No Apologies

I’ve decided I will no longer apologize–neither to myself nor to my anonymous audience here–for failing to write on this blog. Part of getting older entails sacrifices and necessary shifts from idealisms of youth and hobbies once held sacred. Writing for most of my burgeoning life has been a method for me to cogitate and develop independence of thought, but most importantly, to relieve myself of loneliness and give voice to an inner life long held silent.

But now I am married and professionally immersed. Though I don’t have many close friends in NYC since I moved here five years ago, I don’t generally have time to feel lonely. I continue to develop and refine my philosophies, but that development now either takes place amongst discussion with colleagues at my school, at education conferences or events, or on my professional blog, Schools as Ecosystems.

So while I do miss the personal and introverted creative explorations/exorcisms I once performed regularly here on this blog, I won’t allow myself to be burdened by guilt that I am compromising some essential aspect of my existence. The reality is that I am developing in other ways, and such is as it should be, because it must be, and it will be.

Maintaining My Equilibrium

I’ve been neglecting this blog even more of late, since I’ve been dedicating a lot of energy and attention–the little that remains at the end of most days–to my professional blog, Schools as Ecosystems. Unfortunately, my personal life in general has taken a big backseat to my professional life, and I can sense my creative capacity withering as a result.

In one way, I like losing myself in my work. It keeps me positive, focused, and motivated. I’ve been making some great connections with like-minded people. But I also feel that there is a danger in losing my sense of self and keeping myself grounded and focused on the bigger picture.

The bigger picture is god or nothing or all-is-one or whatever moniker we can come up with to rationally address something wholly irrational.

One way I’ve been trying to maintain my centeredness is through daily meditation. I get up at 5 and sit for 20 – 30 minutes, and this helps me to prepare for the stressful day that ensues.

But for most of my life, writing has been a necessary form of self-therapy, an outlet for catharsis, reflection, and discovery. In some senses, my professional writing performs these functions, but as excited as I am by my nerdy quest to create a new lens for education reform, the reality is that I need to write–just to write–to focus within and shed, or transmute, some of the psychic detritus of my daily existence, and to keep myself rooted.

To face the void that sits before me, the blank screen, and to charge myself with scribing words across that vast space, is a terrifying thing. It is belittling, it is demeaning, to sit and stare, fingering keys and knowing that nothing I could possibly ever say will be good enough, complete enough, to encompass the utter magnitude of one moment entire. Perhaps the proper word is humbling. This is why, I’m sure, my ego rears and kicks and strains to be elsewhere, anywhere, captivated in mindless consumption, reading Twitter, watching a show on TV. It takes humility to recognize in written form the great nothingness that is one self. To know that one self is nothing except as a part and parcel of one whole–that any accomplishment that one could possibly achieve is a mere subsidiary of a stream that is falling headlong into itself to realize itself as the ocean. Eventually, however, words must be chosen and strewn across the screen. And in the breadth of a sentence, perhaps, a glimmer, a sheen, a reflectant hue of the truth may lie. One can only hope.

It is the rush of words, the passionate night embrace of a drunken beauty that all too often ends solely in lonely morning, that drives the written dirge. The swelling of the tongue, the Dostoevskyian splay in the struggle to voice an ideal, the Wintersonian sexing of a passion for what can never fully be captured–it is this bloody, full-throated play that compels my quest to wrestle the unknown into this, ullage of words.

I will return to this space to spackle some more of my life here again. Because it is of necessity that writing occurs.

Buddha Nature

In order to write something, anything, my mind strives for some overarching purpose. But what is the overarching purpose of my life? Could this be defined? And if it could be defined, would it be worth writing?

It is better, perhaps, for me to recognize that writing itself, like life itself, is purpose enough, worth enough, to enact for it’s own sake – for my own sake – here within this very moment of being. I can write, so I will. I am alive, so I must live.

Writing is an act of transcribing waves of thought into the structured symbols our ancestors developed to amplify their minds. Through this amplification, they – and all their subsequent generations to the point of me at this point of now – enabled this text that sits directly before you on your phone or your tablet or your laptop or your desktop monitor, ferrying this current of my thought to you.

There are so many ways to amplify our minds in this day and age – due only to become ever more exponentially electrified – that it bears questioning as to what occurs when there is much amplification of little mind? Springing from that visualization (big waves circling outwards from a small pebble) comes the possible insight that the eventual zenith of all of this streamlined jetsam and flotsam is no mind. No mind as the end game of much effort applied towards mind amplification. This sounds koan enough that there must be some truth to it.

And as Meta as all of that sounded, it really is just an outgrowth of the overarching purpose from which this thought flow had begun, which of course could not be uncovered until I had allowed it to unfold without consciously steering myself to it. I commenced writing here on this post in order to calm my mind, which was preventing me from achieving the “no mind” of sleep. And in allowing myself to tap, however superficially, into the wellspring of my existence within the here and now, which is being for the sake of being, via writing for the sake of writing, I have found a sort of quietitude that will hopefully allow me to slip into the cover of my dreams. Buenas noches.

Insomniac Thoughts On Hard Work and Practice, and Some Goals

I’ve been struck, unfortuitously, with a bout of insomnia tonight, which I have been fortunate not to have had in quite some time. Before moving to NYC and plunged headfirst into a whirlwind of frenetic work and survival, I used to get insomnia a fair amount. I tended to utilize such times for writing. Which may be one reason, come to think of it, why I no longer write as frequently as I once did as a West Coast whippersnapper. During college, I wrote sometimes multiple short pieces a day. Now, many moons later, it’s more like once a month.

While I can’t really help that my cognitive and emotional space is spent on other also fairly important things, like teaching kids, I do miss delving into this personal creative space, just as I miss other creative or emotional outlets I used to devote some time to, such as playing my hand drums or hiking/running up the sides of mountains. And I know that every day that I no longer do these things, I am slowly losing the chops that I once had.

