Sam Paul - Why I Committed Suicide

Dan has started working at the Tomato with Jenifer and I, so it will be a family thing soon. The only thing is, I hate having the inside track to getting my friends such a shitty job. They might eventually all blame me for the hot labors at low wages, get a mob together and storm up the hillside to burn down my castle. It’s just so damn hard to find a job up here that makes any money. I’ve been here over a year at least and still make under $4 an hour!

In addition to the boring problems in real life it’s gotten so that sometimes I’m so sexually charged around Jenifer it’s unbearable. Maybe I just hit puberty late and my hormones are kicking in after age 20. Deep down I know it’s all her though. If somebody could figure out a way to harness the energy we expend having sex, the world’s power shortages would soon be nonexistent. The electric company could just pay us to stay at home and hump. Do it for your country! For the record, it isn’t just me pushing her to “do” it all the time either. We just naturally rut around like monkeys mostly in the afternoon or evening. I love having sex in the morning and I’m sure that she just gets sick of me gently caressing her special no-no places until I get her all randy and she wakes up, but that’s because I wake up a lot earlier and I am still so thrilled to find her in my arms. I only have the tiny twin-sized bed so we sleep entwined around each other like boa constrictors. I love sleeping with my arms around Jenifer’s sexy waist or having her head in the crook of my arm and feeling her breath on my chest. A lot of mornings when the sun is shining onto our bodies through my grimy windows, I’ll just lie there and watch her sleep or listen to her breathing and feel her heartbeat pulsing just underneath the surface of skin on her lean body.

You know, as aggressive and comfortable with her body as she is, like all women I think Jen secretly needs me to take the initiative and suggest wild things to keep some electricity alive. Boy, that wasn’t an egocentric statement was it?

Today we used Dan’s video camera to tape us having sex in my room on my 1960’s looking flower pattern sheets. We did every thing and every which way a person would want to do that thing. It was all very passionate and enjoyable and it seemed as if everything we did was intensified because we were always aware of someone watching. I guess the someone would be our future selves, but that gets a little too Star Trek-y. We were finally through after an hour or two so we smoked and watched the tape which started another round of lovemaking. Watching the tape, still out of breath from making it was very erotic. Not in a cheap exploitive kind of way either. Other than the mild embarrassment every girl feels about see- ing their body as others do, it really turned her on and that’s what it was supposed to do.

I transferred the Super 8 tapes to VHS and gave her the copies so she wouldn’t regret doing it later. It’s the only gentlemanly thing to do and I really don’t plan on ever running for public office anyway.

School is starting up again but my thirst for education isn’t ready to be quenched quite yet because I’m having the slacker summer of my dreams. Still it’s good to have some outside force motivating me so I don’t feel like a total bum. The house is starting to fill up with the smell of overpriced textbooks and lots of cool stuff. A regular four man bachelor pad of kitsch with things, that other people might consider tacky, everywhere. Barnum and Bailey circus posters, a giant Star Wars poster from an ancient “World” magazine and a truckload of Beastie Boys paraphernalia adorn the walls. We have a typical stoner pad I suppose, although Jerry and Dan don’t smoke pot they drink enough to feel the groovy vibes with us. I’ve got a $20 TV, that I bought off some student desperate for cash near the end of last semester, hooked up to a Super Nintendo (Jerry’s) near the entertainment center, so it’s on like mother fucking Donkey Kong baby! It’s cool to have a house I can molest with all my eclectic artistic enthusiasms. The walls of my room are slowly getting covered with the cool pictures I cut out in anticipation of future collages. My first year in college I made detailed flyers every week for a fake band I made up called “Smoking Tool.” I wrote reviews of the “Smoking Tool” shows for the local paper and I posted the upcoming show flyers all over town, which was a lot of fun until somebody saw me posting them and aggressively wanted to know why my band didn’t show up to such and such place as advertised. I guess some of the bars and clubs just let whoever makes a flyer play there on the slow nights. With my anonymity burnt, the band broke up and I learned that unless my creativity is directed or focused it often turns to mischief.

In my second year of college I made giant collages (that held weird secret subliminal messages under a black light) out of pictures, shaving cream, cigarette butts and lots of spray paint. I actively channeled my energy into those projects; defacing a large percentage of the dorm hallways and losing my deposit in the process until I entered a picture in an art show and watched it lose out to actual art students. I later learned that the art professors are the judges and always choose the winners based on their students’ projects. A lot of times they even give them the idea and help them develop it in class. I do not mind not winning, originally I was just thrilled to have a picture hanging in the UNT art show, but when I found out later that I didn’t even have a shot at winning because of the politics that are involved with being a successful artist, my enthusiasm for painting diminished a lot. Instead my ‘art for arts sake’ is much better, but more performance—oriented now. My creative energies are channeled into randomly (yet artistically) throwing eggs at the cars in the teacher parking spaces of the art building parking lot. That way the professors can help me with my projects too. My newest creation is to make their cars smell terrible to symbolize the oppression of the constricted establishment. Plus I like to throw eggs. I would say lately I’ve been more occupied and satisfied with experimenting on the canvas I live in. Life.

Jenifer’s been sort of bummed out lately because she’s going to have to give up her apartment on Stella. We’re still together all the time, virtually inseparable, but her roommates have been flaking on helping pay the bills so she’ll be moving back home for a little while with her parents. I suppose the notion of being back with her dad has a lot to do with her being so depressed. Her house is beautiful and huge that it has to be the parental units bumming her out right? I’ll miss sleeping over in her private air-conditioned room but the summer will soon be over and my porch room is much cooler than it was. I told Jenifer that her and her snoopy dog can stay with me anytime, I guess it was something she was worried about because her eyes lit up in that provocative way she has about her. Shit, if I had my way I would have her move in and marry me and bare my idiot children: I sanely keep my mouth shut and enthusiasm contained.

Fourth of July today. Spent most of it by myself drunk. Very drunk I might add. Drunk now. Dan and Jay went to some family thing and Jenifer’s off somewhere. I bought a watermelon earlier this week and a bottle of Everclear and ‘made a watermelon’ if that makes sense. You know, cut a hole in the melon and pour all the liquor inside? So I’ve been sitting on the front lawn in a lawn chair wearing nothing but my skivvies, jamming to classic rock on the radio and trying to count cars while my brain is all fucked up.

I think everyone caught out because they knew I set this day aside to raise hell. I have to go inside to take a bong hit every once in a while but otherwise I’m crisping in the sun until I eat this whole fucking watermelon while celebrating America. How fucking 70’s. Fuck this journal, I’m going to get the BB gun out.