I was watching a movie the other day and there was a scene with a child playing in an empty schoolyard. It reminded me of how I always used to go play in the schoolyards on the weekends. There was something very... peaceful about it. Usually, it was full of screaming kids and such... but when I came there on weekends, it seemed so peaceful... as if time had frozen. I had always gone to my old elementary school by the park. It was a great place, with the "hidden playground" behind the school... but there was the school a hundred yards down the hill from my house, where I would spend summers playing baseball with the neighbor kids and autumns playing football... but when we weren't doing that, I would often walk down the steps from the playground as if to head to the doors that led back into the school... but when I got to the bottom, instead of heading for the doors, I would head left, down the driveway that led towards the gym locker door and the cafeteria... walking along the side of the school... so quiet... so unfamiliar in its familiarity. I would read the graffiti from the '70s scattered along the back wall... and re-read it. You couldn't see the schoolyard, you couldn't see the street... and probably more importantly, no one on the street or in the yard could see me. I could just go there and sit on a little seat that looked like it had been carved in the earth along the fenceline a hundred years ago... I could sit there, and just be. I lived in a huge patch of forest in the middle of the city, and I had probably twenty different places like that... places I could just disappear for a while. Only a couple rivaled the little nook by the old cafeteria at the school at the bottom of the hill. The tower at the old monastery was the best... Sometimes, I would sneak out of my house on a school night and head over and up the seemingly thousands of steps in the pitch black... I had walked them so many times, I had the imperfections of each piece of slate memorized and never lost my step... On an autumn night, you could see the entire city from the tower... all the lights... the bridges... everything. I never got caught up there, in all the times I went. Even if I had, all the nuns had known me since I was five, and they wouldn't have done anything, anyway... I had free reign of the property, it seemed. But standing in that tower, looking over the city... it just felt like I dissolved into vapor and hung there high above the city, like a cloud... like nothing. I was everywhere... I was... nowhere.

Changing strings would be a good idea, at some point... and adjusting the truss rod.
The full-size (click) of the pic is pretty nice... I like my new lens.
Acoustic version of a song coming... soon... maybe.

Well... that didn't take long...

Stubie's brother? Gone... I had known him since high school, too... they were the same age difference as me and my brother... but I sure didn't see that coming less than a month later... or maybe I did... I don't know...

And then (oh, no, it's not over)... ANOTHER former student... gone (I was not quite as "close" to him as the other former student, but we were always friendly and would sometimes gather with a group of friends for lunch, etc.). This guy committed suicide and would not be found for eleven days. After speaking with some people about it, yesterday, it turns out that he was suffering from drug-induced schizophrenia/psychosis. Near the end, it seems he was reaching out to a lot of people for help, but apparently wasn't getting what he was needing from them...

I'm not unfamiliar with drug-induced schizophrenic behavior... on a rather personal level. I grew up with a girl... we had literally known each other since birth. Our fathers played music together for decades. At one point in her life, her and her mother moved into the house next door to mine. Within a few years, she began to show a marked change in her behavior... it would take miles of text to explain how, but needless to say, she had become a very different person as a young adult than she was as a teenager. At one point, she began calling my house about once a week and talking about how she "knew I was using my computer to put messages into her brain..." which, y'know, if I could have done stuff like that, back then... wuh-hoooooooah nellie! I was seeing a girl that had been friends with her for years, also, and one night she came over, having just been next door, and was clearly distraught. Turns out, my neighbor had taken her into a closet with a flashlight and was writing her notes on paper and passing them to her, to avoid speaking... because she "knew I was listening." She went on to "talk" about how I was imprinting her with all these "thoughts" and I was working for the government (prophesy?) in order to... well, I'm not really sure what I would have needed to use her for, really... and I guess that my motive was never really made quite so clear... but... yeah. I was a CIA operative using a Mac Quadra to turn young twenty-something women into zombies for... well, who knows what... I sure didn't. The actual problem? LOTS of cocaine mixed with LOTS of shit like fentanyl and the like... a glorious combination. The girl ran off with an equally-strange man to another state and started working as an operator at one of those big centers that handled infomercials and all kinds of stuff... and weird shit started showing up at my door. Like, products that I hadn't ordered, literature I hadn't requested... all kinds of things. She called at one point and told me that she was the one doing it... although she never really got around to telling me why... ended up moving back in next door... the strangeness ensued, once more, with phone calls and her sitting in her bedroom window watching me working on my computer, playing guitar, whatever... It was... strange, to say the least. I was later told by one of my bosses to "stay as far away from her as you possibly can" (which, having her living next door, was not the easiest thing to do), because people with psychosis can get suddenly, irrationally violent - not exactly new news, but nonetheless, my boss knew what he was saying (I would come to fully realize that hard lesson (in an entirely different situation), a few years later). The last I heard, she was "doing okay..." which has to be better than how she was doing back then, anyway.

