Here’s a day of my life in what I like to call “The Dungeon of Despair” aka The Basement aka my current home. Hopefully not for much longer. I love the basement and have gotten quite used to it after about 15 months, but I’m hoping to get an apartment soon with a friend from work. He’ll get married in about ten months, but that gives us time for a nine-month lease. We’re gonna go looking later today. Hopefully it’ll be less lonely living with a friend and perhaps being able to play videogames together or whatever.

Oh, and a perfect song to go along with this is “Down Once More” from the Phantom of the Opera movie soundtrack:

Down once more to the dungeon of my black despair! Down we plunge to the prison of my mind! Down that path into darkness deep as hell!

Enjoy the pictures, and be glad I’m not a phantom!

Wake and sleep and wake and sleep…

Categories: Life

Artist: underOATH
Song: Some Will Seek Forgiveness, Others Escape
(Source)

Reason for Posting: This song’s got decent lyrics, but the real reason I’m posting it is I’ve got a new way for you to “Show More” of a long post using a plugin that adds a little bit of AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) code to the site. So click the link that says “Show More” and you’ll see what I mean. If you want to make the rest of the post go away, click the “Collapse This Post” link. Enjoy.

Lyrics:
I heard a voice through the discord
A deluge of passersby
I saw one gaze frozen in time
Watching me passing by

And I swear I’ll know your face in the crowd
And I’ll hear your voice so loud
When you’re whispering

Hey unfaithful I will teach you
To be stronger, to be stronger
Hey ungraceful I will teach you
To forgive one another.

Categories: Lyrics, Music

I write with words, but I hope to write something more than words with a short story I’ve been working on lately. I’d say more about it, but I don’t want to give anything away. I’ve got about four short chapters right now, and I’ve been making decent progress. I’m looking for feedback on what I’ve got so far; if you’re interested, please send me an email or leave a comment. If you know my address, just write that one; otherwise, I’ve got one posted in the sidebar.

Thanks!

Categories: Life

I know a couple things about fashion. Earth tones go together with other earth tones. Vertical lines can make you look taller. Those are the two things.

I bought some earth-toned clothes today. I bought a nice, earthy looking jacket, some tan corduroys, and a grayish pair of pants. (I don’t know the names of any colors other than the the main ones — black, blue, beige.) Throw in the purchase of some other miscellaneus *cough* items *cough* and a stuffed Woodstock (y’know, from Peanuts… for my collection — don’t tell anyone!), and I call it a worthwhile sale.

Shopping can be traumatic though. I tried on some pants and I’ll be darned if the fashion industry didn’t make size 34s a lot smaller this year than a couple years back. Those bastards! Fortunately, I’ve got no self esteem to destroy. I fed it to the vultures of academia years ago. (Oh, stop!)

I’ll show them though. This’ll be the last time I shop till the next sale. Bring it on, clothesmongers, bring it on!

Categories: Life

It’s hard having a weekend where I spend most of my nights trying to make time go away in chunks of eight to ten hours spent alone in the basement. At times, I’ll emerge. Tuesday nights are going to become beer/poker/pool night at a local bar. It’s got cheap drinks and appetizers between 4 and 8pm, and at 7pm they have a free game of seven-card stud poker w/ $50 for the winner. I’ve gone there with my friend Benjamin the last couple weeks and had a fun time.

I did pretty well on the poker Tuesday night finishing sixth out of about twenty in one game and forth out of about twelve people in the second game. When you consider I’d never played seven-card stud before (but plenty of Texas Hold ‘Em, of course), this isn’t very bad. Apparently, it’s enough to qualify me for an invitational in December. So I need to figure out more of the strategy for this variety of the game, but I’ve got a decent start now.

I had a few days this past week where every day I heard about somebody dying. The people weren’t people I knew myself, but I had some sort of remote connection to. For example, a band-member’s girlfriend was kidnapped and murdered, electricity fried a pastor Sunday’s preacher knew, and a member of another band died in a van accident in Wyoming. This stuff sucks. I’m fighting to keep the hope I talked about a few posts back, but it’s hard.

In the darkness of the night, it’s harder. I enjoy getting back to work so I have something to be doing again besides moping around and watching episodes of Scrubs for the second or third time (though I still laugh heartily). I counted the other day and realized I’ve been watching every episode of about eleven different TV shows this season. It’s ridiculous — I’ve never watched so much TV in my life.

It’s all a vain attempt to ignore the gnawing of the tragedy of lives played out before me in this cruel place called Earth. Oh, there’s humor, there’s wit, and there’s moments of grandest love and heroism, but most days all I see is death and defeat.

Everyone looks for a hero to save them. However, finding the hero provides no escape from the realities of the day-to-day. I’ll keep looking to my Hero for guidance, for advice, and for ideas of how to get through this grandiose tragedy, but I must take the steps and act out this play before I can exit the stage.

Let us act this out together, sparing no attempt at jocularity, finding no excuse to shed our hearts, and making every attempt we ever can to pardon the people who fall apart before our eyes. None of us can put anyone back together again.

None of us. We can’t put ourselves together again.

Who can?

Categories: Life