DAY 611

The door is there, I can see it. It has a knob that I can just pull or push, I forget now. It is a golden thing and I see it everyday. The woman with the urgency comes in almost everyday through it and does her thing. I like it when she cleans beneath the carriage clock on the side table yet I hate the ticking of the thing. There is a television on the other table over by the small cubic area that pushes open the rectangle of the room. I saw myself on it and I saw my Mum and Dad.

I cry for them.

The window above my bed blows a wind through, though it is not open.

I'm given a list of food to eat, drinks to drink and games to play.

Every few days men come to visit me and are really nice.

A black man with greying tufts of hair comes a lot with toys in a bag and paints my nails.

Another man who makes me laugh a lot brings cheese. I really like him. We have fun and he combs my hair for what seems like ages.

Another man who tells me about a glam rock group he was in makes me wear big boots and I saw him on the television.





Madeline.

the bad times

"I'm worst at what i do best" is how his suicide note began. He further imitated Kurt Cobain's teenage angst with similar clichéd and self-deprecating comments about how useless he was in the letter. The usual "nobody will miss me", "no one loves me" and "i am stupid" lines were present every other line. Even though he felt he was stupid and that no one would miss him, he still made sure to check the spelling of certain words and used a thesaurus to make sure certain words were not overused. He wanted his last writing to be remembered for its content, not its sloppiness.

His note concluded with probably the most common quote in suicide notes since the mid
1990s. "It's better to burn out than to fade away" which he mistakenly attributed to
Kurt Cobain. Even though he was meticulous in making sure there were no spelling or
grammar errors in the letter, his research skills were obviously lacking. He left his
laptop open with the suicide note on the screen.

He stripped naked. "I am going to end my life the way I entered it" he though to
himself. This was most likely not his idea but one from a shitty indie flick that
some film student made.

He wrapped the belt around his door knob and tied the other around his neck.
Tightening it up he gradually lost his breath.

Darkness soon came.




A few hours later, his father entered the room to see his son naked. The laptop had
ran out of power and shut off. All the father saw was his nude son with a belt around
his neck.

"Fucking metal music" he thought to himself. "All the boy listened to was heavy shit like INXS and had to imitate Michael Hutchence".

One step at a time perhaps

And now, my question:

Having turned forty, I can feel an impending mid-life crisis bearing down on me like a rabid Rottweiler riding a runaway freight train. How best to deal with it? Buying a Corvette is so cliché and I can't afford one anyway. An extra-marital affair is right out since I don't have the energy and can no more afford a divorce than I can the Corvette. I need something original and unexpected.

So what can I do to sow the last of my wild oats and burn off my quickly vanishing youth?

- billy(no longer a)boy

Instead of an extra-marital affair, how about a marital affair? Get the wife and kids together, order up a couple of hookers, get yourself an eight ball of coke watch your youth burn away.

Alternatively, you can attempt some form of extreme sport to help you feel alive once more.

The problem is when your done sowing those oats and defying those deaths you'll have to go back to your good ol' day to day. Well you don't have to, but you probably will. You'll realise that you really didn't have it all that bad and that your life didn't suck that bad.

You'll realise that more than half your life is over. And you'll have to make a choice. Whether to live the rest of the time you have left as best as you can. Or you'll come to the realisation that your best years are behind you and that you should just give up.

Get busy living or get busy dying. That's what you can do.

My question is as follows:

If there is in fact no deity or prime mover (which is almost certainly the case). And if the universe is indifferent to our existence and our non-existence. And if there is no over-arching morality or good or evil. Then, what purpose do our lives serve and if they have no ultimate purpose, how does a materialistic atheist justify his own continued existence in this universe (or any other) and find some semblance of meaning to allow him to keep trudging along?

Dear Rotten Bastards Bad Advice Blog

Originally posted by Tomby Stone:

My question ...

I have lost my ability to fantasise. I have always liked Einstein's suggestion that 'imagination is your preview of life's coming attractions.' and I used to lie around for hours previewing all the attractions coming my way.

Having lost faith that anything half decent will ever happen to me ever (which I understand is all my fault) I am unable to imagine a fun and exciting future. I feel silly and childish and even more of a loser than usual whenever I envision any kind of positive future.

Is this a good thing ?? Is there a point we should discard dreams and focus on reality or is this a very bad thing ??? Should I allow myself to dream stupid dreams again ??

Also ... Amy Winehouse, would you ??

If I may answer your last question first...Amy Winehouse? Fuck yeah! As long as there was absolutely no talking. Singing would be encouraged, but none of that drunken Southgate gibberish. She's like a long-stemmed rose on a gravestone. After a full round of immunizations as though I were preparing for safari in West Africa and after donning two condoms, I'd hit it. But then I'm a bit of a slut. I'd probably do her mum too.

As for your fantasy question, I say dream a little dream. But here is what I do. I no longer dream of a brighter tomorrow for myself. I'm too much of a realist. Instead I just dream of an alternate present. Each new day brings with it opportunities to imagine life not sucking quite as much as it actually does. When I read about crime happening in my neighborhood, I just imagine myself as the hero who delivers a sound thrashing to the ne'er-do-wells who threaten the tranquility of my community. When I hear that our economy is spinning faster around the bowl and may soon go straight down the pipe, I imagine a pastoral existence where my food grows from the earth with little effort and my cherubic offspring provide all the entertainment I will ever need. And when the constraints of marriage begin to wear on me, I can imagine that cute girl at the supermarket checkout is really into older men and will lavish me with affection the next time I stop in for eggs and bananas. By comparison, Walter Mitty is a complete amateur.

So it's really the expectation that is the problem. It's okay to fantasize about better things, just don't hold out any hope of actually having them and you're on your way to happily frittering your life away. Sure, it's silly and childish, but then so is real life.

And now, my question:

Having turned forty, I can feel an impending mid-life crisis bearing down on me like a rabid Rottweiler riding a runaway freight train. How best to deal with it? Buying a Corvette is so cliché and I can't afford one anyway. An extra-marital affair is right out since I don't have the energy and can no more afford a divorce than I can the Corvette. I need something original and unexpected.

So what can I do to sow the last of my wild oats and burn off my quickly vanishing youth?

- billy(no longer a)boy

proposition.

I am the mo-ron who chose 'the bad times' as a theme. It's going nowhere at light speed (one word or two?), so I came up with a gimmick...

The Rotten Bastards Bad Advice Blog!

It goes like this:

I post a question; some sort of issue that's giving me all kinds of grief. The first of you weird fuckers to copy/paste the question into your own post, followed by your advice, in turn gets to ask a question. It goes on like that 'til we get bored of it, or until June.

(Obviously, you can still just write a piece to the main theme for this month, which is 'the bad times.' Doye.)

What say you?

Yeah? Good.

I'll start.

Dear RBBAB,

I have this friend, we'll call him WombyBoneClues (inside joke), and he's this brilliant, filthy bi-polar artist from Manchester who I'm totally in love with. Everything he creates is amazing, and it's even better because he thinks it's shit and chucks it in the bin, allowing me to dust it off sign it in the bottom-right-hand corner, and sell it!

Now obviously, I want to live with him and basically make exploiting him a full-time job, but I sort of have a wife and a kid. Oh, and another kid coming in August.

Also, I'm not gay, but the money could be worth it to let him take out his aggression on my sweet, virgin bum bum.

What, oh what, should I do?

Thanks in advance,
EmptyAssInAmerica