This is the End.

I began this blog in 2010, SEVEN YEARS AGO. That's like a million in blog years.

I started this blog seven years ago because I was drowning, hanging on by a thread. I needed something to grasp onto.  Anything.  It was this blog. For better or, let's be honest, worse.

Margaret Cho once answered, when asked why she'd been out of the spotlight the previous (10?) years, "I've been sulking." Christ, I loved this.  We're constantly being told - when having a bad day, for instance - to chipper up!  Things will get better!  Like that's the goal.  Why do I want to be chipper?  What's so good about chipper?  Every chipper person is annoying.  Every. one.

I hate the It Gets Better Project, because it will not get better for everyone. Sure, it'll get better for Dan Savage and his husband, for god's sake, these guys are ridiculously gorgeous.  The only time it's tough to be gorgeous is if you are the First Lady-elect, 2017 - and then only when you try to give public speeches.  Good looking people are doing fine, is all.  Sure, bad days.  Tough moments. They don't have to suffer the worst while someone is simultaneously chipping away at their existence.

No, I am not a good looking man, nor by my actions have I ever earned the love of another. While I do have a few acquaintances I remain without friends or close confidantes. I will die that way.  Hopefully soonish.  Not soon, I've a few more things to do, but soon enough. Reasonably soon.  And even if I keel over RIGHT NOW: OK, then.  Close enough.

What I did the last seven years, during the tenure of this blog, is I came to terms with it. All of it.  (Most of it.)  I've learned to live with reality and not my expectation borne of my privileges and  entitlements.  It turns out I was loaded with both of those, and still daily need to check myself when I start getting uppity about what's not fair!  Because it turns out nothing is fair.  There is no fair.  Life's not fair. Bad things happen to good people, good things happen to bad people. The sun goes up, the sun goes down, the rest just is.  Boo-fucking-hoo.

The rest we've invented, imposed, decided, to help us get our entirely unnecessary asses out of bed every morning.  PURPOSE!  Get up and go do that, then. Intrinsically I have no purpose.  I am a biological result.  My parents had sex one night, yaddayaddayadda, me. Animals fuck, babies are born.  We've turned it into the biggest production number ever.  Yoga, Instagram, Kardashians, Superbowl,  pour-over coffee.  I walk through a mall, any mall, and look at all the ugly crap we amass, and think: once we were cavemen; how did it end up being this?  (Oh, hey, that lamp is really nice.)

I have a customer, only a few years younger than I.  He sits here and drones ONANDON about his female problems.  His TWO female problems.  He's lying to both, he's playing them both, both should RUN FOR THEIR LIVES but he's a customer so I probably won't say that. What I did finally realize one day was, this guy is a smart guy and probably too smart for most and he has too much time and he's bored and he needs to fill his day and this is what we really do to fill our day this is the purpose we invent to get out of bed every day, all this minutiae BS that keeps us going for going's sake. None if it matters. Or is real.  It's the real we make to fill the days, pass the time, and finally make ourselves matter.

...I realized one night, a Tuesday night, after getting up for my second job at 4:30 a.m. to get the bus two hours to work, doing labor for eight, two hours home, walking a mile to the laundromat, two more hours...still having to shower and eat dinner.  I could not get Tuesdays done before 10 p.m. And I would walk home from the laundromat so many times, exhausted beyond comprehension, thinking: there is no response to this, it just is what it is no matter how I feel about it. While I was working the two jobs, I twice worked a span of 7 weeks with zero days off.  In 2016 I had maybe, mmm, half a dozen days off?

I am so grateful for it.  It taught me everything.  It taught me privilege, my own. It showed me the fallacy of what I thought I deserved.  It showed my how I'd grown up thinking life was meant to go a certain way. Or that I'd earned a certain pardon or that I was entitled to a better station in life. Or that I mattered. At least I got to go home, have a very much less bit of vodka, and exist in silence.  There are parents, single moms, every where doing this who have to go home and still cook dinner for their family.  I got off lucky.  And on nights I wanted maybe just a teensy bit more vodka because I work so hard, after all, I deserve it: I came to learn to say back to myself, Too bad, you big cry baby, you don't get to.

Listening to my horrible customer drone on, thinking - this is what privilege is, the indulgence of droning and wallowing the minutiae of our lives of our own making.  And making people who don't give a rat's ass, and never will, suffer it.

And that is what my blog was. It in real time. It in the flesh.

(Some of it was good and funny.)

OK, but bigger than this, here's what happened: It got better.  I know. I'm sorry.

