North Island...

Motherfucker Burn shows up here and sits me down and says something like sorry buddy, this one isn't going to go down like the last one did. I said something like I know, different part of the world - we've come too far, are different men than the men we were stomping around the world in our former lives. He said then that I didn't understand and suggested I listened close. He told me he wasn't writing the second book, that he couldn't, that it wasn't about him anymore. Then he told me the second book had to be written, said something about a process of elimination but by then I was already walking away from him. I don't like surprises and I don't like being abandoned and he was giving me both and nothing else. Nothing else. He said we each have a job while we're here. His is to train for the Ironman and mine is to write the book, the whole fucking book, on my own. I haven't been hanging out with him much because I feel like I've been betrayed - no, not betrayed - I just feel so fucking responsible for this now and that's not a corner I want to find myself in.

I took a couple days, alone, before agreeing to meet up with him again. We had a couple drinks, dinner. He told me at the beginning that I could not walk out on him, but that he was standing firm, that he would be a chaperone, at best until I didn't need him anymore, but that things weren't going to change. I've been through a lot, he said, and I'm going to go through a lot soon, he said, and then he said that he wasn't doing this for any other reason but for the sake that it's what is best for me, absolutely best for me. That's when a crazy thing happened. I believed him, no...I understood him and accepted him. And now I'm here staying in a house on North Island and he's off somewhere else while I get my head wrapped around this. I don't know what I expected this second edition to be like, but I didn't think it would be like this, even after the promises we've made.

I need to understand what is happening here. I need to understand. Something happened. Something terrible happened and I am detached from something, right now just floating.

They Call This Ravenous...

Like fucking a girl and telling her you don't want to fuck her anymore but letting her get your mail or let her hang around your house and suck you off from time to time and day to day, it's unhealthy and unbecoming and it's what my life feels like right now. The world is trying to suck my cock and I'm letting it, have to let it because I can't pull my calendar fast enough, can't come to terms and accept stillness here, in London, as we're thawing out and the world is supposed to be coming alive again, as I am supposed to be coming alive again. Every face I have to face and every word I'm forced to spit feels forced and unnecessarry and for everyone but not for me, nothing for me anymore, nothing satisfying me anymore. I need to move out and away and it's a good fucking thing I am...because I don't know what I would do if I weren't. There are necessities in my life that I absolutely must see through, and when this trip and this departure arrived in my mind, I had to do everything in my power to let it line, to make certain it would line for Burn. We have accepted our pulls in this world, and that this one is heavy and still 9 days from ripe. I talked to Burn yesterday and he is my echo. He may be even worse off than I am - the kid is struggling, fucking struggling and he still has a face to paint and I don't envy him, his everyday day to day when I can sit here and get blasted and ignore and shut out and shut away and he needs to remain present and available. He can't stand being available - he is the most shut away motherfucker I have ever known, so if you know him as anything other than that - he's been lying to you - everything he has ever been to you has been a lie, a huge fucking lie. Go ahead, chew on that. By the time you're ready to spit, maybe you're big enough to understand it's exactly truth. But you're not. So you'll pretend to understand and won't because you can't. Because you're not capable. Incapable. Exactly.

London town. London. I'm going to take some drugs and walk around and take it all in, maybe say goodbye. Because it's necessary. Because I'm going to continue to not only speak for myself, but also my friend Burn...

Because we're tired of dipping, and hosting, and pulling along and willing acceptance from the world for the forms of our expression. Because sometimes when we think about it, we think the worst thing in the world might be to get exactly what we think we want, what we thought we wanted. Because if someone ever came up to me and told me they knew me or that I connected to them because of what I wrote in my book, I'm pretty fucking certain I'd find a clever way to make someone kill me.

Because Burn will never say the things that need to be said. Once we go, we're gone. Never coming back.