Okay, temporally speaking, I’m typing this out in Word like a little bitch since my parent’s spread in the Central Massachusetts hinterland is bereft of internets thanks to a bricked router and possibly other issues due to their alleged lack of tech savvy.
As I POST this entry, it's currently 24 hours later, I've vacated Central Massachusetts without much incident and am currently editing/posting/adding embarrassing pictures to this entry in a nice spread in New York just north of what these folk refer to as "The City."
It’s been roughly eight years since I last set foot in these here parts, and before that, probably another five more, and so on and so forth. This place was never home, and I think from a young age I resented being raised in what I sometimes still claim to this day to be the Masshole of the world.
Again, I’m probably not being entirely accurate, considering that THIS house is not the one I grew up in, that being an ugly sea foam green abomination exemplary of shoddy 70’s tract-house workmanship. THAT house was never home. THAT house was a way-station, a detention center of sorts where I was forced to do time until dumb luck and a college acceptance on the other side of the country paid for my escape. THAT house is where all the lousy memories reside, all the angry native ghosts itching for some idiot to build residential housing on top of their restless remains just so they can pull some unsuspecting child into a T.V. set.
This new house of theirs, purchased after the last of us children made way for greener pastures and matriculation elsewhere, is a museum piece, where bits and pieces are cobbled together in some wildly inaccurate reconstruction of days past and long since dead.
So it’s no surprise, after a fashion, that THIS place has no visceral resonance with me—quite the opposite, in fact. It’s here that I realize that the past is truly dead, with only the survivors left to commemorate and immortalize some latter-generation iteration of the things and people that have influenced us in equal parts significant and ineffectual ways.
Old photographs and yearbooks, mementos of long-forgotten things of dubious importance, keepsakes poorly stored and miraculously untouched by the callous attentions of indifferent moving companies, all now strangely fascinating once stripped of their old meanings.
I’m cringing at adolescent artwork, douche-y pieces of derivative crap emulating other derivative crap from the age of Grimdark and Edgy sensibilities that folks like Moore and Miller and Morrison and Millar now laugh at themselves for in their wisdom and old age.
And now I’m gazing at a yearbook picture of a girl that never existed, except possibly as a set of flawed and fractured stories spun to the amusement of drinking buddies long since departed, the historical female in question replaced over the years with increasingly addled remembrances of the emotions that may or may not have been involved, edited in whatever manner to make for a better yarn. I don’t know you now, and I’m increasingly of the opinion that I never did. Or maybe I let the fiction take over and lost the truth in the process.
An acoustic guitar squirreled away in a closet of a room that would have been my brother’s had he been around for the move to the new digs, the location of said guitar having been a point of contention for the last decade and a half—appropriated by my brother during his college years, then shipped off to wherever school, work, life, and love took him, only to somehow no longer be in his possession somewhere along the journey, in the nebulous years between his then-live-in unceremoniously dumping his ass to him proposing to the girl who’s currently his wife and the mother of his child.
Like any other museum piece, it’s wound up here with no ontological inertia or rhyme or reason.
There’s some interesting history in that guitar, if by “interesting” you mean “emo bullshit moping crap because you were disproportionately devastated when a tangential relationship ended abruptly and not in your favor, so you pounded out a bunch of weepy crap and angry punker music on said guitar until your fingers bled and your voice went ragged, which might’ve only been marginally more pathetic than your alternate plan, which was to get plastered on shit-tier tequila and write “cunt” on her front lawn with weed killer.”
“--And then proceeded to use the douchewad guitar guy routine to get laid by every doe-eyed college freshman with a weakness for “musicians” who accrued a collection of musical numbers sure to get a heterosexual female’s nether regions moist in some dumbfuck sensibility effort to get back at the original girl, who, in all likelihood, couldn’t be bothered to give a shit once you were off her radar.”
But it’s the pictures, and the LACK of pictures, that tells the real story—or rather, the story that isn’t the real story-- pictures of things and people I barely remember, as if some sort of alternate universe somehow intruded upon our own, stealing away all the things I once accepted as immutable fact in my life and history, and replacing it with an odd collection of pictures of me as a child vacationing in places I don’t remember ever having visited.
This is what is left of my life, if you would believe the markers of this Museum, a series of events I don’t recall and everyone else accepts as fact. Maybe we just remember things differently, and I spent so long believing them to be one way for the sake of a good story, while the ones I’ve looked back on in anger responded with bewilderment and confusion as they remember a much happier version of what transpired.
And even this is probably nothing more than late-night insomniac mind-wank.
There probably was a point to all of this, but it’s freaking late and I’ve spent the last three weeks in transit.
Yeah, I guess the point was this: Having come back to the place I spent the majority of my first two decades didn’t quite elicit the torrent of snark and hatred and calls for firebombing a neat little swath across Central Massachusetts that I thought I would.
I STILL didn’t enjoy my time here, and have no regrets about pulling out when I did, but seeing as how even the echoes of whatever it was that kept me in the cycle of anger and resentment for a less than adequate run in these here parts fall dead and flat, it really doesn’t seem as important as it once did. Perhaps it never was.
Maybe this is the point where the turnabout from “graveyard desecration” to “archaeology” happens. Because this is definitely more of the latter than taking a satisfying dump on the headstone of your deceased enemies before engaging in sexual congress with their widows on top of the freshly packed earth.
Maybe that’ will change in the morning light, if the Massholes of the present are anything like I remember.
In any case, enjoy a bunch of shit artwork from the late 80’s.
I’ll try and make up for it in the next few days.
Shit derivative adolescent crap is shit.
HURR HURR TURTLEZ DERP. Goddamn, I suck.
WHAT IS THIS I DON'T EVEN
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