When your life becomes a Replacements song

Living with women is hard. the more they get to know you the more they know how to press your buttons and i'm now convinced you can tell how much you love them by using the inverse anger theory, hence the more you love 'em the more they piss you off, so after losing another conversation because i was trying hard to avoid the tears i inevitably cause when i drop then niceties and become the Caustic Kid i sat and listened and like every punch drunk fighter i took my lumps until i could sit in the fading light of some old gymnasium and nurse what was left of my mind, nurse the wounds incurred from not defending myself...

and though there was no one there to see it and you wouldn't have noticed if you were, i hurt, i took a bunch of my special vitamins and sat staring at the floor for a few hours trying to figure out how one comes to the point where you sit and stare at the floor for hours, flipping through the index cards scrawled with the drunken handwriting that were filed in my head, noticing how dirty the floor was, watching television with the sound off as fighter pilots performed acts of daring in battle, thinking of that song Unsatisfied by the Replacements, thinking about how close I come to being something more than a fucking idiot but never really getting over the hump, i lay on the couch and examined the ceiling and opened the front door and felt the beautiful warmth in the air for Feb. 17, licking my wounds as Louie cleaned his paws...

I slept a few hours and when i woke up i was still fucked and i walked to the diner and ate breakfast, i smoked cigarettes on my front porch and kept singing Bastards of Young in my head, we are the sons of no one/ Bastards of young, kept thinking how i was part of the first generation in Hamerica to do worse than their parents, how i had no wars to maim me, how cold it was getting, how low you could get, how fucked i still was from the night before... and the clouds kept rolling in so i went inside and cleaned the fucking house and cranked the Replacements on the stereo (Don't Tell a Soul and Let It Be) and drank beer for lunch and sang at the top of my lungs and when i was done i crawled back into bed as the gray got grayer and my cats all came in to hang out and we stared at the ceiling together except this time i was smiling and my bed felt good and my head felt good and the cats all purred and i hummed a few tunes and thought of Paul Westerberg and the boys and thought thank the fucking stars for us underachievers...