Author: james

Answer the call, answer the call, answer the call. I am answering.

I feel very dulled. I think this is the most concerning development I’ve undergone in my life; or perhaps I mean disconcerting more than concerning. I’ve had this idea of myself for years of being sharper than a tack; sharper than the word sharp, just on the ball, turn on a dime, a million revolutions per minute, but lately, I am feeling the sluggish reality. Somewhere along the way, stagnation stormed in, set up its oppressive regime and mental atrophy soaked everything up. Of course, it didn’t stop there, because a new leader was put in place of the regime and stagnation wasn’t enough for this tyrant– somewhere along the way, there was a recession of sorts.

I honestly don’t know how I could have avoided it, or what the long-term effects will be, but when you think about it, it is just really difficult to overcome the environment you are in. I am not trying to blame things here, because the way I see things, I always am going to see the sum of myself being what I am putting into myself, but school definitely led the charge of stagnation. I don’t know what you’d call it, maybe a game of sorts, you know, a game.. as in something that adults call a game so kids will do stuff that they want to do. Like quiet mouse, what is the best way to get those miniature energy human things to shut up for once? Oh, we’ll just tell them its a game! That is how I have been going through school for, well, who knows how long. When I was really young, I really wanted to excel, and I enjoyed learning. I just had an uncontrollable desire to make the most out of it. Then middle school days came, and the whole social world started to shift. Suddenly, I saw this entire sphere that I hadn’t paid much mind to. Of course, you have friends, you have your best friends and then you have everyone else. Though when your eyes truly see the scope of this sphere, you get confused, suddenly, “everyone else” is something crucial.

I could identify a moment in time where it was totally disoriented by this revelation. I left the academic sphere all to itself and tried to figure out what was going on with this social one, further leading to a see-sawing between the two, and much like in the physical realm, I can’t even juggle 2 object properly. Time passed and I like to think that I got the concept of finding the right pocket between the two spheres down, you know, Venn Diagrams and what-not. So I returned, fully, to the realm of education. By this time, I had grown up a lot and had a few more tools on my belt than I was as just a lad, and at some point in high school, I really started to begin to develop intellectually. Now, let me say that I am not saying that I was well-developed in that realm by than, nor that I even am now, but just that the process began then; a process that seems to always gain momentum.

So now that this brief recollection of personal history is out of the way, I can get to what I intended to. At some point, I figured out the game of school, or rather, that no matter the setting, you could pretty much always game the system.  I suppose that I figured that I could juggle things more efficiently if I constructed a simple game out of school,  because I knew I could get what I need to out of it without having to put in more time and effort than required. I could probably argue that this was the beginning of the end.

Years and years of playing the same game, just with different variations and the time came; I had my Sky Net moment. I became self-aware. I guess I accepted the truth of how things were. I still have continued to have a desire to really put everything I can into this entire education thing, yet it was nothing like the unstoppable force within me when I was young, just like a rumbling beneath the surface, the Richter scale could perhaps pick it up,  but nothing was felt. Perhaps it was my own folly, for not trying hard enough to get into studying something that stimulated me hard enough, because there are plenty of fields that I would think are much more demanding than what I’ve been doing, but I also think that this is a fragmented stipulation. Why? Well, because it is hard to avoid the BS factor of everything. It is a lot like interacting with people, we have this initial BS layer that we all encounter as a facade of sorts. In my head, I see it like Star Trek, Star Wars and most any space travel Sci-Fi, with these shields around the ship, and we can encounter these vessels only at shield level first. I’ve always hated that when interacting with people, and I guess I hate it with learning too.

Here is the sad part of it all, it really makes me realize how basic I am as an individual. I am almost purely driven by stimulation.

Am I mentally stimulated?

If yes, then initiate obsession sequence.

If not, then forget it– and I do, very quickly.

I study business, primarily. Here’s the thing, I am actually interested in the subject matter. You should have seen me when the whole financial collapse was happening. I didn’t sleep. I just read everything I could find that somehow related to it. I sought out every single perspective I could find on everything. Even more, I was emotionally moved by a lot of what was transpiring.

I haven’t given a damn about anything related to studying business in quite a while. It was almost like I could go into class– first day– and without looking at the syllabus, or even knowing what class I was in, I knew what was expected of the class. I could probably just skim through some Powerpoints, look up the instructions for one of 1-5 major assignments/papers/group projects/presentations, spend a night working on it, and it’d turn out fine. I hate how that sounds, but it is at least close to the truth, because for most classes, in or outside of my major field of study, I’ve followed a really similar formula for practically 4 1/2 years, except you can throw in actually attendance to class, as well as earnest yet meager attempts to actually study anymore than that.

