mindjames

Category: rambling

More than anything, I’m just rambling.

  • Streaming Consciousness, High Bandwidth, No Buffering

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

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

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

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

    Don’t mean to.

  • A Minor Tragedy

    note: June 16th, 2011 — I left this unedited because I like to see how accurate/inaccurate I was typing laying in bed with my eyes closed

     

    i:m writing this lying down in my bed with my eyes closed. Ipray that my alignment on the keyboard isn’t off, or else I’ll practically lose everything I’ve typed.

    There are perfectly good reasons why I am laying down, typing to myself. I have to wake up in about 3 hours and drive another hour to schoolMy sleep disorder aside, I think I could sleep but I am restless. Actually, maybe restless is the wrong word, let’s say stirred. I am stirred. I’m laying down right now, wth my eyes closed and I know that my life, currently, is a crockpot of bs. I think the fact that I have known this for, well, who really knows how long is more of the point. I’m shut off, man.

    It probably isn’t all my fault or intention, but I’ve completely withdrawn; from everything. I go on record as referring to this current point in my life as a minor tragedy. It is only minor because on the tragedy richter scale, my troubles register as a 1 or 2. With that said, I can’t deceive myself, or anyone else for that matter, anymore. This is about as significant as it gets, when considering the entire timeline of my life. I don’t know how manythings you could count as being’ right’ in the present. There are some huge ones, yes. My family, my faith (though it, admittedly, is a bit of a dry period, and I’m not too sure where I find myself fully there again), some close people. I have kivubgm carubg abd fully supporting parents. There is a girl who is absolutely devoted and crazy about me,  I don’t understand why sometimes, though if I ever mention any such confusion or failure to understand, I find myself quickly receding and falling silent for fear of messing something up– as if I have some sort of elaborate smoke and mirrors illusion on the cosmic scale, yet I have no such control or cognizance as to how it works, so I just hide behind it as much as I can. I probably betray these people everyday. And the other few close ones left. I betray people because I am disconnected. That itself is the betrayal. There are small pcokets in time where I seem to phase back in, as if my body were on auto-pilot and the rest of me is on vacation, but here I am, popping into the helm and teasing. Here are my thoughts. Here are my hopes, my dreams, my concerns. Here is me glad-handing everyone a little bit,see, I’m fine, it is the same old me.

    The hell it is.

    Nostalgia is a trippy thing. It is probably one of the biggest cons we pull on ourselves. The contiinual lie we get high off of, just to make sure we are always lying about something. Though, I do believe there are a lot of true feelings to nostalgia, I think they just become amplified to the point that we can’t hear anything else but the notes that we so fondly remembers, Even the misery sounds good when played through the strings of nostalgia. But man, I don’t think I’ve been overwhelmed by nostalgia lately. There is a difference between nostalgia and between a lot of what I’ve been feeling and thinking lately. Nostalgia doesn’t make me feel like my current place in life is so wrong. I don’t want to sell this as something that is a new thing, though this is the most ‘wrong’ I think things have been, but I think it is also the point where I can’t help but step aside and see how far things habe been moving in this broken down vehicle.

    I’m thinking just about everything is wrong right now. The convenient thing about being a student, is that we so easily get to break down our life into semesters. WE cut our years in half and we cut thoseh alves in half, and often times, those halves or halves of halves (yeah, quarters) carry a long with them much change.  Given that our perception of time continually compresses and multiplies until moments and events feel as insignificant as sand and that we can so easily chart meaningful change in our lives, it is no surprise that sometimes life can feel like it is just rapidly changing and spiraling out og control from what you want it to be, or what you tought it was. See, what I thought my life was, yesterday, is already a distant memory of what life what was. That’s just not right.

    I’ve pretty much been relegated to a hermetic state. Quantitatively, there is a lot on each side of the arguments, whether it has been voluntary or involuntary.

    For instance, I am, as I already said, detached, far removed, isolated from much of society. I feel like the past few years has just been a slow process of elimination. A big game of musical chairs with my friends. Sometimes it was me, pulling the chair out from under them as the music stopped. The other half were cases where I feel like the one abandoned, but either ay, I looked through my contacts list in my phone today and just felt really sad. Where did everyone go? Where did I go? Why do we all forget about each other so easily? That’s not right,, man. Here is the true meat of my social life; mom, dad, Kara. That’s really about it, then you have your players in significant roels, but not starring scrren time, people like my sister, or Slinky, or anyone of the Josh’s that I know) for some reason you can always rely on a Josh, and you always make it a point to make sure they can count on you). I am not a major socialite, and I can get by just fine if left on my own, but at the same time, you can have everything else feeling like it has decayed, but if you ave good people to surround yourself with, life will still feel, well, lively. There is no liveliness here. I don’t have any big congregations of old friends to look forward to. I couldn’t pull anything that you could even dare associate the word ‘antics’ withl I’m mummified. I don’t have anything new on the influx. Half of the excitement of social interaction is on newe frontiers. Our lives change, so do our people. Instead, my life has changed, but my people haven’t, so the ones who were there just dopped off like flies. Then it is stagnant.

