Facebook Archives: I can't sleep. Who can these days, amiright? - Damian Burford: Freelance Writer/Podcaster from Denver, CO & Napa, Ca

Facebook Archives: I can’t sleep. Who can these days, amiright?

This is a Facebook post from June 4th, 2020. This was written during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. I wrote a lot on Facebook during that time, I like a lot of what was written here and wanted to save it here for posterity as Facebook slowly smothers the life out of it’s platform. -Damian June 2024

I can’t sleep. Who can these days, amiright?

I told the lady I was going to stay up and read, and sure…I did a little of that, but mostly I sat in the chair and thought about the future. I felt good about those thoughts, but then I sat down here and started reading Facebook and instantly regretted feeling good.

Because, let’s face it. We’re all doomed aren’t we?

I just finished the book Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins. It was a gift from the lady, her favorite book. She was irritated that I didn’t read it right after Christmas, when she gave it to me. But books have a life and a mind of their own. They come to you when you least expect them, and when they open up to you…. When they truly open up to you… it’s magic. This book came to me and opened up at the right place and time.

Jitterbug Perfume is about an ancient king who finds his first white hair in his beard. It’s decreed by the law of his land that he is to die of “old age.” Old Alobar isn’t ready to die and decides to run from death. He continues to run from death and somehow discovers the secrets to an everlasting life. The secrets are wonderful, but lonely.

Towards the end of the book, I don’t think I’m spoiling this for anyone, but a random black character is murdered by police in New Orleans and there are violent protests and vigils for this character. But it’s a book about living forever and does this character really die? They don’t talk about him too much in the book. It’s a white book and made for liberal white people, but it has been on my mind for the last few days.

Reading the chapters about this character’s death, while simultaneously watching the news was…. I don’t have the words for those feelings. Incredible is not a large enough word. His character was just a token. Created by a white man to die after a few humble sentences or paragraphs.

I’m not a smart man. I’ve never been good at looking at the metaphors in novels. Maybe his death was represented in that way on purpose, and it’s the times we are living in that makes me evaluate what that character means. ya know?

But that’s not what sticks with me about the book. The book is about how Alobar decides to change his world. He does so by breaking the chains of his oppressors, which are DEATH and the rules.

It’s an interesting and fun book and I can’t wait to read more of Tom Robbins. But I keep thinking about how the book says Alobar learns to become immortal because he shirks his role in the greater scheme of life and rebirth. He decides not to be a part of the SYSTEM, but to be an individual.

AN INDIVIDUAL.

That’s his first step to immortality. Becoming an individual.

But isn’t that the problem we have in AMERICA right now? Isn’t’ that the virus we are spreading to the whole world?

ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME.
instead of….
WE WE WE WE WE WE WE WE WE WE.

They’re the same letters. Just upside down.

No longer do we live in the country of “We the People…” We live in a country of “ME!!!!!! The People!!!!”
We’re a country of people who want what’s best for US, but when we say us… we mean… “Me. ME! MEEEEEE!!!!!!!”

Me the people. Me the People. Me the People. Me the People.

Look, I know I’m telling almost all of you reading everything you already know. But we’ve been living “Me the people” our entire lives and it’s not really working is it?

The rich get richer, and the poor keep dying when they don’t have too. Who cares who can live forever, if the masses are dying in our streets.

I see the “All lives Matter” posts and comments, and hell, I thought the same thing at first. All lives do matter, but WHY IS MY LIFE WORTH MORE THAN OTHERS?

WHY?!?!

I struggled with these ideas when my sister died some ten/eleven years ago. Why her and not me? Why George Floyd and not me? Why? Why? Why?

Why?

What is a life worth? How much? How many tears? I wonder how many people have seen a dead body. I wonder how many people have watched a person die in-front of their own eyes. How would that change their world?

When I think of the “ALL LIVES MATTER!!!!” People I’ve been thinking of Jitterbug Perfume and the individualism it either taught or warned against. These are ignorant people, not bad people. Just fucking ignorant. They are just as much a product of the system as the dead black men laying in our streets.

It’s been hammered into our collective heads since birth that we should be looking out for number one. You know why? Because communism is EVIL. Caring for other people is EVIL.

I just know that we can not keep looking at the world and think that we belong as individuals. We have to start looking at the world from a place of WE.

Or, I dunno…. Here’s another half brained metaphor: The earth is a symbiotic organism. We have to work together, or cancer seeps into those cells and destroys it. Each of us carry that cancer inside us. So when we do not work to form a more cohesive unit, we die and we destroy others. And WE! AMERICANS! are doing it every day.

Dying.

America is dying and Americans are killing it.

It’s not just BLACK lives, it’s all lives. They have just taken the largest toil, for us. Man, They die every single fucking day for us. For what? FOR WHAT?!?!

Why are we taught from the day we are born that other people don’t fucking matter? Why is it okay for our culture to teach us and other cultures, because we influence the world… that no one matters except ourselves.