But... like... this shit needs to stop... because it's not cool. I've already said I'm tired of hearing about people I know dying because of drugs... what the fuck was unclear about that?

So I was eating, last night, and I opened the paper... and bam! A smack right across the face... a picture of a guy I taught when I was in college... in the obituaries. I had taught him on three separate occasions... two times in a classroom setting and once in one-on-one tutoring sessions for a quarter... We got to be pretty decent acquaintances from the classroom stuff, which is why he asked me to do his tutoring, later on... So, I've known the guy for ten-plus years, now... seen him around here and there... he always stopped and talked when we would run into each other... and all this time, I never realized that he was half-brother with a guy I've been friends with since I moved back from Colorado...

Anyhow, in the tutoring, it was always more laid back and stuff as opposed to the classroom... among other things, he used to talk about his drug use, which was no biggie... I didn't really care a whole lot about how much he spent on drugs and blah blah blah... I mean, at the time, he was 20-21 and that's just how people like him thought they were supposed to behave... it's just "cool," or whatever... I remember what it was like... I wasn't that much different... well, I was with the choice of substances, but... whatever... no biggie... but that was a completely different time and "era of recreation..." even then, though, you could see it creeping up, coming around the bend. When I saw in the paper that in lieu of flowers, donations be sent to one of the big rehab centers around here, I kinda got a sick feeling... sure enough, I called his brother earlier and sick feeling, confirmed... fucking cocaine and oxy overdose...

It has to be, like, at least twenty people since I've come back from Colorado... three friends in the last month... watching the line of potentials growing; the next could be any of them and I shudder to think which one it will be... because it will be one of them... Picking a dead pool and sitting back and watching... because I've figured out, in all my trying to help the friends that have died from this shit... I can't. I may have a short-term effect, much like the shit they can't stop doing... but I could never help like they needed. Who am I or anyone else that's sick of watching friends fall compared to that hour or two of... what the fuck ever you wanna call that kind of "high?"

I can't stand the whole concept, anymore... humans are tools. I keep giving them way too much credit. That much more of a reason I need to be gone. I'm too tired to keep watching friends die... just too fucking tired.

As for the former friend and student... lesson learned, I suppose.

I'm so close to being out of here, I can taste it...

I hope everyone understands... I'm not doing it to spite them... I'm doing it because I don't see any other way...

I feel very strange...

I can't really explain it... but something's not right with me, at the moment.

Random loss of balance, even seated. Funny taste in the mouth. Seemingly forgetting to breathe... and blink... pupils are funny... an odd bit of an autonomic issue. I guess as long as the ticker keeps on ticking, I shouldn't sweat it, but...

Very sudden... very strange.

Kinda spooky.

Pass, already...

