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.

On Memory

OK, so I have a terrible memory. I honestly cannot remember many things beyond the immediate moment in which they occurred. As in, someone will be talking to me, will say something to me that I responded to, and then will say something else in relation to that thing, and I will have no idea what they are talking about. Or I will meet somebody multiple times over the course of 2 years, and have great, in-depth conversations with them each time, and then I will tell them, “Hey, didn’t I meet you before?” And they will sadly and politely inform me that they had this conversation with me the last time, and they will give me their name, and I will promise them that I will remember it this time for sure (and I won’t).

My girlfriend thought I was just kind of being funny when I first told her that I didn’t have a good memory, the first few times that it appeared as if I had total amnesia. But now she’s come to realize that, indeed, I really can’t remember things. You know that movie Memento? I’m not that bad, but I really do have to write things down immediately if I am going to remember. Otherwise, it’s pretty much guaranteed that I will forget it.

Which isn’t to say that I don’t remember certain things. I like to think of my memory as selective of the core essential heart of memorable moments. I remember generalities, summaries, abstractions. I remember feelings, faces, and overall outcomes. I don’t remember names, conversations, or circumstance.

There was a time in my life that I consciously decided that I would not remember anything. I had arrived, philosophically, at the conclusion that the past was meaningless, and thus it was purposeless to attribute any value or time to history and memory. This was during college. This posed some social consequences, in that I frequented apartment parties every weekend in which I generally saw the same basic group of faces–which of course I could recognize–but I had absolutely no idea of what their names might be, and whenever I would see some of these people in the course of walking around campus or at the next party, they would say, “Hey Mark!” and I would respond, “Hey!” or “Hey, dude!” dependent on gender. At some point, I’m pretty sure they caught onto the fact that I had no idea what their names were, and this definitely caused some pause in their consideration of me as either friend or acquaintance.

I have since determined that the past and its accompaniment of memory and history have value and meaning. I now try very hard to remember people’s names if I meet them more than once. But I still just cannot remember most mundane details for the life of me. I think sometimes that this is just the way my brain works. I cannot remember facts, dates, and details. But I have no problem remembering emotions and lessons. I feel like I naturally just remember the things that I feel have value, and discard the rest.

I have learned to work with my disability everyday. At my job, I carry a piece of notepad around with me and a pen so that I can reference lists of what I need to accomplish, and to jot down anything that comes to me. If I don’t do this, I end up standing for long periods of time trying to remember what I was going to do next. I also utilize other people around me who do have memories to remind me of things that I need to remember but know that I won’t remember unless they tell me.

In some ways, this is why I spend so much time writing all of my various thoughts, feelings, and meandering visions onto this website: because there is no better way of preserving my own memory and history then in these writings posted on meticulously backed up networked hard-drives spanning the globe. Honestly, I need this outlet. I need to write myself down. Otherwise most parts of me would be lost to that void of my own negligence. Every now and then I go back a little bit and re-read some of what I have written, and it shows me a continuum that I had forgotten. It reminds me of where I have come from and how I have come to this moment in my thought and existence. Otherwise, I really would not have much of an idea of who I was.

Time Passes

I have been going through one of my quiet phases, where I internalize my daily mental and spiritual and mundane experiences, and thus when I sit in front of the screen I can’t find anything to say. I’ve become more comfortable in my older age (27 soon to be twenty-eight) with just letting myself be silent when I am silent, and allowing myself to talk when I am talkative. When I was a teenager, I was so self-conscious that when I didn’t have anything to say I would get stressed out and anxious by silence, feeling like I had to say something. This then had the catch-22 effect of rendering me unable to say anything at all. Ah yes, those were some wonderful times.

It’s kind of a cliche that old folks harken back on their times of youth and sigh, wishing they could transport themselves back to those idyllic times. I’ve heard people in their 30s set on a solid career path reminiscing misty eyed about their drunken drugged out college exploits. I, on the other hand, have been finding, thankfully, that my life and my perceptions and my experience of life only improve with age and time. To be honest, I mainly hated my college years, though I certainly had my moments of glory. High school was alright, once I had forged some meaningful and wonderful friendships, the ties of which still hold true to this day. Middle school was hell, a time when hormones and societal norms wrecked havock on souls and bodies alike. Elementary school was a waste of time, being alternately abused or condescended to by bitter post-middle-aged women.

