Cortical Arguments

I saw you sitting there, Nate

and I was speaking in my head

wanting  to put hands on you as the veteran, your friend, your brother in service

spoke about suicide.

He read a poem that addressed the fact that every 65 minutes, a veteran commits suicide & that if a vet pops himself and nobody is around to hear it, you better start listening harder.

And maybe it was because my period had just struck or I was tired in the eyes, but wide awake and tangled in the electromagnetic field between our ribcages & the accelerating heart that kept trying to drive me closer

Fighting an instinct to be there with you. For you.

I don’t know you.

The limbic mammalian heart spins carousels of peach and dandelion mist

& the neo cortex halts it with context:

“You’re just trying to seem cool & like you don’t need him, but in your pride, you’re pushing him away. He wants you to sit with him. That’s why he keeps looking back” Every syllable from my beating heart pumped blood into my cheeks while the 200 million years worth of biotechnology plugged into my cranium formed a rebuttal:

“Yeah? And let’s say you do go sit next to him, put a hand on his knee – on his shoulders, wrap your arms around his chest from the back and nestle your face into his bent neck? Let’s say this isn’t actually something he’s comfortable with just yet – or even anything that he wants. Let’s say your argument is an irrational, oxytocin-doped rush of estrogen because you’re programmed to form strong bonds with potential mates so that you can ensure reproductive success for your non-existent offspring. Let’s just say that it makes your impulses biased. What makes you so sure that it would even be appropriate to put your arms so familiarly about his shoulders on the second occasion you’re meeting him as a lover – fourth occasion total?”

The passionate heart is ready to burn down cities, singing ballads as the scarlet of wreckage singes the blue velvet of the sky “Weren’t you just reading about the isolationism of American culture that forbids such physical intimacy & open displays of affection & how it’s the reason we have no value or amount of genuine culture? You are alive and this WAS a real moment, but it’s passed now and by the sounds of the effeminate guy reading a poem about his experience as a gay man in the military, it’s safe to say it wouldn’t exactly come off right, now would it? So HAVE your isolation. At least make up your mind. And by ‘make up your mind’ I mean realize that this inaction is just another thing that makes you dead. Paralyzed by fear that you might be too real, yet too proud & sophisticated to call it fear. Might let your humanity show & be rejected for it. So you would rather be fake and accepted.”

So you weave through the crowd and stand closer.

Then maybe you wait another poem & this time the legs fail when you’re directly behind him. He’s clutching his arms on a collapsible stool that you can’t imagine is comfortable, but heart pleasantly reminds you with a wink & a sneer that a backless stool affords you access to groping him from behind.

squeezing his normally too-tall head to your chest – letting the spiritual spindles of his heart strings fuck her right in the electromagnetic field – so you pause before sitting next to him, so the blood might drain from your cheeks.

Just when brain is about to reroute legs to the exhibition halls because “we don’t need him anyway. there’s a whole museum here. Just because you drove an hour to spend the weekend with him doesn’t mean you have to be here for him, or even spend time with him…”

I saw your hat on the ground. Brian was singing show tunes at this point, and nobody in the crowd really knew how to feel about it anyway.

“Before the tone shifts again…”

So legs skirt over & plopped down next to you –

eyebrow shrug & tight lipped derpy smile to ensure him that “I don’t know why I’m here. Heart made me do it. Don’t read too much into it”

Heart, still cocky from her assumed victory, continues to plot the perfect moment to put your hand on his knee while the poet inside of me considers what an act of humanity it would have been

if I had carved through the crowd, the moment it dawned on me that you might want someone to lean on,

cut through the bystanders all slack jawed and wide eyed at the Veteran’s admissions of his own suicide attempts

and put my hand on one of your slumped shoulders.

The Music Festival and the Human Organism

The performer at the front of the stage is an individual, and in his dance, you see his individuality. The specific man that I am referring to is wearing a shirt that only says ‘FUCK’.