I’m reading Malcolm Gladwell‘s Outliers at the moment, and his argument about success as attributable mainly to extensive practice, as opposed to talent, made a lot of sense to me. I remember my cross country coach in high school (a terrible math teacher, but an excellent running coach) telling us that after two days of rest we would begin losing a certain percentage of our fitness. And I remember reading an interview with John McLaughlin–one of my favorite musicians and world renowned for his lightning fast licks on the guitar–in which he stated that he could tell that he was losing his skills after only two days without practice.

While at a conference recently in Seattle, during a roundtable discussion with other educators about “hybrid” roles for teachers, one teacher who was currently in that role (1/2 time in the classroom, 1/2 time doing policy related work) commented on how during time spent away from the classroom, such as the 2 days we had spent at this conference, he felt his connection to classroom practice slipping away.

I don’t know if 2 days is some magic number, but the big idea here is that without nearly daily practice in something, we begin to lose the skills and capabilities (one could even call it a type of ‘muscle memory‘) we had worked so hard to build. Furthermore, I’m reflecting on the notion that mastery is not some peak that one reaches and plants a flag in and retains from there on out for the rest of one’s life. Mastery has to be built through a lot of hard work and practice (Gladwell says roughly 10,000 hours), and then sustained.

Though I do think that there are certain tracks and pathways that, once formed, can be more easily re-awakened, even if they haven’t been practiced in a while. For example, I’ve been running for many years, but l’ll go through sometimes long periods where I don’t run at all, for reasons such as work, the season, or travel. But when I do begin running again, after a short period of initial soreness, it’s pretty easy for me to ease back into it to the point where I was before. Of course, I ain’t a “master” runner. I don’t run races or anything. But my point is that if you’ve invested a fair amount of time in something in the past, if you begin doing it again, after a short re-learning period, you’re back on track fairly quickly based on where you left off.

All of this is essentially to say that I’m realizing that I have to get much more disciplined about investing more time back into activities and practices that are important to me to develop and maintain, such as writing as an avenue of self-exploration, reflection, connection to a larger community, and expansion of thoughts and feelings.

So here is an action plan, which I am hesitant to lay out as I hate promising things that I don’t follow up on, and I also doubt that anyone really cares about my personal goals, but I feel like it’s better to lay out concrete, explicit goals if this is really important to me:

• I will write by hand in my journal 2 nights a week before going to bed (writing by hand forces me to produce a substantially different style of thought and writing, since I’m mainly accustomed to writing on a keyboard)
• I will publish 1 blog post a week
• I will play my hand drums once a week
• I will hike at least twice a year

There it is. Now I’ve got to do the much harder work of holding myself to it.

Something to Write About

I don’t know what to write. I spluttered out a few meagre sentences that fizzled before they could even hit a period. And as I stared at the blank screen, bereft, I recalled observing this struggle in my 5th grade students as they sat “brainstorming” something to write in class. It’s all right, I would tell them, this is something every writer experiences. There’s even a name for it: writer’s block! Just write down anything that comes to you, the first thing that comes to mind, and keep going with it. You can always go back and edit it or start something new.

And perhaps there is some smidgen of wisdom in those encouragements, even though all I’m really doing is trying to force them to write because I need something to quantify, something to show, something to assess. The wisdom being that we can’t wait for genius divine inspiration to strike – we have to just put it out there, now, while we have the chance, however imperfect and trivial it ultimately may be, or else we risk saying nothing at all, and holding it in, and losing an opportunity to better develop our capability to articulate what is within and to be understood. These opportunities seem like they should be legion, yet they really are quite rare. There is always something demanding our immediate time and shallow attention. Errands, family, TV, Facebook, email, video games, news, books. Something for us to become immersed in, for us to consume. For us to not be lonely, bored, depressed. For us not to confront the dire reality of our own solitary existence.

To create something out of nothing is indeed tough work. It demands humility. It demands that I lay down my pretensions and measure my distance from my own self and from others and step forward into the light of temporary understanding, thus opening myself to misunderstanding and belittlement. But beyond this threshold of fear lies love. An acceptance of my frail attempts to formally communicate myself. An acceptance of my humanity, however proud, however blind, however imperfectly stated. An acceptance that even though I don’t really know quite what to say, or how to say it, somehow I’ve still arrived at a better shore than the one I left but a moment before. And can now go to sleep feeling better relieved, slightly more whole, like I’ve taken one small step towards re-finding myself in the dark empty night, renewing the self that had been sleeping, hidden in the everyday veil of my movements. Enough. I think I’ve found something to write about.

One More Gin

I’ve almost forgotten how to allow my written words to surge from behind some unknown internal weir. Writing, once something I required in the formation of self-definition and well-being, now has become an occasional dirge or some type of social notification. But it is pointless to lament the loss of something one has sacrificed, whether deliberately or by way of necessity. My life is something sometimes beyond the scope of my own creation. I am formulated by forces that are chiseling me into some enmossed hybrid of scales and vascular tissue. The path before me, once a quiescent omega pull sensed only as the horizon, has become more greatly defined, even as it remains unknown. This means, I suppose, that I am simply gaining age, and thus, economy. A self-delimitation that oddly increases power.

This trivial taste of creation whets my will to allow for the vulnerability of writing to overtake me again. There is something of despair here, something of a rugged strength that draws one into a crumbled beauty, a traumatized clarity of vision. It can only inevitably be good for the soul.

Time Tells The Best Stories

I had an interesting conversation a few weeks ago that has made me think a bit as time goes on. I was out drinking at a bar in SF and it was reaching the end of the night after a festive occasion. I wasn’t overly drunk, but I had consumed a fair amount of wine over the length of the evening, so I was not perhaps in the best of conversational and intellectually reflective form. The person I was speaking to was kind of grilling me as to why it is that I am a capable writer, but I do not seem to have any ambition to do anything with it. I blathered on a bit about my blog and about how I’d made a choice long ago to simply write for the love and heck of it, not for profit, and furthermore that I have little attention span nor dedication to writing cohesive pieces, etc, but I have to admit that I do not feel like my answers really addressed what she was attempting to get to the heart of.

