The Gentle News

If you google “without my pain I am nothing” you get a lot of results. If you google “without my pain I am happy” you get only suggestions.

Some years ago, Trent Reznor said or wrote “without my pain I am nothing.” I found that humorous, and responded (to myself and whoever else was listening) with the other one.

My tenth grade English teacher, a large person, sat on my futon in the summer of 2000 and broke it. A few years prior to that, she lectured students adamantly on how certain she was that she would one day die at the hands of an avoidable condition she had no earthly right discussing with teenagers in a public school.

A few days ago she accidentally drove her SUV through the facade of a salon in my hometown. I never hated her, even when a lot of my good friends implied that they thought she was evil incarnate. I still don’t hate her, but I’m a little bit resentful of her sitting on my futon and telling me that one of my friends was on illegal drugs in tenth grade. She knew nothing about him, except that she did not like him. He might have been on drugs, but he probably didn’t take them as often as the doctors and parents told him he should.

The futon wasn’t even really mine, but she did break it.

I am on the back porch right now, shivering in the nonexistent, Texas spring cold. I am not in pain, and I know full well that it’s closer to my preferred temperature inside the house. Yet I sit here, trying to convey how happy I am. I hope some day to have better reasons to sit happily on my back porch at 2:40AM.

I am half way through the first season of House. I don’t know why the show is sometimes called House MD but usually just called House. I do know that I need to read a lot of Sherlock Holmes.

I went to a bar tonight. Last night. Whatever. I went because I knew friends would be there. I was surprised to find more friends than I expected there.

I was too chickenshit to try harder to get B to come with me when we reached that moment where she admitted that she did not actually want to go to the bar.

The only pain I really have to endure right now is that caused by the fissure(s) in my anus. I could start eating right and fix that in a couple of years. Or I could have surgery. Or I could allow a physician to inject botulinum toxin into my anus.

This is as honest as it gets, whatever it is. I don’t need to define “is.” Nobody does, and that’s the beauty of the verb.

The coolest thing about House, MD is that nobody gets him. But I do. You probably do, too, but the coolest thing is that nobody gets him but me.

Fiction, baby. This ain’t it, but I know I could make a lot of it.