The Obscure

The only one who could ever reach me was the son of a preacher man.

I've had that song stuck in my head since the first time I saw Pulp Fiction in full about a week or two ago, along with "I'm a mushroom-cloud layin' muthafucka, muthafucka."
But the Son of a Preacher Man, now that, I believe, is a prime example of everything I could ever love about soul music. It's got those horns, it's got that boiling Memphis guitar, and it's got Etta James. Sounds like a cocktail of delicious soul music to me, and it is. I think I'm going to try to track down that album.
I have every song I enjoy that I have downloaded enqueued right now and shuffling, so after "Son of a Preacher Man" comes "Hell" by the Squirrel Nut Zippers. Not 40 year old soul, but damn good shit nonetheless.

The problem with my sleeping pills, besides the facts that one of the symptoms of withdrawal is almost certainly dying, is that when I fall asleep on them, I wake up the next morning after almost exactly eight hours on the dot. Now, I had a headache last night, so I went to sleep as early as possible because I have no painkillers, and I wake up at 4:45 without the ability to get back to sleep, no matter how much lazing about I do. I wish it was like that when I have friends over. Maybe friends make me sleepy. Actually, it's probably the klonopin I take so they don't see me with the shakes that makes me sleepy. I don't like anyone seeing me with the shakes, I don't think anyone besides my immediate family has ever seen them going strong, I usually manage to catch them with sedatives before anyone else does.
But see, I wake up at quarter of five, and this son of a bitch who lives inside my head already starts fucking around with me. First he starts pulling on my nerve lines so I get those horrible pangs of head-pain, and then he starts filling my mind with philisophical junk that I had thought I had forgotten about, THEN he starts on with how pointless life is and how badly I fucked mine up and, most of all, how I should do all within my power not to let Lena fuck up her life as I did mine. As it is, mine is reparable. But there is only so bad you can fuck up and still be able to pull it back together, some people get lucky and can fuck up all life long and then after a decade or two of horrible debauchery, multiple failings (or not tryings), and a few too many drugs they can suddenly turn into normal, full-functioning people again. My family is riddled with people like those, which is why I think I have a chance, now that I have already fucked up and don't plan on fucking up more than I already have (as long as this son of a bitch in my head doesn't have any more damn plans for me). But I do intend to do all within my power to keep Lena from ever having to think the words, "Where do I go to from here?"
Those are some terrible motherfucking words sometimes, man. You sit there on your couch, your couch where you have spent so many hours feeling cool on, and suddenly realize that you've fucked up, all of those dreams you used to have can't happen now, you'll never be a physicist (that's what I actually wanted to be, a physicist. I could've done it too, I think I still hold two school records for best dumb projects in P.O.T.) you'll never be a successful writer, you'll never learn Russian enough to work in a museum transcribing Solzhenitsyn, everything you used to think about while skipping school and (funny way to ruin your life) burying your mind in books, is dead, and you think to yourself, "Fuck me, man. Where do I go to from here?"
There is no direct answer to that question, not for even any one person. The road of life is long and confusing, and there is a hell of a lot of dogshit on that road, and there is a hell of a lot of fuzz on that road just waiting to pull you aside and make you stagnate. Everyone has to walk through the shit and the traps of the road themselves, take a little help from their friends on the way, if they can. My way, as far as I can tell, is to travel, and write. After that, I don't know shit about it man. That's a fucking footstep in the eighty more years during which I am going to be forced to walk this hard fucking road. A goddamn footstep.
But it is a step nonetheless, I am taking one. Thank god for the first time in my life I'm taking one. But I refuse to sit by and watch my younger sister, my better, sit back on that fucking couch without doing what shit she can, she still has a chance to get through this part of life without fucking everything up. Everyone fucks up some of a highschool, that's pretty much a fact, but she is smarter than I am, and far more clever than I am, maybe not more creative than I am (unless there is some drug involved) but that's because she's all about numbers and shit. I'm not going to sit and see another one of my betters flush themselves down the fucking toilet of life.

What got me talking about that? This son of a bitch in my head did it, man. Stephen King once wrote, "You go through your whole life with some fucker in your head, fucking up your life, and fucking with your mind. The trick is to catch that little son of a bitch, put him on a fucking wheel, and make the fucker work for you."
Maybe I'll be able to pull that off someday.
Jungle Boogie, child.

Additions, not for the first time.

I am quite insane. That is something I came to terms with a long time ago, but the full effect of this doesn't really hit you until you have some time to yourself to think about it. Of course, there is only so mad I can be, if I know that I am mad. But we are all mad here, here we all hear demons who trouble us in our sleep, here there is always the Other Man, here we hear sounds that aren't there, we see things that don't exist, and we know things that we know aren't true.
Yes, it's quite a trip to be insane. A bit of a drag sometimes, but it really is a trip. It has it's upsides and it's downsides. You can sit there and listen to music and feel that the music is coming out of your mind, that you are the main character in a movie and this is the background music of this particular scene. You can sit on your roof smoking cigarettes and contemplate the innocence of the rest of the world, and how much you differ from that world, and sometimes it may not bother you. Sometimes you can enjoy it.
But you can't keep a girl if you're insane, you can't hold a job if you're insane, substances have far too much attraction if you're insane, the strange things you have to do to keep yourself comfortable are overwhelming if you're insane, the strange things you are compelled to do whether you'd like to or not, those are another aspect of insanity that is very disagreeable.
Yeah, we are all mad here. Here we all quote scripture while sucking down ash, here we all work for miminum wage while writing private dissertations on classic literature that will never see the light of day. Here we believe that the couse of our entire lives are determind by the equilibrium of the universe. Here we occasionally crave to take a man's life, here we always crave to take our own.
Once I was a person, I remember it vaguely. Once I was a person who could function in society like any other person. Now, as Man has been torn out of nature, as God has been torn out of time and space, I have been torn out of society to create a society of my own; and like all societies created by madmen, it is just themselves, their insanities and their inanities that exist within the walls of this society. Co-existence is beyond me. Hell, fucking existence itself is beyond me.
Oh yes, oh yes, we are all mad here. And when we remember that fact, we grow madder still. I'm going to go have a cigarette.