It occurs to me that I have never blogged from Soma before. So have. At. It.

Homeless and jobless. But not desperate. And not necessarily homeless. I have friends. Lots of them. Many of them have couches. This town doesn't want to see me go. Neither do I.

People in relationships have expressed interest in me. Flattering, but generally disgruntling. Still, it's nice to know that multiple people consider me highly datable. Or at least the potential greatest friend ever. It's always nice to know some think so highly of me.

And apparently many are thinking highly of me. Highly enough to put up with me living in their apartments. Sleeping on their couches. Sleeping on their floors. Using their showers. Eating their food. Drinking their booze. I have fucking fantastic friends.

In other news: I've gone vegetarian. Slaughterhouse got to me in a way that PETA could not. Gail Eisnitz pushed me over the edge because of her constant description of the slaughterhouse floor, which is the most filthy surface in existence. Workers forced to relieve themselves there because they aren't offered a bathroom break. Blood. Guts. Excrement. Pus. Ruptured abscesses. Rot. Animals in the process of being processed into unrecognizable meat morsels fall onto it occasionally in the process. Workers shackle them right back up. A fallen animal is a lost profit, despite the fact that a single slaughterhouse in America today makes about three times the amount of all meat produced nationally in 1939. America exports quite a lot of meat throughout the world. It is the world's slaughterhouse. America wears a flimsy butcher's apron and is covered in scars because proper safety precautions would require lost profit in the form of internal investment and drastically slower lines. Speed is money. Some die. Henry Ford would have wanted it this way, I'm sure.

Supply and demand.

I will rework myself. I will rebuild my castles.
Or construct what I have imagined.
The rows will be straight but interesting.
The patterns for business and pleasure.
The world will demand me when I am through sculpting the perceived self.
I will be the golden one.
To go from cusp to flow.
From class to class.
Moving upward always.
Stagnation is still a death.
And it is to be feared and avoided.
This is a natural part of personal evolution.

Friday the 13th, my 23rd birthday.

I've spent it wandering around in Bloomington. I feel that this was the best choice. Tonight I will wear a hockey mask and carry a fake machete with me to the bars. After last night, though, I have mixed feelings about drinking again any time soon. I had forgotten what it's like to drink a large amount, not realizing that I rarely drink these days. What would have been a "decent" amount for my body to handle last night turned out to be an atrocious idea. Also, I spent this morning debating about when to get up and explain to Taylor's roommates who I was and I why I was sleeping on their couch.

I quit my job yesterday after my shift. I decided I had had quite enough of all that. If I'm going to be abused by my manager, I'd better be making at least $5/hr over minimum wage.

This afternoon, I plan on rallying people to go see Scott Pilgrim vs. The World with me. Good decisions all over.

They built this house sometime in the late 1800s. We were never exactly sure. The alleyway was once a river. We witnessed it return to that state during a hard rain when I was a child. It smelled like sewage for the next few weeks.

I don’t go outside at night anymore. There are gang members and drug dealers that will stand in the middle of the street, even when my truck is coming towards them, daring me to hit them or stop so that they might assault me. You would think that with the condition of my truck they would realize that I’m not a rich person. Unfortunately, they don’t care. Their thoughts now cycle around the idea that there is no honor amongst thieves, even if the person they’re assaulting isn’t a thief. It’s assumed that we all are if we live here. There is a desperation that both binds us together and makes us afraid of each other. I can’t look at a man walking down the street in my neighborhood and not assume that he engages in wrongdoings. We’re imprisoned in this house.

I thought about joining the military, then realized that I’m not fit enough to do so and that they wouldn’t want me wasting their resources while I attempted to chisel myself out of the body I’d been in my whole life. Then I realized that I would be just another poor person crossing the seas and killing other poor people. The worst kind of corporately owned government pawn. We’re all pawns, but we don’t necessarily have to kill.

All I can do is sleep now. Every day feels like another day of warfare. Of fighting. I told Lauren I felt like I was waiting, but didn’t know when the waiting would stop. The war is with the calendar. The war is with the clock. As Thom Yorke crooned, “I’m not living, I’m just killing time.”