Bruce's Blog

Bullshiterature

sharkboychomped — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 17:05:18 +0000

Carefully perfuming my essence
My existence,
Trying, desperately, to cover the rancid
Wretched, disheartened stench of
out-living my expected
Self-expiration date by years

Despite
Countless attempts
To poison the well.
Excessive drink
& hallucinogen benders.
Scripts and the captain
Inebriated careens
In metal death traps
Disregard for pedestrian traffic laws
Or the slow suicide of carcinogens
None have left my flame, eternal, extinguished.

I notice my blatant half-assery
In hindsight and
Attribute it less to a will to live
Than to a lack of will to know they live on without me

Some (myself included) call me coward
In hushed whispers behind backs
To each other or
Fewer still, directly to my face
Yet all hold the same reverent
Resignation to note that such a jab
Could seem, indeed, to provide
Provocation, motivation
enough to humpty dumpty into oblivion
And none want their own king’s horses
And men, doggedly chasing them
Towards their own demise.

What do you do when your soul’s milk has long ago
Curdled? Does the fragrance weaken?
With time could it be cheese or yoghurt?
Or does life really end in that spoiling of milk, regardless of the
Thriving organisms at work throughout it?

Mexico city blues

sharkboychomped — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 15:31:45 +0000

It took goombas, booze, buddah
To get what kerouac was getting at

Once you’re there, deep in it
You’ll be surprised to find no realizations you haven’t already had

That’s the nirvana you read about
The emptiness you can’t wrap your
Head around

You feel like a dunce without it
Looks like shit from the outside
Is shit inside
Already knew it, only surprise is
No surprise at all

Doubt slips in
“do I understand or overstand”
Easier to leave it at “I don’t give a shit either way”

Once you get it, got it, emptiness abounds
Not worth having
Keep the mystery intact.

Maine folk art

sharkboychomped — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 02:19:38 +0000

After browsing through a maine gallery/art museum guide and discovering a vast majority of the prints were paintings of lighthouses, coasts, and streams I went into a rant about craft versus art that has been met, so far, with blank stares, and vehement disagreement. It was a good reminder that I have both unpopular and necessary opinions. I’m not about to say that art and craft have different skill sets, I just disagree with the consensus that paintings are automatically art, regardless of intent and subject matter. Masterfully crafted furniture is still craft to most, because of its utilitarian value. It doesn’t seem like the utilitarian value of stereotypical imagery should be ignored because of the medium used to create it alone. Using a camera to snap pictures of landmarks doesn’t translate to art, nor using words for non-fiction make it literature, so why are all things created with paint and canvas automatically art?
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of things out there that fit this category of wrongfully accused art, and I have seen paintings of lighthouses that can be legitimately interpreted as art, it’s just that the majority of these reguritations of maine-centric iconography are designed, entirely, to be a source of income, which for me, is a function that pushes the creative output of a person into the realm of craft. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with even mediocre craft as long as it is presented as craft instead of fine art. I’m not about to submit the sock puppets I made with kids or the hastily painted wooden paddles I snagged at the craft store around the way to an art museum unless I plan on having a good laugh at the expense of the writhing self-importance people attach to artifacts presented under the guise of art. You shouldn’t peruse gallerys and museums assuming everything in there is, legitimately, and without a doubt, art. You should, instead, approach such places with the same hopeful skepticism you’d feel walking into a cryptozoology museum. There could be legitimate stuff worth considering behind those doors, or it could be a pile of junk collected by closed-minded fanatics.

Well shiiit

sharkboychomped — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 19:40:47 +0000

Is it a surprise to anyone that the more homeless people and streetpunks I hang out with downtown the more I realize I was suppossed to be a drifter? Just needed to be written down somewhere while I was thinking about it before I put it out of my head again. There’s something more to that desire and I just can’t put my finger on it.