Now look, I was flattered, first and foremost, that anyone would even give two shits about whether I can write or not. And I was flattered that someone would have the empathy and zeal to even bother to press me on the issue. But I was also somewhat taken aback, as I am not accustomed to having to defend myself on the choices that I make that determine my life’s path. But before I could talk my way any further into any insight on the matter, the bar was closing and it was time to go.

I think I realized, as the conversation ended, that I wished that it could continue and that I could really explain my thought process and life decisions in a way that would convince ME. But I also realized that the reality is that truly having that level of conversation, reflecting about oneself and one’s passions and life decisions, is just a bit too narcissistic to really occur anywhere other than in a therapist’s office. Or, well, on a blog.  Oh yes, my friends, self-therapy is unfortunately sometimes and all too often the name of the game here on Manderson’s Bubble.

I mean, I don’t have any illusions of grandeur. I generally get around 100 recorded hits a day, with the majority of those hits consisting of people doing searches for guns and ending up on my post about my grandfather’s gun collection.  Which is definitely not the post that I would care to be remembered by, though it’s nice to know that it might be interesting to people doing research like I was doing.

But I do know that I can be a competent writer, when I apply myself to it. I’ve helped people to edit professional writings and academic essays, and I’ve been penning my bullshit onto this blog for some time now, of course. But what of it? Lots of people are competent writers, and they are out there making a living out of it.

I made a declaration long ago that I didn’t want to write to be published. And the more I tried to defend that long ago decision in that somewhat drunken conversation, the more I realized just how much of that decision could be attributed to the low self-esteem and angry alienation that I was going through at that time in my life. I’ve never really questioned that choice I made, but I have always wanted to write in some capacity, and so the only way I’ve found that I could keep positive and excited about writing was to share it with my friends. So in college, I started an e-mail list, and I would write almost daily prose/poetry pieces that I would then e-mail to people (some of which you can view under the category Pre-Blog Missives). And then later, I started a blog, because it seemed to make better sense to give people a choice as to whether they wanted to bother reading my shit or not, instead of stuffing it into their inboxes. And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. Just writing to share with friends.

But what is this impulse to share my writing with you really about? Isn’t it at heart a desire to be recognized? Why shouldn’t this desire be translated into a project, into a book, into a career?

These are the questions that were raised in my mind. I want to take a moment to stress that I am not expressing regret for any of my life decisions in terms of career, academics,  or otherwise. I am happy to have taken the path that I have chosen, and I am extremely excited, currently, to become a teacher. But neither does my current trajectory negate any future potential for taking my writing to another level. And perhaps at the bottom of it all, no matter how I may declaim about how I like my writing to be imperfect and mundane and blah blah blah, perhaps I really do want to take my writing to another level, and I’ve just been too scared or too lazy to really take it there.

Deep thoughts, folks, that I will end this post upon. Whatever the case, thank you for stopping by occasionally and enduring such indulgent and amateurish writing. Will I ever attempt to write something more cohesive and profound? Time will only tell.

¡Help Me Publish Something!

Help me weed out the fluff and get a solid collection of my writings together so that I can publish them. I’ve got 18 pieces thus far in it, and I’d like to get them down to at least 10 – 13 pieces, if not less. I want them to the be the ones that work together the most cohesively and are the best.

To help me, scan through the pieces by following this link over to Google docs, where you can view or download the PDF file.

Then, vote on the poll below on the pieces that you feel should be included. Vote on only one, or select all 18, it’s up to you. If enough people give me their feedback, this can help me to better consider which ones to eliminate. I’m having trouble whittling it down because I’m finding it hard to edit my own work.

Also, if you happen to feel strongly about any pieces that should be included that are not currently in the collection, then you can write in your own response at the bottom.

Exploring My Self

I have never been much inclined to write down the things that simply happen to me down in a journal. Such as “Today I went to the park and met up with Jane and played snooker,” and etc. My memory also mimics this disinclination. I completely erase from my memory occurrences or conversations which I feel are only of an overly detailed nature. This of course often gets me into trouble, especially with the girlfriend, who feels quite differently about the things that I have let slide from my mind like silicone through a tube. I am someone who thinks in generalities and integrating linkages. I see the connections in things that make two disparate concepts into a greater whole. I have never been interested in learning detailed specifics—at least not conceptually—because I don’t retain this information. I sometimes wish that I could. For example, when I read the autobiography of Malcolm X, I was especially impressed by Malcolm’s keen ability to retain facts and history, and to string these together in one moment in a penetrating response to any questioner. This made him dangerous, because his mind was a weapon, and he used it to blow apart conventional myths and assumptions. But I can’t retain information like that, even if I (*gasp*) applied myself. After I’ve read something like the People’s History of the United States, I wish that I could just spit up dates and events from it in the midst of debate. But instead, the only thing I retain is the perspective of what I’d read, what the overall meaning of those dates and events were. Once I’ve gleaned this overall meaning, I throw away all the details. I think I do it because I’ve learned that this is the manner in which I think most efficiently. I think best in metaphor and quantum leap. I don’t do well with logic, math, chemistry, or any other specific, sequential avenues of thought.

My writing on this blog truly is my journal. I’ve never kept a diary in which I continuously detail what has daily happened to me (although I do of course do it from time to time). But I’ve always written when something deep down in there starts to stir, reacting to these daily occurrences. The daily occurrence itself usually gets left out—unless it was of such enjoyment that I don’t have anything to add to it—but I don’t think that this is particularly important. What is important, to me, is the change that occurs within me, the transformation of myself as I adapt and respond to the cosmos. What happens within me is what happens within everyone else, and this is how I understand other people: through what I have been through, or through what I have imagined. Even when other people have grown up in completely different circumstances from me, I can still relate to them, because the exterior differences are generally shallow. Even when in different cultures, different countries, I feel like I can relate. Because deep within ourselves, we all go through the same innate processes.

I am watching myself, observing my feelings, my emotions, my loneliness, my happiness, my love, my pettiness. I am taking notes, and these webpages are the result. You can understand me. You can relate to me. You can know me, without knowing nor caring what my daily happenstance life may be. So what is it that you are knowing, really? Is it just me? Or perhaps it is also you? Or is it something that between the two of us is cumulatively greater?

