mindjames

Category: life

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

  • 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.

  • cast into the deep blue

    It is almost a new week. For me, the weeks have never started on Sunday. I’ve always considered Monday to be the true start of the week and Sunday to be the secret bastard child that is masquerading as heir to the throne.

    This won’t be an ordinary week. I feel like this week will be a new genesis of my life, a restarting of what hasn’t been for a long time. This can only mean that it will not, by any means, live up to what I expect it to be.

    Let me briefly cover the daily life I have known for a few months shy of a year now. I go to sleep congruently with the sun’s rising. I shiver, shake, sweat and suffer through twisted dreams that are a shade too close to reality until I wake up in the early afternoon. Almost immediately after ascertaining my reacquired consciousness, I get yanked off the ledge as if I had two huge stones tied to my ankles and sleep inertia reels me back in for another hour or two. At this point, it is usually mid afternoon when I truly enter the game. The remainder of the sunlit day is met with lethargy. Occasionally, I have something I actually need to do, or am able to do and like an eager, yet mistaken Houdini wannabe, I violently struggle to break out of the binding lethargy and take care of the things I need to do to re-enter society. This might entail bathing and grooming, something I am increasingly become adept at. Sometimes I need to go outside and workout, or do some chore such as mow the lawn, or maybe tend to some sort of life administrative task. At that point, I barely manage to get on my way in time, and almost always end up cutting corners on these things I usually afford to sloth my way in doing.

    Usually, though, I do just slog about, because usually, I have no pressing matters or obligations of time to meet. So I slowly gain charge throughout these hours until the sun has almost completely set. At this point, I start to feel alive again. It is at this time, that most people are starting to wind down, but I’m wound up. Maybe I do one of those tasks I mentioned earlier, but I likely only sit around, bounding from my bedroom to my living room to my porch or back deck, watching TV, scouring the entirety of the Internet, playing guitar or just staring at the clouds and the treetops. I do these things as long as I can until my body tells me that I need to do something; until my subconscious tells me that I missed out on daily human interaction. Then, I try harder to distract myself.

    Somehow, I manage to keep myself distracted until the arrival of the 3 to 4 AM hours. At this point, my body usually starts to wind down, out of boredom and disappointment, of course, yet my brain trades the body’s excess energy for fatigue, and uses it for its own purposes, thus ramping my brain activity beyond the nimbus clouds. This period of time, I try to produce, process or absorb as much information and knowledge as I can until the brain sputters out and I plummet to my bed like a fallen angel meeting the hardened Earth. Repeat, ad nauseam.

    That is the gist of my existence since last November, a life which became even more consistent when I broke up with Kara in January. I guess I was being generous by calling it an existence. I think calling it a holograph of life is more accurate.

    That changes this week.

    This week I am going back to school. If I am lucky, I may even find myself soon employed, too. One of those elements is enough to register a 9 on my personal Richter scale. It is only now that I’m realizing that I have an irrational nervousness about it all.

    It have been unplugged from everything for so long that I have nearly convinced myself that I’m going to fail miserably at being plugged in– everyday. That’s how this stuff works, though, right?

    For instance, every time I’ve suffered a significant injury in basketball, I have always been paranoid that when I get back to playing I won’t have as much as I used to have, or that I will be much more prone to hurting myself again (likely from rolling back in full steam too soon). There is an element to it all that is true. I spent a few days last week flinging myself back into things. Waking up early for about 5 straight days, living off of power naps, being plugged in to the outside world on a regular basis– pretty depressing when anyone can say that about themselves in a notable manner. It is almost as bad as being able to say, “Oh yeah, I am getting back around to giving that whole breathing thing a try, but my lungs are still pretty out of shape!” Nobody should ever have to go through a near total removal of society. Those things are usually labeled rehab, inoculation or imprisonment. I wouldn’t say I underwent any of those things, unless you wanted to use the term ‘rehab’ very liberally. I kind of had a personal rehab of restructuring my life and getting back onto my feet, but that is stretching it.

    I guess I never expected to ever be at a point in my life where I thought to myself, “it’s gonna be ok, you can do this, you’ve been a regular member of society your whole life. School? Work? Leaving your house every day.. every week.. yeah, you got this, kid.” That’s the most absurd thing I’ve ever thought, and my brain impulses usually play to the beat of absurdity, but it is reality.