“Is he telling us to fuck each other, or is it like.. ‘fuck!’?” the drunk festival goer in front of me wonders to his friend. I wonder too, and settle on the former. The way the artist dances, it’s hard to not want to fuck him. As the crowd goes wild, he basks in the lusty intentions of one hundred or more people that grasp up at his suggestive coils and cocky grin. He’s dancing his individual dance and we like it. Most of the Ithacans at the Trumansburg Grassroots festival have never heard, nor sought after music from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where this band reigns, yet we know we’re attracted to it. It’s strange and different and alluring – and confusing as all hell, as it seems to be a combination of bongos, alt rock and mouth percussion with what sounds like a horror movie-tier out of tune calliope, signaling that the ferris wheel is about to be overrun by bats and undead clowns.

At first, I was annoyed at the audience present for this show, as mostly drunken couples were blocking my way, and it seemed as though the only reason they were present for this band was to show off their couple-ness and festival wear, while pretending to like this unusual world music, so as to seem cultured. Then I realized this was probably just a projection of why I was present for the performance, and instructed my ego to cool it for a minute. Beneath the future shock and wow-factor, however, there is a true sexual energy and relationship that knits the artist to the audience. It’s a one on one relationship for the audience member, and a one on two hundred for the performer, arrousing memories of the deadmau5 visuals I’d seen at Firefly the previous year, where the electronic mouse begins to dance, and electrically transmits this dance, like a wave of Simon Says, through the crowd in front of him. What’s actually happening – being transmitted – is the love of art. The artist is loving their own music, and dancing to it. This enchants us, the audience, and we begin to love this music as well, through all it’s differences to our mainstream culture, so we begin to love their art in our own way, and respond with our own dancing and movement.

Really, the common theme is creation. Both artist and audience are smaller cellular networks in the greater body of the festival; and like cells in the human body, we are mobile. We are taking in food and beer and oxygen and a good deal of pot smoke, interacting with information centers throughout the Trumansburg Fair Grounds, depositing our waste and building up a collect vibe of happiness and love by boogying throughout.

Just as our bodily functions are largely communicated by electric impulses from the brain, and carried out by the working class of microorganisms that make us up, the festival is arranged by those that organize & administer it every year, and carried out by the individuals that tend it. Should the brain cease its functioning or a sudden plague upon our body’s biome occur, the individual we call ourselves would also die, or at least become seriously crippled in comparison to who we were. If the festival organizers decided that next year they would still hold the festival, but would not advertise it or interact with the local community in any way to assist carrying out the festival, perhaps a hundred or so locals would show up the third weekend in July. But which artists would show up? How about the food services and crafts people, trash collectors or waste control services? Reversely, what if the festival were in full swing but not a single ticket holder showed up? Is it still a festival? Can it be considered dead or crippled?

Collectively the festival goers, artists and administrators convene to create a distinct ‘Grassroots’ individuality that anyone who’s been will describe to you as “magical,” through glazed eyes and a trippy grin. The individual human also has a distinct personality, or duration that can be expressed in whichever adjectives those that spend a lot of time around you choose. Is it insane to recognize that what can be tranferred to what is greater than the solitary human, can also be transferred internally, to what is much smaller and abundant in the solitary human?

Festivals, city centers, states, countries, planets. We’re in all of these places, some by agreement, and some because we were born here. Is my liver the Bonaroo of my chest cavity’s North America and my body’s planet earth? We can certainly attract a crowd of probiotics to our liver by gulping down a Kombucha or some sauerkraut. So when I circle Donna the Buffalo on my festival schedule, perhaps I’m drawn by the electrical impulse my brain picks up from her control center. Attraction & Agreement.

Any space cadet will tell you how well festivals and tripping go together. It’s a fascinating way to analyze the human experience. Children are conceived at festivals – some humans are born and some encounter death. We get shitfaced & take shits. We eat, intoxicate, fuck, dance. The common theme through all of this is creation.

