mindjames

Category: friends

Thoughts which heavily involve, analyze, or reference my friends.

  • no title, this one was hard to write

    Summary: Where I was last year. Triumphing over it. Her. The nature of love. What ideals of love that form what we want when we think about loving someone. End.

    I’m tired. At birth, I resolved to start every blog entry I have with mentioning how tired I am. I slept from 6:30 – 11. That kinda sucks. Plus I’m used to going to sleep at 1 am these days.

    I haven’t had an honest update since August. August, as you all know, was when my life got unpaused. It is in play, but there is enough there for it to be fast forwarding. This section is starting to wind down. It feels longer than the few months it has been. I have to force myself to check-in– right now! This is an important moment of my life currently. I need to write about it.

    Exactly a year ago, I was the steaming car broken down on the side of the road, you know, that one on some sun-dried, endless stretch of road in the desert. Even if I could go, I had no direction.

    I look back on it all and realize how much it sucks. I systematically gave up everything I had, even the best things I had. I had a love, but very little to offer her. I didn’t officially relinquish that until a couple months following my break down, but it happened. I had enough moments where I doubted if I’d ever come back from it all. Recovering from serious injury always puts that doubt in your mind that you can do it again; that your injury won’t resurface and prevail.

    A few days ago I turned in a business plan and a strategic management group case. Those two shadows hadn’t left my room in a year. No matter any attempt to fill these dark spaces with light, they remained. I knew going back into school that these specific assignments, as well as the others would not be a problem. I was more than capable of completing them, of excelling, even, but they only go increasingly daunting as time passed; as their time approached.

    Fast forward to feverish typing and hours stacking like Tetris blocks on level 99, I think I ultimately was removed from myself in all this. There was no other way. In every case, I completed these things at the last minute. These shadows in my room were gone.

    Without that obstruction I am now seeing the reality of what is finally–finally approaching. Four months later I finally feel like I’ve found my place on this campus, and now I’m about to leave it.

    I am finally finding that I can feel in other ways, not that I am ready to deal with anything involving love, but that I am finally progressing. I think I am discovering that I need closure on the past. How she decided to find closure may have worked for her, but I now realize it doesn’t work for me. I don’t know what to do about that. I think I need to talk to her, even if it is just one conversation. I don’t know what to say, though. I’d have no direction. I don’t know if it is selfishness or a true pursuit for closure. Every instance of contact I’ve had with her since the 1st of January has waterboarded me with guilt and self-loathing. I don’t want to be a problem. Apparently any contact is a problem. I don’t know what I’ll do about that. Too bad I can’t bat signal this and her contact me on her own initiative.

    I had a conversation last night about love. The prompt was: if you could be in love with any person, who would it be? My answer was no answer. I didn’t know. That concept doesn’t exist for me right now, how could I dare to even spotlight any one person? As an aside, it is interesting to hear other people answer that question. Among friends it seems that we would want a love with someone that is somewhat unexpected, or contrary to how things are in reality. When I think about it, I can only think of 2.. maybe 3 people that I could actually see having a relationship that would constitute real love — out of the people I currently know (and one of those is automatically subtracted, given the circumstance of how things turned out).

    It is odd to me, though, because when I think of a majority of girls that I know, I think that I would be the best option for them, with regards to love.  I also think that I could have at least a ‘decent’ love with just about anyone, and when I say decent I mean better than average– maybe not up to my standards, but better than average. These kind of opinions, when spoken out loud, probably make me sound like some terrible, arrogant person, but I believe this– and I’m usually right.

    It just begs a lot of questions about love, and also what we think about when we imagine a love with someone. I guess love is intrinsically associated with  some sort of pursuit of happiness– an alignment of desire for physical intimacy, emotional support and someone you can just count on being with and around. I hope it is evident that I’m not putting much effort into defining love and the forces that drive the need for it.

    I also think that when I imagine being in love with a specific person, it has a lot of variability, but then again, there are a lot of similarities. I think on this stage, I’ll just leave it at that. I thought about divulging an example, but I think that is something best saved for one-on-one conversation.. it was more just a thought exercise for myself, and a future question to ask people in conversation. Curiosity sparked.

