mindjames

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  • 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.

  • not hollow, empty

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

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

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

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

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

  • Anxiet Ease Gold

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    But good.

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

    I feel much better now than before I wrote this.

     

    Later fellas!

    – Jack Wizzy

  • Rapumentary Vol 4. – One Year Later

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

    Until next time folks,

    Jack Wizzy