    You know, if we lived in some sort of post-apocalyptic dystopian scenario, that’d be more than alright. I’d feel like a winner, I’d have everything I need. The problem is, society is still intact. A few hitches aside, in the United States, we all pretty much live the same lives we were born into. So when I enter society’s various realms, I’m surrounded by people who still have living lives. Ifwe were plants, I’d be feigning my bloom, my fruits would be nothing more than a plastic display, the soil beneath me is totally exhausted and as useless as stone. That is really hard to deal with when all the other plants around you still bloom in the spring, and produce ripe fruit each in accordance with the seasons. I’m stuck in a perpetual autumn and winter.

    From this point, I can say a lot of things that will get me into some degree of trouble with just about anyone who may happen to read this, so, of course, I will. Sometimes I look back on how the past few years have played out and wonder about how things could be diffferent if ___. I won’t lie, sometimes I think that not only would I be better off, but my girlfriend, Kara woud be too if we had never dated. Let me quikcly say that I don’t actually think this, as a dominant thought, but let’s just allow ourselves to understand that thought is more like a democracy anyway, the idea that we aren’t allowed to think some sort of thought that is contrary to what we truly believe is all messed up. What is doubt? It is just a minority thought anyway. Of course, sometimes democracy’s vote sways, but that is not the case here, I am just saying, I’ve had the thought a couple of times. Really though, there is some plausabilitiy to this. For instance, sometimes I  think to myself about Kara. I feel really bad about hiw her life has played out the past few years.. since I’ve been a major part of her life. When we first were getting to knw eachother, she had friends, a decent support group. Friends both male and woman-male. That was good for her, as it would be for ayone else. Now, that’s just simply and truly not the case. I am not sying she has no friends at all, but all of her ‘close’ friends aren’t there, nor have they been for a very long time. Sorry, I don’t just mean close friends, I mean close and immediate friends. IF you’re unable to play a mjor role in someone’s life on a weekly or daily basis, then you’re not really able to be an immediate friend, thiough you can be close. To be honest about this, it really really pisses me off. Why? I’l tell you straight up, I, with full conviction, believe all these so called friends just straight up abandoned the girl. What on earth kind of close friend does that? Ok, I admitted earlier that I’m guilty of such things, and have been since I can remember, I bet, but we are talking about all of them. This isn’t a new thing for her, either, yet this is someone who just isn’t deserrving of such a thing. On that same token, I wonder to myself, would  this have ever happened if we had dated? I mean, as much as we all try, when you seriously date someone, or anything along those lines, it just becomes hard to allocat our time and energy to everyone. There isn’t enough time in a day.  So on some end, I feel like I have ot have at least some significant blame for the initial distance forming between her and some of her close ones, until that turned into a chasm,  Ury, iy id sll dyill dprvulsyibr, brvsudr yo br honrdy, I eill never know how things would be. This means blaming myself, partly, for a person ending up more alone than they likely have ever been is perfectly valid. Thus I can still say this to all of you who did partake in such abndonement, screw you. I’m bitter because people just move on so quickly and easily. And you wonder why I struggle so much with self-loathing? I make myself sick!

    Repeating myself; things aren’t right. Here is how tomorrow is supposed to go. I’ll wake up at about 7:30 in the morning, I’ll drive probably an hour ecause of traffic up to school. I’ll park at the apartment complex I lived in last year and walk across the street, just as I used to do every morning for a year. I’ll fumble my feet, one in fron of the other until I drift into a classsroom. I’ll sit and pay attention. I’ll be mildly entertained from time to time by the professor, of whom I like, and take away small bits of inromation that my brain can nibble on. As soon as I leave the classroom, the amnesia process begins. Within 2 hours, at best, all of te crumbs are  just matter lost in the infinite vastness of ever expanding space, until all that matter ever knows is blackness and nothingness. I’ll go to some sort of lecture so I can get a number credited to my student record, so that I can get enough of these numbers to further contribute to my graduation. Between that time I may go to Kara’s apartment and nap, or go play basketball at noon for about 40 minutes until I repeat that whole class routine. In and out of reality, injecting myself for intol small cracks of society, then just like that extacting and innoculating myself. That’s my day. A few blips on a radar scan and non-existant for the rest. Because beyond that, I don’t do much else that registers anywhere. I keep to myself. I spend time with my girlfriend, or maybe a small small amount with my parents, or to myself, with my internet. There ar e a few other timesI get to be a blip, they vary slightly, and small exceptions or minor players, such as a cat and dog that I spend much time interacting with, but outside of that, I pretty much told you everything you need to know about an entire life, all in half of a day.

