"fox confessor brings the flood"
2006-10-10 8:46 p.m.

i stopped tolerating anger. from myself, from anybody. too scary to deal with. you can kind of transition from anger into disappointment without much effort. and its not that scary to be a drag all the time, but it is guilt inducing. being disappointed most of the time makes you feel guilty, too. which, at least for me, shames me into trying to be productive.

without even a sense of anger, let alone any ability to express it, fear has settled into mind. its not as acute as it used to be, but its still bad enough to weird people out. i've been out after dark twice this summer that i can recall. and this coming unlucky friday the thirteenth has me questioning whether i should even drive or cross streets. maybe i should lay perfectly still all day long and i will awake the next day in the same completely safe position. i wonder how my mind got this screwy. i take myself to be greedy when i realize that i don't give money to homeless people because they are penniless, rather, i do so because i don't want to risk the chance that they might hurt me. i don't know how to be a gun owner. i don't know how to check to see if a handgun is loaded, and i'm scared of going in my closet in case one accidentally shoots me in the chest. i am humiliated by my efforts to buy friendship when i'm broke. and even further embarrassed when i've chosen kind people to bestow these gifts upon, who must think its bizarre for me to be so broke and continue to shell out unnecessarily in their eyes. or not unnecessarily, that's an assumption. but what i do is not part of the late twenties friendship game, and i'm again too scared to learn new rules. it feels like i don't even have time to have friends. if i could just check people off as friends and archive them into a list which i'd never retrieve names from, i would feel more at ease.

i still can't swallow the world whole. i am helpless, and i am dumb.

and i'm a narcissistic asshole. ben is gone nearly every night, and sometimes i watch dateline and try not to think about my peculiar circumstances. i miss my dad and pity myself. i finally found a video of him. its a video of him at shooting practice, taking the gun from its holster and shooting different sequences as he is timed. no up close images of his face, just his full length body at a distance. and nothing heartfelt, of course. just rapid fire, talk of trying to hit vital organs, where to shoot at on the targets. in fact, i feel sorry for him because he starts instructing a friend on good methods of practice, and i can tell that the friend just wishes he would finish talking. the rest of the tape was recorded when the camera had accidentally been left on during an inspection of his septic tank. there are no pictures, but all the same, its the most fucked up stupid thing to have become the subject of the words that your father leaves to posterity.

i gained 10 lbs from my low. i still believe my father flew into a bird's heart. a pheasant or a crow, a sparrow. a mechanical bird that sits in a thin limbed tree. the tree grows outside a house where my parents lived before i was born. the bird still follows my mother. it is a crow or a sparrow, maybe. i don't think my parents were ever in love. pete seeger songs were never ever meant to make anybody this sad.

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