    In my fear I admit I am afraid I won’t be able to hack school anymore. I am afraid I won’t have the competency to handle a job. I am afraid I will shell up around people and live the life of an unentertaining mime. When I think about it consciously, I know that is stupid, but as soon as I lose the power consciousness has over fear, I curl back up, sweat, quiver with weakness and feel my stomach and throat crawl towards each other, engaging in the most awkward, uncomfortable dance since Lindsay dances with Eli in the pilot episode of Freaks and Geeks (ok, ok, Millie dancing prior to that was more awkward.)

    I’d wager the true roots of this fear, beyond just simple atrophy, stem from the fact that a lot of these fears were things I recently failed (or felt I failed) at. I quit school. I couldn’t get a job that wasn’t part of an MLM scheme, over the course of several years, I drifted away from almost all of my friends and didn’t make many new ones, and I cut ties with the best friendship I had so I could be selfish and young.

    I think back to childhood fears that were never conquered. For instance, those certain kids who always tended to pick on you, or just seemed to be cooler and better. I had a few friends like that at our old church. It was always just a kids being kids thing, and I never had anything against them, but now that we are all adults, I still can’t help but see or think of certain people in that light. I guess it is almost like Abuse Jr., conceptually; well, I take that back, more like Abuse V– it’s too far down the line to be considered right under it.

    Speaking of which, here is a crazy story from last week, which is somewhat related to that last paragraph.

    I don’t usually share these weird collusions of thoughts and reality I experience. I find them too personal to really reel them off like a deep sea fisherman casting a helpless minnow into the deep blue. Anyway, it relates to a family, of who’s kids I always felt inferior to growing up, but it was one of those things where our family’s were relatively close; at least close enough to go on a spring break together once when I was a kid. These kids were always cooler, much better looking, bigger and stronger (well, I guess that doesn’t apply so much since there was only 1 son?), and so on. I don’t know why that even matters to a 10 year old, but it did for me enough to intimidate me thinking about it today.

    Basically, I was never personally close with any of them, likely in part due to my quietness and shyness (aided by the intimidation), and also because our paths diverged at the prime years of youth, from about the latter middle school years through high school and beyond. So with an exception or two, I haven’t had any personal interaction with any of them for nearly a decade at this point.

    Thus arrives last week, before my ankle imploded on me. I was headed out to Brentwood for a basketball game, an event, might I add, that I looked forward to for weeks. I’m easy to please. As I’m about to pull in to this place, Christ Church YMCA, I get barraged by a flurry of thoughts. The first being that I knew where I was at, but wasn’t confident until the next thoughts hit me.

    “Oh yeah, this is where Horse interned. This is where we filmed Jazzercise”

    Some more thoughts follow. Each of them were increasingly more insignificant and random.

    “Man, this beat on ‘No Church In The Wild’, wait, that’s a frickin guitar dude!”

    I was disappointed it took me two days of listening to it to realize. The inner monologue continued.

    “This place is forever far from my house. I’d like to have the trees out here in my yard. I think I’ve managed to get lost again– in a parking lot.”

    On and on the hit the hull of my consciousness, until the final one hit and, due to its sheer randomness, snapped me out of it and I left the meteor shower of thought.

    “I’m going to see X here tonight.”

    About 15 seconds transpired as I idly drove my car around this parking lot and smacked myself on the head, in my mind, that is. With the same innocent candor of a subordinate timidly questioning the judgment of their boss, I asked myself, “Did you really just think that?”

    I guess I did. Never could figure out why. That is just how thought works sometimes. I wake up some days and my brain convinces me in the first 5 minutes that I’ll have my head will fall of my shoulders if I leave my room. One time, I woke up in a half-awaken state of delirium in dark Tel Aviv hotel room, convinced with a conviction almost as heavy as the Holy Spirit that terrorists were going room to room, knocking on doors pretending to be room service and then executing people as they answered the door. That delusion lasted a couple hours. So I am not stranger to odd, stray thoughts. I merely shrugged this one off and tossed it into the mountainous pile.

    A bit later, I was shooting around, trying to get warmed up in about 5-10 minutes, which is one of the most displeasing things to do. I’d rather have absolutely no warm up, at least that way adrenaline kicks in quicker and helps out. I wasn’t feeling in sync at all. I am very ritualistic with my warm ups, even if I am just playing pick up outside at the park. If I don’t feel it is working, I’ll do something to reset my mindset. A good way I do this is going to get some water, which I did in this case.

    On I go, out the gym doors to the water fountains located right outside. On my way, I punch the doors open and almost run into two young women. Typical James move, actually. I’m spry and aloof enough to have a strong propensity for such things. I did my weird freeze, pause thing, where my balance teeters around my body, sliding up from my feet to my head, like a reversed hula hoop motion. Eventually this chaotic, yet subtle motion drops back down to my feet and I hop as excessively far out of the way as possible and mutter out an apology I likely don’t really mean.

