What More Do You Want?

...and every silly song seems as though it has significance. 

All I want to do is sleep (and nap).
I'm not sure if this means I'm getting back to normal or not.
Getting back to normal is what we're supposed to be doing; getting our affairs in order (which is to say, back to extramarital sex).
I don't particularly want to, but then, I never wanted to do this while Sarah was alive either.

Being dead carries a lot of responsibility.
There's a lot of talk about what she would have wanted.
She wouldn't have wanted the kids eating this.
She would have wanted us to expand the porch or hang the Hallowe'en decorations in this window versus that window.
It seems important to honour the wishes of those we have lost, but being dead doesn't make you right all of the time.
She's even bossier from the grave than she was before (don't worry, she would have laughed at that). 
What she likely would have wanted is for the rest of those in her family to form a singing troupe and tour around Europe.
And I shall be their manager!

Sarah tried comedy approximately five times.
She was a natural, but then, I would say that.
I used to fantasize about us forming a comedy duo.
Not a couple of idiots sharing a guitar onstage, but just the two of us talking to one another, including the audience when we felt like it.
The dynamic really would have worked.
But we realized there would be a lot of unchaperoned nights in a single hotel room.
And that might have left a fly in the goblet, if you catch my drift. 
I go back onstage for the first time tonight. 
I intend to be bleak.
It's what she would have wanted. 

Oh, and by the way,  I sincerely wish someone had successfully shot what's-his-face Harper today. That would have legitimately, honestly improved my day considerably.

Swallow Your Pain

We all must go on, go on

Go on b'y! Go on go on

We all must go on, go on

For you won't live again

I do my best mourning in the evening. 

This is probably because it takes me several hours to actually wake up. 

I'm at the rummaging stage now, filtering through all of the junk I own for any scrap or morsel of her. 

I toss aside old ping pong paddles and Playstation consoles and hiss to myself, "This can't be it! Where's the rest of it?!"

Sort of like someone on the fiend for drugs, or someone who can't find their brilliant recipe for guacamole. 

All pieces of paper and scraps of our past that I come across I want to ingest. 

Like, I keep experiencing an urge to swallow this note or that card from her. 

I have to stop myself from doing it. 

I suppose I figure that if I swallow these figments, I can't ever possibly misplace them. 

She'd also probably get a kick out of it. 

"He's not going to try and swallow the whole picture frame, is he?" 

In Our Time Of Needles

I'm too tired right now. To write quippy things for you guys, I mean.
I'm not too tired to use the keyboard or anything. I'm here, after all. I'm present.
I was supposed to get my stupid mourning tattoo tomorrow (Turpin loved my stupid tattoos), but I can't because I have to give blood first.
For any would-be donors out there who are also in a motorcycle gang, you can't donate for a year after getting a tattoo. Or a piercing (through your penis head, or the bridge of your nose or wherever).
Some of Turpin's family are working on a blood donor initiative that I won't selfishly spill the beans on, but I should probably participate in that before getting her face tattooed to my inner thigh.

This experience has taught me that, like karaoke, I prefer to mourn alone.
The wake/funeral were very suffocating in that everywhere I turned there was someone.
This was our swim coach.
This was an old teacher.
Here's some dude that I don't know who is chewing a ham sandwich with his mouth open.
I often found myself extricating my person from the other persons.
I'm grieving alone still. These blog posts may seem like grieving, but really this is just me drawing attention to myself, just as I always have.
Like, I'm sort of hoping that Sarah's dying is just the angle that this blog needed.
I mean, I've got the writing chops. I've got the "voice" (whiny; off-key).
A gimmick is all that I've needed to shoot myself into super-stardom/marketability.
I'm not going to date 50 dudes and bang very few of them.
No one would want to read that.
But a friend's death and my consequential mental breakdown?
That's an untapped ploy.
Anyway, what I'm getting at is that I mourn alone, but I will share this thing with you because it's been very pervasive and weird.
I've had a song stuck in my head since she passed, and I don't know why.
It's "Crazy" by K-Ci & Jojo.
I'm not making this up.
At first, it was just stuck in my head the way songs are stuck in your head.
You're driving or golfing or tuning out your grandmother, and suddenly you realize that you've been humming the song and you weren't even aware of it.
Now, however, it's becoming more continuous.
It looped through my head all day today.
I'm beginning to believe that it has a subconcious significance that I may never figure out.
Like, we were listening to it while having some stupid conversation about dying.
Or we used to sing it to each other into our hairbrushes and pretend we were famous or...something.
I listen to it when I feel like crying.
Sometimes I feel like crying anyway, and I listen to it because it's sort of catchy.

