Ignore Me

There's a fucking sushi joint that just opened up in town, and manning the counter, rolling the nigiri up for my culinary pleasure, was a known quantity, former blogger, hippie dude sans marijuana that hiked the Appalachian Trail and came back to sling hash and said "okay" when it came time to draft a sucker from the kitchen staff to toss raw fish around.

I asked him if he had kept up on his blog since leaving the Trail almost eighteen months ago, and he said no, and I said What The Fuck?

Why in god's name wouldn't you want to keep writing? Always?

He said he didn't want people to see he had gotten off the Trail and was no back doing the same shit he was doing before he hiked through the mountains of West Virginia, and I was like Motherfucker, that's what people want to hear about if you can frame it right. I want to hear about the sullen despondency of dead coal towns in Middle America and the majesty of some native flower that maybe only bloomed because you passed it by on a Thursday in May, but I also want to know how trapped you feel making your eighteen jillionth plate of eggs and bacon and how the only joy in your day is an over-hard because motherfuckers don't step up and order their eggs funny like that most of the time, you're only tossing scrambled and o/e to tourists all morning long. I want to hear that your car wouldn't start, that your hairline is receding, that your dog goddamn near ran away last night and you had to cobble together some batteries from various appliances, tools, and remote controls just to power the flashlight that found him hiding in the bushes two yards away.

Think my vulgarity goes up a notch when I've been drinking? You goddamn right bitch.

I live for this shit, I want to read your words about today, yesterday, and the day before, and I want them to live and breathe for me. I can do without the hand histrionics, but I want to hear your suckout lamentations and how you were five outs away from one more hand of sanity before that asshole caught and gloated his superiority. I want to read you bleed. Tell me, show me.

So many blogs, so many... I try, I swear to fucking god at this point I try. My friends kick all sorts of ass in person, but when they drag ass online it breaks my heart. It's a personal affront to the written word to see the words HAND HISTORY #39484792 plastered on one more post, but to paint a Plath-esque despondency around one more two-outer rocking your world is beautiful. There's a bar, and I don't know who's setting it, but there's so much motherfucking mediocrity that gets settled for that I don't even want to read anymore, I just want to turn on MTV and watch Ex-2-Da-Zee rock another ride full of candy colors and the latest in Japatronical gizmodica to dull my fucking senses away from the pain. I want to beg and plead and hold my breath to urge you guys to not waste the keystrokes, they're so goddamn valuable, you have no idea. You do have something to say, I promise, and I know I want to read it, and it ain't all poker, or at least it ain't all hand history bullshit and I did this in my EssEnnGee last night and went to bed pissed off because of some donkey bullshit. Come on! This is freestyle bullshit, this is cold lampin' at the mic, an excuse to get retarded. You don't even have to push yourself, just fucking be yourself, your words count your thoughts count your ideas count you count there's no middle ground just fucking step up and be counted.

Can you tell I've been drinking? Fuckingmotherfuck.

No, you're not as good as XXX, you're not going to get paid and laid like XXX, you're not going to write a book like XXX, but you can do so much better, I promise, I plead of you. Maybe this is the tuna or the salmon or the crab or the shrimp talking, but I want to want to read you and I do want to read you now, but goddammit, step up and be the storyteller you know you are. This isn't rocket science, Mrs. Crabapple isn't cutting you a letter grade with a red wax pencil, this is real and this is nothing and everything all at the same time. If you're making the minimum effort to be open, why not make the maximum effort? I haven't gotten laid in so goddamn long, that's real. I think I'm shit and often full of the same, and that's real. I think about the past and how fucking random events collide and make things happen and Iggy finds my blog and we share a moment about long-lost Cynderany, and all of a sudden I'm in his top twenty links in his blogroll apropos of maybe nothing, maybe not, and I meet Pauly, and I meet Al, and I meet so many wonderfully expressive and diverse personalities and I'M BEING DRIVEN INSANE BY THE SHEER SAMENESS OF IT ALL because I know you and you know who I'm talking to here, and you are so ridiculously capable of more, and I can see it and so can everyone else, and still we get stats and percentages and suckout stories and oh-my-god-can-I-call-a-moratorium?

I want so much more from you, you've whetted the appetite, if that is the proper conjugation thereof, and I'm anxious and eager to know about you and your life and your struggles and your confidence, and why you're an asshole/cult member/crappy poet/fly fisherman/expert macrame artist or whatever the fuck you want to talk about and relate, just fucking talk about it already.

Goddammit.

I was talking to another blogger who was lamenting that WHERE'S MY MOTHERFUCKING MOVIE CHECK BANKY attitude I had been copping for awhile, and trying to talk this blogger down off the ledge, but oddly enough didn't feel that I had to because maybe I was feeling like some sort of diametric polar opposite to what this blogger was thinking and feeling. Instead of being the guy now who wanted to be like everyone else, maybe now I'm feeling like I'm on some sort of island in my own community. I want to know I'm not alone in my efforts, I want to feel like some of my other friends aren't afraid to open up and show their ugly sides like I make myself do. I want a friend of mine to talk more about divorce, another to discuss their insecurities. I want to know about your kids, your wives or husbands, the life experiences that fucked you up like all the ones I've been pushing through the keyboard here. I don't think most of y'all need therapy the way I need therapy, but maybe I'm just being a motherfucking selfish-ass bastard for tossing around this lamentation: Goddammit, tell me something else.

I don't know what to make of this phenomenon of sharing on a worldwide scale anymore, because so few people seem to be able to do it in a consistently engaging fashion. By no fucking means am I saying I lump myself in that group, but I am saying that because I know you, I read you, in many cases I've met you, I know we can do more together.

Raise the fucking bar. Seriously. Come on up, pop it up a notch or two, and watch the fun as we all try to clear it in a single jump. I want you to feel that feeling, that release, that understanding of pulling something ugly out of your past and putting it out there with only the grime of a dozen or more years worth of regret polluting the content. I know there are stories I haven't heard, and I'm starving to devour them.

As a matter of fact, if you have a story you want to tell anonymously? Send it to me. Create a hotmail or gmail or yahoo account, write it up, send it in anonymously. I'll put it up. I swear to god. I'd rather you feel good about telling these things yourself, but if it has to be this way, I'm happy to give you an outlet of embarrassing absurdity.

God knows I've been keeping that side of the bed warm for a long goddamn time.

I feel like I should maybe type a disclaimer before I toss this up, so here goes. I'm 77% crocked at this moment, so don't take anything I'm saying verbatim as gospel or as truth. I'm not fucking around here, noodling some thoughts out there willy-nilly, but I'm also not trying to insult anyone who sees themselves in this post. I have a great deal or respect for anyone who "puts themselves out there" in any capacity, even at the bare minimum precipice of emotional release. I just know most of you can really step it up if you want to, and by god I'll be grinning like a mental patient if that were to happen.

I'm going to go pour myself another drink. Forget we ever had this conversation.