Now, well past academia, somewhat settled into a job but nowhere near stuck in a career, I feel more confidant, more in love with being alive, more aware of the world in which I live, then I ever did. I spent my young adult life being depressed and hating myself and everything else. I still have a lot of anger against the world, but a little bit of anger, I feel, is justified. I see no reason why the advance of age should pose a slew of regrets, bitterness, and fear. (I talk like I’m an old man, but let’s be honest–this culture makes you start feeling passé by the time you hit 25. American consumer culture is all built around youth, vulnerability, and the inability to think and feel for yourself.) I suppose once I hit 80 that I will then begin to grow frustrated at my limp penis, varicose veins, and general shrinkage of body mass–but until then, it only gets better from here. Here’s to evolving with time.

Writer’s Block

At periodic intervals in my journey through life, I stop and step outside of myself and wonder if I really have anything to say. There then ensues a period of silence. It happens enough that I’ve stopped going through the “will I ever write again?” anxiety, but it still perturbs me nonetheless, because I know that every single day of my existence I need to get things out that I normally can’t express. My writing goes through phases: sometimes all I will write about are mundane daily occurrences or thoughts; other times all I will write is abstract poetry.

Writing is a constant struggle to root down to the Source of all things. At some cosmic level, I believe all things to be interconnected. This is the basis on which metaphor, the language of poetry and spiritual introspection and surprise, rests. That ultimately, any random thing can be interrelated to a greater whole, in which it is embraced and liquidated, a drop in the sea.

Postmodernism was an interesting intellectual and cultural exercise in which we recognized the idea of the fragmentation of our identities. But we’re moving beyond that cold shizophrenic paranoia, thank god, and evolving to see that even our very selves be simply shrapnel in the sea of a divinity that defines and repels us all in the same breath.

Once it was black and white, and poor and rich, and women and men. I’m hoping that our culture is quietly evolving beyond such facile reductions of our godhead.

In any case, the moon is almost full here on the lake at this fall time, bringing with it a whole slew of questions and remembrances and sorrows and light. I’m writing here at this very moment because I am alone, and you are alone, and we are together. The most important thing, I think, is that we understand ourselves through each other. I will continue to write, searching to uncover the line that strings our hearts together across the oceans of time and space.

The Battle Between I and Them

The battle, it would seem, is between inner and outer realms. Those forces representing literality and appearances are constantly attempting to destroy the representatives of the heart of matters, the inner essences of things. Because the outer world is based upon order and structure. Whereas the inner can be explosive, creative chaos. The two worlds, of course, should not be and are not really at all diametrically opposed. The tricky matter of language and the way things appear is what leads to the warfare.

I once wrote to explore the beauty of language, the flow of words, the way a sentence could be so perfectly breathed, spaced, punctuated. I don’t write that way so much anymore, because at one point the sound and form of the words overcame their meaning.

I once was so self-conscious that I could never be myself before any stranger, let alone breathe properly in public spaces. I felt as though everything within me could be visibly seen, as though every pair of eyes was a judgment of my imperfect humanity.

Now, I don’t think so much of the ways other people look at me. I think of the way I look at them, if I am going to think about it at all. It is my mind itself which is the veil to understanding. Becoming, as a Zen Buddhist might say, of No Mind is the quickest path to joy. No mind, no judgment, no fear. Things are never simply the way they appear–they become the way in which they are received. I want to be the best Host to all good things in life–selfless, serving, supportive.

Self-help books these days all talk about boosting your self-esteem, building your self-image, assuaging your battered ego. I’m talking about throwing it all away. I’m talking about getting beyond yourself, because there’s something much greater. I’m talking about bridging the inner and outer worlds completely, such that the lie that there has ever been a Them and an I can be denied. We are all of one flame, and the ashes that fall in differing shades on the earth are nothing but something to contemplate, to say a few words over, and then to mix into a mulch from which living things will grow.

Positive Potentiality In Peops

I talk often in my writings of the need for openness in perception, the lack of expectations, such that another human being can exist more fully in their potential, which is ultimately infinite. I write of this often because it is one of my frequent, daily shortcomings in my interaction with strangers. By the way, if you ever feel that my writing is preachy, take it with a grain of salt, because I am not preaching necessarily to anyone but myself. Writing is a way for me to discuss issues and provide myself with advice that normally I can’t distance enough in daily life to see.

Anyway, so in the professional sphere, dealing with rich, complacent assholes is a frequent occurrence. Actually, a lot of them aren’t assholes. They are just weak minded and kind of pitiful in their ignorance of reality. They make a lot of money but they don’t have such basic social skills as courtesy or the ability to hold a conversation with someone outside of their limited social sphere. They drive an SUV mindlessly, without any idea of what cost such a thing might have to anyone else. They have spoiled, obnoxious children who will most likely grow up to be just as dumb and sheltered as they are. They like to power-trip over people who are only courteous to them because it is their job.