    The whole school part of it makes it all even more depressing. I treasure knowledge as much as any other man or woman who has at least a nominal value for wisdom would, but let’s look at education on a curved scale. The effects of my education, on the instituional level that e call school, has prety much maxed out. Not that it has, by any mean, just that if you did something like throw in a doctorate or something, I may end up much further with wahtever I’m studying than I am now, but the time, money,energy, thought and so on einvested into it doesn’t really justify the gain, because relatively speaking, it is very little. Most of my education comes from my own pursuits these days. I mean, I learn in school, and it is valuable stuff I learn, Lord knows I have a lot of completely useless knowledge I’ve chased down in my own time over the years, but we live in this world where we can soak up more knowledge than we can handle, and in more ways than ever. I don’t spend akk if my alone time learning, but I spend a lot of if learning, in some capacity. I study things that interest ,e to the point that they drive me. Just like we grow and experience phases that shadow the growthin our life, so do our interests change in this shadowing manner.  Right now I am obsessed with the art of storytelling through film and audio visual mediums. Obsessed. I feel absolutely compelled to absorb as much as I can, as I find myself coninually shaping how I want to tell stories through such means. I can write and pour endless thought into all things related, but to ask me to give you a ouple of pages on some poem I read in Spanish, or to analyze the environment of an industry and how it would affect a certain company are just so tedious to me right now. I can do these things in my sleep, and I pretty much have been for a while. So the scary realization hits me. At some point, the ability to force myself to do such things is going to run out. It is a finite thing to be able to force yourself to perform adruous work in things that you have trouble stimulating your mind with.

    I really try to not paint such a negative picture about school, because I don’t want it to seem useless. I have just had my fill of recycled thoughts and discussions on business this and industry that, and so on. There was a time I was obsessed with related things, for instance, the economic meltdown a few years back. I spent hours upon hours siphoning every piece of infromation out of what was exactly going on. The thing is, within the instituion, it is hard to get a real discussion going about the institution. I’ve pretty much met my limits in terms of trying to immerse myself in a languafe  in order to learn it, while being in a country where the primary language is English. So I take all these Spanish classes, yet get worse and worse at Spanish because I can’t force myself into furrther immersion so that I can continue to get a hold on the langue. I’m tired of having tons of thoughts on things that I understand in Spanish, but everyone having half-ballsed discussions because we can’t really express our thoughts like we’d like. I can continue, but my point is just this; arduous.

    Scary, you know? I’ve done this school thing for so long, 18 years without a break, and academia isn’t what I want to do with my life. To all the people with their PhD’s and Master’s degrees and so on, that is what was what they wanted on some level, so thyey were able to do it. More power to them. Intellecutally, there is no problem, in terms of desire, I’m scared that I’ve ran out, yet I am a few steps away from the finish line. Where is my motivation? It is lost. All of this stuff in my life is just suddenly missing; or so it seems.  So what happens I have to turn myself into a liquid and inject myself into cracks and small holes here and there, then pull myself back out again. I have to pour myself into all sort of things except the glass that I want to be in or need to be in. I exhaust myself, I difffuse myself, I dissipate. From here, anxiety grows.

    I’m filled with more anxiety than I ever have been. It is like looking at the national deficit 50 years ago to today, the quantities are that striking. I think when you look back on the past, I maybe outputted the same levels of anxiety, the anxiety farm always had similar crop yield, but I could spread it out all over. How many avenues do I have to sow my seed of anxiety now, when I myself and evaporated? Atomically, I am all over the place. I’ve drifted into the clouds, I’ve parted north, west, south and east. I’m in some other planet’s orbit, i’m in 60 different galxies at once and I’m only getting further away from the center. Do I want to go to school this morning? No. Do I want to continue pretending like I care the whole week? No. Do I want to continue hanging on by a thread, getting this graduation nonsense sorted out? No. Do I want to succumb toall that pressure and just tell myself i’m going to sit down and take a breather when I’m so close to the end? No. Do I want to risk never crossing that finish line? No. Do I want to step out of this buffer and truly put myself in a place where I have to assume the full responsibilities of a grown adult? No. Do I feel young at all anymore? No.