    I have many more thoughts on the forefront, but I’m having trouble writing given the environment I’m in. A 4 person chat group decided to assemble next to my work area, so long 5 hours of peace I’ve enjoyed. I have to get back to work anyway.

    This time last year I was laying in my bed 16 hours a day, trying to hide from the rest of the world; using sleep as a numbing agent to everything I was feeling. Now, I’m about to finish up a couple more presentations and barrel on. I get stronger everyday.

  • social parasite

    wake up at 4:45 tomorrow. Damn, that is going to come quick. Just forget about it, get it tomorrow. Get the extra 20 minutes. I’m writing garbage tonight, anyway. No, no, stay up. Churn it out. I’ll let another butterfly flutter-by — off again. These thoughts, my thoughts, are like light particles, never again will the same waves touch my face in the way they do in the present. Tomorrow, it might still be light that hits me, but it won’t be the same. Force the thought out, I have to, I’ll sleep when my body KOs me.

    Pardon the inner monologue, but I’ve been battling with myself to force this out and sacrifice a small amount of sleep for poor quality, or maybe not get around to writing for who knows how long– and not on the kernel of thought I want to write on. So I’m doing it.

    I hate that I didn’t do any writing on here for the entire month of September. It was a great month. I don’t even just mean that in the paradigm of my life, but September is always such a pleasant month, filled with some of the most pleasant, beautiful days that the calendar year carries. Sorry for not treating you as well as you treat me, September.

    I’ve been busy. I think I’ve finally gotten a grip on this schedule. Since I last blogged, I’ve ‘powered up’ by many orders of magnitude. As much as I hate to relate myself to a Pauly Shore movie, I feel like Encino Man. I was brought out of stasis in August. I spent most of September recovering from severe atrophy. October, will be the first full month I have to make use of it all.

    There have been a lot of significant changes in my social sphere. After yesterday, two of the biggest are the return of two of the most kindred spirits I know, Robert and Joshua ‘Big Cheese’ DeWayne Homer. I’m out and about, almost all of my closest friends are all back… here. In many ways, I am at full power, or at least I’m back at my peak capability.

    With a small amount of insight, you would know that I don’t care for personal chronicling in such a manner, so herein lies my main point from all of this; I am a social parasite.

    Maybe it isn’t quite a parasitic exchange, but that is how I relate it in my head. I have trust to be myself around my best friends. I trust myself in different ways with different ones. Thus, the more I have around, the more complete level of trust I have in everyone else. I feed off of that. I feed off of being with a few friends. I am comfortable by myself, but I don’t let people see much of myself when I am. I am merely comfortable subsisting. It would be nice if it weren’t this way, but I’ve accepted how it is going to be.

    Thing is, I’ve had to regain a lot of the comfort and trust I had with those that I actually had the comfort and trust with. I was out with 3 of the most inner circle I have last night, and I often felt myself comfortable to just subsist, instead of realizing that I, the prawny, tiny parasite had so much more at my disposal than I am used to. I had the vehicles in place to be bigger than my body, larger than my personality, to be the mythical creature I dream that I used to be.

    Robert and I have had a lot of talks lately about being ourselves; feeling like ourselves. In the weakest period of my recovery and ‘exile’ as I’m now calling it, I often wrote about not feeling comfortable in my own skin, about being some foreign entity operating this… thing, that was supposed to be me on some inefficient, poorly designed proxy. The good news is that I go through long stretches of days now where I feel like I am pretty much the me of today– the combination of the me I used to be and the changes that have stuck from being dinged around like a pinball the past few years, but I know that despite that, I still won’t fully reveal myself unless I am able to enable myself via social parasitism.

    When the thought that is now the words on this blog first materialized in my head, I had a lot more to say. I’d like to think it was more intriguing and insightful, but now, I am just reflective and vague.

    Last night, I had a conglomeration of 3 of my entourage that I rarely, if ever, get to be with all at once. It was nice to have that comfortable, almost untouchable feeling. I could feed off of that comfort that they brought to me and flourish. I did. I think I am accepting that I will never be anything more than a social parasite. Socially, I can either be a weak, sickly non-entity, or a mythological demigod that wears a cape, but it is purely dependent on who I have around me, and how recently I’ve been able to ‘feed’.