    As I’m having an intimate moment with the water fountain, I get hit by my dulled, blunted, primitive spidey sense as I realize:

    “Uhh……”

    I consternate.

    “Was that X?”

    It couldn’t have been. The thought was already random enough, I don’t need any sort of psychic justification messing with my head any further. I initially put my faith in the fact that I hadn’t seen this person since I was 13 or 14 (assuming memory isn’t failing me), at some youth camp. I assured myself I must have been mistaken. Chalk it up to some sort of bizarre thought fueled pareidolia. Of course, my mind was already raped at this point, and the train wasn’t ending any time soon.

    I was mostly preoccupied with playing basketball for the next few hours, so I honestly didn’t put much into confirming or denying any sort of bizarre coincidence, but what little thought I did siphon away to figuring out if it was who I thought they were (the Bears), led me to sit at about a 92% confidence interval that it was.

    In retrospect, I probably should have just asked and been done with it, but beyond my primary physical preoccupation I mentioned, I was too bothered by the way things actually unfolded in my head. Coincidences happen daily, constantly. Sometimes they are just overwhelming though. I must have my biggest ones when involved with playing basketball, though. For instance, my longest breakout of deja vu was 2 minutes long, in the middle of a summer tournament in high school. Imagine two minutes of competition, where people are trying to stop you from doing what you want to do, realizing you’ve seen what is happening before, thus dictating everything that happens in your head right before it does– for 2 minutes.

    This stuff messes with me. This strange anecdote has little to do with what I initially wrote about, but I guess there are a few tie-ins.

    Everything messes with me.

    Certain people and things in life will still intimidate me for the same reasons, until I am given and take an opportunity to show myself that I am working myself up over nothing.

    Weird things happen. That’s life.

    Pretty girls are people too. That’s life.

    Nobody will always succeed the first time or how they want to. That’s life.

    Some people will pick on you. That’s life.

    Any heart is susceptible to being broken. That’s life.

    Ankles get sprained. That’s life.

    People wake up early and force themselves out of their own shells every day. That’s life.

    On and on it goes. In the end, all I know from all these things is that as long as I am alive, I have an infinite number of moments to conquer in my life.

    I’m scared as hell about this week, despite it being something I used to do effortlessly, but I’m going to force myself to become a conqueror a few hours from now and not look back. At the least, I will play one in my very own story about my own life.

    I already cast out one minnow into the deep blue, now I am diving in, myself.

    – James

    EPILOGUE

    Also, in the veeerrry rare event that anyone involved in any of the events, whether directly of indirectly, ever happens to read this, well, uh, Hi? Jajajaja

    Finally, apologizes for doing weird things with verb tenses throughout. I’m tired and don’t care to proof read/fix.

     

  • barely squeezing out any words

    I have more than you.

    Now you can call me King.

    One man; dominion over the rest.

    Men and women in my palms.

    All I see are my possessions.

  • 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.

  • The American Tragedy

    I feel like Ernest P. Worrell lately, you know, like in Ernest Goes to Jail, when he has a mass influx of electricity pumped through his body and then all the electricity begins to surge through his body and zap everything he sets his eyes on. Instead of electricity, I’ve had a surge of emotion, dimmed emotions.

    Before I go to sleep at night, I feel a lot of dread. Not because I don’t want to approach tomorrow or anything like that, I wake up and generally feel excited to be alive and given yet another day to experience whatever the world sends my way, but just a dread knowing that I’ll wake up tomorrow and be in this same sort of rut I’ve been stuck in for almost a year now. A directionless life, or at least no wind to take me where my sails are facing. It’s nice when you’re young to get some respite in such things. Like anyone else, I always looked forward to summer because it meant I could wake up whenever I wanted, play as many video games, spend as much time with my friends and do as much nothing as I could handle. It worked because I never got quite as much as I wanted, and there was an end to it. Now that I’m older, it doesn’t work because of those same two reasons.

    I can’t force myself to wake up early because I have nothing to wake up to. I have a lot of goals and projects and I do a lot to work on them, but I have different subsets of goals set out. My real-world and adult goals have been the following (and in order): get back in school, get a job, move back to Nashville, complete my final semester and graduate and then likely move to LA with Ryan B. In the meantime, my big picture goals have been plentiful, such as get all the music work done on my documentary and fake rap duo I’m in, start filming other things, establish myself in other ways (such as in the competitive gaming community) and all sorts of other things. The big picture/abstract stuff has been all I’ve been able to do, but because I hit a roadblock in the actual tangible stuff, I feel myself rubberbanding in the other areas.