    Do I think back on to memories of simple things, like going to football games at my high school each friday and feel like that never existed? Yes. Do I think back on to how the stupidest stuff in my life was so exciting, like going to school each morning or to class later on in hopes of seeing some girl I hardly know but thrilled because I can add more to my memory than just that time she was wearing whatever and what it felt like when I made her laugh and feel like there is nothing to look forward to… or at least that life is not a simple as it should be? Yes. Do I feel like a lot of people who have meant a lot to me have abandoned me? Yes. Do I feel like I have abandoned a lot of people who have meant a lot to me? Yes. Am I fed up with how, if you round up, everyone so willingly and ignorantly falls into the exact mold society dumps them into? Yes. Do I feel bad for the people who are still unfortunate to be stuck with me and my current state? Yes. Do I think I am a ghost, a poorly executed program of the person I once was? Yes. Do I sometimes feel like I am locked in to what my life currently is and where that means it must be going? Yes. Do I feel bad for feeling that? Yes. Do I think it is wrong? Yes. Do I think that I’m a long ways off from where I know I need to be? Yes. Do I think that in the future that all these tragic elements and more will be back to being ‘good’? Yes.

    Do I think I can make it there with the current state of everything? I don’t know….

    Do I think I’ll be able to wake up in 2 1/2 hours.. I don’t know that either. I’ll feel even worse than I do now if I don’t, though.  School isn’t even just school at this point, it is my entire life, nearly all-ined over the course of 4-5 years, more of myself invested into it on all facets. We have so much pressure on ourselves in the things where there should be no pressure.

    When I started writing this, my eyes were closed. For better or for worse, they’re open right now.

  • closets full of ideas

    The other day I was looking through all of my posts on wordpress– drafts, stuff I published and what not– and it turns out that I actually have been writing pretty regularly. I probably have 15 or so entries that were either finished, or more than 70% written and I’ve just never published them.

    I’m not really sure why, but I am currently thinking that a lot of it has to do with a slight deviation between speaker and writer/author. I’ve been writing a lot of stuff, which despite a lot of it being heavily wedged between the roots of my life, also has a lot interwoven of which is from someone else’s life; partial fiction, partial reality. In line with this thought, I’d imagine it is just too much trouble to be actually publicly displaying smudged writings. Maybe I’ll change my mind on this, or realize I am wrong about my theory entirely, but for now none of that will change.

    The more interesting portion of all this is that is the reason; why am I writing these cross entries that represent a very out of focus picture of my life. I could come up with answers for days, and that signifies the multiplicity of pretty much everything. I’m not interested in completely breaking down something that won’t get more than 60 minutes of thought in the next 6 months, but I would like to at least get something out of the hour or so of thought that will be spent.

    Call this the optimist within me– yes, yes, he is in there hiding somewhere, much akin to a political minority on the same scale as the independent party candidate in the U.S. Presidential election– but I think the first thing to note is that it is a corporeal representation of the fact that I have ideas. Substantial proof that I have a lot of ideas going through my mind these days. I wouldn’t consider everything a bleeding of ideas though. My thoughts aren’t just hemorrhaging and seeping into every other thought around them, but I think it is a subconscious representation of many things. For one, I’m not trying to write fiction, but I have a few entries that border on the line of being short stories; straight up. I don’t want to be writing short stories though, I mean, when I sit down and write the stuff I have zero intention of writing a short story, or any such work of written fiction. I’m just writing. I just get ideas and I want them down in words, whether highly abstracted and more stream of conscious, or something that resembles a narrative format. Of course, when I think about it consciously, it seems apparent that I just don’t want to risk the misconception.

    On that angle, maybe I’ll get over it and just put the stuff up for the heck of it, I know my intentions after all, and nobody can convince me I did something I didn’t. In fact, having this internal dialogue with myself on it, I probably have given myself enough of a ‘screw it, I have ideas, I’m writing them however I want and posting them, so screw all of you’ attitude to probably starting excessively posting these idea based things. I need to be able to steal from myself in the future anyway.

    Bobbing back into my subconscious, I think I can also say that a lot of it helps cover up thoughts and feelings that hit me from time to time. You know those alien thoughts and feelings that come into your mental orbit and briefly streak across the sky of your consciousness and don’t return for years? Those kind of thoughts and feelings– often dark, or conflicting, maybe troubling, foreign, or something straight out of the mind of that evil twin you have running around somewhere.