The initial bit of this blog, the onset, I'd been struggling with an emotional breakdown, health, alcohol, fear, loss, upheaval.  It was real, they really happened.  I was in an environment that treated me poorly, where I both lived and worked, after too many years this way I was trapped - in it and my own dirty diaper about it.  And I was too poor to have options. Money - I don't know if it buys happiness, but it does buy you options, and that is A LOT towards happiness. Is all. Stuck between too many rocks and too many hard places, the second job saved me, freed me, allowed for options, and I could finally breathe.

Also, I had last year a weirdly successful art show and sold 25 paintings.  Mostly small buggers, a few large ones.  One week I got two checks from the gallery, a pay check, another paycheck from the other job, and a tax return.  Crazy week.

I applied to live at a new, low-income artists residence.  With the second job, the one thing I no longer did was make new art. (Too bad, you big cry baby, not every one gets to do what they love.)  Because it was subsidized housing, it was a lottery process, and I hit that lottery.  I moved into it. It is more than what I paid previously, (previously I got a discounted rent because I worked for the owners), but mush less than market value and also about four times the space as the previous place.  Like, a ridiculous amount of space.  It's embarrassing, really.  There was a smaller one I preferred, but I made too much money this year for it. Next year, when I make not enough money for it, I'll get kicked out, I think, but I got it a year and here's the perk: when you walk into the office, people say hello and they smile.  WOW!

The second job finished, I now get to live in the new palatial apartment with all the very nice people, and paint.  I'm good for a year, at least.  So: woe is me after that?  No.  So then I'll do something else. That's all. It turns out that's what you do when shit happens.  Something else. 

2016 was a crap year for a lot of people. It was a crap year for the world.  But 2016 was a very good year for me. 2016 was the year Little Bored Fauntleroy finally grew up. 

The End.

It's a second job. I am painting this guy's house, his and his wife's, where there no longer live but still visit three grown children, two of them girls, women, with long hair.  Along the base-boards the long hairs are gathered. They get stuck in my blue tape.

Stray long hairs freak me the fuck out the way spiders or snakes or clowns do others.  I pull them out of my tape with a shiver, uncontrollable, like heebie jeebies, and fling them away from me.  Stray long hairs give me the willies.

I was thinking today: just like women.

Christmas, I send out cards.  Whatever. 

I make my cards, usually.  This is this years card.  It's been photo-shopped, this one was blank, but on each of them I wrote on the cover, " Merry Christmas ______________."

Open it up and tucked inside is an air freshener in the shape of a pine-like tree.  Here I wrote, "Hope it doesn't stink!"

I thought the card clever and funny and stupid.  And of course the tree had to be black, because it's funnier than green or blue or orange.

The card was sent out to 10 people, the usual suspects, family and friends that include two ex-girlfriends.  Both of these I dated over 20 years ago, and they now have lives and families.  We are not in close contact, the cards at this point are mostly a habit of a formality.

The tree was such a horrible scent I was hoping they all went into the trash, but one person commented they hung it above their cat litter box. One said he hung his in his 1975 Chevy Impala.  (That was a joke, just like the card.)

And then there was this, a letter I got in the mail from one of the exes who re-contacted me a few years ago after having broke up with her long term boyfriend.  I was no longer interested in her, and came to not particularly care for her, and never called her.  But about two, maybe three times a year she would call me for reasons I never understood.  I understand now.

Dear Little Bored Fauntleroy,

'Merry Christmas, Mary Lou.  Hope it doesn't Stink.' ...I am aware of the fact that you are angry with me.  But literally, a black Xmas card, a black Xmas tree.  Wow.  You're mad.  It's that engagement, isn't it [I guess she's engaged with that guy she's been dating the last few years, GOOD!] ...or do you just send cards like this out to all your exes? A few relevant facts...You didn't know what to do with me when you had me.  Not once, but TWICE.  And I absolutely have to have a stable life with a partner who can step up to the plate.  [There was a second time?  When?] [I was in the running for being a partner? When?] 

..then she tells me how much she loves her fiance though he hasn't actually proposed and she's struggled in life and be happy for her.

The heebie-jeebies, the willies.  Just like women.

Earth and I are not getting along, relentlessly.

