mindjames

Category: life

Writing that directly ties in to my life as a whole.

  • 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.

  • Anxiet Ease Gold

    Last week I had a day where I almost wrote about 4-6 entries and was just going to have them post on a schedule. Almost, as it turns out, is equal to nothing. Despite my shortcomings, I’ve come back and am at least writing one. I’ve wanted to and probably needed to write on this for a long time, so it only makes sense that I am writing it at a moment that is most applicable.

    Today I feel like I might just start uncontrollably vomiting, until all my insides start spewing out in front of my eyes. Of course, it doesn’t stop there, it is such an unease that after I’ve nothing left, lost treasures of the ancients start erupting from my mouth, the forgotten City of Atlantis, Planet X, and Jimmy Hoffa, who would know look like a huge overgrown fetus– all of that feels like it could be thrown up right now. Just some run-of-the-mill unease.

    Anxiety is a very weird, overbearing thing. Gosh, what is it I am trying to remember, it is a book or movie or something where somebody talks about battling drug addiction only takes a few seconds of weakness to destroy days, months, years of strength. No clue what I am trying to allude to or what the quote is, but that is the gist of it. Anxiety can be kind of similar. More on that in a minute, I need to dig for some more context first.

    I don’t know how I’d describe myself, I wouldn’t say I suffer from social anxiety or it is anything remotely near any sort of clinical thing, it is just something that started off as a small battle my entire life. By the time I had started to get into my upper teens it was a battle I had pretty much won and didn’t really worry about it more than what I’d say the average person does. It only takes a couple weird years to loosen all sorts of screws and discombobulate a person in that cliched image of some sort of device with gears flying out everywhere and stray springs popping out. I had those couple years, and so when I got out of that I pretty much had my sequel: The Anxiety Empire Strikes back, or however you want to refer to it. I felt crippled for a while. That’s what it does though.

    I’m no expert, but the basics of it all is that your brain gets conditioned to respond to certain things with fear. So your input response is a physical discomfort and displeasure. The thing that is stupid about the whole thing is how broad the scope of what ‘social’ anxiety is. Because unless you’re living in the wilderness, that is pretty much the entire make-up of one’s life. So now, if things are conditioned that deeply, all it takes is a stray thought and your body places a survival instinct stressor on itself. Fun.

    As an aside, I almost feel like curiosity must be a sister or brother to most forms of anxiety (assuming it is an irrational fear being experienced), just because socially, the average level of anxiety experienced tends to deal with the unknown. When we don’t know the outcome, or further, the realistic outcomes are so limited that we know the few they will be, but not which one it will be, it tends to be inescapable. I bet I’m mostly wrong, it just doesn’t seem too different from curiosity, except for whatever reason our natural reaction is to probe and prod into the situation, instead of recoil.

    So here is where I find myself today: most of the time I have no problems at all, that feeling that my insides have been slowly boiling and are about to ooze out is entirely absent, but then there are just those moments where it just comes on. It is more specific than that, though. There is a loose pattern that usually involves 3-5 days at a time with no hints of such a feeling, then the day comes.

    From the very moment I wake up, I’m covered in it. It’s like Nickelodeon as a kid, when everyone and anyone just got slimed for no reason. You’d be watching a show that had nothing to do with slime and then out of no where some unwitting kid looked like the evolution of Slimer from Ghostbusters into a biped. Just slimin dudes because they over-budgeted it and needed to be cost-efficient some how. And that’s what it is like. I was asleep, old school Nickelodeon recorded a show at my house and they thought it’d be cool to slime me– cause that’s what they do. So now I wake up and I’m like, “What the?– Oh come on man!”  As soon as I make my first conscious movement, I feel the dreck and sludge of this filthy feeling, and then from that point it is your classic video game level design with the clock counting down and having to escape before it hits 0. I have to shake off this feeling as soon as I can so I can function normally, optimally and how I want to. Heck, if it is that bad, it sometimes is just so I can function comma, period.

    And that goes back to my point about how it only takes that one impulse to hit you for a microscopic fraction of time. Instead of falling back into addiction though, I just need to be jabbed by an impulse once or twice and I might become useless for an entire day. Until either my subconscious starts to make sense again, or until my body gets worn out from being so stressed (which in cases of extreme anxiety is usually what it takes– it rarely takes being fatigued out for me, though it helps that it wears on you a bit so my rationality can take over quicker).

    And that is the brief summary of one of life’s many inconveniences. It is just obnoxious having to deal with it, especially for the 2nd time. Because when I’m feeling normal and good, I think to how maybe the day or two before I was having to feel broken down and like my nervous system swapped all my controls, so if I wanted to use my right arm I needed to wiggle my toes, and if I wanted to take a deep breath I needed to wink and so on, yet on this, the average day, I feel so good. I am entirely sure of myself, maybe even almost to a fault– but I’d rather take that on as a liability than the anxiety.