I can’t stand these kind of people, and unfortunately I have to deal with them frequently. But the truly unfortunate thing is that out of the numbers of people that I see every day, it is really only a few who are like that. But that few taints my perception of all the rest. And so I end up classifying a whole group of people and writing them off, such that I really don’t give any of them a chance to be anything more than just another moronic, well-off American.

It’s hard, incredibly hard, to shake off negativity once some stranger has been rude to you. I worked as a ticket seller for a gigantic ski resort one winter, and I dealt with a lot of rich to pretending-to-be-rich people who only knew how to be demeaning and dehumanizing to me once they couldn’t get their way. It got to be after a while that I wouldn’t be truly nice or open with anyone at my window, because every individual turned in my mind into a stream of idiots, bitches, and assholes. And everyday, every hour, there would be some idiot to reconfirm that. So I would just be indifferent and cold to all of them.

It’s like that receptionist, you know the one, at the doctor’s office, or that person who you talked about your refund with at the customer service window–that employee who was just outright rude to you, and seemed to derive no pleasure in life except to be rude to you for no reason. We’ve all dealt, way too often, with such a person, and they ruin our day. They are unhappy, bitter people. You know that all they do is go home and then talk shit about people from work.

I’ve been that person from time to time. All it takes is one rude motherfucker, and I close up and try to limit my interactions with guests as much as possible. And I thus effectively close off any potential in any of these people to be anything but what I view them to be. Every now and then there is that one person or family who is truly, genuinely nice and warm, and it is a shame if I can’t allow them to be that in my mind or in my interactions with them. And the fact is, further, that even the worst asshole, even the most representative complacent, close-minded sheltered bigot, has a side of warm intelligence and creativity, in which they can be viewed and understood within their own unique, personal context. It is simply that I must get beyond my own ego, I have to learn to see the bigger picture–such that if someone is being rude to me, that I should not take it personally. Such that even if someone has been sheltered and suckled on ignorance and wealth all their life, they still have that boundless potential as God. To allow myself to be mired in bitterness against them is a waste of my heart and mind.

It is, of course, much easier to say this than to manifest it in my life. But I’m hoping that if I say it enough, it will work its charm. Because I believe quite firmly that it is in the everyday that the world is changed, and if I or anyone else can’t get beyond appearances than we are just allowing the bullshit to perpetuate. It is not just Gandhis who change the world–it is the nurse you dealt with at the hospital, it is the guy who took your change at the Taco Bell, it is the person crossing the street at the stop sign, it is every person in your day, every person in your life, every little positive interaction. You know that warm feeling you get, when you smile at a complete stranger who is only interacting with you because it is business, and you get a smile back, and it is real? And you’ve actually connected to this person, and you’ve made their day, and they’ve made yours? That is what it is to cross boundaries and change the world. Positivity. Every day. Every moment. The potential in every person for love is boundless.

Tonight

I am sitting in my cabin deliberately isolating myself from partying. And for the first time since Toby’s suicide I am feeling ok with that. Being comfortable with this space within myself and not selling it short simply because I am afraid of being alone.

When I was a child, there was nothing worse than what I might imagine.

I seek other people to confirm my fleeting impressions. But none of this reaches the deepest essence of what can never be conveyed. I have to be alone to discover what I really need to say. My self-knowledge comes out of cultivated silence. I like to sit and drink some good red wine and eat some Dagoba dark chocolate and listen to Milestones or Somethin’ Else or, of course, Kind of Blue. The way Miles plays to the silence, listening deep down within himself. He isn’t playing to the crowd, or to notions of what is good, or because he’s trying to connect himself to some greater purpose. He is playing to what he hears, based on a past of study and lifestyle deliberation. Miles was one lonely son of a bitch. And it was worth every note punched out of the void and sustained without vibratto, hanging liquid and elephantine and strong in the midst of all of that wondering hard-hitting rhythm and astral projected saxophone work.

There is much critical cutting thought that is applied to the way we live our lives. What is most important is what we learn from each other and take into ourselves to grow. The excess dies or gets lopped off or burnt. The root is the feeling that we had at the moment of conception, when we broke through the shell and instinctively drove directly to the source. Without preconceived notions or fears or hesitancy. We knew what was there and did it because we had to if we wanted to survive.