On Saturday I was on my bike and I got hit by a car. 
On Wednesday I was crossing the street and I got hit by a car, by a guy who'd stopped to let me cross the crosswalk, looked at me in the crosswalk, and then lurched forward into me and hit me. And then sat there smirking.  I walked away.
On Thursday I called to find out if I got that apartment I was waiting to get for over a month because there are no affordable apartments in this town and I've been looking for six months now and time is running out and she said no, I didn't get it, my credit is bad.  Except my credit is very good, perfect, actually, and she said maybe it's fraud and I said, why don't I bring my bank statements and other paperwork to show you, prove to you I am qualified to move into that apartment and she said no. 
I went to the bank to ask about that and the lady was busy but said she'd be right with me and ten minutes later she walked out and then so did I.
Instead I went to the store to get something and the kid wouldn't let ME try it, he wouldn't let me touch it, only him, only he could use it because he was The Expert and only he could use it.  It was a wallet. And so I walked out. 

And so I walked out.
And so I walked out.

And so I walked away.

I woke up today, this morning, finally.  Meaning I'd been awake through the night more than I'd been asleep.  Cumulative days of this really do it to a guy, and I am that guy on this day.

The new temporary apartment is on the side of the building that gets the morning sun and this is a painful way to ease into a day: hammering brightness. Squinting into it, hating, I woke up this morning, finally, thinking: I need to be honest enough to give up art.

All my life I have been fascinated with the ones who exert great energy and discipline into a wrong idea, and now I see that I am that one. These are our moments of truth, this, right now. I can think of no greater wrong than the one purported your entire life. That's a lot of years, and then what?  This illusion that was so necessary it lived this long.  You fed it, fed it to others, swore it.  Hid in it, flaunted it, behaved it.  Used it to evade, evade, evade the truth of it, that it wasn't ever real.

How did I ever let it get this far? This out of hand?

The final act of vacating my previous apartment was taking a circular saw to 5 paintings that I just didn't want to move. This is what it has come to, moving these things around, having to accommodate them, a weight around my neck.  They will never be seen, they will never sell, they take up space, they cost money to make, and they're not very good. Except the ones I like, and I DO like some, but I seem to be alone in that one, and since I am the only one seeing them, it's pointless to have them for myself.  Like if they were an over sized sofa that was a bitch to move and a bitch to accommodate I don't want the fucking sofa.  This is what painting has become.  My over sized sofa.  And I think it may be time to get rid of it.

It will be neither the first nor the last idea to outlive its usefulness. That it is mine is all that makes it sentimental. And that I should never have bought the stupid sofa to begin with.  THAT'S the folly, right?  Right.

THAT'S what I'm talking about, baby!

next.

I don't know if you need a prolific story to be a prolific writer.  I've neither.  But the one I have is on the move. 

I live in this building and I work in this building at a very small job that serves this broken introvert well.  It is not full time and it lets me paint. For it I get a free apartment and some money and I own nothing and live a very small life. It is mostly satisfying, it mostly fits, but sometimes I get restless and wonder why I'm living a lot like a senior citizen.  And maybe that's not good.  For reasons I haven't got.

I went to visit my father a couple of weeks ago.  He's still alive.  He is alive and depressed and living a lot like I live.  Remote, internally.  My brother's death broke him.  The next year or so he was angry at us - for good reason - why were the three losers still alive while the Shining Star was taken from him?  Good question, one I agree with, one that has no answer other than that's how it went.  Shining Stars die too soon, Dick Cheney lives forever.


Yes, it's random, all of it.  Well, like pi.  It's random, eternally, sprinkled with bouts of coincidental patterns.  Like, they're only patterns by the coincidence of their random neighbors.

I asked my dad, Do you believe in god?  He said he's never come up with a good answer on that one. He asked me if I believed in God.  I don't.  And there-in lies the rub, I realize.  Because my dad's wife does believe in god, and because she believes in god she believes in purpose, hope, plan, morality, intent, reward, faith, and finally, heaven.  Because I do not believe in god, I believe in none of that.  My parents had sex, I showed up, end of story.  It gets me nothing.  For it I deserve nothing, mean nothing, matter not at all. I have no entitlement and no rights.  I am here by accident and now I need to fill the space of that until I no longer am. What I do with that space is up to me as much as it is up to me to not fill that space. 

What has happened as I've gotten older is seeing how people are opting to fill the space.  It's with a lot of desperateness, and it is everywhere. I am so sensitive to it and the ugliness it procures I am frozen in my own life for fear of being them.  If I do nothing, I wont be them.

Last year the building sold and with it the small job that has kept my existence blissfully minimal for seven years now.  Meaning I still have the job, but for new people who are renovating the building and then making decisions.  Meaning it is only a matter of time before I am one of those decisions. 