    First off, let’s just ignore the fact that I did have a job and just randomly left. I don’t really care to talk about it. I don’t do things liks that without reason, or at least, I’ve never known myself to, but I also don’t do things for only one cause, unless completely deplorable, which is why I don’t really care to talk about it, because it was a culmination of things that struck me all at once, which led me to make the decision. It just wasn’t the right situation for me.

    With that said, it is funny because now on this job hunt, I have broadened (or to say it bluntly, lowered my standards) my possible horizons so much that you’d think I’d consider my previous departure to be foolishness, but I don’t. Anyway, with that addressed, I’ll say that it plays a large part in the feelings I have to endure throughout the day and night. I think a lot of it boils down to what is really irking me lately; I hate to see my family in the position they are in these days.

    I catch myself watching my dad, even just sitting at one of the computers in the house, typing some piece of work up, or maybe just kind of staring into the blankness of the screen as he collects what must a rare moment of rest and solace in what amounts to a microfraction of a day in his long, burdening life and just feel terrible. It isn’t that I pity him or imagine he hates his life or anything, I know he has more joy than he knows what to do with, but it just seems like the great American tragedy; to be put in this world with all these nice things the modern first world brings us then, at some point, ejected from the smooth sails of a hang glider and forced to free fall through the rest of life just trying to maintain what bit of life you know. He never had much, and his clutches were removed from that comfort for perhaps all of his life he can remember, but like practically every westerner, he had more than he could probably afford– at least when he was no longer to able to live only for himself. Now what stands is a 60 year old man, likely fatigued beyond my comprehension, everyday his body breaking down as the days pile on, and like the slower friend who tends to get lost his mind too follows and slowly catches in that regard. This process, irreversible, compresses and accelerates in the complete opposite manner of the first years of your existence — which seem to last forever. Instead of having any sort of rest to look forward to in his future, at any point in his life, he wakes up every morning to a greater burden to drag and seemingly bigger puzzles to complete, greater problems to solve and so on. Not just no rest; less rest.

    I see my mom, the unstoppable force, doing what objects in motion do– always staying in motion. Always working, never resting. There is no throttle with that woman. She always goes at 110% until her body shuts down on her. While school is out, she doesn’t have her normal job, so they are trying to build up a business out of nowhere, not even on their own time like they wanted, but because they have no choice but to make something work. On her own, she runs her kitchen as if she had 10 people working it– this sometimes cramped, uncomfortably hot and claustrophobic space in what is already an oft cramped, uncomfortably hot house. The three of us who live here love each other dearly, but sometimes I think these walls aren’t big enough to fit the three of us, maybe you can call me a spoiled American, but I think I’m more of a victim to my culture than I am a propagator. Finally, as each day concludes, I get to witness her slowly break down until the power is completely sucked out; a 53 year old woman relegated to an inanimate crash test dummy, motionless and so worn out that you’d think what you are witnessing is something completely devoid of life. Then, perfectly parallel to the cycle of the day, she resurrects, slogs those weathered bones, worn tendons and rusted joints back to operation and goes full force again.

    Then there is myself. The one who has to dread going to sleep because I will wake up again the next afternoon, apply to 3 to 7 more jobs, assured that it will lead to nothing, knowing I am the most capable person in the family– even more capable than most people in general, yet totally helpless. I think at some point in my life, I got lost and stumbled into a Twilight Zone episode where some supernatural force decided to take away my ability to influence the real world, but imprisoned me in it, so I could merely witness the long break down in nature and end of all things, watching those I love do what they can to hang out, yet unable to join them in the struggle.

    I witness these things and feel it is tragic because I want to be able to help them. I know how much these people have done for me, as they continue to do so, yet I can’t find my own place in the equation. I’d be less miserable being miserable with those I love than I would be spoiled, knowing the others are miserable. In fact, I think I’d be happy. And that is just a piece of this emotional overload.

    I will say, it is kind of a funny thing, because I feel these kind of things as if it were a continual numbness. You know it is there, you feel it, but nothing changes. I am still very happy throughout the day. I don’t feel really sad or down, or any sort of emotion that affects the present, I just feel them all juxtaposed at no cost to my demeanor or outlook on life, it is just that awkward looking passenger seat attached to my motorcycle.

