*

They say heartbreak's good for writing music but I think that spite and anger's too mixed into everything to actually do much good. Nothing I do seems good enough. Nobody else’s stuff does either, to be fair. It all sounds like lifeless dull trash to me. Not just the guys. I mean just about EVERYTHING I've been listening to or hearing on the radio or out and about. It disgusts me. It's like the times where food tastes like sawdust to me (so... also now). This is worse, though. I'm comfortable not eating. Music's my LIFE. I'm clinging onto any old thing I can find that still sounds as beautiful as I'd expect it to, but I'm also faintly terrified of the day I put on, say, The Kick Inside or The Dreaming and Kate's voice sounds like the taste of dust[63].

Or I feel every single bit of exhaustion from having to peddle our own form of popshit for all these years, all at once. Or all I can think about is a cynical wondering of what kinds of backroom and backstage horrors went on in the background while some whiny, tinny voice sings his or her bubblegum ooh baby's over stabby keys and gated snare and reverb. I'll wonder if that whiny voice had to stick a hand down Don's pants to get that radio single. I'll wonder if that whiny voice forced a girl to stick a hand down his pants later to make up for it. I'll hear that one girl from that one party screaming in my face sobbing; see all the fifteen year old girls dressed and lined up thinking they're so grown when all the guys want them for is how un-grown they are. Spoils. Collateral. All so that one whiny fucking voice and his ooh baby's can make some guys in suits some extra cash. Kill yourselves before I find you.

–What we have written already has SOME good to it, even though it's not much yet. I can tell that, from an objective standpoint at least (as objective as you can be with music). It's been hard writing things specifically for the band anymore; I'd been so excited to continue expanding my horizons on my own/with others, to continue to make pop conform to what I need it to be and get better and better at doing so, but obviously Walter had other plans. The bass lines we've thought up are SO fun, though, and Rory can barely make it through them because he's blowing thru even more coke than Nate does. What the hell am I going to do with him. Well – I have SOME ideas. I just don't want to necessarily act on them. At least not yet.

*

Things outside of business are just as much a hell as they've been for the past year and a half. Mom's dying. Cryssie's dying. Tommy's dying. Paul's dying. Mike's dying. Leo's dying. Dante's dying. Not all of these are close to me, but it doesn't matter anymore. Whatever free time I have left is spent caring for at least one of those people. Nathan and the rest know it now and they're trying to be all sympathetic about it when I hadn't heard them utter a fucking word about anything to do with AIDS until I had to out myself to them. And I fucking told them that, too-- that they hadn't cared before, so why start now? Because it's ~me~? No one else deserved sympathy before then? The dying didn't have a name or a face so they were out of sight, out of mind? Cringing, cowering, stupid blubbering explanations. I didn't give them any time or closure. They can sit there with their explanations and guilt and deal with it.

I feel like such an automaton generally, a thing fueled by ugliness alone, and I'm worried about how that's affected my bedside manner. I do feel more human with them. I can find it in me to smile, somehow, if any of them give me reason to, and it feels almost like a real smile, not like a baring of fangs. Tommy did tell me recently that I looked lost, and I admitted to him that I was. He wanted to make me feel better by reminiscing about the good days, about La Rosa at its full beauty, but I couldn't take it. Thinking about past good things doesn't make me feel better anymore. It just reminds me of how terrible things are now. And regardless, it was my job to make him feel better anyway. He was the one about to be put in fucking hospice. It was just three years ago I introduced Ben to him. I never thought about how lifelike he looked then, had no reason to, until I had to see him like this. Shriveled to nothing, and so fast, always faster than you’d think.

Cryssie asked me to sing for her and I did oblige that, because it was Cryssie. So I sung her the songs I've been singing to Mom, the ones she used to sing to me, the ones I would sing Ben to help him drift off to sleep in my arms. It's been hard, generally, to lose myself in song these days. Like god's started to shut it off from me because I stopped respecting him, but he treated us like shit first, and you get the respect you show and deserve, which is what I keep telling him. But anyway. I can find it again for those songs, and especially for Harf. For Mom, for Cryssie. And she could tell, too; she smiled, took my hand, told me it was like the angels coming to take her home. "I'm glad you came back to us, honey.", she said, "I'm glad you learned what's important."

And I'm glad she said that last thing, because I was so close to collapsing into tears and that injected a little surge of anger into my heart. I told her she might've given up on me once but I'd never given up on any of them. I was kept from them sometimes, but that was different. She just let out a tired little laugh. Closed her eyes. I couldn't let the anger stay. I knew she wouldn't understand. She didn't know Walter and Walter will never know her and if I can still thank any sort of god for anything it's that. If I even heard her name leave his mouth I think I'd end up in prison for life.

Mom might be closer to death than any of the rest of them. It's been insane going from work to this every fucking day. But she wanted it this way, she said so herself when she was still lucid, so I hope whatever is left of her is happy for me. Walter said once that I didn't know what to do with myself when I was alone and that's why I got into trouble, and it seems Mom agrees with him. Which makes me think he was right. Which I fucking hate. I got a little surge of anger that one time with Cryssie but I get them constantly about Mom over various things, sometimes for seemingly no reason, and it makes me feel like a monster. She's the one literally suffering and dying and I'M angry-- not all the time, but enough to bother me. What the fuck is my problem. I wish, for once, that my fucking brain would work like a normal human being's. But I'm nearly thirty-six and it hasn't happened yet.

*

There're finally tests for AIDS. After nearly half a fucking decade. Fuck Ronald Reagan. Fuck his entire government, because at this point he's so senile who knows what HE'S even doing and who's pulling the most strings (it's like this whole country's crumbling apart, i'm crumbling apart, so many others around me are, we're all crumbling together and apart). And fuck the stupid worthless pathetic moron that shot him with a .22 instead of a REAL fucking gun and fuck him for missing his heart. You don’t try to be fancy or pussyfoot around with something that big, you go point-blank and blow his fucking brains out, fuckwit.

Anyway, I'm negative (some-fucking-how, despite all I've done and all that's been done to me). Knowing that for the first time, finally, unearthed and relieved so many fears at once-- things I couldn't even give myself time to seriously think about because I knew I'd just truly go fucking insane if I did-- that I was barely able to keep from crying in front of the clinic people. And then I actually did cry and cry-laugh in my car. Lorenzo didn't kill me. Ben'll be okay. Greg'll be okay. Shann'll be okay. I don't have to fucking call them and tell them all they might be dying because of me. I didn't hurt anyone else, either (at least, not like this). I barely give a shit about myself at this point-- I just wanted to know THAT. I wanted to know that, and I wanted to know I could function well enough to care for people who deserve to be alive, who deserve to live so much more than I do; I wanted to know I could truly use all the energy I have left in me without needing to hold anything back for myself. My "self" brings everything down anyway. Hollow it all out until there's truly nothing left and I can disappear.

*

[63]Or Adventures in Paradise or Bad Girls or What’s Going On or Peter Gabriel 3 or Help! or Pet Sounds, or…