Dancing becomes all the more interesting in this context. In the mini festivals and city centers within us, microorganisms are boogyin’ and shakin’ all about, doing most of the same things – living. They’re taking in gases and liquids and solids, breaking them down, channeling them into energy or usable  materials. Some of this energy, they’re using to move and shake a replication of their own DNA into our bodies, to take over the family name when they finally bite the dust. The legacy of our cells becomes the aging we see in our faces. The global warming of our body’s demise. Cells die, People die, Worlds die. Festivals die too, and even celebrate birthdays. Grassroots turned 27 this year, because we all collectively gathered to create it. I turned 21 this year – not because a faction of microbiology gathered in my corpse to animate me, but because this is a metaphor. Please, people, follow the analogy. Okay?

What’s so interesting about our urges to dance and jump and expand and bump our bodies together in the presence of this strange music channels a deep tradition encoded into my DNA. My body is always moving, within the thin barrier of skin that separates myself from my not-self. The twist of my hips and springs in my calves that causes the boy two rows up to keep  glancing back at me are a tribute to the constant life-creation-death cycle that continues my own existence. Our collective movin & shakin continues the existence of this festival. As it becomes less kept with the times, and more esoterically held by those that have been going since birth, eventually Grassroots will wither and die.

The artist’s “FUCK” shirt now takes on a whole new meaning. Yes. We should fuck each other, so that new generations of those holding the grassroots tradition are born and this Greater Body can live on in our descendants. Is it a coincidence that the body rush of LSD almost always gives me a spontaneous orgasm? Now, I’m looking around at all of these healthy and unhealthy bodies, wondering which ones want to wriggle with me as badly as them. In fact, I’m starting to sort the more healthily evolved bodies from the not. The people dancing in ecstasy from the ones looking around with mild desperation, continually sipping their bevvy. I feel the aerosolized hair follicles of the woman in front of me. Each sequestered strand follows the same, long loop-de-loop that makes her hair curly. I want badly to reach out and grasp her hips and sway with the wild beauty of her. I feel my own strictly laced braids. They roughly scrape the tan that used to be sunburn on my shoulders. Little stubs. I want to be free and flowing like she is, but I recognize that I don’t want to undo my braids only because she has. I feel the real heat and life emanating from her, and I am ready to embrace it in myself.

With my hair down, I feel the heat at the back of my neck, feel myself begin to sweat, feel my limp white hair tangle in masses and overlap where it wasn’t supposed to. I dance. My body beckons all those healthy enough to rival me, ubiquitous with a dominant sexuality that my forsaken tripping partner could never conquer, and so had to leave. My shoulders roll and the hair falls over my face, many times. I could feel people watching me and checking me out. Though I enjoyed the feeling, and felt myself twinge internally, responding to their nonverbal interest, I was now committed to expressing my own individuality through the same dance that transmitted the artists individuality to all of us. Recognizing the scent of my own sweat, I feel the network of intel my body is constantly relaying to the other humans around me – the pheromones that my movement macerates, the flicks of eye contact when my toggling gaze cinches to something I like, the fertility in my hips. With my senses so heightened to greet the world with passion, I wonder if I can even catch hints of my cunt in the thick air. Or someone else’s.

Festivals like this walk a very thin line. Yes, it’s nice to get a bunch of like minded individuals and pack them into a concert yard where they can exchange sweat, saliva and scents, bumping their young, prime bodies against one another, perhaps with a love, perhaps finding a new love. However, pack too many humans too closely together and a great time becomes dangerous. Diseases spread in splaying saliva. Port-a-potties are crawling with the viruses and germs that also want to maintain their existence by wriggling through the flesh barrier of your spread legs. With too many people, some start to go unaccounted for – I flash back to the three woman rape parade that Zach, my abandoned trip partner, and I witnessed when the acid was almost an hour into frying our brains. Three women in multiple stages of undressed – one entirely naked – walk through the dance tent with a bewitching light that flashes, one holds a candle, one tells us that her body is not an invitation. The one without any clothes on at all. The woman leading the group I recognize from yesterday, as the woman that operates the Red tent Women’s shelter (for all self-identifying women) in the Healing Arts section of the festival. She repeats “Raise awareness about sexual assault – NO RAPING”.