Balance Acting

My summer fellows training has ended, so I have no excuse now for not frequently tending to this here blog. I will try once again to achieve a consistent performance of post-a-days in order to meet Augustal National Blog Posting Month requirements. We shall see if I can maintain such discipline or not. There are some days when I just simply can’t find it within me to write something, knowing that it will be ridiculously trivial and demeaning once I sit down and take a good hard look at it at some later time and date. But I suppose what I need to bear in mind is that part of the very reason why I have been consistently writing–without any higher goals or objectives of being published or successful–since middle school has been to deny the prevalancy of some idea that good writing must be merely pristine, perfect, and pure. I seek, therefore, to embellish informal writing intended to be shared with my friends–now in this day and age termed “blogging”–with a certain status and depth of artfulnesses, of deliberateness, while still using it for the therapeutic, temporal, connective intention that informal communication is largely about. But let me set something straight here: I am not a “blogger”. I have been writing in this manner since long before the advent of web-blogs became a hot ticket item. I am a writer. I write so I can live. A blog just so happens to be a highly convenient mechanism to share my writings with the world.

It’s like the difference between a jogger and a runner. When you jog, you are running for exercise. When you run, you are running to live. If you don’t understand that distinction, then you are a jogger.

The distinction between informal and formal writing is not so very clear in any case anymore. The immediacy of the language of e-mails, text messaging, and twittering has led to a natural aversion in most people to any form of abstraction or strenuous embellishment. And who can blame them? I share the aversion to staid words that serve no function other than pompous self-preening. Yet I also enjoy the playfulness of well-stated formations of words. The power and impact of syntax and artfully employed synonyms cannot be understated. The formal language of academia can either be sucked dry of all marrow of life, a limp husk of signification, or when deployed consciously, a tactful display of power, ripe with meaning and revelation, a preacher’s sermon more than a professor’s tract.

I think there is a balance that I seek to achieve between the lines of formal and informal language, where I can enact an impactful immediacy that lingers just enough to make you want more. I’m not saying that I gain this regularly. But this is how I want to write. To punch you in the gullet like a wine or whiskey that you taste. Something coming from a deep barrel of thought and feeling, combined in one moment of rubber and road. From which the journey continues. A fragment that is tied together somehow with all the fragments that came before. Not quite complete in and of itself, but suggestive of what will come.

Because that’s how life is. It’s beautifully fraught with meaning, but it’s never quite the dramatic, slow motion, soundtracked scene that can be encapsulated in a frame. It slips and sloshes outside of trite definition. We can’t quite hold onto anything, and this is what is sorrowful and what is full of light. The spaces, the gaps between neurons. From which sparks fly. From which stars shine. From which sentences are strung and minds are momentarily breathless from recognition of the void that exists between hearts.

How could I write this?

How could I possibly sing into this despair, this thin air of the void between distant strangers? What could I create to withstand my own insecurity, that could remain standing apart from listless self-concern in the overwrought perception of the wind from others eyes? I look into myself and see mostly fear, a defensive readiness, a reflection of my environment. This is not an excuse. I need to speak of what is within me, this bottled up genie of anger, petulance, and routinely denied divinity. Is it that I am getting afraid to die? That the more patiently I stock up for the future, the more loss of presence I incur? Enough questioning. This is not an inquisition. This is the attempted cultivation of understanding. Between estranged parties. The tentative negotiated establishment of dialogue.

It’s hard, sometimes, to empathize with strangers when they seem to ask something of you that you can’t imagine. Yet that much harder to ask yourself to begin to articulate your own emotions. Because you are so estranged from yourself that you fear a stranger may yet somehow know you better. May see into you directly for what you are. A human. A somewhat pitiful collection of experiences determined by circumstance and placement. How can you transcend this? How can you transcend this? How can we?

You can’t. You suffer from this realization. You shake, you cry, you wail. You stand silently with hands in pockets, overwhelmed, underheld, simply shelled. You can’t be any more or less than what you are. Until something within you is shed. Until you jettison the weight of your dreams, the afterbirth of your desire. Leaving a hollow form waiting to be filled. Leaving the space of a song that is waiting to be sung, in fullness of pain, to fill the voiceless silence in every person that they may or may not have known that they had.

We must cling to each other, like life rafts in the fearsome storm of the unknown. We must watch each other, drink each other, live each other. I am aching to tell this to myself, so that I remember when I am with you. That I love you, everyone, that I love to live, that I am willing to suffer to know this again everyday. Because this will soon be forgotten. This will be misunderstood. This will need to be reiterated, revoiced, rebirthed tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

This is Struggle, These Words

Apparently, I am seeking to unfold a new methodology of articulation in this medium. If I was perfectly honest with myself, I would acknowledge that my writing is in some way a form of laziness, in that I simply write things off the top of my dome that tend to be similar in essence to something I’ve already written before. Which I’ve conveniently forgotten about. I burp up fragments from my inner sanctum of feeling, some containing a momentary burst of inspiration, but mostly just some convoluted form of self idolatry, perhaps.

It might be helpful at this point to give voice to what it is I want my writing to really be about: I want it to be about integrity, about the inner connectivity that binds all disparate individuals and strangers together into love and deeper knowledge. I want it to be about me, but not about the me of the surface daily mundane realm of miscommunicated passings, but rather about the me that is divine, the me that is you, the me that is us, the me that is everything and nothing. Less spectacularly, I want it to be about reality, and about the life that I live as told, pragmatically, from out of dry wit and a sordid heart. I want my writing to sing to you, to speak to you, to inspire you aflame, to nod your head in rhythmic understanding, to know exactly what it is I am talking about and to smile in recognition.

Most importantly, however, is that my writing expresses something that I am unable to express otherwise. That I learn of myself from my own act of self-creation. Thus learning of you, in that leap from difference to communal know-edge.