    I won’t stop trying to fix that, but I have other things to worry about, like veiled interest. I gotta make that stuff more direct, eh?

    The Parasite. I hate parasites, but I don’t think I mind calling myself that, either.

    Oh ho ho, had to put some sort of self-loathing quip in there, or was it?

    ¿

  • Thoughts from a deceased conversation

    Last night I was talking with some friends and on multiple occasions each of the writing proclivities of my friends in the room and I go brought up. There was sort of a pre-approved consensus that one friend was the poetry guy, one guy was the short story/fiction/narrative guy, one guy was the song writer and I was the anecdote/essayist/non-fiction prose guy of the lot.

    This wasn’t to say, “Oh, well you’re this and he’s this, there is no way you guys can or ever write anything else,” but the general point or acceptance seemed to be that we each tend to write in these mediums because they are our strengths and the mode we prefer to write in.

    In the brief span of some hours, I’ve managed to find the time and energy to think on that some more. I don’t remember consciously thinking about it, which must mean that it has been eating away at my brain for a little while. Something about it didn’t resonate properly with me. It is only as of an hour ago that I realized I disagree with the sentiment.

    It kind of relates to something Dr. C went over today in Venture Planning about virtue. Virtue is basically the active representation of ones character, thus (and in this case, in business) actions and decisions people make are defined by virtues. These virtues aren’t something that is a conscious process, but something that has been cemented as part of that person’s character over a lifetime of previous decisions and actions. In the case of the class, the example was people who have conducted poor business practices (like a Madoff or Enron crew) didn’t have the entire internal process before deciding it, they likely just did it, because that is how they’ve done things throughout their entire lives.

    I don’t think the previous paragraph will relate a whole lot to the rest of the writing, but I think my thought there is that I wish the concept of virtue applied to productive output. In this case, I don’t believe it does.

    I don’t write in a narrative format very often. Though I did with moderate regularity when I was younger, I rarely write poetry anymore. Even when I do, I don’t consider it poetry. Only recently in my life have I started writing songs, despite it being part of my lineage, but just because I don’t do these things, doesn’t mean that I don’t gravitate for them.

    Let me drill straight into the core here: I don’t think the format that you usually see me write on this blog, or other avenues is my strongest point as a writer. In fact, I think it is one of my weakest. Maybe my best practiced, and also the one I have easiest access to, but not my strongest. If you asked me what I thought my strongest suit in this deck of cards was, without any hesitation I’d say it was narrative. The thing is, I almost never write in that format. When I do, I don’t often finish what I start (even if I finish a draft, I don’t revise, rewrite, etc.). And even when I get that far, I almost never let anyone who doesn’t have my set of eyes see it.

    Maybe you don’t agree with me and are thinking, “Well, James, if it really was your strongest area, you would involuntarily do it more often.”

    Look, I don’t know if I could accurately identify why I don’t, I think there is an element to these other forms that is much more personal than just writing personal accounts and and egotistical essays. In this format, all I need are a couple of ideas and a vocabulary and I can express everything I need. It isn’t the most fun thing in the world, but I do enjoy it. In something like a narrative, I still have the foundation of ideas, as far as themes go, but I also have to have ideas for the narrative, as well as direction and an entire different set of tools for structure.

    When I write something like this, it is like someone giving me a box of bike parts and saying, “You. Build 2 wheel machine!”

    When I write a narrative or anything of the like, it is more like someone giving me a couple tools and a gun to rob people and dropping me off in the unnatural median between the forest and the city, then instructing me, “You! Go build something resemble spaceship. Use what find around you,” (don’t ask why I decided to make this part in stereotypical caveman speech). Definitely more daunting.

    So now you might be arguing, “well, James, that is my point. You aren’t better at it/suited for it because you don’t want to undertake all of the creative and structural responsibility involved.”