Let me stop myself right here. I don’t want this to sound like a couple thousand words of me venting about school, educational institutions or undergraduate studies, because this is not my goal, nor what I want to do. In fact, I do think that the university that I call home has proven to be one of the best in the area in a lot of fields that I have been interested in. I can easily keep this kind of talk up for pages, the point being, I am not wanting to bash school, the common educational process or make myself sound like I think I am brilliant or anything. None of these are true, I just need context. I need contrast. I need to outline how I’ve gotten to where I am.

Now that I’ve rambled a bit too much, then tried to excuse my rant, I can skip ahead and do what I should have been doing all along; sum it up. Long ago, the things which took up the majority of my time began to fail at mentally stimulating me. I resided in this stagnant land for too long, without questioning it. Furthermore, if you throw in stages of emotional and personal turmoil of sorts, as well as unexpected phases of life in there, you get desecration.

So I’ve been living in a desecrated mental-emotional state. I let it come to this. Now I’ve dulled. I wake up and still think I am sharp like I used to be, but I try to venture outside of my own head and immediately get tangled in the weeds. This troubles me and I hate it. I hate stagnation. I hate this dim feeling. I realize now, that because of how my mind works, how I work, I can never accept stagnation.

I feel like people have been perceiving me in the wrong way for a good while now, even close friends, or probably former close friends, as I’ve strayed away from most everybody– this idea that I just don’t care. I’ve dulled out. I care, perhaps to the point of addiction, about trivial things, thus I am a harmless tack.

I’ll tell you one thing, I may have dulled in many ways, but when it comes down to it, I am sharper than you. I am Excalibur.

I just need to get back to applying this to all these other areas of my life, and not only my own purely internal interests. I guess at this part of the story, I’m still just the Sword in the Stone.

I am kind of scared of myself, lately. Maybe I am really just fearful for myself. It isn’t the typical sense of fear, though. More of a suspense. That suspense of not really knowing what the person is going to do next. The thing about suspense, is there doesn’t have to be any real sign of danger, the fact that you realize how truly random life is can be more than enough subconscious terror for one to handle.

Anyway, I guess I have this notion that I have become intoxicated with the idea of disconnecting. Because I am intoxicated, I have no real control over it at the moment. What tie will I sever next? Will I cut myself off completely, and disappear to some distant sector of the world and start over? Or maybe I am just a kid playing with sharp objects– a marionette playing with his own strings, cutting them with no direction until I incidentally cut off the one controlling my hand. Then I’ll just be a partially functional doll, something even Pinocchio would mock.

Surprisingly, none of this seems to concern me that much. I think it boils down to one thematic factor of my life. I don’t make mistakes.

Joking, of course I make plenty of mistakes, but my entire life I’ve been obsessed with trying to make the optimal decision. Anytime I have failed to, even if it was still arguably a good decision, I let myself have it. It isn’t an innovative system, it is just typical, but it has always been in overdrive. (here come the ridiculous statements..) I feel like, relative to everyone else I’ve grown up around, that I’ve really made very few mistakes. Of course, what do I mean by mistake? Well, I don’t know if I have a concrete definition, but I guess I really mean, those kind of decisions that you know are likely just so stupid, yet you do it anyway. We have a lot of words and phrases that kind of feed into this concept, but they all hit different areas. Chance, gambling, throwing it all away, risk, youth, folly, ignorance, ad nauseam. It doesn’t even necessarily have a negative connotation, it just is what it is.

In high school, my coaches would always get on to us, about how we weren’t playing to win, we were playing not to lose. In some sense, I feel like I could say this is sort of how I feel about my life. So I say that I feel that relative to all the people I know and have grown up with I have made less mistakes because I have obsessed so much about it. Maybe it wasn’t me trying to make ‘the right decision,’ or do the right thing, but just me trying to not make ‘the wrong decision.’

I don’t know how much sense this is making, I’ve written this in my head dozens and dozens of times– it came out a lot better each of those times, but the point is this; it has driven me crazy.

I am not advocating waking up in the morning, leaving the house and setting out to screw up as much as possible, nor am I saying that the thought that I should be afforded some of these phases of poor judgment that I didn’t allow myself to have, but anyone who has ever learned anything difficult (aka, everyone) knows that you are probably going to learn more from your shortcomings and mistakes– I mean, otherwise, you’ve already learned it… or something to that effect.