This is how I hope to write. To write striving directly for the heart that lies deeply beneath anything that could be known.

Art Fruit = Fart

‘Artistic’ energy is like organic farming. Forces must be in balance, must be cultivated, understood, worshipped. Crops must be rotated so that the soil is not depleted. Love and dedication. Sustainability, beyond oneself, is the keystone. For life, growing aware of itself, either wishes to reproduce or destroy itself. I wish someday to be able to pluck a sprig of fresh parsley from my garden, chop up some of my own carrots with the good earth still clinging to its crevices, my own nurtured garlic, some washed and deep green spinach, sauteed with Tamari and chili paste, poured steaming over brown rice cooked in a cast iron pot over an open fire. To rely on nothing but knowledge and worship for my life. The reason why I write is because I am capable of it. I am able to express a bounty beyond myself that I can nurture, that I can pluck out and present as a host to you, my cherished guest, a platter of my love, of the universe here in my heart.
Enjoy!

Beginning

Yes, now here in this space of place-time I am conferring transferrence of hitherto privatized words into cyberspatial interstitial form. I haven’t been writing much at all lately, and what I have written has been so embarrasingly child-like that I would be loath to even glance at it ever again. But there has been things bubbling and frothing somewhere in some darkened grotto of my dome, strands of emotions waiting to be solidified and brought to light someday as words on a page which happens to be this one you are now viewing. I’ll start the page off with a few old and familiar favorites just to see how they look in this newfangled frame, and then henceforth, hopefully, some new items shall be displayed. Eventually, or in late November to be exact, this forum shall also be used as a travel log for the 80 days whilst I am in South America. Please come visit every now and then so that I can feel loved.

hesitant thought flows in the spider-house in Austin

I
the minute of sentence is to speak this essence of what i see, what i seek, in the connection of infinite possibility that lies in the loss of what cannot be held anyway, to fly, as it were, into a space of play within the elements of what are, to sail with a given wind in a given direction ever always beyond my control; there are times in my life when the current eddies into a swirl of whirlpool stasis, when it seems that i cannot even feel, let alone express, the emotions which bestir the depths of my conciousness. and i act in ways that would appear to me to be counter to everything in which i thought i believed. but here is this spark, catching, fanning the flame of my fingers against the keys of a language that at times is like scratching against a wall, inert, cold, laden with rhetorical adjectives. . .
II
where is this deep place of integrity within you that lies so unknowably beyond language? in the flurry of drunken information that passes so swiftly in the form of money, you wake up into tomorrow half-way spilling over into endless gaps of a nameless suffering, like batter on a waffle-iron, burnt into a patterned shape molded for consumption. it is from the depths that emotions rise, filtered, bubbled eventually into expression, displaced, floating like the plastic piece inscribed with words in a fortune-telling 8-ball, the writing on the wall on the backs of your eyeballs twisted into your mind into an image that platters out of your tongue to be served into a wind of breath and sound into the space of the world. you project an image of yourself onto a plane of endlessly successive images, in the hope that somewhere out there in the darkness there is someone who can pick you out and understand you, and look into themselves and discover a language of themselves in which they can craft a response back to you, into you, to build a platform of a new perspective out of all of the emptiness that surrounds. . .
III
what i am trying to say is that i’m fumbling like an idiot in the darkness with a pen, trying to write myself into everything i come up against. but there are these feelings that i have in myself that i haven’t learned yet how to define. and i come stumbling across these vast new fields of perception in other people, and i suddenly no longer know who i am again, and i am like a child, struggling to place my flurrying emotions into articulation. where am i? who am i? my tongue flutters in my mouth like tree leaves in the breeze–ultimately untranslatable, more of a momentary feeling that passes into the next block as you drive by on your way to your destination.
and yet. and yet. there is definitely this light in my gut that i can feel emanate out my eyes, despite the endlessly blind progression of passerbys: i find it in the dive bar smoke stippled scene, in the live wire plunge of practiced instruments attuned to my attention, listening to the formations of what i have never before heard, i find a sense of redemption in the patterns of loving, brave people who have left their societally defined selves behind, who stand before us weaving strange new threads of wonder, a multi-colored universe in which we are fully embraced if we choose to be, if we can let go of our fear and plunge forward into motion: a place in which there is no judgment, there is no holding back, there is no dissociation of beauty from that which is all around and here and now. i strive to reach this place with my haphazard happenstance words, with my frantic urgent need to connect to you across this physical distance, to reach that within me which is most true, most beautiful, and most worth sharing with you.