    I still disagree. Sure, I tend to write like this because it is convenient, but that isn’t the ultimate factor by any means. I might have said this above. If so, I reiterate, it is more personal. Not just for me, but for the audience (even if there isn’t any). If I write a story, the person reading it can immediately be turned off because they don’t like how I decided to tell it, or a ton of other reasons that come down to taste. If I write an essay on my opinions on planking, you can conclude that it isn’t well-written and my ideas are crap, but even if you have a strong negative response to it, you aren’t really going to take force against the creative decisions I made, because my entire purpose was the spread ideas and opinions. Like I said, assembling the bike. I can invent just about anything and call it a spaceship with the world around me, and maybe if it doesn’t resemble something from Star Trek, you won’t like it.

    I almost feel like the act of reading profusely, as well as considering yourself as member of a particular craft skews your expectations of things. Oh wait, I absolutely believe that, and I think most sane people do. That, unfortunately, is just really annoying. Over the past few years I’ve changed a lot in my perspective on how I react to creative craft. There is still a part of my that will always have an emotional reaction to what I consume, but there is an equal partner in that which acknowledges the risks that person took to craft something, let it leave their head into something that others consume and ultimately (and most crazily) share it with someone outside of themselves. I’ve watched, heard and read things of which are qualitatively bad from both perspectives of refinement and whether or not there is anything in there I can personally enjoy it, but you’d best bet your house that I still appreciate it.

    Who am I to judge anything?

    I’m really tired and I lost a lot of stream from my first couple paragraphs from now, and I also have to wrap this up due to time constraints, but I think I got a couple points across enough.

    I don’t think that my actions define who I am creatively, because my actions are gated. As the gatekeeper, I choose who sees what part of my creative estate. You could say that I am flawed in my abilities as a poet, lyricist/songwriter or anything else if I don’t choose to be confident or comfortable enough to share that part of myself. I won’t agree with you nor will I argue against that, but the point still stands, I don’t think you can necessarily bracket someone in to something because of the unseen. Maybe you do see all there is to see, or maybe there are other hidden strengths. The point is, there is no way of telling. Even as myself, I don’t know all of my talents and hopeless faults.

    It is a shame I only had 40 minutes and a poorly functioning mind to write this, but this is the medium that I feel comfortable ‘settling’ with.

  • Txt Msg Transcripts – Vol. 1

    I recently decided that because sometimes I say things very relevant to my life in text message conversations, that I would start a mini series of entries that takes good stuff from them. Mostly for the sake of being able to permanently get down parts of myself that I explain. This is the first one, from a conversation explaining my current status in life.

    Note – I will always only take things I said for my personal blog uses, never anything that was texted to me from someone else.

    Talking about being caught in a vicious cycle of climbing out of my hole and slipping back into a small rut: and how I hate sleeping because when I wake up, I reset into feeling all the bad weight I’m carrying (thus continually staying up later and later):

    “Long text incoming. It is most definitely a vicious cycle. I haven’t been as impacted by it as I am now in a long time. It all goes back a few years, a saga of which I’ve talked about plenty. When I had my break up, I retreated to my home for a period to spend some time being nothing but broken and recovering; a period of time in which I was effectively a useless human being making no contributions to my surroundings. the time came when I had recovered enough to actually restart my life. I got re-enrolled [in school], started looking for work, reconnected with as many people as would have me, mostly conquered my newly developed anxiety and so on. Got a job for a while and that was the best I had been in years, was even part of normal hours, waking up at 8 everyday, rarely able to stay up past 1, but then that job wasn’t where I needed to be so I left, and since have not had luck getting more than a few interviews. Thus slowing my plans of moving out, finishing school and moving to California in January. As well as making it hard to financially sustain a social life (as this all colluded with my parents current financial situation developing). More than anything, it kept me in this place I had sought refuge [my house]; physically and habitually. So I was already battling the usual struggles, but on top of that I was in the place that made it easy for previous feelings to return to me, which as evident from the past 2 weeks didn’t take much leverage to gain influence on my life again. Essentially, without something to occupy my time and also get me moving on from here, I don’t know if I can conquer the cycle.”

