So then I...
...said to come see me at http://suburbfabulous.livejournal.com .
I don't what else to say.
Goodnight, for the time being. I love you, both of you, all of you.

All the sky's alight.
Before the storms come, let us give thanks for this briefest of sunny days. I wonder what all of it means, and when I'll feel good again. I'm trying not to get discouraged, but it's not easy. I don't have any religion, drugs, or obsessions to hide behind. This is me, under these conditions and trying to find a way back up...and I will do it. I have to; too many people are relying on me, too much rides on my beating this malaise, this great darkness, and burning my way back into brighter tidings.
I know I'm a whiner. I know it could be worse. I also know that a great deal of this is all my fault, and that's a lot to live with. I wouldn't wish my conscience (and I most assuredly DO have one!) on anyone, right now. I can't even remember where all of this started, but I'm pretty certain it goes a long way back.
Maybe I shouldn't have bought into others' expectations, but it seemed a better path at the time...and frankly, it still does. Would you rather live with the notion of being monstrous, misunderstood, and prone to stupid, stupid mistakes, or would you rather believe that it is your great gift to always find a way to make things work, make people like you despite your deformities and strange ways, and you can do whatever you set your mind to?
In between, there is reason. I know there are odder balls than me; I know there are taller, fatter, and less attractive people; I know that other people make bigger mistakes, or face far greater challenges...but that awareness does not change the fact that I have to fix my own life, my own heart, mind, soul, and body, and I have to do it myself. Nobody is going to speak up for me; nobody is going to hold my hand; nobody is going to validate my existence or, in the absence of such validation, blow sunshine up my ass.
It's down to me.
Solo.
And I have no idea what to do.
Dammit. This is one of those times when even the wrong move is a move, and even a mistake can bring a learning opportunity. The sad, sick fact is that I am scared of letting people down again. Yes, that includes myself; one of the first casualties of a compromised conscience is altruism. I'll do everything I can for everybody I can, but I think I might have to fix myself first...at least, that's the case if I want to do more than offer lip service to those in need. I've done that for long enough, I know.
Now is a time for heroes.
If you see one, tell them to call me. Please.

Cancel The Search Party.
I can't seem to lay hands on a copy of Word/Office/Excel (or The Incredibles, for that matter!), so it looks like I'll have to stash chunks of my awe-inspiring novella right here.
Warning: I swear a lot.
Other Warning: I don't want you reading Word One if you won't comment. Be prepared to justify anything you say (for it can/will be held against you), but stay stiff and we'll be cozy.
Another Warning: I really do swear a lot. I try to avoid that online, but sometimes the MF is all I can type.
Last Warning: Even tin-foil underwear will not save you from the Guthrie radiation.
This shit is for Red, the last bitch on my literary pirate ship. This shit is for the League, my homies from then, now, and forever. Names change, but the mission is still the same. Outdo the other guy, quip mightily, and resist.
I'll start posting stuff in the next 72 hours, as time permits.

