luke chrisinger, thank you for recording and recording and recording some more. the songs language three and emotion one are allowing me to momentarily forget that i havent slept past three a.m. for weeks, that in a fit of rage, i excommunicated my sister-in-law and in turn, i guess lost touch with the only two people who allow my brother to live on through them, my niece and nephew, that i openly cried at work after seeing that a wind storm had snatched up two undeveloped baby pigeons, still in their egg shells, and smashed them against the concrete flooring of the patio. the simplicity of the following lines somehow helps simplify everything else that isn’t so simple at all. deceiving myself isn’t all that bad, not today. thank you luke chrisinger.
saturday looks good to me is playing shows and i can’t go to any because none are in toronto or anywhere near toronto and i can’t make it to the cleveland show on monday may 14th because i have to work that day and so, yet again, i’ll miss seeing fred thomas live. it would have been rad to sing along to leave it aloneand get swept up in the distraction of it all. sort of needing that right now. anyone want to kidnap me that day?
There is always that moment when everything becomes too much and the idea that there is help out there for you to embrace brings relief. The help itself does not bring as much relief as the thought that maybe this time around you will be helped, or better, you will become ‘normal’. The possibility of help is the moment you await. That moment hasn’t come. The people closest to me have become strangers, and I don’t even care. I’ve wrapped myself up in the thought that it doesn’t matter, that they never mattered. I’ve wrapped myself up in alot of illusion and falsity. I’m getting by, and by that I mean, I am paying my bills and nothing much more. The moment when everything became too much is long gone and there was never a doubt in my mind that relief was no longer available to me, that it no longer even existed.
May 2nd 2011. I had a dream. I don’t usually remember my dreams, in fact, for a time, I was convinced that I didn’t dream at all. Then I had this dream. I dreamt I was running through a cemetery. People were around, no one I knew, theatrical people, Felliniesque people, people lounging in trees looking like they were part of the scenery, and there I was wearing a white tissue dress running through the cemetery trying to get away from one dark-haired woman who was following me and kept asking me what I was doing there. I didn’t know what I was doing there, I did not belong there. I ran through a house, dodging the dark-haired woman and then found myself in the city where I climbed the stairs to a dingy apartment where my brother and his high school friend Daryl sat on a couch watching television. I sat down with them, between them, and then left. I started running back home, but wound up in the cemetery again. Then I woke up. The friend in the dream is someone who me and my brother use to hang out with quite a bit, but not for at least 15 years. I’d recently been informed that he had undergone a very serious brain surgery and was lucky to be alive and doing well. My brother had emailed me about it not long before I had the dream. 48 days later, my brother was dead. To this day I still feel a huge amount of guilt that I didn’t call my brother and let him know about the dream. In my mind, the same mind that believes my brother would still be alive today had he not gone to Italy last June, telling him would have made a difference and altered the events of June 19th 2011.
Today is my brother’s birthday. He would have been 42.Last year I called to wish him a happy birthday long distance from my work. The conversation lasted a minute, like most of our conversations at that time, brief. He thanked me for calling and said bye. I went back to working. My mom held a lunch in his honour yesterday afternoon. No one talked about him. It was odd considering we’d all gathered to celebrate his birthday. My mom made all of his favorite foods, barbecued steak and sausages, five bean feta salad, blueberry strudel, banana chocolate chip muffins. All I could think of was how I called him for no more than a minute last year on his birthday. There was no good time to bring this depressing memory up. Everyone seemed busy busying themselves so they wouldn’t have to think about Franki. It seemed like no one would be able to bear considering their own memories of wishing him his last Happy Birthday. I kept my memory to myself and ate another piece of strudel.
There is Sam. There is work. There is music. There are books. There is sleep. There is nothing without you. People say life goes on. Life does not go on, it comes to a screeching halt and there is nothing. Nothing.