    “I know these things, but it is good to hear it too. I just need to tread water long enough to get out of where I’m at; the one “small” aspect couldn’t be more prevalent these days. I feel my primary personal affliction right now is that I’m nearly 25 years old and am feeling barred from the rest of the world because I’m trapped at home with no real responsibility and no way to be independent, and in the meantime these little 5 lb. weights keep getting attached to me as I’m trying to stay afloat, which manifests in the form of anxiety. So each day that goes on, even if the weight doesn’t increase, it feels like it has. So I sleep and wake up feeling more anxiety than the previous day, despite probably having spent most my energy the previous day conquering what anxiety I had. Eventually I get to the point where I get nothing done. I quit applying to jobs because I feel defeated, I quit trying to sort out school because I feel like neglecting it, I don’t work on my film project because I don’t feel inspired, I ditch plans I had because I feel like wallowing alone, I even avoid contact with the people I live with [my parents] because I feel shame. Then there are the more sociological elements, such as most of my closest friends not living in the same state. Half that do, still live far enough away to make it hard to come see me and I don’t always have money for gas. Furthermore, almost all of them have jobs and lead ‘adult’ lives so I feel like I’m some child who didn’t grow and develop while everyone else moved on like we were all supposed to. It is kinda funny how I envy them [because I can’t afford to have a life], yet they envy part of me for actually having all this free time to relax and enjoy as much life as I want.”

  • Assorted

    It is a good time to write something, considering I’m feeling particularly empty right now. There’s a reason for that, which I’ll get to in a moment. My goal here is to churn out a few paragraphs, with each one covering entirely different territory. Just littering a small assortment of thoughts on the table, maybe you’ll like some of my wares.

    I just completed rewatching HBO and David Simon’s (as well as Ed Burns) ‘The Wire’ — the critically acclaimed masterpiece, and likely the greatest piece of TV yet created. I remember the first time I watched it, I had heard all this talk (read: hype) about how it was the greatest show ever– from sources that I consider credible and respected, to those whose tastes I didn’t much regard to complete strangers. Anytime anything gets “best ever” hype, I’m immediately put off by it, anytime something gets hype from every possible corner of the Earth, then it will pretty much take Jesus’ second coming to sway me into its favors, and even brilliance takes me a while to overcome. This isn’t because I don’t want to like something great, but because the billing is so long it gives it a value that is impossible to amount to– kind of like the National Debt. With that said, it took me about the first episode to have the rug pulled under my feet and get swept under it. From that point on, I knew I was watching something that is a masterpiece on the same level that we call works of DaVinci or Michaelangelo masterpieces. Something that is so brilliantly executed, has an intricate plot that isn’t a labyrinth to follow, characters who stick with you even when you’re far removed from the show and hits so many huge nerves on society and reality– it’s relevant and entertaining. Maybe one day I’ll write some more on The Wire, but I wouldn’t say what hasn’t already been said countless times before by many who can say it better than myself, but the point is, it is the best example of the Television medium being used to its full potential. I feel utterly empty now that I’ve finished on my second time around. I think I even feel more depleted than the first time, and the first time was a catalyst that ultimately led me to quit school in my last semester. Frankly, I feel so many things as a result of this 5 season journey, and most of all, I’m sitting here right now thinking to myself the all these characters are out there in Baltimore right now just continuing the saga of their lives, their bodies splitting their cells for their short stay on earth and existence just barreling on like it always does (which hits more on a Six Feet Under level). I don’t mean to nuthug on HBO or The Wire anymore, but I think the point here is that very very rarely does a film, even a great one, leave me feeling so much emptiness at its end. I love television. If I had an ultimate dream, it wouldn’t be to write and direct movies (which is high on the list), it’d be to create and produce a television series for HBO.

    Sorry, that paragraph was really long, but I am trying to hold to my hopping paragraphs promise.

