Last Night I Sang to the Monster Read Free Page A

A’s and do all kinds of stuff around the house and I don’t get squat.
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    Sometimes, I get these ideas in my head and I just can’t stop them from entering and it’s like the ideas tell me what to do. When I did stuff like break windshields and crap like that, it wasn’t even as if there were any thoughts in my head. There were just these feelings running through me, bad feelings. Really, really bad feelings. I just wanted to get rid of the feelings. I’m not sure God knew what he was doing when he put feelings inside of us. What is the purpose for human emotions? Will somebody please tell me?
    So there were two things I really worked hard at: not feeling and getting good grades. The getting good grades was easy. The not-feeling part was hard. But I’m working on that. The way I see it is that if I didn’t feel anything, then I wouldn’t wig out anymore. No feelings = no wigging out. The solution was simple. So why is everything so hard?
    My friends were really into drugs and booze. But it’s not as if I wasn’t into the mood-altering substance thing. I tried to be careful. I didn’t want to screw up my plan. And the drinking was cool. It helped, you know? And the other thing was that I was really into cigarettes. Love to smoke. And I’m good at it too.
    Substance abuse. That was a joke me and my friends liked to make. We wanted to write a song about substance abuse. These are some of the lyrics I wrote when we were all stoned out of our heads:
    What is this thing you call substance abuse?
    All I wanna do is forget and get loose.
    Drinking and smoking over and over
    What’s so great about a life that’s sober?
    There’s nothing cool about being young
    When the monsters of night have stolen the sun.
    I’m tired of searching for words in the sky.
    All I wanna do is drink and die.
    Nothing is real. It’s all a big lie.
    All I wanna do is drink and die.
    There’s nothing cool about being young
    When the monsters of night have stolen the sun.
    You know, that song, it’s another one of those pieces of paper on the floor of my brain. Anyway, my friends, I really liked them. Antonio and Gloria and Tommy and Mitzie and Albert. God wrote crazy on their hearts when they were born. But it was good when I was with them. It was like we all belonged to each other.
    And they were all really smart. I know people think that druggies are really nothing but a bunch of losers. But the truth is that the smartest kids, they’re the ones doing the drugs. We’re thinkers and we don’t like rules and we have imagination. All right, so we’re also all fucked up. But hey, you think sober people aren’t all fucked up? The world is being run by sober people—and it doesn’t look like it’s working out all that well. Just take me and tear me up.
    My friends, they always made me laugh. Not that I remember a lot of the things we did together. We got smashed. But I didn’t feel alone—that’swhat counts. The rest of the time, I just felt like crying. You know, the word sad that’s written on my heart, that word. Sad. Yeah. Crying. Okay. But my friends made me laugh.
    We played games. That was cool. We liked Scrabble. I think we were all sort of in love with words—but we liked to keep those words in our heads most of the time. We had this game. Every week, we’d pick a different word. They were like our own personal passwords—and we couldn’t tell anybody what our passwords were. At the end of each week, we’d pick a new word, and then we’d get high and yell out the old words, the words we were tossing out. I remember one time, these were the words we yelled out:
    Eschatology
    Ephemeral
    Capricious
    Coyote
    Luchar
    Soledad
    Some of the words were in Spanish and some of them were in English. Gloria and Antonio were really into speaking Spanish and even though I had a Mexican last name, it was a language that had been lost in my family. Yeah, well, a lot of things got lost in my family.
    But with my friends, I didn’t