    From there, I don’t really have any take on it though. Am I trying to not vilify myself? Am I trying to maintain a conceptualization of myself that is antiquated? Maybe I’m just trying to spare everyone else of having to deal with the kind of thoughts and emotions that we likely have to battle with from time to time. I don’t have any clue, but I will say that as a best friend of mine once noted when talking about his creative process (and I very very loosely paraphrase– so loosely I’m not even close to paraphrasing), “By letting myself work through the darker side of my thoughts and myself, I am able to work out ideas I have into more balanced end results, or that can better show the good out there.” Heck, I really just paraphrased a lot of myself, but rather think that he said something that pretty much was exactly inline with my own views on such things.

    In the end, this all falls in the line with the well-known fact that being associated with us creative types (especially the writers for some reason) is an association that is apt to go through many moments that you won’t find in typical means. From saying one foolish sentence which can inspire thousands and thousands of words, to what can seem like a self-expose (imagine there is an accent over that e) of an insane, depraved person. Regardless, I have a closet of ideas collecting dust, so soon I’ll either do some spring cleaning or just move that crap up to the attic for 25 years.

  • Remote control

    I’ve got a robot version of myself. I don’t want to get into technicalities, but essentially, it is an exact copy of me; a remotely controlled clone. It is easier to call him a robot, so I do. The appearance, the mannerisms, speech patterns, everything down to the last hair follicle are a carbon copy of ‘me’. Without myself, he is a soulless, lifeless shell.

    He sits in my room, toiling away on various inane tasks and school assignments. He goes to my classes for me and collects dust, and if he were of 20th century design, gather rust. With flawless impressionism, he masquerades from here to wither-to. He holds conversations with people. He can even pass for a young businessman in the making. Some say he has pretty good presentation skills. He makes small talk with the friends of my friends or other various persons he may happen to be introduced to. After he makes their acquaintance, he says, “hey,” to them when he sees them and emulates similar facial responsiveness and brightness as anyone else.

    In his ability to flawlessly be me, for me, he is a perfect being.

    I am far away. It isn’t even so much that I always want to be, but I am. I couldn’t tell you where I am exactly, but  space is deep and wide. It is a void so vast that far away becomes just another detail at a certain point. I’m at that point. I am far away.

    I like my robot. I can control him from where I am. I am myself via proxy.

    My robot is not perfect. Even operating under a robust remote control system, he can only emulate. If he were an ocean, he’d cover an entire planet in his soothing embrace, yet if you were to dive beneath you wouldn’t get very far. He is Solaris.

    My robot doesn’t care for the average lives of average people. He does not need to be liked, thank goodness, for a robot with such a need would require too many batteries. He doesn’t care about many things. I can only program him to handle so many things at a time. Yet, that is all I need of him.

    Where I am at, the matters of the life of my robot hold very little concern. When you’re in space you are consumed by the Alien. Earth does not accept the Alien concerns and the Alien tasks. Earth is the Alien’s prison and society is the warden.

    I am grateful for my robot. He serves my prison sentence for me. He is an incubator. He is like a pair of well-tinted sunglasses to a sleeping student, yet at the same time he is also the voice recorder in his pocket. Even better, he is the illusion of omnipresence. I am here and I am there, or so you think.

    He is here so I don’t have to be.

    When I find my way back home, you will never know I have been gone. Likewise, when I send my robot self to his vacation to the great beyond, you will never know he left you. One day, I’m sure I will miss the robot version of myself. Will you miss him?

  • On being in a rut

    Being caught somewhere on the negative end of a downward slope sucks. I’ve been riding this wave for a while, and I still have my days (like today) where I’m not sure if it is still headed down, if it has bottomed out, or if I am finally starting the long ascent back to sea level. I just know that right now, I am still in a rut. I mean, I’ve had a lot of my life upended in the past couple of months. When I refer to this concept of ‘my life’, I merely refer to the very thing that we become complacent in. The ways I am able and most often spend my time, the people I see and spend that time with, my daily and larger pursuits, the things I am able to turn to when I have absolutely nothing to do, and so on. Just imagine it as some shelves, on it you have your items, pictures of people and other things that ultimately go a long way in defining who you are at any given point in time. Today, I’ve taken a few things off of my shelves, and moved the position of a major one or two and even with the small number of changes, it is hard to go more than a few days without really feeling the effects.

    So what usually comes of such upheavals? In my case, it has really put me in a rut. I am optimistic that I am going to change the entire situation, and once again I’ll be the iconic figure of the man atop the hill, ready to staple his banner into the ground and declare that he is king of the world, but until then I know I can share many nights, empty spaces of time and vacant schedule feeling like I do tonight. I look back to where I was almost 2 months ago, I had just made a few cracks into the pile of rubble I was under and I could see some light. Eventually that turned into something that felt like I had finally liberated myself from what must have been a caved-in life. I had so much energy. I had enough ambition to power a shuttle to Neptune and back. I had my thumb on the reboot button; it was going to be a brand new story arc placed in the middle of the overarching one I had been caught in. I told myself that I’d go stir up some trouble, build some new bridges, and conquer lands neighboring and afar, then when I get done, I’ll circle it all back to where I started, and everything would be better than ever.

