The relationship. Is over.

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The relationship. Is over.

And it did not end well.

I’d never been in love before her, and I can say that now honestly as in the last week I have shuffled closer to insanity than I ever have, which can only mean love was had, and lost.

She came over to hang out. And we made guacamole. Once it was eaten I thought it was time to do it.

I laid my head in her lap, which she, admittedly received awkwardly and let it all out. “I’m still in love with you, and I think we can make this work”. To which she said nothing. “We had a lot of problems, yes, but since the break-up I’ve looked deep inside of myself and really tried to improve on all of the things you said I should improve on once I looked deep inside myself, and now that I’ve improved, I think It’s time to give us another shot..” Tick. Tick. Tick. “… Cause I’m still in love with you…”

It is in these moments when you understand how loud the sound of nothing can be.

She paused, and said, “I’m going to say something that’s going to hurt you.”

And it is in these moments when you understand how much you preferred the sound of nothing.

“I’ve been seeing someone for the past month… and we’re exclusive.”

Which was, honestly, not something I was expecting to hear.

See we broke up over the phone, and the events post-breakup were so chaotic and confusing that the only logical conclusion, I thought, was to let the dust settle, regroup, and try it again. After all, who falls in love, breaks up over a phone call, and doesn’t give it another go? Seems like such a waste – building a locomotive only to turn it into a museum the first time it falls off the tracks – of course we’d give it another go – I just needed enough time to realize that the net-value of my freedom was less than misery I’d feel without her. (Enough time alone that a complete inability to make yourself cum without a small wink of shame in the mirror has a way of doing that). I know I was taking a little time storming back to her after getting broken up with, but the idea that we’d be able to just shed each other after we had gone through so much drama together (and we did – big stuff) was impossible to me. Yes, I had complained and wavered when I was in the relationship, but I had no perspective outside the relationship to compare - I complain and waver now. I’m a complainer and a waverer. Being in love and maintaining sanity takes practice - you only know you can speak German once you’re in Germany and it takes a good deal of fucking up schnitzel to know what isn’t a sausage. This is how I felt.

And then, In that one sentence, I knew, the relationship, was over. All the refreshing of her MySpace profile, the checking of her IMDB resume had to stop – all these purvish little ways of keeping her retouched image in my head facilitated by an internet intent on snapshots of memories.

Love is like gluing your heart to someone else’s. You share one common goal – to keep this blood flowing, but if one person develops an irregular beat, however small or hidden, it runs the risk of stopping the entire mechanism. To a lesser degree I see myself having done this.

Peeling two glued items apart is a destructive task. And frustrating. The very act of gluing in the first place says I plan on these two things being stuck together for quite some time - but when they separate, or just find themselves separated, things are going to get torn. There simply is no easy way to dizzolve glue, you separate by ripping.

But glue is strong shit, and if those two hearts can manage to not short the other one out with it’s momentary, say, indecision, than continue on it will. This is what I thought would happen.

But happen it didn’t.

So it was with a distinct tearing sound that I received that little bit of information, and had to swallow hard to get that last chunk of humble pie down my little throat before coming to my senses. Before deleting her from my Gmail quick contacts so I know whenever she’s online, before removing the risky pictures of her in my cell phone, before slowly rediscovering the solitary resolution of being single, again.

I remember having a distinct guacamole taste under my tongue as in that one moment this bucket-full of revelations came crashing in on me – the relationship, was over. And short of stealing Doc Brown’s Delorian and going back a year it was unchangeable – what I had done, what she had done, was cast in the carbonite of our memories, and here I was. With my fucking head still in her lap.

I had spent a good deal of time discussing my breakup with Tere, a Mexican woman who owns a comedy club I perform at a lot. She has been my informal coach in all of this, and I have disobeyed most of her advice selfishly thinking that I’d only know if it hurts once I’m hurt.”Joo know” she’d say to me in her gently lilting accent, “If she starts to see someone helse, jour going to go crasee.” And I’d laugh it off thinking “Don’t worry Tere, who builds a locomotive only to turn it into a museam the first time it runs off the tracks?”, but it is in hindsight that I can see the error in my thinking and the honesty in her coaching. I haven’t gone crasee per se, but my already hyperventilating imagination has gone into overdrive dealing with the acceptance of my relationship being over, and even more, with the formation of elaborate fantasies about her and the new guy enjoying themselves and just generally being happy and well laid with myself nowhere in the room. Or house. Maybe he has a house, I dunno, all I know is that’s he’s mid 30’s, successful, and they’re exclusive. That and he probably has a golden dick and can cure the sick. With it.