    The last week and a half has been an emotional oddity. Yesterday I texted my friend my favorite quote from Minority Report, “dig up the past, all you get is dirty.”  It is true though. Sometimes the past digs itself up, though, and like a horror movie, the arm of the undead reaches out from the ground and sucks me in the void. When that happens, I panic. When I panic, I do stupid things. I did something stupid. In a way, you could say I channeled the dead (not literally, if somehow that wasn’t clear enough). I had a conversation with a person that I’m effectively dead to, thus they have to be dead to me, or else there would be too much pain of loss. I was thinking a lot about this conversation, if you can call about 7-8 exchanges of text on Skype a conversation. You (“the dead”) had said something about things (in the past) going wrong, or knowing that you never will know what went wrong. I don’t want to look it up, because that is digging up the past, nor do I want to misconstrue what was said, I just remember what struck me, though. I am pretty sure it was general like that, but in my head, I thought about it and wondered if you really used to wonder what you did wrong. If know you, and even if we don’t exist to each other anymore, it will be a long long time before I can say I don’t know you, then I know that you felt this confounding and bewildering thought before. It makes me sad, because if I could ever get anything across to you, it wouldn’t be how much I loved you, how much you still mean to me, in some weird distant satellite orbiting the Earth kind of way, or how much I often worry about you and hope you’re just doing well– or any of these things. I would just want you to know that there is no question of what did you do wrong. It makes me sad because life is the biggest paradox. It makes less sense than quantum physics, because I can assure you with my entire being, that especially in our last act, you did every possible thing you could have done right. That’s all there is to it, and the only thoughts and feeling on that it is safe to let out. For now, I’m going to pat down the now reburied past unless it comes seeking me out.

    I’m listening to an afrobeat song recorded in 1975 right now– Expensive Shit by Fela Kuti and it has got me thinking about a lot of songs I have stumbled upon over the years. I think the best example is that Vanderbilt radio station Robert is obsessed with. Anyone who knows me a little bit knows I hate the radio and if I know you well enough and you listen to the radio, I will chastise you until we are both raw in the loins from it, but this kid always insists on his radio station, especially late at night in the summer, because that is when they let people DJ who play stuff from the farthest reaches of the Earth and time. I gotta admit, I love listening to that station at that time, you got me, Robert. Some of that stuff is the most bizarre and disconcerting stuff I’ve ever heard, to plain bad, to really cool, but more than anything I just think to myself,  “People actually recorded this?.. In a studio somewhere?..  At some point in time? What?” There is a certain feeling connected to this, and it is likely fueled by the fact that I always listen to these things at these weird hours, 1 AM, 2:13 AM, 4:25 in the morning and so on. I don’t know if you’ve ever gotten that feeling, where you almost feel like a small part of yourself is not quite aligned with the rest of your body and you’re kind of pulled out of yourself, but that is one ingredient. As the music plays, I just get this vibe that at some unimaginable time in a non-existent place, a group of people got together at an hour that nobody else on the planet is awake (never mind time zones and Earth’s rotation) and recorded this music that only 247 other people on the planet have heard, and now I’m the 248th. Then, while I listen to it and process that, I think to myself that none of it mattered, yet it still was created. Whether it was a good creation or bad, it didn’t matter, it just happened. Now I’ve been given this little capsule of time, bundled with energy, emotions and fragments of the persons’ lives who created it, and when the song finishes it, I will be one of the few people who is now carrying the small piece of life and culture— all the while the sun hides and the rest of the planet sleeps. About thirty minutes after I listen to anything like this at hours like this, the feelings finally completely fade and I feel like my being is again entirely one. Maybe nobody else has ever felt this but me, but I’m just throwing it out there. I’m repeating this song and feeling it right now.

    It beats feeling completely empty.

    I’m glad I wrote this.

  • not hollow, empty

    I’ve had terrible success trying to shake my recent habit of late evening naps. I think tonight might have provided the leverage to overcome some of my weakness. It is one thing to wake up from a night’s sleep feeling all tricked out of your mind and paranoid from a bloated dream that touches on all the wrong nerves, because you have an entire day to shake out of it. The sun is there, which brings out the rest of life and you know that you’re living in a breathing world. When it happens at 10 pm, for all you know you’re still dreaming. There is very little sound outside beyond distant, anonymous barking, the ambient hums of mechanical monsters haunting the paved pathways, marking their territory with exhaust fumes and leaking fluids, and sometimes, like tonight, the wind and the trees whispering messages to each other.