I begin to remember why I walked away from Zach. All the conversations we’d had throughout this trip about how I’m not ready for a relationship, and not ready to have sex with him, and the way that he explained how he could help me heal – could make me comfortable through sexual encounters between us. How I’d betrayed my own boundaries in order to maintain the connection with him, and how fucked it was. How, this morning, we’d made an agreement that I absolutely did not want to be physically intimate with him, and that he would respect this in me. Then we’d given massages to each other’s weary bodies. Full body massages. How his hand had cupped my breast and I’d pushed him away, frustrated at not being understood. And when we started tripping, how I’d had to stop him from touching me intimately – only on the hand and back – and he’d responded “It’s who I am”.

Statistics from health class are scrounged up in the schema of my brain’s filing system:

Three out of four rapes are committed by somebody known to the victim.

1 in 5 women on college campuses experiencing sexual assault and rape.

I think about the “interesting” stories about other members of the animal kingdom that are rapists as well. The dolphins and chimps that kill porpoises or babies to force the female back into estrus. Perhaps rape occurs, on a subconscious level, when an organism desperately wants to pass on it’s genes – continue its life. The female duck’s main morphological evolution has occurred in its corkscrew genitalia; dead ends and false leads incorporated into its anatomy, to give them an extra advantage when it comes to choosing which genes it will pass on in its young. An edge of paranoia flickers in my thought process, as I begin to feel more and more violated by the persistence of men with sex, even when it’s been outrightly denied. I begin to see Zach as a set of damaged genetics, and the entity of Zach, a conveyer of said genes, attempting to pass them off, terrified at the possibility that his line may end one day.

The phrase “attacker” takes on a hilarious tone in this light. If 90% of rape cases know their ‘attacker’ beforehand, then the whole event really isn’t as sudden as the language makes it seem. Perhaps it’s little comments that could be taken as innuendo, or as harmless joking. Perhaps it’s suggestive touching or other things classified as sexual harassment.

Or perhaps it’s a relationship, where one body explicitly states their will against sex, and the other manipulates and prods and pushes as much as they can, until finally a breaking point is met, and a rape occurs. Perhaps the ‘attacker’ is even trusted preceding the attack. With Zach, I know I will never be raped or forced into sex, and yet I find my trust in him to make me just as vulnerable to betraying myself. His gentler prodding makes me feel as though my best interest is always in his mind. I see his sexual frustration as equally important to my own aversion, when I ought to be considering my own aversion as a testament by intuition. “Not gonna say yes when all I really mean is no. Not gonna say no unless you know I mean it.” And yet the boundary between yes and no has been so obscured throughout our trip. I’ve come to forget that I always have the right to say no, and that when that response is not respected, I have a right to be outraged.

Respect is abiding by what people tell you about themselves. I’ve learned to abide assholes by believing them when they tell me they re assholes. We like to think that human beings respect each others desire to not have sex, and yet statistics show just how often women’s will is not respected. Of course, a much smaller percent of these rapes will result in a pregnancy, and an even smaller amount of these pregnancies will be kept, but this doesn’t necessarily reflect on the hard wired ideology motivating the rape. Men feel rejection, yet continue to attempt initiating sex with us. It is disgusting and far from conducive to a healthy atmosphere. I flash back to a conversation with Matt, where he told me that women are tending to select, sexually, men that are less aggressive. We are choosing to pass on genes that will produce more feminine men, because they are less of a threat. This idea is only theoretical, and yet I believe it.