What is it that I am trying to say? I think I want to say that this is supremely important to me, and that I want it to be important to you. That I want this to be much better than what I am. That I want the world to be much better than what it is. That I want to write my way into you, in understanding, in peace, in confrontation, in commiseration, in fire, in quiet pain, in love.

Creating Personal Space

I am someone who is accustomed to a certain level of privacy/loneliness/personal space. Some of this comes from having lived most of my life in Southern California, the sprawl capitol of the nation, wherein we travel individually in cars acrost mile-wide expanses of tar in the suburbs. My travels in South America served to introduce me to the concept of living in compressed communities, with local transportation often a matter of being shoved into a Korean mini-van with sacks of potatoes, chickens, scantily clad women, and old men with hats, virtually sitting in each other’s laps. I thus gained the understanding that having privacy and personal space can be a matter of privilege that many people do not have a concept of nor access to.

It is therefore fitting that I now reside in the densest metropolis in the United States, where personal space is most directly equated to public space. I also am currently living in a situation where I have little privacy, as I am staying in somebody else’s living room.

I bring this up because all of this directly impacts my blog. You may have noted already that most of my posts since moving unto NYC are matters of externality. I traditionally write with a focus primarily within, as I feel that is where the locus of development lies. But I find it hard to sit down here and really turn inward. It has made me realize just how reliant I am on the possession of personal space and privacy, a privilege I have oft took for granted.

Just to give you an example of the level of problems I have with this: I have never been able to write with someone looking over my shoulder—even if it is just the possibility of being able to look over my shoulder, such as sitting with my back to a window to the street. It’s almost like I feel that there is something subversive in the act of writing, something that I need to hide (until I’ve finished writing, of course, whereupon–apparently–I wish to post it for the whole wide world to see). I don’t know where I acquired this fear. If we were to follow this neurosis further, we would discover that I also have an aversion to displaying true emotions and spiritual depth in any public manner. I used to consistently be asked by strangers whether there was something wrong in places like the grocery store or at work, because my face tended to be so neutral in reacting to my surroundings and situations that people took it for anger or sadness.

I’ve gotten better about projecting a more apt public appearance, but my bashful writer’s block is still in full effect (I also have a bashful bladder as well, unable to pee when there is either too much pressure or other people about—but I know I ain’t alone on that one). So either I will adapt to being more capable of turning inward in public spaces with no privacy or physical space, or I won’t be able to write much of depth until I acquire my own apartment, which god knows when that will occur.

I’m working on it.

Soul Searching

The purpose of this blog is as a venue for me to dig down deep inside of myself to find connection to my greater environment. I feel that I’ve been extremely lax of late, for various reasons that are not all my fault, but still, I feel the days slip by without a cathartic post like a weight over my shoulders. I feel like I’m letting not so much my readers down but the very blog itself. It deserves better. It deserves my best, my most attentive and heartfelt soul searching, my most creative and risk-taking aplomb.

I believe that the act of creative writing is of the utmost importance to everyone who searches, not simply to “writers.” The act of writing creatively is to reach down inside of yourself to discover meaning and purpose from places that you may not have known even existed. It is something much deeper than journaling—though journaling is a step in the right direction. It is an attempt to move beyond surfaces, plunge straight through into the threshold between sub and super-conscience, to delve beyond action and narrative and directly into feeling, and to bring these inarticulate ranges into sound, into sight, into the world where they can be related, communicated, and transformed. To write, then, is in a sense to shed, to seek, to grow.

It is also a stepping outside of time, outside of the everyday world, to take stock of what is within. It is an alternate world momentarily created in the space between my fingertips that rove over the keyboard, and thence between your eyes that draft over the word bits on the screen. It is movement into the void, into the darkness within yourself that folds over you in times of stillness, despair, and loneliness.

It doesn’t have to be pretty. In fact, it shouldn’t be pretty at all. It should be challenging, breath taking, anguished, perplexing, staring you down across the subway tracks. It should call out to you like a baby in a vacuum, words mouthed through a telephonic lens, fire capsuled in a flow that can’t be confined simply to this subject, this person, this place. It should reach through, eventually, somewhere, at some level, to everything.

Tracing the path of the roots to the sky is the reason why I bother to focus on this, at the behest and detriment of my everyday self. Here, I can find something better, yearning, unashamedly ambitious and desirous of beauty, yet still backed by my own breath. Here, I can try to be what I can’t be in the busy ebb and flow of surface life, the self that sits, the self that waits patiently to speak when the passionate pulse of life is through. Here, I search and I seek the soul that meets me halfway in the night to you.

Middle of the Night Math Blather

Ah, insomnia. Sometimes sleep is just not an activity that my mind wishes to engage itself in. I thought I was done with journaling after returning from Colombia, yet find myself unable to step back into my somewhat standard methods of disassociative discursive writing. Partly this is due to existing currently in a state of limbo, as well my current dedication to studying for an inane test, the GRE, which apparently was crafted to “weed out” people who shouldn’t be applying to grad school, i.e. people who have better things to do with their free time then study irrelevant things for an unimportant test. I have not intended to neglect writing on this blog, in fact I kind of need it to stay sane and balanced, I just have not had the personal mental space necessary to turn within and get it out. Hence the insomnia.

I am well aware that the details of my personal life holds little of meaning nor interest for the outside world, and I generally cringe from bothering to sit to transcribe my mundane existence onto a blog, except when I am traveling and my mundane existence is somewhat more interesting—but I have little recourse at the moment. This is therapy, in a sense, a salve to my sleepless and seeking self. An attempt to write myself into a stability and stillness necessary for movement onward to hopefully a time when I can write something much more meaningful and applicable to the general populace.

Anyway, I need a topic to write about in relation to myself, so I’m going to write about math, because it’s been on my mind as of late. First, a brief personal history: I have never been “good” at math. I used to explicate this deficiency as a result of the way my brain worked: I was “fuzzy brained”. I didn’t think logically. I was a writer, a draw-er, a right-brainer. But I have since realized that these were simply excuses to cover over my laziness and lack of will to learn something that I believed was useless. I have always been stubborn, and when it came to math (and science), I simply didn’t want to learn it. In my old age, I now realize that I was and am perfectly capable of applying myself to math. The problem is, with math you are supposed to keep building on the foundation of what you have learned, so that one year you learn decimals, and then the next fractions, and then the next ratios, that kind of thing. You are suppose to retain information and then develop your understanding with this foundation intact.