An Even Bigger Butterfly, Part 11 and then some.
Adolf's car was a brutalized mess just forward of the driver's side door, but none of the Unseemly Trinity were injured. This doesn't explain a blessed thing, I realize, and so it's time to tell you Something Important.
People have passed through my life, will pass through my life, and maybe some of you are transients now. Some of you will come in and leave more often than I'd like; some will stay for no good reason, or leave for the same.
When Matt and I were running our overweight white heinies off, we weren't doing it for Adolf, Muggs, or the Gook. I wish we were. That would be the caring thing to say, the nice thing to say. The truth is that we were running for someone who slip by us one time too often.
We were running for a kid named Joe Barbiero.
Matt wasn't always the cuddly drummer boy he is today (ever see Jason Patric, the actor from Lost Boys, Rush, and Geromino, with a beard? That's Matt.) He was a clean-faced kid from The Hill when I met him. He'd been hanging out one day, and had made the acquaintance of a slick little hipster from Fair Haven (this being Barbiero...at Notre Dame, you get an insulting nickname, a self-enforced title, or you lose your first name for four years.) In Matt's sophomore year (my junior one), Joe introduced us. We hit it off immediately, two incredibly manly music geeks with good teeth and questionable judgment.
Joe was trouble, and he was one of the best friends I ever had (namely, because of his troublesome nature.)
I first met him during my first freshman year (I had two, because I was so good at it). He tagged along back to the house for lunch, along with two other misfits. After a lengthy discussion of how tough he was, we decided to wrestle.
I learned a lot that day; namely, never let a Fair Haven kid keep his keys, or he'll smash them into your genitals, several times, with great force and alacrity (I have two older sisters; it wasn't debilitating until later in the evening.)
Given this bizarre melee, we decided that we should be friends. He was obviously a great fighter (ok, he was a cheap-shot artist...but an artist, nonetheless!) and I was clearly a great strategist (I let him wear himself out abusing my family jewels, then fell on him at top speed)
We shared many a lighter moment, and many a lighter for many a moment, over the next three years.
He was always calling me to join him on some stilted double-date, often suggesting that I might get lucky. (Given that I was almost always due to endure the recycled affections of a girl that Joe had dumped, I don't think luck is a word I'd use.) Sometimes I went...and there'd be no girls at all, for either of us. I learned a lot of ways home from Joe's house, and I came to realize that, if he was assuring me of a ride home from one of our hangs, I'd better bring bus fare.
On September 24, 1988, he called me and asked if I wanted to tag along on a mass expedition. Several people were piling in a car, and he assured me that there would be at least one unattached girl. I demurred yet again, citing a need to actually do homework (for a change), but, in all honesty, I was really tired of being a fifth wheel. I knew some of the girls involved, and frankly, I didn't see a chance with the one I liked...nor did I trust the girl who was driving. She was Joe's girlfriend, a girl with a history of family issues and mental instability. She'd just gotten her license, so her father had either lent her a new car or bought her one. I never really asked about that part.
They'd just left her house on Hartford Turnpike in North Haven when she decided that they were better off driving down a two-lane state road at almost 100 miles per hour.
Then she turned around to talk, according to all accounts. Turned around. At 100 per.
Joe grabbed the wheel, or tried to. He wasn't wearing a seltbelt.
The car swerved, hit a low retaining wall, and bounced. Joe was already through the windshield when the car flipped twice.
It took a few hours for the chest trauma to finish him.
That's what Matt and I saw, not a carful of friends broadsided at just-past-walking speed.
Adolf, Gook, and Muggs were fine. In retrospect, it was obvious that Matt and I were not (in comparison).
You'd think that this, with all its delays and stammering attempts (on my part) to write it, is close to the end.
No. The car accident was the biggest event of that evening, but this is not just about that evening.
A stone has been cast, and it is still in mid-air. The ripples are yet to come.

An Even Bigger Butterfly, Part 10.
Drummer Matt is maybe 6 feet tall. He weighed 170 pounds, tops, at the time of the accident. He spent at least an hour a day behind the kit, which keeps one limber, strong, and pretty happy (if Matt is any indication, anyway.)
I was 6'7", 340 pounds, and I spent about an hour a day working my forearm muscles (playing bass).
It is 73 feet from my front porch to the accident scene, and Matt was never within three feet until I stopped running.
Oddly, nobody got hurt except Matt and I. His legs were spent, and my chest was on fire.
Go figure.

An Even Bigger Butterfly, Part 9.
Sorry it's been so long, but the real world was busy dragging me into new stories; wait a few years, and maybe there'll be happy endings to share. Now is the middle time, where I struggle to find out if I'm at the denouement of a past life, the start of a new one, or just a long stay in the middle. If you were patient, thanks. If you weren't, I don't blame you.

After a solid hour and a half of E minor and drums, accompanied only by the sound of a swooning throng (these were our friends...they swooned a lot, some of them professionally), it was decided that we should all go back upstairs and drink heavily. I abstained, since I had a house party to run. (When the party was at my house, I saved my drinking until it was only Jono and I, and cleanup was over; many a melancholy moonbeam has lit our way from the porch to the morning...as with so many others, I can't imagine why he still puts up with my maudlin nonsense.)

Jacques was buzzing like Wall Street at an IPO, and it soon became apparent that he had quite a bit of company. With some folks, it's hard to tell; Teri was still bubbly when sober, for example, and Wendy was still utterly and completely bugheaded, so I tried not to offer her anything that might make matters worse. I chose this moment to start really laying groundwork with Terri, trying (somewhat) desperately to subtly chat her away from her friends, one of whom had apparently spent an afternoon with some Manic Panic hair dye...the other should have spent forty times that long on a couch in a brownstone. Together, they were like the postmodern Wonder Twins. I theorized to Jacques that if they swatted their pale, angry hands together, they'd take on the form of angry animals...but really COOL really angry animals. Jacques laughed, but it might have been the expensive beer talking (Jacques brought his own, many times...I never took it personally, for some reason; maybe I was just happy to have somebody nearly my size in attendance, so I'd look like less of a circus freak.)