When knit together with the new paradigm, I begin to see my selections and sorting of the healthy organisms present from the unhealthy organisms present ,I see this selection process in myself. Zach’s pushiness and puberty-esque frustration appears as such a red flag to me, because it denotes properties of his genetics that no longer fit with the more harmonious consciousness. In this new law and ordering of the chaos, people respect the wishes of each other, because they know that an individual knows best for itself – not for separate individuals. We respect each other. Perhaps this is how paradigms come into existence. Survival of the fittest. I pay attention to my body and respect its needs. I give it healthy food, plenty of exercise and creative outlets and consciously work towards healing myself by listening to what I intuitively know I need. I am attracted to individuals that conduct themselves in the same way. Carnally speaking, I am also attracted to the opposite, if it’s got cute enough features. Yet in these cases, I meet a lot of resistance from the parts of my mind that know what is best for me. My intuitive self seeks out everything it needs and rejects what it doesn’t through subtle ~feelings~

This isn’t to say that the new paradigm is necessarily on a trajectory towards this healthier, more harmonious existence. It is simply following the trend of evolution. If sexiness is what we select for, chances are, the new paradigm  will be one of less conscious individuals. However, if we select for healthful traits – as Grassroots and I seem to be doing – via being in tune with our layers of consciousness, then we will most likely find humanity to be characterized by harmony. Which is why it’s so important to keep Grassroots healthy – why it’s so important that Grassroots is recognizing and combatting the presence of sexual assault. Someday, festivals will be creating their own version of young in the fourth dimension – which will bone chart cauterized by the relationship. The network and all that it can create through participation. I raise my Rolling Rock to my lips and watch a young couple grope and swing and dance together, and smile back into my dizzy turning.

Manhandled

I am so tired of little boys acting like they own me. Treating me like a child that couldn’t know any better. Zach warning me of hook up culture, because he doesn’t want “his girl” out galavanting with strange men. Strange men with bigger cocks and more in their seductive arsenal. Nick acting like a big baby when “his girl” is sexting with another man, or when “his girl” is giving strange men her number, or when “his girl” hooks up with a friend. I am nobody’s girl.

I bet he watched the whole video, of Mack cuming for me. Bet he read every text and allowed it to fill his anger like a sail. The gaul of him. Calling me his girlfriend to Thomas, painting me as some cheating hussy, when the truth of the matter is that he is a weak man. Just a weak little man that needs to own a woman to keep her. Can’t admit his loneliness, but also is never “quite jealous”. You’re full of shit. You’re a jealous, egotistical cunt that can’t see past anything that doesn’t fit into the picture frame of how you want other people to see you.

So, you bought the VCR that isn’t quite compatible with your system, but you’ll keep plugging and plugging away at it, trying to force it to work, but it never will. You can push into the USB outlet as much as you want, swap your input with your  output, flip a dial – flip every dial, but I will never be some object you can buy to adorn your identity.

I am woman. I have come to Earth to participate in life and love it. I have come to see all your faults as beautiful and complimentary details in a great portrait. But you’ll never let me view you holistically. You’re either God or Demon, and can’t fathom somebody seeing you as otherwise. Because you don’t have wise eyes like mine, you’ll only let me see you through the picture frame that you create for yourself. You’re filled with unspeakable pain when I won’t cramp myself to fit into it, but instead splay out into infinity on the ever forming canvas. My eyes are the palette that paint the world and your words are a blindfold. Keep them to yourself until you’re ready to look at everything contained within the word reality.

Spirituality as an Attitude: A Manifesto

We create our own reality.
Our life is a storybook in the first person that we’re constantly writing, with every action and every thought. Aristotle understands half of this in his well-known saying: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Correct, but he is only seeing half of the picture. What we repeatedly do is a condensed product of who we are moment to moment; what we do is motivated by our thoughts and emotional reactions, which are provoked by our experience of life. These internal parts of our identity are also not who we are, ultimately, because they are not the only things present in our minds. We have the Thinker that experiences emotion and produces thoughts – a running narrative on the state of things; and then the Awareness of that narrative, slightly behind it.The Thinker belongs intrinsically to this Awareness, and depending how often we separate from the world of thought, and invest our energy in awareness, the more able we are to influence the Thinker.

