slightly paranoid

Meshuggah - Combustion

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Love this song. A full fucking sprint the entire way through.

Tool - Jambi

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Just because I’ve been listening to a lot of Meshuggah doesn’t mean I don’t have time for The Best Band on Earth.

Meshuggah - Nebulous

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This whole album, Nothing, is nearly perfect. I’ve been listening to a lot of Meshuggah in preparation for their new album at the end of March.

Hey, that rhymes!

I took a drive today to two places that are sort of (but not actually closely) related: The first place was to my doctors office. You see, I’ve been having short bursts of very sharp pain in my groin area. Needless to say I was slightly alarmed, as this has been going on for over two months. My mom thought that it may be a hernia. A little known fact about me is that I was born with a hernia. So since I had a hernia operation when I was born it is possible for it to come back later in life.

Well fuck. My mom was right. The doctor said that I’m not pregnant, but I do have a hernia—again. My body is fucking retarded. Now it’s gotten to the point where going up too many steps hurts it. So I gotta get that shit taken care of. Then! The second place I went was to a medical supply store to buy a cane.

Yep, that’s right. I’m now walking around using a cane. Picture a younger, not as smart version of Dr. House, and you’ll get the picture. Yeah, I look pretty badass. I won’t use the cane all the time, but trust me, when I do use it, watch the fuck out. It’s super-sexy, too. The ladies are gonna be all over the young dude with the cane. This might be a totally new angle for me. Maybe I’ll keep the hernia, let it worsen, and use the cane full-time. It’s also useful for tripping people and poking other guys in the dick when they’re taking too long at the cashier.

Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, People magazine, April 1974:

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’

You may be the one of those people to know that it’s like to live through a disaster. Maybe you were the only survivor of a plane crash. Maybe in 1988, a plane full of graduates from the McCullenville University of Jester Studies goes down in a fiery ball of hilariousness in a Ohio corn field. The only reason you survived the crash was because your clowning had caused severe depression. Telling your family was out of the question—they essentially forced you into clown school. Clowning is in your family for generations. So you bite your tongue and battle through it.

Thank God for drugs. It was the only way you got through classes. Between the pills and alcohol you had a lot of absences. But who cares? You didn’t want to be there anyway. The weekly calls were hard. It took everything in you to sound happy for your parents. During every pause in the conversations you wanted to tell them how you really felt. You wanted to tell them that being happy all the time is making you very unhappy. You want to tell them that putting a false smile on your face tore your heart to shreds. You wanted to tell them so badly, but every time the words were on the tip of your tongue you heard the happiness in their voices. So you swallowed the overwhelming sadness and pushed forward.

Sometimes skipping classes was worse than suffering through them. You try to allow your mind to escape through music but the hatred of your surroundings make it hard to enjoy anything you once used to. Again, drugs were your answer. Seemed like a pretty great answer at the time, too. Why not escape for a little while? Everything else in life sucked anyway.

The process of becoming addicted to the pills seemed to happen so fast. You never thought of them as being addicting. Yeah you *wanted* them, but that’s because you were in pain, right? Crushing emotional pain. You read the stories of people who have their lives ruined by drugs and think “shit, that’ll never happen to me.” Yeah, you think you’re too smart for that. But it sneaks up on you.

A bag of a hundred pills used to last you over a month in the beginning. Before you realized what was happening to yourself, you were able to eat over two hundred pills with little effort in 3-weeks. But you still told yourself that you didn’t have a problem, “I can just stop.” Easier said than done.

You always believed in God. Or at least you thought you did. The idea of someone watching every step you made was a little creepy, but the comfort of a guiding presence was a nice feeling for a while. Drugs made the presence of God impossible to you after a while. Drugs made you question the rationality of a higher power. The cold reality of your bitter sadness consumed any other pleasant thought you had now.

Every weekend you still dreaded the family call. Forcing false happiness was so unbearable to the point of suicidal. The phone rings, you take a handful of pills, put on your happy face and say, “hi mom!” She and dad had no idea. You’d do everything to keep it that way. You thought you could keep the lie going forever.