I mean, look at the god damned grocery store parking lot. Look at all those carts strewn across the parking lot. Some right next to the fucking cart corrals. Look at the tables of restaurants. Look at the grass in our parks. Look at the world. We can’t take care of what we’ve got. We can’t put on a fucking cloth mask to help save the world…..

We fucking destroy it every single day and think “I DESERVE BETTER.”

I dunno what to do.
I’m not a smart man.

I’m a 38, almost 39, year old man, who battles some weird depression he doesn’t understand. I struggle everyday to keep my head above water.

This little journal entry is my way of bloodletting my sickness out of me. I’ve got all this shit inside me, poisoning me and I have to let it out. I have to put it somewhere, so why not here…..

I don’t deserve to live on this planet any more than George Floyd and the lifetime of other people who have died unjustly. But here I am and I’m still here.

He entrusted us with this place. We should take care of it, and the only way we’re going to make this place better is if we work together.

However, there are things keeping that working together just out of reach and we have to destroy those things. We have to burn it all down. We have to set it all on fire. Then on those ashes, maybe… Just maybe instead of building a castle for ME, we can build a castle for US.

I have a message to myself I wrote on the back of a sticker sitting here on my desk and it says on it,
“How can I make the world a better place.”

It’s a thing I struggle with and struggle with often. Can I make the world a better place, no. But I think if i can get just a few other people to listen. Maybe if we can get a lot of people to listen… maybe…. just maybe…

And I think we are getting closer. We just need to keep asking the question WHY? Each and every day.

WHY? WHY? WHY?

And one last insomniatic thought from Jitterbug perfume by way of my brain:

We’re just soup. We’re born from soup. We live our lives. We go back to the soup. Why not make the best soup we can? Why not make everything the best for everyone?

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“Here’s Your Future” or “We’re gonna move to Northern California.”

November 20, 2021 No Comments

YOU GUYS!!!! Claire and I are going to do the dang old, dang thing! Ha! No we’re not getting married or having kids….We are moving out of Colorado at the end of January! I have been here for 20 years, and while I feel like Colorado is my home and I will one day die here; Claire has lived in Colorado all her life and wants a taste of something different! So we are going to go off and have an adventure. We have no clue where we will land, or awaits us, and it doesn’t matter as long as we have each other and our Dick… the tabby cat. Claire has a passion for fine wine and has always wanted to live near the water. After talking her out of moving to Florida, we are currently looking towards Northern California. But we’re also looking at Burlington, Vermont after she had a dream about it a few weeks ago. So it feels like anywhere is on the table right now. I don’t really care where we go. I’ll go anywhere with her, as long as it is not Florida. I have no doubt that one day we will be back in Colorado one day, but for now, we’re going to go see where the roads take us. Life is too short. I’m already 40 and maybe we’ll get 40 years together… So why not get out there and see what is happening in the world? Plus, for the last two years I have sat here on the couch and “worked on myself,” and worked on my growth, while she has been sitting here feeling stagnant. It’s time for me to be the supportive partner and it’s Claire’s time to grow now! You know, but with a nice ocean breeze in her hair. We might land on our asses. It might be a disaster, but as long as we are doing it together… We’re going to have one hell of an adventure to tell you all about. I could end it there, but before I go I want to thank the Graf brothers for taking a chance on me at Music City Hot Chicken – Denver. I was ready to do something stupid. I was ready to stay here, while Claire went off to California without me. We would try the long distance thing and see where our roads lead us. But the brothers and owners of Music City, Sam and Jordan heard of my predicament and my own special version of “Should I stay or should I go now,” rambling through my head. I had been telling them that I wanted to stay here and build something with them here in Denver. I just wanted to be a part of something special. We sat down and they each told me it would be okay for me to leave and things would work out just fine. A few weeks ago, I was cleaning the fryers for the umpteenth time, “Here’s Your Future” by The Thermals, played unprompted in my head. That week, Claire had been in California exploring and looking for her future home. There was no one home waiting for me and I was probably going to fall asleep on the couch again that night, after drinking too many beers. I was sad and lonely and in mourning for the life I thought I was going to have to lose. “Here’s Your Future.” And I know it’s obvious to many of you, but remember I’m not that fast and on more than one occasion someone has asked me if I was on the spectrum…. I’m scraping the flour out of the bottom of the fryers, and then it dawns on me… It took me long enough to get there, but I figured it out. I was already building something special. I was building a life with this wonderful woman. I would be a fool to let her go on alone without me. I want to go on this journey with her. I decided to commit to her and us. Had the brothers not sat me down and told me everything would be alright if I left, I probably would have stayed and kept pushing through. I would have made a bonehead decision to stay here and potentially miss out on a great adventure with these women I love, oh so much. Also, if I’m being completely honest, I always felt in over my head in my job at MCHC. I wasn’t cutting it, and didn’t know how to communicate what I needed to make things work. Cleaning those fryers, I thought a lot about Eric Stoltz and his time on Back To The Future. Stoltz was originally cast in Back To The Future as Marty McFly, when Michael J Fox was not originally available. Fast forward seven weeks of filming and it just wasn’t working out. On paper Stoltz seemed like a great idea. It could have worked and it could have been great, but the chemistry just wasn’t there and during those seven weeks, Michael J Fox became available and the film would of course go on to become a classic. I’m excited for the young man who is taking my spot. He’s got way more knowledge, experience and the back of house skills needed to take the restaurant to where it needs to go. He’s younger, hungrier and incredibly positive. He’s what that place needs and I can’t wait to watch it become a runaway success… much like Michael J Fox and Back to The Future. So “Here’s You Future:” We’re going to go off and have some adventures. We are going to hunt for that simple, happy, healthy life. We’re going to do it together. We’re not leaving until the end of January. I’m going to be with MCHC till mid-January and we will be leaving heading somewhere the first week of February. We’re going to be looking for recommendations on where to go. She wants

