I've got this dog, right? His name is Wiley. He's a yorkshire terrier. And I'm almost positive that every bit of his internal dialogue is screaming.

He's so excitable, I can't imagine the voice he hears in his head as not screaming constantly:

"OH MY GOD HI HI HI I'M THE NEW DOG HI! HI! PLAY WITH ME I'M CUTE GODDAMMIT! HI!"

"I HAVE TO PEE! I HAVE TO PEE! WHO ARE YOU? OH SWEET JEBUS LORD IN HEAVEN GIVE ME SOME FOOD I HAVE TO PEE!"

"YAY THE CAT THE CAT I LOVE THE CAT COME HERE CAT BE MY PAL OW OW OW OW OW OW"

Trust me. If you could see this pooch, you'd know what I mean.

This is pretty much all I've been thinking about today.
"God never gives you more than you can handle" Recoil Breath Control

You think?

day to day facts fade away as sleep descends

No, no prose tonight.

"No, I know you're looking for something that's hard to find..I think I have what you have in mind"

Three more months until I leave Long Island, New York.

I sincerely doubt I could have delt with the day to day stress of living here if I had not spent two years burning in Florida.

It's all a matter of perspective.

It's about getting older.

It's about living.

If you find your life is a big dark room...just turn the light on.

simple as that.

Yesterday was the first time I posted somenthig here. I found it very interesting. Looking at the posibilities, noding can be something really cool.

.So I created a node, but in Spanish. Someone told me I should not post in Spanish; well maybe this could help practice my English. It's somewhat difficult to write in a language other than your native language.

Eight days ago from the date I write this I went to a party with the intention of having a good time. I remember pouring the first drink, the second, and the third. Next thing I know I woke up on the couch, my shirt off, my shoes gone, and the sun up. My friend Justin sat next to me in the same situation, and I looked at the other party members as they lay on sleeping bags on the hard wood floor. I had been sitting up in the couch asleep, and I turned to look at the other couches. They had their covers pulled off and were lying out to dry. Various cleaning products lay empty or partially filled in various positions on the window sill.

Truth be told, Justin and I had drunk ourselves past silly. We were loud and disgustingly messy. We threw up over the couches, ourselves, and the floor. We made a huge mess that our friends had to clean up at 4 in the morning lest they get any sleep past the stench. Justin banged on the wall until the Housing Director of the building came over twice and threatened to call the cops. I flirted with all the girls there, and said things that I would rather not admit to.

I don’t remember any of it.

Although I got some flack for some dumb things I said and the mess I made, for the most part the reaction was positive, that “we should get Bacon drunk more often!” The next day was spent rehydrating myself and recovering the strength I had. Last Sunday I woke up and got online to hear some news that I had been waiting for. He wrote it to someone else, but he knew I would read it. Secretly I hope that is why he wrote it to begin with. My close friend (not the fellow drunk, mind you) wrote to this anonymous listener that it is hard to save respect for someone as you are cleaning off the vomit from their person, or as you are keeping them from falling down like a little baby. He said he was saddened that the person who he talks of philosophy and women too couldn’t put a sentence together to save his life. But the part that cut the deepest was this, verbatim, “I cared for them while it appears that they couldn't care less about themselves.”

Whether he meant to or not, these words formed the centerpiece of the thoughts I had in my head for the entire 6 hour midnight flight to Amsterdam I took this last Sunday night/Monday morning. Austin (my traveling buddy) was asleep or at least faking it, so I had no distractions to stop myself from sitting there mentally beating myself up.

I have told numerous people at numerous occasions that I don’t need alcohol to have a good time. I can have fun without it, I don’t have anything to hide from, and I am already relaxed enough without it. In a previous chapter I said, “In a world full of unspoken rules, leaving your inhibitions at the door can be a welcome change of pace.” This sentence accomplished two things. One, it scared the living shit out of my dad, and two, it defended alcohol as a way to relax and cut loose from your normal life. I said this to defend my decision to go to a party with alcohol being served to minors. This statement is so much grander than that, in retrospect I lessened the idea by using it to dignify such a lowly concept.

Last Friday night embarrassed me more than I let people know. Not only did it embarrass me physically, but mentally. I made a mockery of the things I say, and became hypocritical in my ideals on alcohol. I used to be proud of the fact that I had never blacked out or thrown up, and held it high as proof I was a responsible drinker. I can no longer hold that banner high.

One of the things you know if you claim to know me is that I like to be in charge. I’m a bossy kind of guy; it’s just the truth of the matter. Alcohol took away my control. It gave it back in the end, but it didn’t have to. I saw it coming, each time I drank a little more, each party I was a little braver.

Alcohol scared me, and now I’m not so brave.

In the time since I discovered my one drop, I have been involved in some conversations with people where the subject of tribal registration has come up. Registering, for me, will be a complex process, because of my atypical family history. An unknown father and a mother who was, herself, adopted, adopted back in a time where records were less formal, is going to make proving my Cherokee blood difficult at best, especially since there are no records, and, well, Mom isn't available to answer questions.

But the part that gets me, that part that makes me want to rip people's heads off and shit down their necks, is when they say, "well, yeah, you better grab that free money!"

Grab that free money, you, that's the whole motive. Forget pride in having ancestry here that didn't commit genocide or rape the land, forget the aching void in my life that I want to fill. Forget my roots. Just grab that free money, the pittance offered by a government that made treaties, broke them as fast, put my new-found people in concentration camps and a forced march cross-country to land that was offered because no one else wanted it, land that was often taken away as soon as any economic value appeared.

Forget my search for roots. In large part, the people who make these asinine remarks are people who have never lived more than 50 miles from where they were born, people who can't talk about a person they know without identifying what family they belong to. I grew up in a family that loved me, but it was not my family. I was taken in, but there will always be, underneath, that twinge of rejection -- probably one of the reasons why I have found in myself an almost irritating need to be accepted without strings. The people who think I'm in it for the money have a home, a place where, in the words of Robert Frost, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

I've never had a home like that. Now that I have, at last, begun to find out where I belong and who I really am, to have that quest denigrated as an attempt to get something for nothing is an insult, a cut to the heart that these people are so ignorant of they don't comprehend my sudden anger.

Cash payments to Indians is not something for nothing, to begin with. It is a dime on the C-note for the lands that were claimed, for the treaties that were broken, for the racial and cultural genocide that was committed. The Trail of Tears was a death march comparable to Bataan, but perpetrated on civilians. The people who think I want cash are the same people who deride the Indian casinos that dot the Minnesota landscape. They chuckle whan they find a tiny legal irregularity in the deed for one of the larger ones. "Serves them right. We aughta get some of that too."

I am primarily of European ancestry. I have no idea, as I have said, who my father is, so one-half of my family history will be an eternal mystery to me. People who proudly trace their ancestry to Ellis Island should understand what it means to belong to a people, a tribe, a clan. "I'm half German, 1/8 Norwegian, 1/4 Swedish, 1/16 Portugese, 1/32 Swiss, and 1/32 Lichtensteinian," they say. They should be able to have some understanding when I say, "I'm a bastard of mixed ancestry. I am Cherokee."

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