I stopped retaining my mathematical learning in the 3rd grade, when I decided that I didn’t think math had any purpose in my life. This obviously made things difficult in school, as I never really learned how to do much except the most basic of arithmetic. The only way I got through was by utilizing the fact that even when you don’t understand how to do something, there are always examples for each type of problem. So you can look at all the answers to the odd numbered questions in the back of the book, which are essentially identical to the even numbered questions, except with different values. It takes little effort, as it’s basically monkey-see-monkey-do rather than an innate understanding of concepts. That’s how I got through math, up to pre-calc. And then, other than the SAT, I thought that I was done forever with math. This was a more or less accurate assessment, except that I had to ostensibly tutor high schoolers in the subject when I was working as an instructional assistant. However, the math was easy, and my students were all special ed and needed extra reiteration (don’t think for a second that I’m saying they’re stupid; they just don’t generally grasp bullshit standardized subjects very quickly because their brains don’t function in a “normal” manner), which meant that I got pretty good at explaining how to do things just by doing examples over and over again. But other than that, I’ve always been able to do what little math I’ve had to do in my life with the assistance of the handy invention of the calculator.

That is, until I started recently studying for the GRE. I breezed through the reviews of the antonyms, the word comparisons, and the reading comprehension sections. There are a lot of weird words that I’ve never really learned that I’ve got to memorize, such as pulchtritude, or splenetic, but on the whole I find the exercises fairly straightforward, if annoying and snobbily academic. Then I got to the math section. And suddenly I went from swimming in the sea to fumbling in the rocky rapids. My self-confidence dropped to my knees. And I was reminded, harshly, of the fact that I had stopped applying myself to math in the 3rd grade.

So now in my belated adult existence I am attempting to teach myself math all over again. It’s akin to learning a new language for me, and it takes double the effort because I still have an ingrained bias against math in my mind. I keep telling myself that I am fundamentally incapable of learning it, even though I know this is untrue. And I know this is untrue because while I was reviewing the verbal sections of the GRE, I came to a sudden realization of something: analyzing literature and utilizing words effectively is actually much closer to the process underlying mathematics and science then one would think.

I have had this realization before. In college, I had some roommates that were studying engineering, computer science, and pre-med, and inevitably the issue arose in conversation regarding the nature of the different majors, the fuzzies vs. the logical reasoners, the English vs the hard sciences. I was always frustrated that people seem to think that when you are writing an essay about literature, that it is all completely subjective bullshit. Sometimes it is—but then it isn’t good writing. The fact is, all good writing is based quite firmly on what is given and established, just as a scientist proceeds with his hypothesis based on established research. When analyzing a piece of literature, the essayist must thoroughly examine it, and accumulate the evidence that will contribute to his thesis. He then takes all this evidence and ties it all up into a convincing argument, bolstered by flourishes of flow and nifty word placement. It’s like what a lawyer does when he researches past cases and nuances of applicable law in order to write up his case. It’s an effort that is completely logical, and defensible through evidence and a coherence of presentation.

Such literary efforts can always be made through differing points of view—but these points of view must be defensible by what has already been established, or else they hold no water. You can argue, for example, the far-fetched notion that Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is really a covert parable of a spiritual science of the seven chakras—but you’d better be able to provide concrete evidence from the movie that corresponds directly to metaphysical literature on chakras. Otherwise, it’s just a bunch of bullshit. In other words, you can posit any kind of thesis that you want, but you have to be able to defend your position, and convince others that your position is superior. If your thesis is confirmed by the wider community of critical scrutiny, then it becomes part of the established canon of literary criticism. Just as the process that occurs when a scientific hypothesis is confirmed as valid and takes its place as established theory until another theory comes along that is more inclusive.

Anyway, so the gist of what I’m saying is that the process of thought that is applied in either the conceptual effort of math or writing is essentially the same. It just takes some rote memorization and a concerted effort on the part of the thinker. So I’m like a little kid again, going back to school. We’ll see if my experiment in applying myself as fully as I can to mathematics will work or not. So far, the outlook is dim, as I still remain just as stubborn in my old age as I was when I was a young whippersnapper. But I’ll give it a go.

Wish me luck and let’s both hope that I am able to not only get some much needed sleep, but that I also eventually start writing some good non-mundane and non-mathematical posts real soon.

Knowingly Into the Unknown

Standing on the cusp of the breaking wave of my life, I look out into the wide horizon and see only unknown, only uncertainty, only the undefined. And this is as it should be. If I knew any more about who I will be, and what my future will hold, and what I am supposed to be doing in the next year, then I’m afraid that I would start to feel confined. I suppose it’s in my Sagittarius zodiac sign or something. As much as I am self-controlled on many personal aspects, I could never feel comfortable with all of my future already defined. I’ve always been naturally allergic to plans and formulas and expectations. I am firmly in the Fukuoka school of acknowledgment that I know nothing, and will never know much of anything, and that no one else knows nothing just about as well as I do. That’s about the best summation of my view of philosophy, science, religion, and humanity in a nutshell right there.

Who cares, though, what I think anyway? Why do I bother scribing random scribbles across this computer screen? I suppose I am always hoping for the flash of inspiration that only too rarely ever fully hits. I am waiting for that cathartic spill, that cathedral dirge, that cataclysmic splooge of beauty that every now and then filters somehow out through my fingers. Tonight, unfortunately, is not one of those times. But the practice and training of forcing myself to write is good nonetheless, even if I know that I alienate my fickle imaginary audience. But part of why I write (as opposed to why many other people write) is for the very reason of combating the thought (in my own mind, at the very least) of writing as needing to be perfect, grammatically sound, soul wrenchingly deep, suspensefully clever, and/or breathtakingly beautiful. I wish to combat this Hollywood-ified ideal of writing that the industry of New York Times bestseller lists and college writing workshops uphold. I want writing to be about me, and you, and what our actual mundane lives truly constitute. And then, of course, I want it to be all of that other aforementioned stuff as well, but that’s secondary to the mission.