Clash of the Titans; Reality vs Daydreams

sharkboychomped — Wed, 12 May 2010 06:21:46 +0000

The more I go to the places I wasn’t allowed to go and do the things I wasn’t allowed to do I realize she had no reason to fear them. She wanted me to stay sober because she had it lodged in her head that it was what I wanted for myself and she was afraid of letting me become my father. I think a small part of her was afraid of what I would do with freedom. I am so outgoing with people I know, but so painfully socially awkward with people I’ve met before, and incapable of introducing myself to people I don’t know. I’m angry as fuck to. I left my sweatshirt by the monitors at the bar tonight and when I went to grab it so we could leave it was gone. I automatically assumed it had been stolen and got pissed. I went directly to ready to fight in my head. Why do I react to everything with violence as a default? I’m not even that violent of a person.

What the fuck do I have to prove to the world?

Closing Door

sharkboychomped — Tue, 11 May 2010 01:26:46 +0000

I know you need to be needed. I know you want to be earned and not owned. I think I know one of the things you are confused about and why it’s causing you to push me away. I wish I could have you but there are so many reasons why I can’t. I could never say it to your face but I really think I’d wait for you until the end of time, but I feel like my end is rushing towards me and I don’t know how to fight it off. I hope this is all in my head. I hope this isn’t the way it feels right now. I hope things aren’t the way I’ve decided they are, but I will do my best to understand if they are. I really think I could be happy with you forever, but I don’t know that you’d feel the same with me.

May 13, I could’ve saved myself a lot of overthinking and batshit crazy if I had just asked for clarification. I am completely okay with the way things actually are. I understand and I am sooo supportive. Wish I had just asked instead of wasting all that time panicking. She’s so much more wonderful for being willing to put up with all this.

Congraduation

sharkboychomped — Sun, 09 May 2010 05:59:24 +0000

I’m fighting as hard as I can to not just break down and weep until I dry up. I’ve known for a while that I can’t have what I want in this situation for so many reasons. I know the biggest one is that I am so fucking discouraged, but I can’t find a way to feel like I actually even know what I think I know. The way it’s been going she is digging for any escape. I’m so jealous of him even though I have no right to be, and the fact that she ever even temporarily entertained the thought that I only put up with her for sex destroys me. I’m both glad and terrified that she specified that she wanted to keep her most recent visit g-rated. Between feeling like graduating just means I am directionless again, having to face the fact that if I do get my degree I’ve got no goals again, and all the things I keep overthinking about her I’m fighting the urge to feel like I’m drowning. Why is it the only way I could fight back the hurt and fear is rage? Where’s that sense that things are going to be okay someday? I know I had it somewhere.

Stale Realizations

sharkboychomped — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 14:07:28 +0000

Today I realized I’m still grasping at straws. I’ve got shit in my mouth that I just can’t wash out and the only way I can think of to deal with it is to just keep eating more. I’ve no chance at anything normal with the girl I want to love, and everything with my wife really has been to far gone, too destroyed for a long time. I was looking through my external hard drive. Found pictures of us from high school and caught myself thinking “there’s no way she ever really looked that fat, there’s no way I ever looked that bald.”

I tried to delete all the things I backed up from her computer and couldn’t bring myself to do it. I stumbled across the list of baby names we’d started and now I am completely numb. Micah would’ve been a strong young boy, and Aiden would’ve liked soccer. Noah would’ve been teased in school because he was too smart for his classmates and I would’ve known how to help, because I was just like him. Issac would’ve been too proud to ever ask his dad for help, and athletic in ways I could never keep up with. Izabella would have been rebellious and I would have had to terrify so many boyfriends to help her weed through the useless ones to find a decent man. Aurora would’ve loved camping and hiking and dancing on my feet, and Jacob would’ve been a painfully late bloomer. Anya would have been smart and pretty and to busy trying to be the best at everything to really have any friends, just like her mom. Nikolas would’ve been a little bastard and tested me his whole life. Alana would’ve been sweet and serene and mothered everyone she met, and Izaiah would have been the baby of the family. I would have called Dorian JD and made him watch scrubs so he’d understand why, just like my mom showed me pictures of the Steve I was named after. Alijah would’ve been a wonderful son, calm and measured, spending his whole life doing the right thing, and Cullen would’ve been the prodigal son. Ada would’ve been an insufferable bitch when her hormones kicked in and Keira would’ve walked around with my sister’s smug assurance that she was better than everyone else and my belief that the world revolves entirely around her. Adrianna would’ve spent her entire life giving up halfway into things because she just plain didn’t feel good enough.