I know this because I was told I was not a team player.  I was told this because one day some douchebag told me to bend over so he could fuck me up the ass and I said no thank you, sir. By not doing this, I was deemed not a team player.  As a matter of fact, I am very much a team player; I am very bad, to a fault, in not taking one up the ass by some little girl douchebag who uses the word TEAM to get what he wants, and then throws a tantrum about it, so that now I am going to be one of those decisions. 

These are the things we do to fill the space.  Power, importance, prestige, entitlement to feel a purpose that does not exist.  And lots and lots of Instagram-et-al.

Anyhoo...my free apartment is free no longer. It is not full price, but it is not free.  The building is being renovated from the top down.  They are at about the half way point. This week I am moving to the bottom floor.  This will buy me a couple more months while I continue to look for a second job so that I can afford to move out of here altogether.  This I've been doing for many months to no avail. I think if I left this job I would better fare, but I've made the decision to keep my current job as long as I can. There are customers here I never see, and over the years they have been very good to me.  I can't seem to simply quit and walk out on them while their best interests may be compromised; I need to be sure they are safely on the other side of the transition to be able to live with myself. 

I live a charmed life, and I know it.  It has many luxuries, none typical. Still, in my middle age, between many rocks and many hard places, what no longer exists are the illusions we wrap ourselves in to get to the next business day. The remains of the day are only realities, the sum of our choices, minus pomp and circumstance.  I am looking at the sum myself in the mirror wondering what is the man I am?  In the next few months I will find out, for better or worse.

No we can't all get along. Move on to Plan B.

Here we go again, and so far Jon Stewart is most correct:

"We have to peer into the abyss of the depraved violence that we do to each other and the nexus of a gaping racial wound that will not heal yet we pretend doesn’t exist.  I’m confident though, that by acknowledging it, by staring into that, and seeing it for what it is we still won’t do jackshit. Yeah, that’s us.”

To answer Rodney King's now famous 1992 plea,  "People, I just want to say, can't we all get along? Can't we all get along?":

No we can't all get along.  Move on to Plan B. 

We will never all get along.  We are animals and tribes, all.  Acquiring the evolution of reason or rationality does not erase appetites or instincts.  We are mindlessly connected to our mish-mash of genes and evolution like an iPhone6.  There will always and forever be mistrust and suspicion, prejudice and hate. These will be defined as racism, LGBT-phobia, sexism, and all the other terms that incorporate a single idea: who we are and will always be.  

Not you, of course, not me, of course.  But many and forever.  IT will always exist.  

So, beyond the kumbuya rhetoric and impossible dream of us all one day magically getting along, how will we opt to manage this reality? 

It's the empty rhetoric we engage in that keeps us from ever having to do anything at all. Me, right now.  This is us.  I've said my piece.  My job is done here.  I might have a cocktail later.   

PS. What reason knows.  

#thanksdave.

If I can be accused at all of sentimental idolatry, it is for David Letterman.   And like a big little pussy, I've been crying all week leading up to and including last night's finale.  Because:

I've watched Dave every night since I can remember.  He began intelligently goofy and fiercely witty.  Irreverent and sarcastic and funny.  There were things on his show you never before saw, like Brother Theodore, by whom I was mesmerized.   But Dave was story, an epic, it would turn out.  Our hero was   was flawed, as in human.  Over time, years, he'd succumbed to bitterness. There were entire years he was painfully unwatchable.  His heart surgery saved him some, but Harry saved him eternally (and maybe the intervention of antidepressants, but nonetheless). Dave, at the end of this arc, is resolved. There is no greater elixir of love than traveling with your hero through hell and back, especially when back is such loveliness. We so rarely get heroes at all, much less the arc of redemption.  Maybe the Iliad, or the Odyssey, I don't know, I never read these.

I've spent more hours with Dave in the last 30 years then with my own family. There were days, many, when the only time I laughed that day was while watching Dave.

Dave after 9/11.  Dave after surgery. Dave continuing to have on certain guests well past their prime in respectful homage to those who came before. Dave in conversation with the best and brightest, always engaging and well played, you'd wonder why this guy wasn't instead on PBS. Dave's famous on-air apology, showing everyone how it's done. His one-liner response to Rod Blagojevich's opening statement remains one of the quickest, right-on moments he's given us. Dave was the classiest guy on TV.   He knew his place.  That's why the final montage to the Foo Fighters had so many bygone guests, so clearly showing us: this era has passed, these people are gone, and this is the only guy who recorded this history so widely, so completely.  The show is archive, and Dave was a proficient curator.  No one could have done it better.

Thank Dave.