Vintage Film Reviews: A Wrinkle In Time (2018)

March 15, 2024 No Comments

This is a review I wrote about the film, A WRINKLE IN TIME, directed by Ava Duvernay that was posted on Facebook on March 15th, 2018. I wanted to post it here to keep for posterity. Thanks to MoviePass, I went and checked out A Wrinkle In Time tonight at the movies. The books were my favorites as a young boy. I remember actually getting detention in the 7th grade for getting caught reading one of them in Science class, a class I tried to purposely fail for some 7th Grade reason. Watching the movie, I remembered being that awkward shy fat kid who didn’t really have any friends, who was picked on and beat up in school every day. Watching this movie, I remembered that boy and tapped into him and I could see what this movie was reaching for and I think that’s why it held so much over me. I remembered getting the shit kicked out of me for wearing Rustlers or having a lunch box instead of a brown paper bag… I remember what it was like to be an outsider, yearning for something more and I remembered what brought me to those books in the first place. Because of my love of the source material, I didn’t hate the movie. I actually rather enjoyed it for the most part. The end was clunky and I felt like somewhere down the road they took a machete to the source materials and cut massive amounts of the heart and story from the books. I like some of the ideas of what they have left, and some of the new things they made up, but It felt like they cut oh so much meat off the bone that all you were left with was the scraps of a much better meal and I know what that meal tastes like so I can imagine it why I’m eating the scraps of how good it could have been and I think I just answered why I liked it. What I remember from the books, which is a little bit foggy. I own them, but probably have not read the first on in about 8 years… The original novel is about the inter connectivity between ourselves and the universe. How we and the Universe and everything in it are all a part of each other. These children are on a mission to save their missing father and save the universe. The book had a message that was much more about how only the power of LOVE could defeat the darkness that is advancing on our universe. Whereas in the newest film, it’s lessons are to LOVE YOURSELF and find your strength from within to defeat the darkness. I like the idea and I like the lessons of that idea, but by making that the core concept of the film, it took away a lot from other ideas from the book left in the film. So characters like Calvin had much less to do in the new film and much less a role to play in the new story than the old. PLUS WHERE WERE THE BROTHERS? You left in boring old Calvin, but got rid of the brothers?!?!? What the hell. The bad guy at the end of the universe. The darkness coming to over take us all was much more scarier in the book. Oh and Charles Wallace is a psychic child who knows things and is “creepy” and the kid who played him in the film was OKAY, but more annoying and less Creepy. I kept wanting, this character, which is suppose to be one of the most impressive minds in the universe to be a little more otherworldly like he is in the books. I kept thinking I wanted him to be more GAGE from Pet Semetery. haha Also, and why make this extraordinary mind adopted in the film?! In the book he’s the son of two of the most brilliant minds on earth, so it makes sense he’s so…. Otherworldly, but in the book he’s just a psychic adopted kid. But seriously, we felt no menace at the end of the film towards this Ultimate big bad…. So it felt flat. Okay. I’m nitpicking and I’m probably still buzzing off that edible… OH AND WHY DID THEY CHANGE THE CREATURE MRS WHATSIT CHANGED INTO FROM THE CENTAR THAT WAS ON EVERY COVER OF EVERY BOOK THE THE LEAF CREATURE!?!?! What the hell! But still. With all that said, I enjoyed the film. I think it will be great for young children and I really hope it opens them up to the book series. The books gave me strength and hopefully it will continue to do so for generations. Adults who are not fond of the source materials… Stay away. I don’t think there will be much for you here beyond some cool looking popcorn scenes. And the movie right now has an IMDB score of 4.2, but I would give this something like a 6.2. Not horrible and worth to watch on Netflix on a dark and stormy night…. (As I get down here to the end of this I realize I’m probably definitely still buzzing on this edible and probably shouldn’t post this. Did I even say anything worth a damn at all? Oh well. I spent all this time on it, so why let it go to waste.)

Facebook Archives: I started Zoloft and So Can You.

April 25, 2023 No Comments

I just wanted to put this out there for those who struggle in silence, so that those can know they are not alone and if this buffoon here can work to make himself a better person, so can you.