And with this, phase two begins.

Whatever that is.

And from now on I’m letting them speak first.

Rad

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I find myself watching this over and over again. It's just rad. And so his is package.

Barracuda

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This is very pretty. Very beautiful animation.

Movin' A Little Up

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So I'm all moved in and Koreatown is a room in my head with a closed and quiet door.

I haven't lived anywhere socially desirable since my parents paid what I was too young to know was an ungodly sum to cram me into a small apartment in the East Village during college. We'd drink in one of the local bars who didn't ask how old we were or didn't give a shit and then stumble the couple of blocks back to our apartment where the doin' it up large would continue until it needed to stop. The place was tiny - my room was what was sliced out of an already small living room, and our kitchen area was technically a kitchenette, or female kitchen, but it was close to everything and convenient as hell and friends never need much convincing to come and detach with us. Because the rent was being paid I didn't have to grasp that it kinda takes a lot of money to maintain in the East Village and that once that thing with the planes and the buildings was over, I was soon going to be an L train and 30 minutes of frustration away from everything.

And this trend continued on and on deep in the Puerto Rico area of Brooklyn for four years until I decided that leaving was the best plan and I packed what I could into a car and left.

Arriving in Los Angeles I accepted a quick sublet with a friend of a friend whose parents bought her a condo they clearly wanted for themselves in a comically planned-out housing complex in Culver City, hardly a place anyone without a handicap either golf or physical would want to be in. It had machine-controlled brooks that would stop their babbling promptly at eight, which was surreal.

The sublet didn't work out very well, and after a dispute where she informed me that I wasn't allowed to have girls over because "That's like my mom's bed and that's just graosss", so I bit my tounge, hopped on Craigslist, and called the first place I saw. An out-of-it guy picked up and seemed just stoned enough that I knew I could live with him. Half an hour later I was in the living room of 136 N. Edgemont Street and only because I had cash and could move in immediately he stopped strumming his guitar long enough to say "Uh then yeah."

And it was right back to the outskirts of the ethnic neighborhood for me. The place was good-enough, but the bathroom was anemic and for whatever reason had a tub with a separate shower area and while this would have been fine for a bath-loved the boiler was too weak to heat an appropriate amount of water and at about your balls it began to get very cold.

I stuck it out though, and when my cousin Jesse moved down from Seattle God love him he stuck it through too - and with the smaller room. We didn't have any options, the lease I had signed expired in June which meant at least another half a year of the sno-cone man and screaming Mexican children playing all day and night right outside my bedroom window, an actuality that always made me extra guilty when masturbating.

And when it was time to look for a place Jesse and I decided to only target the areas we actually wanted to live in - basically the Hollywood / Loz Feliz area. After a suitable amount of searching we settled on the place we currently live - a great 2 bedroom 2 bathroom a couple of blocks away from lounges, Thai Food, and places people actually want to be rather than having relegated themselves to.

We got briefly sidetracked by a chance Saturday look at an apartment in a building called The Chateau, which my cousin still calls Le Chateau, a complex that looked like it housed the casts of this years NBC pilots. The landlord was young and strict and every window in the apartment opened on to a granite hallway but I'd be lying if my cousin and I weren't ready to sign on the dotted line when we saw the sheer number of Little Girles walking around. Vagina, or the false promise of Vagina, will make a man make some real hasty decisions. Our application was denied though as the party looking at it after us was able to get money orders into the landlord five minutes before Jesse and I and thats only becuase Rockin' Ralph's money order machine was under the weather.

And so it was with a proud amazement that last night, the first night spent in my new apartment, I walked outside I was almost hit by an attractive female hipster who was riding her bicycle for enjoyment and not because someone was pursuing her. And around the corner people were having drinks at a hip lounge and not the pool room in the back of the questionable bodega. I had finally situated myself in a place I'd be happy to talk about without an addendum of disclaimers explaining why I didn't really mind the constant screaming and Gay Guy and his loud motorcycle. This is where I am, and here, is where I want to be. It feels odd, like life is shaking me saying "Seriously man, try being an adult? Just try it." And maybe the adult in me is going, "I can live with a dishwasher... I can uh yeah that's just fine."

I'd like to continue this trend of upgrading the components in my life-computer. And in my real computer, but lets not get ahead of myself. I think situation plays a large role in definition and now my definition includes a cold jacuzzi and lots of Armenian people. Which is just fine with semi-adult me... who is letting a machine wash his dishes as he posts this.

-Ben