This isn’t a declaration that I am about to turn myself into a moron for a while, or any sort of statement that I am on the market to make myself some fancy new ‘mistakes’. If it is taken for anything, take it as an individual coming to grips that as hard as I try to avoid it, I am going to make some decisions that later leave me feeling regret, or just plain wondering what on Earth I was thinking. This is trying to learn how to accept that fact that I really have no grip on the future. I can predict what tomorrow will look like, and usually do a good job, but that isn’t to my own merit, because I also can predict what tomorrow will look like and end that day blind– if you know what I mean.

Forgive me, please. Ha, actually, those 3 words outline everything perfectly.

I probably only make sense to myself.

Rock on!

There’s something about this time of year, something about going outside at night and just standing out there in the cold and dark, as the wind sneaks around the trees as if its playing a game of hide and seek with the night. Sometimes I’ll look up and notice how much clearer the sky looks, in a much bolder black and better contrasted dots of seemingly infinitely distant nuclear fusion, and I just feel removed. Much like the stars themselves, while I gaze upon them they seem so calm and serene, but when distance is no longer a buffer they burn and erupt with unimaginable intensity, I feel the same way about myself. It is almost as if I step outside and by using the lifeless feel of the cold air, I can illustrate an outline of myself in my head. I can close my eyes and see this tiny being standing outside and alone. I can look at him and understand how much he is feeling at the moment, because when you can place yourself in such a place, you really can only feel. I stand there, and at the same time feel that the world, in its own way is dying, yet simultaneously that the world is so full of life and wonder.

So I go back inside; bring back the noise. Perhaps it is too much to handle.

Traditionally, my dreams have never been very direct. They have always been extremely vivid, intricate abstractions of a million various thoughts and feelings, but rarely direct. Rarely would I ever believe, upon waking up from one of my many memorable dreams, that I could say, “Yeah, that one was definitely derived from being stressed out about accidentally throwing my dad’s hat off of the parking lot shuttle in Disney World.” Or anything to that effect. If my dreams were a crime scene, there would be no patterns, no tangible evidence, but if you could harness yourself and hover above the room, the mess of the whole thing would reveal itself as some sort of M.C. Escher meets Picasso meets Salvador Dali type of bloody, catastrophic painting. I’ve asserted it before, and I will again, in most cases, I believe that my dreams have served as some sort of creative medium. I sleep. I dream. I wake up. I have experienced and seen images of a constructed world which does not exist. I connect this with my waking thoughts. In an ancestorial fashion, somewhere down the road, the seeds of these visions comes out in some sort of self-expression. This process reciprocates. I have two distinct consciousnesses, one waking, one sleeping. The combination of the two seems to fully construct who I am.

Lately, things are different. An error has popped up in the system. I’ve been having tangible dreams, on a very frequent basis. Sometimes I go to sleep feeling paranoid, lost and beyond the point of desperation. When I wake up, I feel driven, determined and like I’ve arrived at the point beyond hope– assurance because I am able to do something about ‘it’. Sometimes the cycle is the opposite, and I wake up feeling how I did before I went to sleep the other night and vice versa.

These dreams I have– these dreams are so terrifying. I’ve been invaded. The invaders are fools though. They are the clever cat hiding behind the somewhat translucent curtain.–

I can see you there, you know?

—     These dreams are still in their vivid, intricate and impossibly abstract settings, but its all just a smoke screen. Immediately they are given away. In the settings are the things that must be haunting me. People, events, experiences that all happened and were very real pervade these elaborately constructed sets. Filth, I call it– and like some sort of terrible sludge monster terrorizing the perfectly imperfect surroundings of human order and urbania, I wake up and have no trouble following the slimy, grimy and detestable path around the block to memories that are the same relative distance in time.

Lately, my life has changed a lot. I am no longer suspended. I am not fastened into any type of bracing. If I could fly, then I could fly anywhere my heart desired, but I am no where near flying, so I am just free falling.

I left the system that I so vitally depended on. We tend to hand over our lives, in their entirety, and tell entities other than ourselves to take care of them. Cultivate them, incubate them, this is my investment, making it into something more. Maybe I just realized I wasn’t getting anything more out of it. Maybe it wasn’t so much the thought that if I took my investment of self back that I could get more than I could get within the system, but more like, if I don’t get myself back, there won’t be any of myself left worth having.

If you ask me why I am not in school anymore, well, then that would probably be the best I could offer. Not much of an explanation, maybe, but I am not gifted enough, in words, to do any better.

The sun’s down again. It usually is. That’s when you choose to live.