Because our lives be messy, imperfect, trivial, glorious, and filled with worldbreaking news everymoment, everysecond. If only we learned to pay more attention to it. The live-brought-to-you-now of our eyes, of our fingers, of our feelings. And while we might like to think that we’ve got our selves kind of nailed down and our friends supportingly cast and defined, the fact is that we only know our future just about as well as weather stations with the latest up-to-date data and supercomputer technology know the long-term forecast: with some percentage of certainty only for the next few days, if even that. From then on out, it’s all subject to change.

Because every little thing is a part of every bigger thing. Because every door that is opened into a new perception is another pillar demolished upholding the former universe, and another jack sprung up into the sky of some new one. Every part interacting with every other part combining into an incredibly complex whole that is unknowable, uncertain, and uncontrollable. No matter what anyone may think the future may hold, the only thing that is verifiably certain is that we don’t know shit.

So to get back to me and my little trivial bullshit daily life: like I said, I’m just a-sitting here up on the crest of a crescendoing adulthood, looking out into the open unknown that is my future and only knowing this: I’m looking forward to a few months of 90% chances of dancing, aguardiente drinking, malaria prophylactic taking, and numerous blog post making. After that, god knows. And she can keep it to herself.

Grappling With This

This is an attempt to grapple directly the demon by the horns, to look straight into the face of chaos and give to it name, to keep balanced and sane on the flurried crest of waves breaking in all directions. Keep things held within long enough, man, and suddenly you may find your self pushed, pulled, beaten, and probed by the outer world into shapes that are no longer your own. Here. This is mine, I take this moment into my gut to recreate myself in these words that come from the integrated depths and surfaces of the world that lies eternal within and lies infinitely varied and fleeting without.

You see, sometimes I just let the world, it pass, it passes, it flurry, it swirling all around and past and through and it’s like an invisible sand sifting through the fingers into the cosmic spread of desert . . . so I’ve got to speak, at some point eventually, compelled not even by vision or thought or some cohesive direction at all, but simply by extreme and dire NEED. I have to do this, I have to stop the world and offer this fragmented piece of myself imposed onto its stream, the moon of my self-desire wavering whole for fragments of time, before passing again through into the flux with the rest of it all. . . before I’ve got to do it again, redefine myself again, respeak the flame that burns quietly and hidden throughout my depths to be shot out into the light to spark so suddenly and spontaneously into the night.

If you think that this is a hobby, as I might even myself say if you asked me and I were forced to say what this is, then we would of course be mistaken. This is my life force, the stroke of strings that gives to the soundtrack of my days meaning. Because on the surface, I am nothing, and none of these things I do in the outer world mean much of anything. And deeper within, the cosmic dance begins to become more manifest, the colors, the fires, the intertwinement of space within form, a wall of moving pictures. This is a necessary and critical reckoning with what it is to live, and what it is to exist, and what it is to feel. This. Me. I. Now.

Fitting

Words have not been coming to me easily, which speaks itself of some disconnection between within and without. So in struggling for reparation of these unseen scars, I know that the only way to heal is to hurt, to allow myself to feel some pain that has not been expressed, but easily, so easily repressed. It could and can be something as abstract as the disconnection between sublimity and mundanity, between possibility and actuality. Or something so small as a moment’s ignorance, a shadow’s fall across that page in time. Locating the exact pinpoint of dislocation is not so important, I don’t think.  I think it more critical to address this very moment’s division, in which I would attempt to pretend that I have nothing to say, that there is nothing to say, that there is silence within, nothing worth writing about, that I am incapable of writing effectively about what I might happen to think of, etc.

So this is an incantation, a spell, a charm of words wreaked to heal, words woven to address a lack of words. Sometimes I begin to think that everything that is written must be deep, must be good, must be pure, must be whole. And so the imperfect, unchosen words slip away, disappear, hide fragmented into the folds of silence, and I am left with nothing at all to speak, because nothing, in the beginning, is good enough of itself, no word on its own can embody completeness. All of these imperfect pieces must be strung together, stitched and woven together, until something beyond themselves, something beyond myself, begins to make itself known. And how can I know what this complete vision will be until I plunge into the shrapnel storm of potentiality, and begin to pick and choose fragment by fragment, brick by brick, carefully placing and replacing and deleting, until a stairway to something has been made?

And so here it is, this beginning entry into renewal, rediscoverance, rebirth. It must be done again, again, everyday, this remembrance of what can never be captured. I must start anew at every step, forgetting momentarily what has come before and concentrating only on what is to come, and what will be formed. And then it fits.