    I woke up feeling empty, nature is giving me nothing but support for that feeling. Everyone else is sleeping the night away, or winding down what was likely another typical, long day. My brain will be wired by the time the clock meets midnight. I’m realizing that it wasn’t just an off putting dream that has me feeling this way, though. I am starting to feel that I spent the past week in the company of ghosts. Consider this: lifelong friend comes into town and stay with me for a few days. This is the first time I have seen him in 3 years. This is also the first time he has been in the state in 10 years. Just like that, he is gone, and it could be anywhere from a couple months to a couple years between the next sighting. Next, we have my right hand man for the past 6 or so years of my life. I see him less infrequently, but that also means it is much more sporadic and random. Pepper in a stretch of days that were just like old times, then cap it off with being suddenly stirred out of sleep for 30 seconds to pick up a knife and say, “turns out my flight was today, see ya,” with the fact that it will be over a year before the next time I see this man in person and you will be certain it was all an apparition. Finally, one of the last pieces to this puzzle, and when combined, the longest standing and most consistent from childhood through adulthood. I just saw him get married, that is what brought all of the specters together. He is going to enrich the Earth across the globe for another year also– this is what this guy does. Before I even get to know him again, he is gone, and next time I see him, he will be even more foreign than the previous times. All of them will be. I will be, too– whether it is because I am the same person, or because I grew in awkward places, we’ll see.

    Now depleted I stand, empty I feel. I am pretty sure I had the epiphany that I had a large portion of my soul sucked out over the period of 6 days, that’s the fourth person I have to mark off this year, and another one that I never got to meet. Naturally, I am expecting the physical universe to literally start rocking and crumbling before my eyes. The only option I’ll have left at this point is to listen to fitting music and learn how to gracefully fly away.

    You were looking for some sort of change, weren’t you James? You never said you weren’t looking for it to smack you in the face, Right now, I’d prefer to still be in that dream, trying to speak Spanish with a family who had purchased our house which was never for sale than to be sitting here feeling emptied out right now. I’m telling myself right now that this feeling is nothing more than a bull’s gift to the ground, but it’s ineffective.

    I’ll wake up tomorrow and it will be, though. I don’t have a choice.

  • The end of the journey out west

    It’s closing in on 3 am here on the west coast. In a few swift hours I’ll begin my trip back home. By that point, it only would have been 10 days since I left. It is amazing what 10 days removed from everything, placed in a completely different setting, just relaxing and trying to enjoy every moment of life can do. I wanted to write a few times while I was gone. I even considered keeping a daily travelogue, but I either failed on that front or just didn’t have the time. I kind of like that it turned out that way. I get to culminate instead.

    First thing’s first, I want to say a few things. For once, the last post that I actually published was about depression. I want to make it clear one more time, I don’t suffer from any sort of clinical or physically induced depression. I just hit seasons in my life sometimes. The past 8 years or so are probably years most prone given all of the transitions hitting in succession as well as the final stages of metamorphosis from ‘a kid’ to ‘an adult’. But once again, I don’t regularly suffer from depression, so don’t misunderstand me. If I get depressed, it is just a very temporal phase in my life– we all go through these things.

    Secondly, I’ll go ahead and get this one out of the way. I’m going back to school. The fact is, I never intended on not going back and finishing, and for all I know something in my life may sweep me away and I don’t, in fact, make it back at the time I expect/am declaring now, but for all intents and purposes, in this moment I can say I am going back to finish up the little bit I have left. If I keep my Spanish minor, I only have 19 hours left (one of which is a 1 hour total joke class, so it is really just like taking 6 classes instead of the average 5). Or, to my understanding, I can even graduate without that minor and only have 11 hours (what I was told). Either way, I know that there is a large part of me that has such a distaste for how messed up the system is (the loan system + mercurial rise of tuition and costs is oppressive) as well as how much I think school is just a hoop jumping contest (and I hate jumping through hoops), or how I pretty much completed my major course of study and just quit going 1 week out from having practically no work left, but there is also the prideful part of me, who wants to bring that degree home, not just so I have it as some sort of superfluous credential to tote around the career field, but to my actual home. You know, this piece of paper that nobody else in my immediate family has, something that my parents would be immensely proud of, even if we all understand that in the scope of things it bears no meaning on the world, or if it doesn’t truly prove much of anything as far as my personal capabilities go, you know pride, something that is ok in the most minuscule of amounts. There are other parts of me, such as the one who has genuinely enjoyed my experience at Belmont University. The one who realizes that I made a lot of meaningful connections there, and opened the door for many more. The side that understands how significant so many of my experiences as a student there were, inside and outside of the classroom. The part of me that underwent the slow process of becoming disconnected from the entire university and the people it consists of and feeling insulated from the entire atmosphere longs for one more stab to get plugged back in. Finally, just the plain fact that I’ve never been a quitter, and I never intended on quitting when I left. It was simply a means to an end– the end being graduating. It is just something I am feeling strongly. I spent a long time feeling all types of dread, anxiety, ambivalence and apathy when even thinking about anything associated with school, but now those feelings have subsided, and as I continue laying out a general groundwork for the path my life is on at the moment, I hope to get that aspect paved as part of the process.