It is reductionistic to say that who we are is as simple as our actions. Actions only cement in place a history of who we were in that moment, without ever exposing the details of what caused that particular accident of an action. Which part of our collective identity – meaning the holistic interplay of all the various roles and archetypes we fulfill throughout our duration – causes individual actions/mindsets in each moment?  All of this is enclosed in our personal story. Who we are is nothing but the protagonist of that story. Reality is the gestalt of everyone’s stories going on at once – collectively intersecting and producing plot twists in the stories of others, yet who you are remains a moment-by-moment construction of who else’s story is influencing yours in that moment, and who you personally are preceeding each moment, always bleeding into the next, forever surging into itself. The momentary decisions we make create the next, into infinity; the Butterfly Effect in action.  I created this moment without knowing that this Manifesto would result from my creation, and that’s kind of what art is like. We continually create our reality, without being aware of the resulting future, by constantly interacting with the world and all the other worlds going on. We can influence these resulting realities through learning from past moments and using that knowledge for growth in present moments. Of course we never have control of the future, and adverse things that may intrude on our known routines, but we always have the power to interpret a moment how we wish, and this determines the way our story is written and the way it will be recorded in our history. Our interpretation depends on our attitude.

With a spiritual mindset, I can interpret, learn from, and make the most of my time spent depressed. It’s a lot like flying a kite, and using a strange gust of wind with which to propel your mindset. When I’m depressed, I do what I can with it. It’s like taking a burst of momentum & running with it. When I’m overtly depressed, I have good and bad days. If I take a good day and do what I can with it (things conducive to feeling better: self-care, cleaning, creation – should it come, observing beauty in art books or nature, seeking out loving connection or understanding in another), I find myself swept away with it. Like an exponential magnetism. It is the herd behavior inside myself – if one thought is doing it with complete conviction, and infects other thoughts similarly, the mirror neurons inside myself avalanche in the direction that has the strongest pull – whether positive or negative. It is thought polarization that maintains either a positive or negative attitude.

I’ve observed this in my own downward spirals – one day, I’m far too exhausted to get out of bed, so I go back to sleep. I wake up much later and am not able to accomplish the things I’d wanted to while I was sleeping in, that had meaning for me (volunteering, reading and article, researching, meeting with someone). I feel badly about myself because of this, reasoning that I should have fought my exhaustion and forced myself through it because at least then I wouldn’t feel like a failure. Not wanting to feel like a failure, I invest my waning energy in escape, because comfort is the only energy expenses I can manage, besides continuing to lay in bed and stare at the wall.  Perhaps I scrap the entire day in light of these feelings – I spend it doing NOTHING conducive to feeling good (despite what I may or may not have salvaged), maybe I eat junk food, smoke weed and watch a lot of tv. All of these feel good in the moment and distract me from who I am because of the pleasure derived from them. {However, through observation, I know that eating junk food makes my body feel poorly which affects my self-love and overall mood. Weed does the same by causing my thoughts to be foggy and dulls my experience of life which is constantly altering, so I’m more likely to miss an opportunity for love or connection or experiencing beauty. TV is a huge waste of time that can be addictive}. Maybe because I indulged the day before, the next day, my desire for that pleasure again is aroused, and I think to myself “well, what’s the harm in just one more day – one more indulgence”.

This type of attitude is conducive to habit-forming, which is helpful if the habit is good, but only destructive if it is bad. So maybe I smoke, over time with frequency and my thoughts become increasingly duller and I am unable to create or communicate or even be self-aware, because I am off in the ether, feeling good. Maybe I eat a lot of junk food and cause my stomach to feel nauseated for the rest of the day, and feel fatigued and bloated. Maybe I waste hours watching TV, and don’t read something I told myself I would or don’t create anything again. Eventually, I stagnate and feel poorly about myself for not having accomplished anything, for having no novel thoughts or perceptions on the world with which to record and for pain/discomfort in and with my own body. These swell together in my depression and evoke low self-esteem, fatigue, misconceptions about myself, isolation from others, a dulled ability to do things that I love (writing, singing, playing, socializing). Seeing this transformation in myself causes me to feel cynical about my own abilities and potential, because my thoughts are constantly overrun with the negative, so I say, “oh well, I guess this is just who I am at heart, and its way too difficult to get back to who I was, because I’ve spent so much time being this fat, lazy, dumb slob with no convictions and no ambition. I’m wasting my life and wasting space on this planet”.