Late Night Ponfiticate

I’m tired. But I can’t sleep, which necessitates, of course, a blog post. Something to do with the lingering scents of cigarette and bleach. Funny because I stopped a Harry Potter flick midway to go to bed, but here am I, fingering the little keys of my laptop like herein I might find the meaning of life. I write generally because I am in need, need of expression, need of compassion. Call and response of the heart and mind. It would seem that everything in life is causation, simple cause and effect, spark of synapse and subsequent baby manifestation, but we know this ain’t the complete picture. That there is something still, calm, centered, beyond the action, beyond the forces, some ultimate blissful unknown. Not god, necessarily. Like a you within yourself that is not yourself but everything which includes you and moves beyond you to include the cosmos. You glimpse this glimmering place within yourself when you breach that line between ego and insecurity, and find something more that connects you to everything else. Like you could die and this would still be there. Contexts shift and ebb and flow. Your heart flutters like an aspen leaf in divine current. But there is within yourself still this stillness. Unspeakable, unshakable. Closest thing you could do would be to sing unprotected. Producing fairy children out of thin air with the sheer volume of living magic exhumed from your lungs. Too often we are fearful and layered, buffered in sadness and joy. Unable to breakthrough to anything beyond what we would tell ourselves and each other we are. When in reality we are so much less, so much more insignificant than anything we would ever imagine. Ourselves, as we know it, are nothing. The sheerest, thinnest stretch of connection between galaxies. Rolled endlessly between infinitude and a single pointed finger. What seems at first glance like utter madness is in fact the most logical of steps descending into knowledge. Beyond appearance and self castigation lies this lakebed realm of playful alien forms defined only by our own seeing. What do you see? There it is! Simple, powerful, devastating. The world flattens, bends, shifts to our limitations. We can ruin everything, but it wouldn’t really matter. Because what matters is beyond matter. The sparrows flit from bug to bug over the water, wings bathed momentarily in sunlight as you eat your spaghetti. Everything would seem to center on the sauce, on the light. All is everything. Not just this, not just that, but every single minute thing collects itself into a picture which cannot possibly be deconstructed. So you fly, you sing, you move from point A to point B and in between the weather changes and you comment on it and people say “how are you doing” and you nod and say “good.” and the world explodes all around you to fall at your feet as you craft fantasy after fantasy after TV shows and spam filtered half lives, but nothing will ever quite approach what is there in the movement of the image of light to fall into your eyes backwards to right itself into your retinal after perception firing into thought, into perception, into meaning.

You take a breath. The whole universe quivers. What will be created? What will be destroyed? What will be understood?

Writing On Writing In the Early Morning

I can’t sleep (what a surprise!) because the jerk downstairs comes home from work at his gas-station at 1 in the morning and commences chain-smoking. I once smoked cigarettes on occasion (Kamel Red Lites) until I started living and working out in the wilderness and realized that it doesn’t really make sense to fill your lungs with nasty shit when you’re breathing in pure mountain air. Now that I breathe in the second-hand smoke on a frequent basis, I can only think of cigarettes with the utmost revulsion. See, the problem with second-hand smoke is that you don’t get any of the benefits of enjoying a chemically enhanced stick of cancerous compounds manufactured by large corporations—like the nice little buzz and the visceral joy of holding a tiny white rolled piece of toxicity in between your two fingers. All you get from second-hand smoke is the residual nasty odors that seem to linger at least an hour after the cigarette has been smoked, leaving a burning sensation in your throat and eyes. You get all the shit without any of the pleasure.

In any case, I don’t feel like ranting about it, because I’m already getting hypertension from it as it is, and besides I’m a little sick of ranting, it’s so negative. So I’ll pick a topic and expound on it for the pure relief of tension that it gives me, to expound on things, which is the purpose of this blog—a forum in which to expound freely. Some expoundings are more eloquent then others, it must be admitted. Sometimes I wonder if I should exercise more QC and just post things that I consider truly worthy of being read, which would definitely slim back my posts substantially. Part of the thing about a blog is that it must be updated somewhat regularly, otherwise it will just look like a ghost town . . .
Why don’t I talk about writing? I began writing (deliberately, not as a class assignment) regularly starting in 8th grade. I wrote kind of emotional short stories with abstract story-lines told in the first person. Then at some point in high-school I began dabbling in poetry for some reason. By the end of high school I think I wrote mainly just poetry or short vignettes as opposed to longer short stories. My last year of high school my computer that I had had since 8th grade crashed and I lost all of my writings up to that point. This was when computers were still relatively new and it hadn’t really been quite established to laymen that you need to back up your shit if you assign any meaning to it. Losing my writing was devastating. I felt like part of my identity, part of my history, was lost. I couldn’t write for almost a year after that. It was like I had never written, I couldn’t believe that I could, without the evidence.

In college I majored in English with a concentration in poetry, and I took poetry workshops where you sat in a room with a handful of poetry freaks and criticized each other’s shit. The whole experience of attending a large college in a big city ruined my desire for writing—or at least, for a certain style of writing that colleges manufacture. That whole academic thing, that incestuous writing that looks like the real thing and uses all the big words but somehow is completely devoid of spirit. It was at that point that I realized that I didn’t want to write for a living. Because to write ‘good’, publishable stuff, to me, meant selling my soul.

During college I began sending almost daily e-mails of writing out to a group of friends. Through this I developed a new style of writing—immediate, fragmented slices of everyday life skewed into something that could be simultaneously prose and poetry. I would just sit down and write whatever came into my heart or head. I think they even have a name for this style of writing—”flash writing.” It was like a journal except not, because I was talking about events through the lens of my emotions and inner being, or I was writing quick short stories, or haphazard poems. (You can view all this stuff, by the way, if you click on Pre-Blog Missives under Categories there on the right.)

I didn’t discover blogs until 2 winters ago, when I was extremely bored and depressed and had nothing else to do. I discovered liberal and informative sites like Talking Points Memo, DailyKos, Cosmic Variance, all that kind of stuff, and was kind of amazed that I hadn’t really known about this whole parallel universe of blogging. I had been blogging all along, I just had been doing it through personal emails instead of posting it on the web. The advent of free and easy blogging tools such as Blogger and WordPress.com convinced me that I should make the switch, because you don’t have to be a computer geek to figure out how to post on these things.

For me, writing has always been a form of self-exploration, an outlet, a means of working through my daily existence. I don’t think that writing necessarily has to be perfect and conform to some kind of standard. I think the most important thing about the act of writing and having someone read it is in the inner connection formed between two people. The communication of hidden worlds that can’t possibly shared through surface level daily interactions. I consider writing to be much more than a hobby for me, even though I don’t get paid from it. I consider it to be a lifeline, a sustenance and an outlet, wholly necessary for me in order to proceed through my existence here on earth. I have other outlets, sure, I play djembes and go running and hiking, I MySpace and drink mint juleps and watch Netflix movies, I draw weird little alien faces. But writing has always been one of the foremost means for me to know myself—and through knowing myself, knowing other people—and sharing who and what I am. Writing is a struggle for expression, it challenges you to formulate thoughts and emotions you would just let foment otherwise. It is a struggle for transcendence. It is a struggle for embrace. And I recognize, my dear reader, that your reading this at all is truly a blessing. Thank you.