The Journal of Charlie Pace {R}

[Charlie Pace]

((Random excerpts I wrote for Charlie's journal. They will probably have a linear timeline...sometime.))

August 15th, 1999

In the haze-y glow of an night of complete and utter chaos and all around debautchery, I remember standing up and looking at myself in the mirror. The bright Los Angeles city lights glowed in the background and I wondered standing there silently, how the FUCK did I get here?

I've always had a notebook. Since I was a wee little child of a very young age, I've always written down everything I've thought of, even if it didn't make sense to anyone else at the time. Which, looking now, makes me wonder if anything has changed from the days of my crayola-scrawlings. Well, I tend to call Sharpie's my writing utensil of choice, now. And I spell a bit better. But still, I have been told many a times (by my brother, mostly) that my penmanship can be compared to that of a five year old. He's just mad because he writes like a girl.

Anyway, I've always written everything down, you see. Every little titbit (did I just write tit?) of information that popped into my head, I wrote down. I dreamed about bacon and toasters? I wrote that down. I thought of the best line to the greatest song ever written? That went down as well. I thought about absolutely nothing at all? Well...that went down, too, somehow. Point I'm trying to make is that every little thought I had that I deemed important, I wrote down. However, as we (and by we, I mean DriveShaft, the most kick-bloody-ass band in the sodding world) find ourselves rising to the top of the charts (and the WORLD!) I find myself hesitating. Why? I don't know. Perhaps it's just the simple fact that anything I write could later be deemed perfectly good blackmail, should anyone get a hold of this. Perhaps it's that I think that should I put everything down, in this giant and vast grand-fucking-cayon of a buisness that is rock-stardum, I will lose the one thing that has held me from the ledge. Kept me from walking that six extra feet and diving right into blackness.

Maybe it's good that I'm still writing everything down. They say writing is good for the soul, right? Bloody right, they are. Who is 'they' anyway? I'd like to meet this small (I'm guessing they're small. There only seems to be a few of these buggers that make up all these stupid sayings that people say 'THEY' said) group of people and ask them where the hell they come up with all these fucking good sayings. 'Cause I need to tap into their source and pull some out for myself. Knowledge is power, they say.

See? I want to be THEY.

Someday, I know Liam and I will be THEY.

DriveShaft is going to make it. We're going to be the THEM that they talk about, and everyone is going to love us. Well, if everyone doesn't, Liam is going to try to love everyone. My brother really is a manwhore.

Soundcheck. Liam screams like a bloody girl.

Oh, and Happy Birthday to me. Twenty years young. I'm in a rock band shooting towards the top of the charts and I'm only twenty. What'll happen in a year from now? Ten years? I don't know. All I know is that it's gonna be one hell of a ride.

Okay, sound check for real.


April 15th, 2000

I can taste it so much in the back of my mouth and fuck it feels so good. I can taste every single crystal sliding down the back of my throat and even though they say it's disgusting I think it's fab and Liam's sitting here stoned out of his bloody goard and this is the BEST FUCKING LIFE I EVER HAD IF I COULD FUCK THIS MOMENT I WOULD WRECK IT.

more drugs. more drugs and as I'm writing this some chick is blowing Liam and he's making all these weird and annoying sounds and I wish he'd just shut the fuck up because I'm trying to snort a line and I can't snort a line while I'm laughing too bloody hard when Liam says 'suck it baby, harder,' it makes the cocaine shoot all out of my nose and I'm both disgusted and amused so I have to leave the room taking my drugs with me. He's still moaning but then it gets muffled and semi-silence fills the room once again until the sound of 'oh god' in a very female voice fills the room again and I'm thinking amused that my brother thinks he's a sexual god that could give Pan a run for his money when in reality he's just an addict like the rest of us that has good use of fingers and tounges. Sexual addicts, drug addicts, we're all addicted to the feeling. Now there's screaming from both pitches and it's starting to annoy me and I'm sure Jesus Christ is getting tired of his name being used in the most vilest of vains. Just come already, the lot of you.

I know as I write this that the drugs are bad but fuck they're so bloody good my toes curl and my breath hitches up in my throat and there's some girl that just walked in with a bow around her stomach and nothing else and I think i want to fuck.

happy birthday to charlie.

[Charlie Pace]

Some day, 2005. They all blend together anyway.

I have no clue who she is.

It's like what they say babies hear. Sounds and mumbles and groans that sound like human speech, yet you can't speak it, can't understand it, but all you know is that it's comforting. Safe.. Is it some sort of weird language that I don't speak? Am I hearing Klingon or something in my dreams? No, if it was Klingon, I'm sure it'd sound more manly, and gutteral. And this is not gutteral. It's sweet and light. And besides, I don't know why I'd have star trek characters in my dreams. Star Wars, maybe, but not Star Trek. Leia was a right sex bomb in that little slave outfit. I wonder if Karen would be Leia for Halloween. I'll have to ask her.

I wonder sometimes if I'm dreaming about my mother. I thought I saw her last night when I opened my eyes. I saw a woman sitting in the rocking chair by my bed. I saw blonde hair and the smile that I remember from my childhood and then in an instant, she was gone. That's when I got sick. Karen, bless her...I asked her once what it meant if I saw a girl in my dreams. She told me that maybe she was my angel. My muse. Or maybe I was just sex-starved and I'd dream up a woman to satisfy myself.