Her preoccupation with being a mother is really the only thing we still had in common after the summer I told her I’d been lying and drinking. The threesome we’d had when we were both destroyed had been eating us both alive and we’d been dead in the water since before we’d even gotten married. It’s amazing that you don’t notice just how disgusting stagnant water smells until you realize you’ve got a big mouthful of it. She wrote last January that it was over and I knew it then too, but we just kept pushing forward because all she could think about was the moment she would get to be a mom. She kept fighting to make it work because of those little red hands and soft fingernails. Those tiny clutching fingers flailing away when she said “Hello, I am your mommy and I’ve been waiting my whole life to meet you.” I know that I still love her and care about her, but it isn’t the way you love and cherish a wife, I don’t know if it really ever was.

It tears me apart that we ripped the best part of each other out. She could see that I was distant because I was so hurt and afraid and depressed. She could see it plain as day and I just couldn’t find a way to care enough to get help, to admit that I needed it, and because she was in over her head and kept telling me she couldn’t fix it I took that as her not caring enough to try. I won’t ever be her husband, not that I ever really was. I want be the father to her children. I won’t be her children’s grandfather. It doesn’t matter how many times I see those words or say them, I just can’t make them make sense in my head. It’s like I’ve been washed in the river of souls in the underworld. There’s a faint tinge somewhere that those words all mean something catastrophic, but I can’t figure out, for the life of me, how they could possibly relate to me. Their in some alien tongue and I can tell by the inflection that it means some pretty soul crushing, dream shattering shit, but I just can’t wrap my head around how it relates and what it means for my future.

My future is a joke. I can’t even stay motivated enough to graduate college. I don’t care enough to show up for classes. I just want to move back in with my parents, find a minimum wage job and drink until I’m to far gone for any of this to stir me at all. I don’t even want that faint tinge of recognition when I say those words. I don’t want the hair on the back of my neck to stand up, or the loud heavy pulse in my head. I don’t want the world to slow and the air to start feeling like Jello. I want to cut it all out of me. I’ve come to terms with so much of the rest of this. I’ve forgiven her for her part in all this and I’m starting to forgive myself. I can see what I did wrong and I want to find a way to not do it again next time. I’ve forgiven anyone else I blamed for this turning to shit so fast. I’ve come to terms with the fact that we are getting a divorce and that it is a good thing. I’m happy with the fact that she is with someone else. I’m excited about the possibilities I have coming up in terms of who I can date and sleep with and getting to actually live life and make mistakes instead of being to terrified to fuck up what I had to try anything. I just can’t come to terms with the fact that I am not going to be a dad any time soon. I don’t have a family to take care of. There’s no real reason for me to get a degree or a career immediately because nothing is waiting on it to happen. If it takes me a month or ten years, all that matters in the end is that I eventually finished college.

It’s such a melancholy place to be, to go from having everything planned, even though it wasn’t really my plan to being completely free and completely empty with it. I’m worried I am going to spend the next sixth months rushing to be a dad and end up with someone even worse or end up as someone even worse. I need to learn how to not turn every conversation back to me, to actually listen when someone needs support and just be there instead of intentionally or unintentionally making it about me. I need to learn that I am self pity doesn’t balance out a constant need to be the center of attention, and that pity parties just lead to people writing you off. I didn’t peak in high school. I still have a lot of potential. It is just going to be an uphill battle to keep striving to reach my potential and pushing my limits instead of just settling for something slightly better than my parents attained.