And yet — I’ve made the long, difficult journey back there before (to a person with talent, health, clarity of thought and creation). It – again – starts with one, two, three grains of TRY, then ten grains of good habit, and then the whole damn avalanche comes racing down and all of a sudden… I’m happy?    I’m happy. I made that journey back this past year, after a strong bout of depression that started with a relationship going south, a realization that I was no longer important to the one person that was important in my life, and then half a year of rebound. It started with making new friends who stimulated my life and thoughts (watching other people become important in my life), starting to run again (building my health, quality of life and self-esteem), eventually pursuing a new love interest (having the spiritual experience of being in love), writing poems when they came, enjoying life (the outdoors, the nights, the love), going out on limbs and taking the opportunities that were handed to me, putting myself out on limbs by sticking my neck  out – and continuing to, allowing others to fuel my wonder with the world and motivate myself to study and learn. While these were landmarks on my journey back from depression, none of them (even all together) were enough to fully bring me back. It was the attitude that I developed that allowed me to believe in myself and allowed me to follow this path back to happiness. I would not have believed myself or trusted myself enough to put myself out on the limbs that lifted me highest.

I continue these attitude-based habits in my daily maintenance. I still experience bouts of depression that intrude on me with fatigue, irritation, anger, depersonalization and a strong urge to cry –  sometimes provoked by illness and sometimes provoked by a lack of spirit. Getting sick knocks me completely off my feet and forces me to be bed-bound for days, which makes me extremely vulnerable to being overtaken by my depression. However, by maintaining my spiritual attitude, it is easy to take advantage of things the moment I get a burst of energy – a gust of wind. The moment I’m feeling better after being sick, I clean up and change my sheets, air the stale air from my bedroom — get out of bed, cook myself healthy soup and tea, straighten up my room, because I know it boosts my vibes to have a tidy environment, spend my day quietly watching movies I’ve been meaning to see, etc. These are the actions that separate me from my depressed self. But these actions do not define me for en eternity – only in that moment. They don’t make up for past actions and they don’t assure that I will remain this way forever. Additionally this only exists in the world where every day is basically similar; if a wrench were thrown into the monotony of our “average guy” story, who we’ve practiced being will determine how we handle catastrophe.

Perhaps another’s story will horribly intervene with yours – you may meet the end of your story one day by being squashed by a random meteor. Perhaps you will be taken out of your story and thrown into a nightmare of history by a sudden war, fatality or persecution. Each moment will still be what you make of it. Are you the type to attempt escape at the cost of your life? The type to derive meaning from it, while passively accepting the reality of it? Are you the type to be broken and victimized by it? Possibly, you are a combination of all three and many others, fluctuating throughout the time of your life spent inside of this tragedy. Being yourself, with your own duration, encountering others with their unique durations within this tragedy epoch of your story contributes to the constant creation of your own reality that you are always doing. This is very much an echo of the Serenity Prayer.