Protein... no, fruit. Mango... no, papaya... no... both. Yes. lol

Another, gone... Steve... no... Stubie... lots of crazy nights in that fucking car (how did we miss that pole, man?)... lots of fun at Mark's... and in Scott's basement (I remember how you always loved running that lightboard)... Every time I saw you at the Knights with the ol' man, it never failed that one of us would bring up some of the insane shit we did and lived to tell about it. Every time you came by the house or went to Pizza Hut with us, Ma would always tell me what a nice guy you were... 'cause... well, you were... of course, she never got to hear about us leaving Pizza Hut and getting tore up... from the floor up (I said stop, wait a minute, now, hold up?). Well, it wouldn't have changed the fact that you were a good guy... maybe a bit "corrupting" (haha), but hey - you kept me out of more trouble than you ever got me into.

I'm sorry it had to happen this way. No matter what, I'll always have a "whole lotta love" for you.

Rest well, young man,

"Jimmy Page"

It's been a week since Douchey went *poof*... I have to say, one of the better moves... everyone is sorta getting along, again (well, in that "I will talk shit about everyone behind their back but will at least smile to their face and work a little harder than I did when I saw his dead ass goldbricking" kind of way)... Voodoo is definitely a little less stressed, now (he told me about how he was really close to losing his job over him... and that's really impressive to consider... considering Voodoo, and all - you could tell he was eating away on his last nerve, but it's not like he could just fire him, willie-nillie... but... if Douchey just "went away," problem solved... for a lot of people, not just Voodoo). Overall, just a better feel. Oh, it will be short-lived, because someone else will take his place as the shit-disturber (like Woody & Beavis, and Drunkiepoo (and, subsequently, Drunkiepoo Too), and Baby-Killer, and all the others that came before him)... hopefully I'll be out of there in a couple weeks, anyway... then, I'll care even less than I do, now.

Thursday night was kind of eventful. There's a guy working there... decent guy... or so it seemed... but it turns out he's a wife-beater. The cousin of said wife works with him, too... and found out about it. I was standing there, listening to the "escalation" and it was pretty choice. My two best friends, there, come out for lunch and I'm like, "Hey, there's gonna be a brawl," and tell them what I heard. Wife-beater guy is kinda small, and Wife's-cousin is a lot bigger... so it could get ugly. Cousin goes and talks to Voodoo and has his coat and says he's done for the night and will probably lose his job in the morning because he's going to beat this guy... then proceeds to go buy some groceries... then proceeds to pace around the front for what seems like hours... I go to leave and I don't see Cousin anywhere, so I'm thinking maybe he cooled off and left, or was at least going to take care of this personal matter somewhere besides there (turns out, he was in the lot with a friend, waiting for Wife-beater)... I'm heading out and in walk two cops... one of them, one of the freakin' captains... pretty big deal, I'm thinking at this point. I'm good friends with both of them, so I ask the Cap'n, "What the fuck are you doing out at 5am?" to which he replies, "Making seventy-five bucks an hour..." lol Touche. So, I talk to them both for a while as Voodoo tries to wake up Dad and give him the lowdown... Anyhow, much longer story short, both parties were escorted from the lot and nothing happened (I'm still trying to figure out who called the cops, though)... but Cousin was fired up... and I can't say that I blame him. I have pretty low tolerance for people that come at girls like a man... but he probably handled it a little on the wrong side... and both of them are losing their jobs over it, now... perfect timing... but that's life... their life, anyway.

Sold myself a mortuary
Now loss is gain and I'm so very
tired of being used,
but what else can I do?

Close to me
but not inside, I know
Closer, parasite...

Someone should have told me when I was younger
Life was only learning how to lose
Now I'm older and so much stronger
And I only feel I'm being abused

I hold my hands out only hoping
For what I truly deserve
I draw back nothing
Only a promise
And I don't know what that's worth

And now my hands move slower and slower in pain
And, oh, my mind's going over and over -

My god, my soul is dead
Its ringing in my head
Disregarding what you said
I fall farther down, instead

My god, my soul is dead...

The things they always told you,
the things they tried to sell
You know they have created
your own personal hell

It's a beautiful lie...

...

Never wanted just to sell you,
just to tell you why
Never wanted just to heal you,
just to hear you cry...