    So like I said, 10 days, it really isn’t that long, but then again, most vacations are even shorter. It was the perfect length in the sense that I don’t know how much longer I (or the generous friends I have) could have financially sustained it. At the same time, it was at the borderline length of removing myself from routines, I feel like when I get back, I might have to work a bit more to kick myself back into gear (especially physically), but I’ll be back to the shape I was in and into the routines I need to be in– as if I never left. At the same time, it there was just enough kickin’ it time for it to be meaningful, to be impactful, to make a real difference. As each day went by I got a lot more comfortable with everything, but especially (most importantly) with myself. I haven’t been comfortable with myself in forever– to the point I had forgotten myself. I’m not starting to feel comfortable in my own skin again, the gloves fit my hand again, basically. Since this is the end of it and the last night, I can really reflect, and just reflecting on this day alone, I feel really good. I feel that today I really did get broken in a lot more than all the other days combined, not to say that there wasn’t more exertion all of those days, but just that the progress today was the greatest. So not only am I building off of that progress, but because I felt the effects increase in an exponential manner that means I have momentum. Momentum will be everything to me in the coming weeks. There is no other way to put it; it’s just freakin exciting.

    This was not the kind of get away filled with reflection and all sorts of arduous introspection. This was just getting the hell out of there and just hanging out, just chilling you know. My two point men out here, Robert and Ryan have been incredibly generous to me, and it is almost hard to feel blessed because really it gets me thinking, “What exactly did I do to earn anyone who would go that far for me in my life?” And of course, other friends and my hosts have also blessed me a lot more than I deserve. I’m glad I got to spend time with the people I did, hopefully it can be a sliver of time that various people can look back on and recall it being an enjoyable week and half, and if I’m lucky, a time that was enjoyable in part by my temporary company.

    I know I’ve talked about moving, and I am still considering it. Of course, amidst having to figure out a lot of things in my life in terms of the present and also needing to finish school, it is impossible to tell how that will work out, but it is funny, the LA area is a place I always thought to myself I could never live, but I think knowing there are people out here who can erase this entire concept of  inability goes as far as to make it an appealing place to live, all other things aside (and there are a lot). So who knows, maybe I’ll still end up back out here. Plus Ryan Baker is still my point man on a project. So I may have to chase a dream for a while, and this could be where I have to end up in order to chase. The thing about it is, chasing a dream for me isn’t some quest to attain this mythical artifact (the dream), but instead, it is just the chase. Sometimes you need to chase just to say that you chased. I wouldn’t mind chasing for a while, at least you’ll give your legs some work. For all I know the dreams I end up chasing may take me to the obscure corners of the earth after all, the may take me to crazy southern California, or they may plant me down in middle Tennessee for longer. Either way, I am now starting to once again see the excitement in life both long term and short term. Most importantly, my journey out here is done and I’m coming home. For now.

    It’s good to be with friends no matter where you are. It’s good to be home, no matter how everything else is. I’ve missed all of my people back home, and I’ve missed plain home. All the while, I’ll miss the people I have spread out all over, as well as the places I’ve been familiar with in my life.

    Really, it’s just good though.