    To analyze it, I think I am mostly frustrated at everything. Things aren’t going how I’d want them to, or how I have been trying to get them to and that exposes other things. In this case, I think it almost exposes reality for what it is; I’m getting old, I’m grown up, I’m there, but society won’t let me join it. I now recognize my place and the sobering truth of my age and where I’ve already arrived at in life, where I’ve already left (youth), thus I now have to recognize that my parents have lived probably more life than they ever imagined possible. One day soon, I’ll be the 60 year old man. I won’t be freaking out because this arbitrary figure that is a big deal in my mind is now assigned to my father, but it is assigned to me. Perhaps in my lifetime, medical advances will allow me to have that same ‘all-your-blood-drops-to-your-feet’ freak out epiphany like that when I’m 120, who knows, but it is what it is. Actually, that is kind of odd to think about, I don’t think I’d care to live so long. Maybe it is because to us it just doesn’t seem natural, but I feel like even if science can make it possible for our bodies to function longer and longer, that doesn’t account for our mind’s. That’s so much more guilt, pain, joy, happiness, sorrow, exictement, disappointment, apathy and memories to have layered on top of each other.

    More and more I believe that the greatest thing about youth is that your frame of reference is so direct. I have my best friends, the only family I’ve known for my life. The girl I loved or used to love. My first set of pets. My first this and first that, everything is just fresh. As it all goes on, all those things in the back stale and the newer ones have different impacts because the experience coupled with it. The significance of everything seems to fade. Did I love the girl I thought, for years, I was going to marry when I was just starting adulthood, but let go because I wasn’t in the right place in life as much as the girl I thought I was going to marry well into my adulthood, who left me? Did I love her, her or her in the same way? What did this best friend mean to me as opposed to this one? Ad infinitum.

    I could probably go on and on with all of these thoughts and feelings, but I have already gotten very convoluted and frayed with it as it is, I think I will end it here.

    As I toil away and struggle to get in a place where I actually feel that I have entered adulthood, in a societal manner, all these thoughts and feelings mount. Everything becomes so constricting. I’m bound and like I said, all I can do is just watch the life pass by until I can break free and put in the assembly line with everyone else. Damn, and to think all I really wanted to do was to make a little bit of money, go to the gym, eat three times and have a girl give me attention.

    Too bad this life thing doesn’t get any easier. As long as I can find a way to make it easier for my parents, that’s all I need.

    Selah

  • My Word

    I put complete faith in it my entire life. I grew up believing that it carried some sort of virtue; a personal regality and honor meant for nobility. Blindly I trusted it as I let it lead me from each phase of life as if I were just a naive flock of sheep. Yet if I take the time to acknowledge it, there hasn’t been any aspect of my inner workings that has been the breeding ground of more betrayal than my own word.

    How many times I tell myself that I’d never do this or never do that– I’ll always do this or do that, and with a will cast in brawn and smoldering iron I possess unrelenting faith in these things I tell myself. Yet, as I continue to take new forms, shapes and molds, I turn my back on these concrete words I’ve placed within myself and never look back when I betray it. Not even for a single lost strand of time in the universe, not even in the moment it takes an electron to compete a single orbit around its nucleus do I even acknowledge this continual and villainous betrayal of myself. Well this is that acknowledgment.

    Even without that acknowledgment, I still justify to myself, “well this is just me growing.” Our whole lives we are led to think that the personal growth of a human is akin to a tree, sprawling outward and upward. Linearly tracing this path of thinking I could tell myself today that when I was 15 I couldn’t see as far out on the landscape of the world, but if we do, as individuals and minds, grow like trees, then odds are we are stunted, deformed, mutated, miserable weeds that are merely disguised as trees. So maybe at 24 I have a greater, broader perspective than I did a year ago, five years ago, or as a teenager, but for all I know, maybe I ended up burying my head in the sand on other things. What I believe to be improved vision could just be the darkness of the earth. I’m not here to argue or dispute any of those possibilities, my point is that I will stand firm in my word today, as I was yesterday. Tomorrow, I may have no memory of that. It’s an odd little thing. I know that my word and myself betray each other often, I admit to that right now. I am still telling myself, right now in this moment, that I’m a rock. So I look in the mirror and expect to see a rock. Maybe last week I was also telling myself that I am a silent shadow, and this week I’m a firework, but still, if I believe I’m a rock right now, then even with that questionable track record– even knowing that eventually something I assured myself was true about myself will become a total falsehood, I still, in the most absolute of faith will believe that I’m a rock for as long as I can tell.

    Maybe my word will betray me on that. But that doesn’t stop us from trying. It’s an odd little thing.

    So are the thoughts that replace sleeping.