Guilty of Being White

sharkboychomped — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 15:08:42 +0000

It had been an exhausting couple of weeks, but redemption was on the horizon. My blistered feet only had one more day of suffering until the glory of new shoes. I spent all day at work fantasizing about how perfect those new etnies were going to feel, or how protected those dc’s would make my feet. After making sure the check had cleared the next day I hobbled into the mall and made my way to the storefront I had been drooling at on my lunchbreak for weeks. I stood and stared at the selection and felt torn. My daydreaming was interrupted by a rauckous cackle and an “aaaay boieee”. The stereotype of a man standing next to me grinned from ear to ear. “What can I do fo you cuz?” he pushed out the corner of his mouth.

“I’m just in for some new sneaks man,” I gasped in a reverent tone. My white-boy senses were tingling and I was already worried I was going to offend him. “Do you have any dc’s or etnies in eleven wides?” The last sentence was almost a church whisper and I could feel a sinking feeling in my gut. Growing up in Maine I had no bearing on how to act.

That cackle rushed past his lips again. “Nah son, we done been cleaned out,” still grinning from ear to ear he damn near shouts the next line, “but I got some hi-tops that gone blow yo mind!” He swaggers into the back room and disappears. My fight or flight reflexes are starting to kick in. I start rolling through a list of topics. Is it racist if I bring up wu-tang clan, I wonder. Is it okay to laugh because I feel awkward? Before I can even get a plan of attack formed he’s back out with one box in hand. “I know you gone laawdeese,” I frantically try to decode “this tha hot shit son.” He cackles again as he opens the box. It’s that same cackle from “let me clear my throat”.

I do everything I can to bury my initial reaction, I can’t possibly shit on his taste. I’d look like such a racist. I swallow my pride and try them on and the second I get them laced up he shouts “OOOO-WEEEE!” I jump a little bit and he cackles again. Much to my dismay they are amazingly comfortable. I look up to see an asian girl in a panda dress and an anime nerd with a panda hat walk by. I chuckle a little realizing I don’t have any right to judge anyones taste in clothes right now. The events that take place in the next couple of minutes are all a blur. Somehow, I get to the register stunned and guilty and when he says something about how my shoes are shining I visibly wince. Please chuck d, don’t mention shoe-shine with my skinhead standing in front of you. Someone is going to get the wrong idea.

After a quick dash to the car I look down at the neon monstrosities on my feet. I can feel my pride sink a little bit lower as Minor Threat’s “Guilty of being white” plays in my head. As I step out of the car to get the longboard out of the back after arriving home there’s a glimmer of hope this isn’t all bad. I get on and I’m amazed at how comfortable these shoes are to skate in. Before I know it I’m as far into the ghetto as I have ever been and look up to an immediate rush of white guilt. Five or six dudes give me a white boy sneer and I do my best to get out of there. I’m no where near fast enough. They’re on me like a pack of dogs. “Those kicks are too good for you cracka, lemme help you out of ‘em” one of the dudes says. “Yeah, run you shit” echoes another of his entourage.