    I still believe in that dream.

    The problem is, I am looking at things almost 2 months following, and in many ways I recognize that I’m just a man standing in a hole in the ground. I’ve got my arms outstretched, you can often see the glow on my soot and rubble tattered face as I light up at the sight of any new opportunity.

    “Take me! I’m coming along!,” I shout as I see any potential adventure or adventurer cross my path, but I am unable to latch on.

    I’m still standing in this hole.

    As a younger man I had a lot more reckless abandonment residing within myself. There was once a time where I had a friend make a list of ten random girls that I would have to ‘pursue’ in order of intensity based on the number. It was silly, it was probably juvenile and if there were actually any hint of seriousness to it, probably could have been considered a little cruel (whether that would have been to me or any of the girls is up to hypothetical history). But it ultimately it was meaningless, just a little fun, I suppose. Today, I don’t know if there is any hint of a person who would do that on any grounds, and that really sucks. Sometimes I wonder if it has to do with age, and with having a few years on my belt I feel the ultimate truth of my mortality, even my social mortality.

    Socializing has always been an issue of turf. I have a lot of friends who are comfortable on any social ground. I’m not. I don’t want to play by your rules. I need to take you into my world, I need to let you experience my head– it doesn’t work like most people’s. Nobody has a mind that does, and I am not going to confine myself to the idea that we can establish a set of standards and norms that say that we should have quasi-cultural-universal expectations to constrain us. I used to have a habit of leaving without saying bye; specifically in larger social events. It wasn’t meant as a slight to anyone, or an indicator of rudeness, indifference, or disgust. It was just what I did. And you can’t argue that it is a more memorable departure. If you drop off the face of the earth, people wonder about your fall. What happened to you, where did you go, are you ok, what is wrong with you– the things a mind can wonder are limitless. Anyway, I unfortunately gave up that habit after I had my mom chew me out for it once. Of course, I didn’t resolve to quit because I thought she was right, I don’t, but out of the limitless respect I have for her. Though, I wish I had never given that up. I wish I had never given any of my social ground up.

    That is just the thing right now. I don’t have my own ground to stand on. I can’t usher you to my yard and say, “Hey, let’s stop inside my nice little cottage and take a look at how I’ve decorated the place.” This is too important to me though. I’m not good at being me if I am a foreigner. As it is now, I just wander from yard to yard, always on somebody else’s grounds. I guess in that regard I’m just a nomad searching for a land forgotten; no wonder why I’m uncomfortable.

    It is even harder when this social concept of territory always exponentially expanded with the territory of my own adversaries. As it is now, I still don’t feel very comfortable on my friend’s grounds. I’ve been away for a long time, I get back in town and most everything has changed. New faces, new places and a lack of time for an old one to fit back into the picture. As it stands now, I understand, with a lot more clarity, why people who drop off the map for a while and go through a lot of changes always seem so hesitant and distant coming back to the former pieces in their lives. It is hard not to feel alienated. In some ways, you’ve changed a lot, but everything that you left behind feels so constant. Who wants to feel restricted? Who wants to risk being judged, even? The way I see it, it is like you have someone who eats Mexican food all the time. It is their favorite, just all things Mexican food. One day, you introduce say, Italian or Chinese food. Now they have multiple apetites to fill, multiple flavors to explore, something different that sometimes holds their interest. What does that mean when they come home for dinner and would rather eat Spaghetti than Tacos? They don’t have anything against Chips and Salsa, they love them dearly, but maybe even just once a month, they really just feel an insatiable need for some Lasagna.

    Where do you go to get fed?

    Unfortunately, the Yellow Pages doesn’t have any application in a social semblance. So you get in a rut. The distance you feel between the old is just as great as the distance between the potential; what could be new. I’m impressed how much of an impact this has. You might feel an inspirational tug, but you try to get creative and you feel emptied out instead. You try to be productive and work hard, but you’re exhausted after one breath. You try to reconnect, but you feel bored, or like you’re just another obstacle in the schedule. You try to plug-in to something new, but you can’t find an outlet that looks like it can power you. You try and try, but you’ve already defeated yourself before you get out of bed. It isn’t that your world has collapsed on you, just your willpower to keep that from happening has. Recharge.

