayne Gacy. Clown. Serial Killer. Rapist. Artist. Professional voodoo shaman.

(Melancholy Logorrhea would make a good name for a band. Or a horrific disease. Like one that made you cry and write mopey livejournal entries so much that you died.)

So, this is what I think. For the past godknowshowlong, I’ve been like a flooded turbine. Water gets dumped in me, and I spin and spin in order to get rid of it. If I slow down for even a second, I’m just overcome. I drown. I filter out that which isn’t pertinent, that isn’t useful, and just keep trucking along. But where am I going?

This past month has been the exclamation point on a year-long run-on sentence of slow decline. Most of you know the particulars, but basically, I came as close to stopping as I ever have. My engines got flooded to the point where I was practically leaking water from my eyes every day for a month. Everything hit me, from now, from last week, from 7 months ago, from years ago. I just stopped moving, and I looked down. And I saw a dead albatross floating in the water.

In many ways, I don’t let go easily. Some people who may or may not still read this thing will probably take severe issue with that statement, but I think it’s true. I still hold on to memories and people and memories of people from years and years ago. I’m still angry about stuff that went on in my childhood, that I barely even remember anymore. I’ll probably be angry about it forever.

I think it’s also true that I don’t hold onto things easily either. I will, in a transient fashion, have ups and downs and get close to people and whatnot, but I don’t know how to keep hold of things for the long haul. I don’t think most people do. I think it takes a lot of failure and a lot of heartbreak and a lot of human wreckage and a lot of work to teach one how to get things right. Boy-meets-girl movies drive me up the wall. They only show the beginning or the end. Never the middle.

I have a minor obsession with human wreckage. Never happens at the moment things are going wrong, but inevitably, down the road, I’m overcome with guilt and nostalgia and memories and I just collapse because, holy shit, how awful a person am I. I did this. I’m responsible for this. I should’ve done more. Been more.

Then the turbine kicks in and I remember it was never as simple as that. There was always circumstance. There were bad times. Lots of them. An endless sea of depression that washed into things and never hit low tide. Negative feelings. Out-of-whack feelings. There was a reason for it. It’s not all me.

And just before the engines clear out the floodwater, I wonder for a second if I’m just filtering out that which isn’t useful with lies I tell myself when I’m laying down to sleep. But that isn’t useful. Why dwell on it?

At the end of the month, my brother celebrates his birthday, so, in the spirit of good big brotherness, I ask him what he wants for his birthday. After some consideration, he answers with what is surely the hot-ticket item for the newly-21 crowd: a copy of “Racism in the United States: A History of the Anti-Miscegnation Legislation and Litigation,” a USC grad school dissertation from 1979.

Uh, okay.

So I got my roommate Alex, who still works at USC, to snag a copy from the library and bring it home, so I could photocopy it. Well, we started running into problems when the library listed three entries for it. Because it was three volumes long. Additionally, the library provided the rather quizzical addendum that it was 29 centimeters thick. At this point, I was of the opinion that perhaps I can just drop it at Kinko’s and run away.

Undeterred, Alex ordered it online and picked it up from the library. The librarian tried taking it off the shelf gently, tipping the spine so that it would fall into his hand, and was caught wholly unprepared. Unable to actually get the thing to budge, he instead started to clear other books from the shelf until he could wiggle the 3 volumes out. Alex toted it across campus with no shortage of grousing, and abandoned it on my bed as soon as fate would allow. Thus, upon entry to my room, I found this. I moved it about, and found that the books altogether weigh around 6 pounds. Not a comfortable weight. Furthering the misfortune, copyright information is blazoned across the opening of the book, so Kinko’s wouldn’t touch them with a ten foot pole.

Nevertheless, my brother deserves presents for his birthday, and given that this is his heart’s desire, I set to work on taking photos of each page. I did summarize it a bit, but I think my scanning work remains true to the spirit of the book.

The beginning.
The middle.
The end.

I would like to point out that the book is 1402 pages long, with additional notes going on to page 1694. I feel no shame in my chronicling efforts.

Happy birthday, Jeremy.

Wait for it to load. It’s worth it.

I feel a disturbance in the Katamari… as if millions of fans cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced…

I just… ah… there are no words.

Uh. What. The. Fuck.

Seriously.