    Today was one of those days where I woke up covered in it. I still hear the distant echoes of it reverberating around my thoughts and feel it softly rumbling around within my chest and stomach, pounding on the lining of the walls, “Let me out!”  It’s not getting out today, though. I’m pretty much good now. Last time anxiety and I had one of our little tussles was about 5 days ago, before that was probably 4 days previous to that. If I omit the one 5 days ago (it was an unusually overpowering case), and keep an inventory on all the cases of it, there is a clear linear trend of how long it lasts and how strong it hits me.

    I think I’ll end this by paraphrasing something a best friend said this weekend. We were talking about confidence in oneself and in others (loved ones), as well as within a relationship. We had basically all concluded that we felt so much more confident when we could take our pitiful bit of confidence (if I imagine confidence in a physical manner, I see it as something akin to silly putty) I possess and stick it in the pocket of someone we have absolute trust in. Which is why he, currently dating someone, says he feels more confident in himself than he’s ever been, and why I, being out of a long relationship, had been feeling the lowest I had my entire life during the past half year. We all had laid out everything perfectly. But we, of course, weren’t putting absolute faith and confidence in the right person. If I put it in myself, I have too many ways to spoil it, have too much dirt on myself to keep it pristine and something to be proud of, and if I put it in anyone else, a girlfriend, wife, parent, Lady Frickin’ GaGa, or anyone, they are just another person, so either they will end up failing as I would, or I would have to, at some point, take that confidence back from their pocket and take it for myself– which likely will leave me with none when that time comes (as it did). As a Christian, it only makes sense for me to take that confidence I am supposed to have in myself and let God handle it.  Absolute faith, remember?

    I always say epiphanies are annoying because they are so obvious/common knowledge. That one was annoying.

    But good.

    Anyway, anxiety sucks. I suffer from it in small, weekly spurts. And that’s that. I just like writing about my flaws.

    I feel much better now than before I wrote this.

     

    Later fellas!

    – Jack Wizzy

  • Rapumentary Vol 4. – One Year Later

    First thing: I’m feeling lazy but oddly productive, meaning I’m not going to format this like I usually do until later (so I can use this productive burst on something else). If you read this and don’t see this, then you got in after I formatted this. SUCKER!

     

    It’s been a while since I chronicled my work on my current pet project. A few months.. crazy— it’s June already? Wow. Anyway, a lot of the going has still been kind of slow. but lately my personal productivity has sped up. I spent the last few months learning and practicing as much as I can when it comes to mixing. I am just now feeling comfortable enough with it to finish up some songs and take the pseudo fictitious hip hop duo part of the documentary live. The real good news out of all this is that I can focus more on songwriting, making music and ultimately circle back some to the film aspect, which is no longer a cub, but a ruthless, starving bear. A picnic basket isn’t going to be enough to satisfy Yogi.

    This is a pretty important update because we have officially reached the 1 year mark on this project. The earliest rough draft of any tracks I have on this project dates back to May 27th, 2010, a really rough mp3 of Lactose Intolerant with my scratch vocals, as well as all of Ryan’s verses. The creative process is such an arduous pain. It is probably the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever subjected to myself through, but the more ambitious and broad your scope, the longer it takes to chip away at turning out something finished– and as anyone who creates knows, these things are never finished, you just force yourself to stop working on them and share it with as much as the world that cares to pay attention.

    Now that I’m thinking about it, I am actually surprised that we have actual video footage filmed and collecting dust particles of bits and bytes on a hard drive somewhere, yet the actual project hasn’t really started in my opinion. One of my closest friends in college and I had a ritual of nicknaming everyone in any class we had together. If I explained the nuances and intricacies of properly and effectively doing this, it’d take pages, so I’m going to shorten it and say that these nicknames were essentially random. One of the better ones was ‘Hat Wizard’. In my mind, this phrase has almost no meaning, although I do know that when I coined it I was thinking of Merlin or some form of a wizard who wears a wizard hat. Now I know it was all foreshadowing. I’ve made huge strides on being a hat wizard, trying to effectively wear every hat I can, not only in hopes of using it to market my talents and dedication, but really because I have no choice but to.

    This has been a year long musical odyssey and I have nothing to show for it– yet. This is a new horizon I’m arriving at. I spent this year drifting at sea, every morning seeing the same painting of yellows, reds, oranges and gold bouncing off an endless navy blue surface, each night watching it turn into an endless void of black sometimes hidden by the silver glow of the sky’s lunar guardian. Soon, I will wake up and find myself wandering an entire new space, new obstacles, asteroid fields and the irresistible pull of gravity from all directions until I reach that new horizon, that new planet of which, in the third phase, I will crash land on. But for now, I am still a sailor.

