WEEK OF BANALITY

Starting last Monday (06.19.06), I have had a grin on my face for seemingly no reason. Actually, I had plenty of reasons.

I want all of you to know that I am in love again! I am happier than I have been in awhile. I know this may come as a shock to some of you, my friends, and I know that it hasn’t been very long since the last time I felt this way, but I can’t help it. I just feel I have to scream it from the rooftops. I feel like Tom Cruise, except not as fucking crazy.

Some of you may know who this new person in my life is. Some of you have heard me talking about them, seemingly out of the blue, as though I know them intimately (I do). Hell, some of you have even seen us together. Maybe you’ve seen me shyly, yet comfortably holding this person as though they were meant to be only with me. You may have seen me staring at this person as only a lover can stare, hanging on their every word while they look back up at me, letting me touch them ever so slightly and caress their skin.

Some of you also might be silently judging me for certain reasons. I know this. I am aware of some of your opinions about this person. Yes, this person has been with others. Yes, this person has been loved by others. I don’t care about this. You might say love has blinded me. What you all may see as a flaw, I see as beauty. This person makes me happy. This person gives me more pleasure than anyone else before has given me. Feel free to take that however you want it. It can apply to any aspect (emotional, spiritual, physical, etc.) of our relationship.

It had been a while since this person and I had been able to be together. I had forgotten how much he could pleasure me. I had forgotten how much I loved him. How much I have always loved him. When I open the cover of Incarnations, Clive Barker reminded me why I fell in love in the first place.

I have been reading other authors for a few weeks now and just received this one on hold at the library. Just reading the introduction to this book reminded me how good this man is at writing. He has a passion for the fantastic that I have not seen in works by other authors. He has a talent for making the gruesome fun, the innocent bloody and corrupt, the nightmarish tolerable and awesome, and the beautiful frightening. His characters have the horror of H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, the complexity and love of Wally Lamb or John Irving, and the richness of Jonathan Stroud or J.K. Rowling. He creates worlds that are filled with as many amazing creatures as the isles of Earthsea. There is as much magic as Narnia and as much imagination and depth as Middle Earth. I am thankful for finding him at this time in my life. He is a superb talent that I order you all to go read a book by. Any will do, but I recommend Books of Blood, the Abarat series (there are two so far), Imajica, Incarnations, The Great and Secret Show, and Weaveworld.

On the subject of authors, I finally got around to reading H.P. Lovecraft a few weeks ago. I have been a horror fan for years, and just now got a book of his short stories. I can truly see where some of my favorites get their inspiration. Lovecraft and Barker are two reasons that this last week (06.19.06 – 06.22.05, Friday counts as weekend) was good.

On Monday and Tuesday, I rediscovered an old favorite band of mine. Anyone who owns Marilyn Manson's Mechanical Animals, Holy Wood, and/or Golden Age of Grotesque, I suggest getting them back out and giving them a listen. Patrick and I were talking about them at work and I had to go to my car and bring in my CDs. I rocked out almost all day at work and on the way home. I also came to fall in love with Pearl Jam's work after Vitalogy. I don't know why, but I got a swell of contentment and peace while listening to "Present Tense" and "Thin Air" while reading with my lover, Clive Barker.

Also on Tuesday, my sister, Emma came into my room and asked if I could make her a CD with a few songs that I had on iTunes. I was happy to oblige (I get my writable CDs for free anyway) so I let her sit down and pick out some songs. She picked about seven songs and just told me to fill the rest of the CD with whatever. I was very happy to hear, the next evening, that she really liked the Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Dissociatives, and Gnarls Barkley tracks I had chosen for her. It made me happy to know that I spread a little bit of positive energy around. Thursday, I was grinning all day because of this.

Every Thursday morning, I stop at the 7-11 on Lackland Pkwy. to pick up a copy of the Riverfront Times (St. Louis's premeire free-press newspaper) for Patrick, Alonso, Chris, and myself. I like to catch a few people in a ripple of positive energy. It never disappoints. I mean, it's free. I can't afford not to get it. The left-wing comics and Red Meat were funny, as usual. The new Adam Sandler movie, Click, actually got a good review (it is shocking for the RFT to give a mainstream movie a good review). And of course Dan Savage, the flaming sex columnist never fails to inform and entertain. Plus the Unreal news section was quite funny. It involved a series of fake entries in a twenty-five year old Abe Lincoln's stoner diary (at one point, he refers to his new stovepipe hat as "fucking awesome"). All this and ads galore for Pridefest (which I've always wanted to go to, gay or not) made me grin as well. The RFT always catches me up in a little ripple of its own every week.

A few weeks ago, I bought a Nintendo DS Lite with the game Brain Age. This game stimulates your brain with simple math, reading, and memory and word games. It doesn't actually make you smarter right away, but it gets you mind working a little a day. Every day, it measures your "brain age" and tells you how healthy your thinking skills are. The lower your brain age, the better. The best is 20 years. Last week, I had an average of about 35 years. Not too shabby. I've since gone down to 22. Mellifluous.

Last but certainly not least, I was grinning to myself all week because of some strange marks on my person. It seems I got some "battle wounds", if you will, from an overzealous someone that I hung out with last Saturday night and Sunday morning. More on that later.

All these things may seem stupid and a bit arbitrary, trite, jejune, atomic, trivial, or banal, but these are the little things that, throughout the weeks, give me pleasure. Call me a dork, but that's what I am, I guess.