Can't See The Memory For The Trees

Peter was telling us that it was time to gather close friends and family.
I went into the den of my father, thinking of my nights standing there, looking across the street during our conversations and escapades.
Why not look at one another while we spoke on the phone? We had the luxury.
I went to the window then, to look at where she once stood, and to seem dramatic.
But Dad's trees were 15 years older, and I couldn't see past them.
I realized then that there was no going back to that time.
We'd all been adults for too long.
I sank.
A minute or a day later, Peter called to tell me.


*Geoffrey Hartman, in his paper On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies mentions two contradictory elements of trauma knowledge, and this post, when it was written, was an example of the first of those, I think. On the contradiction, Hartman mentions how traumatic knowledge of a horrible event is "registered rather than experienced. It seems to have bypassed perception and consciousness, and falls directly into the psyche."
The other form of trauma knowledge, according to Hartman, "is a kind of memory of the event, in the form of a perpetual troping of it by the bypassed or severley split psyche" (page 537).

*Peter was Sarah's husband. We met at the age of eight when he happened upon me rolling my red wagon along Finn Street, mere meters from the house she would come to live in.
They only got married cause they met, and they only met cause of me. And y'know, I never pointed that out nearly as often as I would have expected myself to.
Though I couldn't share the bond they'd eventually form (there wasn't enough room in the bed), they let me in on little big things, like telling me that Sarah was knocked up before anyone else. We were rolling in their Mazda 3 at the time; two surrogate parents telling their adoptive 29-year old that he was about to get a new brother or sister.
Did I mention there were kids?
Oh, there were kids alright.

Wakey Wakey, Legs So Shakey

It was a brief stop at the costume shop, and then I was off to the wake.
I chose Spongebob Squarepants because he's very popular these days.
Also, I recently watched a documentary about voice actors, and the Spongebob guy seemed really nice.

I saw a lot of folks at the wake. A lot of old friends.
A lot of girls I once wished I'd gotten handjobs from.
It was a good day.
The service will be over soon, and then the hunt for a new whacky friend begins.
A psychiatrist would likely say that I've been using humor to avoid my own crippling grief.
Granted, a psychiatrist might be right about that, but on the bright side it should make for some great blog posts.
Don't touch that dial!

Rise and Pine

Fuzzy today.
Sort of feel like I haven't slept enough, probably because I haven't slept enough.
Rowan came by to wake me up this morning.
"Wake up, Uncle Paul!" Her cute, stupid face a few inches from mine.
Then I yelled, "Get outta here, kid!"
Later in the day I poked her awake while she was napping.

Weren't You Just Here?

I feel like I'm in a small room with a single, unlocked door which leads to a party full of people that I don't want to talk to.

Hopefully I'll feel like something else soon.

...

My best friend died today.
...
Nothing funny about that.


* written approximately 2-4 hours after "the news."
Really, I have no idea what time it was that I learned the news. I just know I uploaded this post at 6:41, and I know that I napped before I wrote anything.
I remember coming downstairs, leaving solitude for the first time, to sit to my mother's dried, re-heated pork chop (they thought it better to eat without me).
Sarah couldn't eat by the end of it. In fact, she couldn't swallow water either.
An old-school vegetarian, she stopped ingesting flesh back before it was fashionable. She admitted that if she got out of there, she wanted to eat some meat (or at least chew and spit it). I promised I'd make her whatever she wanted.
This dialogue ran through my head (my first haunting!) as I thought to myself, "She couldn't eat any more. I shall never eat again! For her!"
Then I realized that was stupid and started cutting up the chop as I cried.