    So, as I said a second ago, I still have nothing to show on this project. The reality of it is that I have nothing I am willing to show yet. In February I played a few rough mixes of a couple tracks for my dad. Up until then, nobody outside of two or three others had heard nary a thing I had produced. This was actually a pretty nerve wracking thing for me. For one, I don’t always like to show things to my family first, because the good and bad thing about that is that they will always be positive about it– especially a loving parent. I don’t always need that positivity, so I usually let myself wrestle with it on my own and get beat up for a while, then when I need that boost, I go to what I can count on. Secondly, as I covered in my first entry, my dad is a musician and I have never not known him to be anything else or less (those two words can spell each other), and as far as musicianship goes, I don’t feel like I hold a candle in any regard (though I also hold the opinion that I am better than him in every way when we interact with each other). As we all know, I’m newer to this in comparison to my other creative pursuits, but I guess I am not ‘green’ new thanks to my upbringing and guitar playing. Then there are a few other miscellaneous aspects, for instance, I have to do a lot of singing on this project. I don’t nor ever have considered myself a good singer. My dad and sister sing, and kind of as a result, I never have. I wouldn’t say I’m bad, but it isn’t one of those natural things for me (I’ve been working a lot on it in the past half year), so it is something I am not always comfortable with, merely because most people don’t know that I ever do. Funny, because every time I let someone new hear a track they never realize it is me singing. Basically, there were a lot more reasons why this was kind of nerve wracking, but it was done and he liked it.

    Beyond that, he didn’t really hear anything more than that one time, so the other day I actually let him and my mom (who hadn’t been exposed at all) at some stuff– a mix of old and more recent stuff. The reception and what not is irrelevant, the point is that if I am feeling comfortable enough to do this, then I am almost comfortable enough to offer a true look at this project, and not just words. So here is my guarantee:

    My next entry on this project will feature at least a few snippets of some of the tracks for my pseudo fictitious hip hop duo– of course, I may even put some stuff up on their soundcloud before then… so…. We will just see how it goes. I have to just finish tying a few knots on a lot of things, arrangements, mixing, some writing, recording here and there (this excludes the songs I’ve recently started on, but there are also good odds I finish a lot of those first because my process is better and my abilities are more refined).

     

    There you have it. I’m pretty much going to leave it at this for now. Not much insight, or expounding on anything, just more of thing where I place a milestone in the ground for my own purposes.

    Final thing I will say is that it is a total bitch (honestly the only substitute I can think of to replace this word is about 2 paragraphs long– I’m lazy) to come up with all this stage and group name nonsense. You’d think for a fake persona and group it’d be easy because it shouldn’t much matter, but there are so many external forces that it has to align with.

    Be proud of me, I kept this under 1500 words.

    Until next time folks,

    Jack Wizzy

  • Dice Roll

    I’m tired. No rest for the weary, though. That’s what the weather channel told me this weekend. My best friend told me that last weekend. I am buying into it, as much of the stock I can get.

    I have nothing to say, or maybe lack the energy to say it. I have a few drafts and an update on my project, but I just haven’t gotten around to finishing them. So I pick up some scrap words and put them down here right now.

    If I’m fortunate, tomorrow will be unabatedly critical in me beginning a new chapter in my life. Well, I’ve already begun it, but I’ve either been trying to write it down without ink, or scrawling it on napkins because I lake paper.

    Two lines to a paragraph. Two by two, hands of blue. Twice, I woke up today. And now I’m falling short. One more thought though, I am pretty sure that the mantra I buy into the most in my life is it is better to be lucky than good.

    This is where the stream ends.

    Roll ’em.

  • Letters I Shouldn’t Write

    Here I am, in the dark, before the sun steals such solitude away from me, and I’m sitting at my desk writing something I almost wrote last night. I’m listening to that song Millionaire. I played it for you a couple summers ago. That songs always made me feel all the bumps and edges of depression and sorrow. I shared that with you. It was never you that made me feel that way, but we got there together. So I’m listening to it again, as I sit here by myself writing letters I shouldn’t write.

    That song will always be able take me back to that place, and in turn, back to you. But then again, I don’t know if I could ever sincerely turn my back to you. I vaguely remember the past couple of hours, at best, but here I am. It is almost like blacking out for a while, then you wake up and see your life before you, and then you’re before the altar– and that’s that. Here I am now.

    Had I actually wrote this last night, it would have been a subtle, seething and counter-bitter cry for who knows what. It wasn’t that I felt I resented anything about you, but I resent being resented. I hate playing the villain. I know I put myself in that position, and I know a real man takes that role and carries it til the end of his days if he has to, never complaining, never looking behind his back, searching for someone to see that it isn’t just, but what in life is?