    As an individual, I recognize this process. I acknowledge these feelings. I… feel them, for lack of a better word. I don’t let that end the story, or a chapter, or a page, or even a sentence, if I can help it. A slump is a slump, if you keep on swinging, you’ll eventually swing your way out of it. Of course you have to work like crazy to improve that swing in the meantime, but that is the basic principle of it.

    I need my own ground to stand on.

    I need that equilibrium, and a home behind me to look back at so I can recognize that I, as a sole person, have influence in some magnitude on this planet. Eventually someone is going to recognize me again, or spot me hidden beneath the cluttered motion of a crowd– and that will just be the start. All I need is that foot in the door, or rather, that one foot on my own turf, and I know the hard part is done. I only hope that I have enough time between now and that moment. I need to circle it all back to the things and people in my former stage of life that were most important to me.

    For now, I will feel the effects of being in a rut. I will feel the people who have forgotten about me. I will feel the unfamiliarity between myself and my body, who once had so permanently etched into its memories the secrets on how to perform a number of feats. I will feel the betrayal the so-called-artist (for lack of a better term) felt when I abandoned him for all that time. I will feel holographic on my good days, and I will feel like God considered erasing me from all existence on my bad days. In the end though, I won’t forget people, or myself, or who has placed my existence. As much as I would love to look back and give the cold shoulder to anything that makes me feel so very buried right now, when I reach my monumental moment on that hill, and I raise this flag over my head and with a quaking declaration have my moment of reestablishment, I will do so knowing that I will do all that I can to prevent the long process set into motion that ultimately sends us plummeting into a rut such as the one I am in.

    Being in a slump, or a rut, or a funk, or whatever it is to you makes yourself easy prey to all sorts of negativity. Even right now I want to at least be cynical. I owe Conan one on this. I was younger once, and I felt in a similar kind of place. Being cold got me where I wanted– what I wanted, but what good was all that cynicism? Being warm-hearted about everything will get me to the same ground. It took a lot to not accept the state I’m feeling right now just to write this, but I did. Maybe starting right now I’ll get back to climbing out of this hole I’m standing in.

  • Tyrannical Dreams

    I’m not sure I’ve ever had the same dream more than once. Instead, I’ve had dreams set in the same world or environment, in fact, it is a pretty regular occurrence. Sometimes I like to think of my dreamscape in the same vein as a video game like Zelda (this concept applies to a ton of games), where you have this massive world and it is divided up in to these very distinct and pronounced regions; each with their own separate titles. There is almost a certain reputation associated with each one. As far as the universe I’ve constructed in my dreams, it is an environment that puts such a world you might find in one of the Zelda games into a molecular perspective. With that said, when I have dreams set in these very similar settings, I feel like I’m just in a different region of my dreamiverse.

    For instance, I have one series of dreams that has a few defining traits. The biggest player in all of it is the nighttime setting. There is no concept of day, it is a very dark world, the only light is provided from the dim orange glow of street lights and sometimes houses. This leads into another dominant aspect; it is predominantly set in a large suburban neighborhood. Most of the time it is specifically modeled after a neighborhood of one of my best friends– a place where I spent a lot of very memorable times in my childhood. There are two other major characteristics I can identify off the bat too.

    First is the concept of powerlines. In a visual sense, they are always of great importance. The angling of visuals in my dreams is often from an elevated view, one that is often high enough to be looking down from power lines, but I also can recall a lot of visuals of just random cut aways to looking up into the night sky as the dimmed grey clouds speed by, sometimes revealing the ruler of this nightened world– the full moon. Finally, and probably most distinctly to me is the presence of what I’d call vampiric creatures.

    These aren’t actual vampires I’m talking about, but if you look at characteristics of the fiction of vampire folklore throughout history some of these things are consistent. Also, when I say creatures it is important to note that that they are essentially human in their cognizance and existence, but they represent a more ascendant and powerful figure above what we typically see as humans. In all my dreams in this setting, I’ve never figured out if they were predatory of just observational, but in this vast, dark neighborhood they often scour on the power lines prowling about, camouflaged with the night sky in excessively long black-caped cloaks. They fly about from street light to street light and are seemingly incapable of making a sound. In particular, there is one that tends to be dominant in these dreams, a female of this species who has often given me very uneasy feelings in my dreams– sometimes even terror.

    I’ve had dreams in this setting that have led me to going to an absurdly massive neighborhood pool that was packed, wandering around the same block in my lonesome in an endless cycle as I was stalked by the vampiric creatures, a set of dreams that revolved around safely traveling to a caged outdoor basketball court, one where I took refuge in a basement maze that connected my friends house to their neighborhoods, and probably the one that I remember the best: the one where another street wandering leads me to an entire section of the neighborhood that has been engulfed in a cornfield. People’s yards and houses vanished into this small country of corn, except for one house that was a little bit off center in the maze, as a family sat in rocking chairs on the porch in the distance. When I managed my way to the house it was vacated.