The evening wore on, and some of the small fry (not a misnomer or insult, really; they were all younger and less prone to binge drinking than the dozen or so professionals lurking in the kitchen/living room/front porch) decided to leave. Adolf, Gook, and Muggs left (they were longtime saddlemates, and had arrived together, too), so Matt and I walked them out, watched them get into Adolf's car, and waved from the front sidewalk (in West Haven, only the Italians had hedges that year; most of the semi-Irish had hewn them down so we'd have a clearer view of the police. The West Haven Irish, at least in my old neighborhood, have long had a corner on the noise-complaint market, and we'll part with it only when you run out of cops.)
When they reached the corner of Ocean Avenue and Morris Street, the same corner that had so successfully eluded Dio Phil, time hiccuped; there was one long pause, one quick burst in the middle, and then there was an ache in my abdomen.

I used to wonder what God's piano sounded like when you hit that lowest E. The resonant gong would probably stop time, steam the blood from your veins, and drain every ounce of soul out of you. Assuming this wasn't the last thing you heard, the return of these natural essences would be like rebirth...but that's not what happened. That's not what I heard, actually, although for nearly a full second I was certain it was. What I heard was Adolf's car being slammed into at a reasonable speed by an oncoming motorist.

An Even Bigger Butterfly, Part 8.
Sometimes we do stupid things to impress people. This includes climbing Savin Rock while steaming drunk, throwing a sleeper sofa to emphasize our displeasure with the leadership of the Furniture Department, and driving eighty billion miles from civilization into the heart of West Nowhere.
Or we invite Drummer Matt over to jam. That does just as much damage, but it let me stay home.
We decided to start with Working Man by Rush, since it doesn't require much guitar anyway...and we had, well, none. I plugged in my twelve-pound warhammer of a bass into my 300-watt combo, and away we went, he on his plumbing experiment and me on my loud black metal ensemble.
The air turns solid when we do things like this; the molecules get so agitated that their vibrations can be felt hundreds of feet away...I'd swear you could taste the air around us, probably the same ash-nylon-voltage taste that I got when I played somewhere with bad grounding. About fifteen minutes into this orgy of minor chords and overdriven low end, Jacques stuck his head around the corner and mouthed the words "cops at the door."
I have always been a responsible citizen, so I went upstairs and spent some quality time with the Bringers of Law. It seems my loving neighbor, Mr. Rudnicki, had summoned the gendarmerie yet again. It was nowhere near his first time, and it would not be his last.
Fortunately, the police were reasonable men (as well as being musicians themselves.) After two more such complaints, they stopped responding.

An Even Bigger Butterfly, Part 8.
Sometimes we do stupid things to impress people. This includes climbing Savin Rock while steaming drunk, throwing a sleeper sofa to emphasize our displeasure with the leadership of the Furniture Department, and driving eighty billion miles from civilization into the heart of West Nowhere.
Or we invite Drummer Matt over to jam. That does just as much damage, but it let me stay home.
We decided to start with Working Man by Rush, since it doesn't require much guitar anyway...and we had, well, none. I plugged in my twelve-pound warhammer of a bass into my 300-watt combo, and away we went, he on his plumbing experiment and me on my loud black metal ensemble.
The air turns solid when we do things like this; the molecules get so agitated that their vibrations can be felt hundreds of feet away...I'd swear you could taste the air around us, probably the same ash-nylon-voltage taste that I got when I played somewhere with bad grounding. About fifteen minutes into this orgy of minor chords and overdriven low end, Jacques stuck his head around the corner and mouthed the words "cops at the door."
I have always been a responsible citizen, so I went upstairs and spent some quality time with the Bringers of Law. It seems my loving neighbor, Mr. Rudnicki, had summoned the gendarmerie yet again. It was nowhere near his first time, and it would not be his last.
Fortunately, the police were reasonable men (as well as being musicians themselves.) After two more such complaints, they stopped responding.