Sometimes, and by that, I mean all of the time, you live by thinking. Your mind lives vicariously through your body.  The problem is that nobody else sees it. You’re alone tonight,.. thinking about how cool you are. Your coolness quotient is greater than a beatnik chilling in his resident cafe, right side of his lips clamping onto a burning cigarette, smoke fading away into molecular obscurity, conveying his caution-to-the-wind-transient-life-like-smoke-don’t-give-a-damn outlook on life, yet still not quite cool enough to surpass the James Dean and something to lean on combination; a small difference, yet still a vast chasm to be caught in. That’s ok though, you have more than enough traits to make up for the small shortfalls in coolness; sharp as a bloodthirsty tack, just lying in wait on the ground for an unsuspecting toe, you’re smart. You’re wittier than a sock puppet, but you don’t put much stock in wit–wit gets annoying. That wit does translate into what could only be called a superior sense of humor, yet your sophistication often holds it back. Yeah, glue it all together, you’re medieval. You’re a knight. You’re decked in the most elaborate armor; platemail breastplate and leggings, heaume with the red feathers of a phoenix on top, concealing your identity, yet cultivating your reputation. Nobody wants to see your figure propped up on steed, growing into view on the horizon. You’re who everyone needs to watch out for, but nobody else sees you.

You used to feel overshadowed by your friends, until you realized you are overshadowed by your friends. Together, you’re like a fun house, except they replaced the mirrors with normal ones, so they look all proper and beautiful, while next to that you just look slightly amiss. Not completely wrong, but you don’t stack up. You don’t make much of it, because no matter that, when you are with your friends you feel like the biggest man in the room, or at least the one most worthy of an ego, maybe that’s even true, you wouldn’t know, nor would I. This doesn’t make you any less overshadowed though, and that just feeds the envy, and envy is a gluttonous pig, or maybe just an American.

You envy women. They don’t have to do anything but stay girls, while for you to be on the radar you have to accomplish something. As soon as you’re not accomplishing anything, you’re disappearing. You’re invisible for now, its too much work, accomplishing stuff. You wonder how that is fair, “I have to make the world turn. All she has to do is let everyone see her at a good angle,” you’re scoffing again just thinking about it. If anything really mattered, they should be lining up to petty your coat, whatever that means. Instead, the laymen line up as if Steve Jobs himself declared her, “magical,” taking turns at her, like a balloon, huffing and puffing every pleasantry and desperate attempt they can, hoping that their contribution will transform them into laid men, or at least noticed. Apparently, that’s an existence validated. You take every approach you can come up with, yet you always fail to see their contribution. You just failed again.

“Screw this,” you think. So instead of putting in the work, you do nothing. Perhaps you prefer obscurity over injustice, there go those values again. You have them.

They don’t get you much.

The sun still isn’t out, so there really isn’t much to illuminate yourself. That’s that, nobody else sees you, nobody else recognizes you, but at least you know.

You’re cool.

It is hard to take a look inside when you pass by the mirror without recognizing anyone. Look up and there’s a stranger in front of you. Familiar face. Reticent eyes. Robotic expression. Was it in a wax museum? Perhaps it was out of expectation that you forgot who you were. If you aren’t continually reinventing yourself, then who do you become? Staying the same surely doesn’t mean you stay yourself. Aliens populate this planet and, if they aren’t careful, become too comfortable in the foreign skin they briefly occupy.

I’m not one for becoming too comfortable. Is staying ahead of your own curve being on edge? It’s probably even slightly paranoid, but small doses of paranoia, like alcohol, sugar or other numbing poisons, carry positive effects. Stay on edge, stay sharp. If you’re not at least one step ahead of yourself then you only become your own shadow. Sometimes I spend some time under cover of my shadow and think that it feels good — to sit there, spoiling in darkness. Then I long for my face. Without my face, I am unidentifiable, indistinguishable. Let’s keep my shadow riding my coattails, I’ll run the show. I’m more suited for the bright lights and big stage, anyway.

Who are we to share a thought all to ourselves? I’m thinking it, you’re thinking it, he’s thinking it, she thought it a long time ago, but we sat on them like all those young days, where we lied to our parents without any real reason to. Who are we to judge ourselves for a thought? In the future, thoughts probably will punish like we already perceive they do, and when that day comes, who knows what will become of me, but until then… let me think. What’s the worst that could happen? Something could come of it. I don’t know, but the word ‘could’ has never brought me anything in my life. My luck is more neutral than the wind. Cut out the histrionics. Chain them up. You can feed them, but make sure that plate is always just out of their reach. Too much fear of others. Even if there is a holocaust, there’s no more sense hiding from it anymore. Take me for what I am.

Misinterpret instead. Who do you think I am? What do you think I am? Maybe I don’t know either. Say very little so everything writes its own story, fills in blanks and takes creative liberties; become something else. Or use every word at your disposal and say nothing at all. Maybe…

Don’t mean to.