    What I’m getting at is less a dream recollection, but really the emphasis that when I dream, while a lot happens and there is a very powerful audio/visual presence in my dreams, I believe the most prevalent effect to be an emotional one. Maybe not emotional in the watered down version we know in our consciousness– anger, sadness, happiness, love, etc.– but the more abstract sense of feeling. Just as I, and probably everyone dreams things that are to bizarre for reality, the feelings I dream are the same. I dream feelings that I could never hope to describe or articulate into any form outside of just feeling them.

    Even further, if I dream, I usually can remember most of it if I put the effort into it. Though, if I do it takes a long time. If I recall a dream and even go as far to write it out, it usually takes at least an hour to go through the entire thing. The feelings are different. I never have to make an effort, but I almost always remember the feelings I experience. I can think to a dream I remember and I.. feel how I remembered feeling when I dreamt it. It works in reverse too. I think of a feeling I remember having in a dream and I can remember the dream in a very distant sense. Kind of like seeing a painting at a distance that barely makes itself aware to the eye. While with recalling the occurrences it is kind of like knowing the answer on a test but not being able to bring the information out.

    Now, when I brought up this suburban night world dreamscape I specifically wanted to point it out because the dreams tend to be rather unpleasant. They really aren’t good dreams at all. I don’t wake up from them and feel good. I wake up from them and if I have the time to soak it in and ease back into reality, I feel like I’m in desolation. A kind of dream that can make my mind take a vacation from the immediacy of reality for hours– I don’t know if other people have them that often, but I’d hope that you’d know what I’m talking about. Most of the feelings I have from these dreams have flavors of terror in these highly abstracted and complex feelings, yet here is the caveat: I love these dreams. If I had a choice, I’d take living in a world like this one that I dream than the reality I know. I think I can live with admitting this because it is simply impossible and will never actually happen. I enjoy my dreams better than reality. It is the only redeeming quality of sleep. The more I learn about my own dreams though, I realize it isn’t just these super surreal settings and scenarios that are so addicting, though they are, but these feelings may be the greatest draw of all. The combined effect of all of this leads to the essence of what dreams are to me. These things you end up aspiring for, but in this case can’t have.

    Let me quickly note that I’m not trying to give reality a diminutive quality, but just that dreams are addicting because, well.. I think I’m about to get in part of why I’m thinking they are.

    I remember when I was a lot younger, reading up on lucid dreaming. I think there was maybe one time up to that point where I had realized I was dreaming but didn’t wake up, but it was very short-lived. Apparently you can condition or train yourself to have a greater propensity to dream lucidly, or become aware you’re dreaming. Who knows how much legit backing there is to this idea, but I did try it for a few weeks in my teens one summer, and it definitely seemed to work. Funny thing is,  for the most part I always decided to fly and not do much else in these instance, and I never woke up feeling rested. But given this concept, then if you have awareness that you’re dreaming while you’re dreaming, then you are gaining control of a world that nearly has the perception of reality on pretty much all the senses. That’s a pretty powerful thing to consider.

    Just thinking about this a little bit really leads me to believe that a lot of why I really have an addiction to dreaming and visiting all these worlds my subconscious has constructed is because I am in control in some sense. I can’t help it that living in a world where Stevie Wonder drives an ice cream truck and sings with joy about killing one of my best friends as he makes constant attempted to obliterate him with his ice cream truck, ultimately leading to us sprinting into the back of his truck which is, in turn, a cafeteria with marble floors and tables that is at least a mile wide is more interesting than waking up every day and going to school, doing the same actions and hobbies on a regular basis, seeing the same faces, interacting with the same things and abiding by the same universal principles.

    It is a dynamic escape, an unpredictable and fresh adventure each time. One that provides experiences, sights, sounds, events and feelings that we rarely get in our everyday lives (though there are definitely things that reach and exceed this standard in reality, they are rare events). Though, sometimes I think this represents the tyrannical self. In a physical sense, my body, my mind and so on is generating these dreams. On some level I want to feel and experience what I dream, or else I wouldn’t really dream them. I mean, I like having terrible dreams from time to time because the powerfully intoxicating feelings they give me when I wake up. And I know that I have some sort of preference to my so called dreamscape than what can sometimes be a mundane and limited reality.. so is there some sort of latent desire for a self-generated tyranny? I suppose so, as I have the gall to even think that a world that is heavily influence and even constructed by myself is better than the one I live in. Pretty selfish really.

    Good thing they’re just dreams though, right?