So, the next thing I know I’m coming to again. My shirt is bloody and ripped. I can still feel some wetness on my nose. I look up to see the leader of the group toss my sneakers up at the powerlines. The flip end over end like neon nunchucks and land with a whisper on the powerline. High fives and complicated processions of handshakes follow. “Guilty of being white” starts up in my head again, and I realize I might actually be a racist.
It had been an exhausting couple of weeks, but redemption was on the horizon. My blistered feet only had one more day of suffering until the glory of new shoes. I spent all day at work fantasizing about how perfect those new etnies were going to feel, or how protected those dc’s would make my feet. After making sure the check had cleared the next day I hobbled into the mall and made my way to the storefront I had been drooling at on my lunchbreak for weeks. I stood and stared at the selection and felt torn. My daydreaming was interrupted by a rauckous cackle and an “aaaay boieee”. The stereotype of a man standing next to me grinned from ear to ear. “What can I do fo you cuz?” he pushed out the corner of his mouth.
“I’m just in for some new sneaks man,” I gasped in a reverent tone. My white-boy senses were tingling and I was already worried I was going to offend him. “Do you have any dc’s or etnies in eleven wides?” The last sentence was almost a church whisper and I could feel a sinking feeling in my gut. Growing up in Maine I had no bearing on how to act.
That cackle rushed past his lips again. “Nah son, we done been cleaned out,” still grinning from ear to ear he damn near shouts the next line, “but I got some hi-tops that gone blow yo mind!” He swaggers into the back room and disappears. My fight or flight reflexes are starting to kick in. I start rolling through a list of topics. Is it racist if I bring up wu-tang clan, I wonder. Is it okay to laugh because I feel awkward? Before I can even get a plan of attack formed he’s back out with one box in hand. “I know you gone laawdeese,” I frantically try to decode “this tha hot shit son.” He cackles again as he opens the box. It’s that same cackle from “let me clear my throat”.
I do everything I can to bury my initial reaction, I can’t possibly shit on his taste. I’d look like such a racist. I swallow my pride and try them on and the second I get them laced up he shouts “OOOO-WEEEE!” I jump a little bit and he cackles again. Much to my dismay they are amazingly comfortable. I look up to see an asian girl in a panda dress and an anime nerd with a panda hat walk by. I chuckle a little realizing I don’t have any right to judge anyones taste in clothes right now. The events that take place in the next couple of minutes are all a blur. Somehow, I get to the register stunned and guilty and when he says something about how my shoes are shining I visibly wince. Please chuck d, don’t mention shoe-shine with my skinhead standing in front of you. Someone is going to get the wrong idea.
After a quick dash to the car I look down at the neon monstrosities on my feet. I can feel my pride sink a little bit lower as Minor Threat’s “Guilty of being white” plays in my head. As I step out of the car to get the longboard out of the back after arriving home there’s a glimmer of hope this isn’t all bad. I get on and I’m amazed at how comfortable these shoes are to skate in. Before I know it I’m as far into the ghetto as I have ever been and look up to an immediate rush of white guilt. Five or six dudes give me a white boy sneer and I do my best to get out of there. I’m no where near fast enough. They’re on me like a pack of dogs. “Those kicks are too good for you cracka, lemme help you out of ‘em” one of the dudes says. “Yeah, run you shit” echoes another of his entourage.
So, the next thing I know I’m coming to again. My shirt is bloody and ripped. I can still feel some wetness on my nose. I look up to see the leader of the group toss my sneakers up at the powerlines. The flip end over end like neon nunchucks and land with a whisper on the powerline. High fives and complicated processions of handshakes follow. “Guilty of being white” starts up in my head again, and I realize I might actually be a racist.

Don’t ask me about the gold
I pity the fool who doesn’t respect the belt
Virgil standing on your chest for the ten count
The million dollar man shouting everyone has a price.

Don’t ask me about the green
The bamboo chute gripped in surprisingly human paws
A smug grin on a black and white face
Happy panda is happy indeed.

Don’t ask me about the purple
Neon high tops in tones of yellow and green and purple
That reflect my bruised ego
And a crippling fear of being a racist

Don’t ask me about the white
The little ears on the top of the cap
Each one a secret pact
Odd birds of a feather fly together after all.

1 Sentence Karma Journal

sharkboychomped — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 15:07:57 +0000

Monday, March 22^nd

I always knew that one-testicled bastard would get what he had coming to him, but this feels like too much.

Tuesday, March 23^rd

Breaking his knuckles with my face is hardly what I consider getting what I deserved.

Wednesday, March 24^th

He contemplated suicide while he was drunk last night, that evens it out a little bit.

Thursday, March 25^th

I’m not looking forward to that hospital room this afternoon.

Friday, March 26^th

Looks like he’s gonna pull through, so I can go back to being pissed.

Saturday, March 27^th

I’m losing her and she isn’t even really mine to lose, I guess I had it coming.

Sunday, March 28^th

Seriously, why am I so broken up about this, I knew the way it had to be before anything happened, but still…

Monday, March 29^th

Some people never learn when to quit while they are ahead, should’ve hit him while I had the chance.