Liam's found his soulmate, alright.

I don't know what she is or who she is, but I'm in love. I'm in love with a girl and I don't even know who she is.

I met a girl at Saint Sebastian's. She said her name was Claire Littleton. She had a baby, Aaron, who had a head like a turnip and she looked so sad. She was saying that I died on a plane, and I kept telling her that I didn't die on a plane. I died on the floor of my hotel room with head full of bad blow, nose full of blood in my brother's arms. Details, I told her.

She looked so sad. Underneath it all, for one brief second, I saw her smile. Is it wrong to love someone when you just met them? Or maybe not love. Maybe love is too strong, because I think I've only been in love once. I don't even know if that was love anymore. Her baby was cute. I wonder what I would be like with a baby. I do well with Mae, I give the baby-sitting thing pleanty...but my own. Something to call mine.

I can't even call myself mine. How can you love someone when you don't even love yourself?

There's the thing I don't understand. I don't know how to explain it to anyone. I don't love myself. I hate myself so much; I hate who I've become and hate everything that I've done and yet...when I close my eyes and I'm on that beach that I've seen so many times in my dreams as of late, I love myself. I close my eyes and smell the ocean and the sand and I know that I mean something. My life means something.

And then there's that girl. She's always behind me, always beside me and yet when I look over, she's gone...but she's never really gone. She's far away, smiling and telling me that she'll see me soon.

I wonder what they'd say if I told them I wanted to sleep forever. Would they lock me up in a padded room? It's not like that. I don't want to die. I've died already once, I didn't like it. They said I drowned. Well, they didn't actually say that, but that's what I got from it; the blood got into my lungs from my nose and I drowned.

Somehow, someway, lying on the floor, drowning...it felt so familer.

Maybe this is what happens in a breakdown. Everything that's most horrible and most frightening, it feels like you've done it all before. Maybe I'm still drowning and havn't found a reason to come up for air.

Maybe I'd be okay with drowning if I knew what I was doing it for.

I should go. It's getting hard to write. My hands don't want to do what my brain tells them anymore.

So this is what it's like to hit bottom.

[Charlie Pace]

January 8th, 2008

It's over.

I officially don't care anymore. I'm tired of caring. I'm tired of screaming. I'm tired of crying and I'm tired of lying. I'm tired of always being the one that needs to be picked up out of the hole, only to realise that the world that I've been brought back up too is more violent than the dark, black pits itself. Maybe I should just dig myself another little hole and curl up for a couple of years. Maybe things will be different. Maybe there'll be someone waiting for me. Maybe people will stop being fucking idiots. Maybe America will have a decent Football team. There could be hundreds of possibilities if I just slept for a while.

Liam's back on the drugs. Karen has no idea yet. Or maybe she does and she's ignoring it. We all walk on eggshells mixed with pins and needles, careful not to spoil anything or pop someone's bubble of perfection that we think we have here. God, it's anything but. It's anything but perfect, and I know when we leave for Sydney, it's going to be worse.

Maybe this was too good to be true. Having my brother and sister in law in my flat, playing the perfect little role of mother and father to a four year old and a 30 year old child. I'm almost 30. I've been on this planet almost 30 years, and in 30 seconds it could all go away.

I wish I had gotten the number of the girl from the hospital, Claire. Claire Littleton. Maybe I shoulda asked her out. Maybe I should have asked her to marry me. I mean, the worse thing could have been she would have said no. Or laugh in my face. Or call the cops. Hell, the closest thing that I have to a soft, warm thing next to me in bed is Mr. Teddylicious the Third, the stuffed Teddy Bear that Megan gave me. The fact that I'm stuck next to a male (how IS it male, anyway? Facinating.) teddy bear with a button for a nose and the same, unchanging blank look. I'm not quite sure if I'd like it if it smiled. That'd be a little unnerving.

The dreams are getting worse. I wake up in a cold sweat. I've got bruises on me that I don't know how I got. Unless Mr. Teddylicious is a violent bedmate. And then, I've got a whole other set of problems than just bad dreams. I've got an abusive teddy on my hands. I wouldn't be surprised if the sod punched me in the middle of the night. I need a female Teddy. Maybe I'll go to the store with Megan and replace Mr. Teddylicious with a Teddy of the female kind.

Once again, how does one know the sex of Teddy bears? And if I got a female teddy bear, would Mr. Teddylicious get jealous? Or worse, violent? What happens if I have a Teddy Domestic Violence episode on my hands? What if I have to call the Teddy Cops? I just hope Ms. Teddy does not scream out that she loves him as he's being hauled away in the cop car.

These are the things I think of when I'm not on drugs, I just realised that. The gender of Teddy bears, and domestic bear violence.

I need a hobby. Or a girl. Or both. I need a new life. I need a job. I need something that doesn't remind me of what I've lost, and what I'm losing. What the people I care about are losing.

I'm toying with the idea of telling Karen. But Liam would hate me, Karen would leave, and I'd never see Megan again.

Everything's just so bloody fucked right now.

And I miss Libby.