    With that said, I sit here, in this lightless, gray-colored solitude repeating this song and knowing that I don’t feel that resentment right now. I just miss things. I couldn’t say, at any point, that what I did was wrong, it wasn’t exactly right either, but it was necessary. I still say that in some twisted way, I did you a favor, because I know how cancerous I had become and you don’t need to be a second-hand life victim, but was it worth giving all that up in trade for the entirety of my life?

    I don’t know.

    I just know that I miss all that was. The other family that I didn’t go and visit enough. My pets, becoming a closet Crimson Tide fan, the lazy days together, the crazy days together, the time apart afterward, the shoulder to offer or the shoulder to cry on. I do, very much, miss you. I never haven’t. It wasn’t until recently that I started to feel the full effects of it all. If you ever read this, hopefully you’d realize this is a good thing. It is my great thawing from that time of cryogenic emotional freezing. I’m becoming free again, maybe I’ll come out of this cocoon as a flourishing, fleeting, flying being and not a mutated carcas. I wish I could make you proud of me again, and not think of me as someone who was, so I hear, bad to you. I know I couldn’t show you that though, even though I’ve started to breathe again, I couldn’t go back to it all yet, this lonely path still has plenty of unwinding left before I can join the rest of the human race.

    As much as I yearn and miss everything, to even consider backtracking would be foolish– not that you would have any of it, but in spite of that absolute truth, I just miss that shoulder; both sides of it. I wish I still had that ear that fully understands me, but I am nothing but pure vulgarity to that ear now.

    What is more bitter than spoiled love?

    Don’t get me wrong, I feel good, and life is great. If I told anyone I’m on top right now it would be truth, but..

    I feel like a bum. I’m feelin’ sad like a million bucks.

  • Hello – revised 3/7

    Hello,

     

    I am miss you.

  • a brief reflection

    Ah man, back at it again. It’s been longer than I intended. I was with some classic friends the past weekend and the blog got brought up. I recall at least Biddle half-jokingly saying how an entry is something he has to set out time in his day in order to read. I don’t doubt the time consumption that is associated with reading these things, so with that said, it takes me that much longer just to write anything. I have had a lot I’ve wanted to say, but I haven’t yet wanted to take out the time to say any of it until now.

    I want to take the time out to actually talk about my life in a daily, almost journalistic manner. I’d consider that a departure from my usual ramblings. As I previously alluded to, I hung out with some old, good friends this past weekend. It isn’t like I haven’t seen most of them pretty recently. I’ll admit, pretty much all of them I haven’t seen enough of when I have seen them, though. This was one of the few times we got a big group together though. Oh, before I forget, I’ll note that these were my Belmont friends, most specifically, people I lived with an intimate manner for a couple years.

    There is something to be said for that– the whole dorm experience. Being pretty far removed from those years then reconnected for a couple of hours really goes a long way for reminding myself just what that bond really is.  It’s the full flavor of feelings. On one hand, it is sad on a lot of levels. A lot of these people I was with, Poop, Biddle, Horse, Cheese, Joyce dudes(jajaja) like that, I mean, there was a day and time in my life where each one of those dudes was literally a brother of mine. I’m not sayin that I don’t think that of them anymore, or disowned anyone, but that connection just isn’t as strong as it once was in some cases– more on a throughput level– I know given some time and consistency that’s easy to get flowing, but it sputters and spikes otherwise. Or a guy like Tough Guy, who could decide to move to Antarctica and never be heard from again, but would still be a legendary figure in my life of mythical proportions. It is just sad what becomes of us and our relationships over time, because they change. People change. Our relationships with people change. We change. Everything changes, yet we take what we have when we have it for granted.. this never changers. I really do miss those days though, I miss the people, the characters, the personalities, the escapades, and so on. Before I go the other direction, might I also point out, the writers of LOST would tell you that is exactly what their show was about. Too bad they spent the rest of the show making everyone believe it was more about some crazy island and things that, when spoken about out loud, make you sound like an Nebuchadnezzar crawling through the desert howling out inanities.

    There is also sweeter side of the emotional flavor spectrum. For one, it was really great to just sit there in the middle of all these people and really see how grown up everyone is. Not that I advocate growing up, I think it sucks and if you do too much of it your life will be over, but more that pretty much everyone is on their feet pretty solidly post college, even though we are all still figuring so many things out. It makes me really happy for everybody, though. Plus it was nice to spend an afternoon doing something that a few of us tended to always poke fun at, “being Belmont.” Something vaguely constituted by somethign so simple as just hanging out with fellow Belmontian’s in the area, in this case, McDougal’s (we all know Hillsboro Village is the crux of our Belmont essence.)

    Initially, I had planned on continuing this entry into an entirely different subject, but instead, I think it is just better to leave it as a small reflection. I could go on and on into all of my thoughts and feelings and talk about specific people that I feel deserve at least that much from me, but that is perhaps for another time.

    Instead, I abruptly, awkwardly end this.