We all start our stories in a set of  unalterable factors (generally: our race, sexual orientation, home culture, etc.) alongside circumstances or factors that are more alterable, though often through much opposition and struggle – which act as LEARNING opportunities for us (ex’s: gender/sex, religion, behaviors and habits). Generally, we cannot change our roots, but we CAN grow in whatever way we please to, shooting out to whatever direction we  want. A tree may be pruned constantly to fit within a pleasing shape to whomever holds the clippers, but the tree has the resilience and hope to continue bursting through these societally pleasing boxes to fulfill its own destiny and to reach for the sun in its own way. We can change to be whoever we wish to be, because the world truly is what we make it, within the confines of what restricts us naturally. In rarer anecdotes, certain individuals have made triumphs through supposed “unalterable factors” via  pure will and refusal to lose hope. Wilma Rudolph was told after her polio-inflicted paralysis that she would never walk again, and became the fastest woman in the world (circa 1960’s), Anaïs Nin slaved over her novels – producing them herself – for a society that did not value her perspective, until she finally became recognized (in the modern age), the resilience of those that survived the holocaust (Victor Frankl, in particular), plus EVERY success story you’ve ever heard. The hope of individuals who refuse to accept defeat have been proven more often than we know, even if just in the anecdotes of your friends on Facebook.

This is why it is so important to use and understand life as a learning opportunity. We must live life with an open mind, because we live in a world of uncertainty. Science tends to have an ego attached, and tends toward the idea that all things can be known NOW. But there will always be questions. There was a time when people knew beyond a doubt that the world is flat, and we’re no different today – there is so much science still doesn’t know.

To assume that I know everything now and that this is how it will be always is a mistake. I am excited beyond reason for every love, every instance of suffering and every experience that I will have, because I know that I will continue to find truth in the world and continue to get better at living wisely and will be able to contribute so many more truths to my own art and creation! I will be able to do something better next time (whether it be the beauty of a relationship, or something as simple as baking a cake). By experimenting, and then doing, and then doing over and over again as a habit, we learn! We get better, we become experts! We integrate it into our flow, and into our life-long dance!

If I can learn to keep my head in a crisis, I will be that much better at dealing with crisis. If I can learn how to detect my depression when it surges up again, I can combat this by knowing what triggers me – it’s all body chemistry & psychology. If I can learn my deepest fears and grievances – If I can know which previous parts of “my story” are damaging me still now and making a victim of me, I can detach my ego from those things and tell them that they will no longer have control over who I am. I am, ultimately, not my thoughts and feelings, but the awareness behind them. If I choose to give my energy to the parts of my life that defeat me, I will spend most of my time feeling defeated. If I can learn what things widen the gap between me and my depression, I can do those things constantly to maintain my balance. If I can learn to harness my awareness and use it to be present in my body and anchored in sanity, then I can better treat myself and maintain my health.

By learning and observing, I gain wisdom about how I live my life, and subsequently, I love it with those truths alive and active, making my life into something beautiful and wonderful. When I have a new experience, (ex. Going past 6 months in a relationship with somebody) I learn more about what it means to love them, I learn how to compromise, I gain the wisdom that you can disagree and fight and still love more strongly than ever. I learn what/how much tension I will take to continue a particular experience. I’ve learned my boundaries – I learn about myself. I learn how to draw the line, and I continue this particular exercise knowing that at some point it will end. At some point we will break up, there will be some endstop when the relationship becomes too damaging to us to continue it, too unhealthy, as a bad habit, to be enjoyable any more, infecting other aspects of our lives. And at this point, we will separate, but I will certainly love again after this, because love is a dazzling experience that can change the entire nature of existence – a particle (with considerable weight) in the ether that can influence and infect all the other particles as to entirely sweeten this time we spend on earth. When I do start a new relationship, I will have the knowledge of this past love to do it better next time, and be a better lover, be a wiser lover, to continue to grow. I have valued growth  so strongly throughout my life, and growth is a product of learning.

Having an open mind is oh-so important for this reason. I agree with the teachings of Alice in Wonderland, here – I indulge as many as twelve impossible thoughts before breakfast, because I never would have made it to this happiness – this life! – if I hadn’t been open to the possibility. I believe in the impossibility that this life is a great cosmic joke. I believe these impossible things, because the world itself is impossible! If one million factors hadn’t all aligned to produce this world, I wouldn’t be here, and yet I am. This existence is highly improbable. This existence IS a Boltzmann brain emerging from the ether, and I plan to construct it exactly how I choose. There are *impossible* thoughts in existence that the mere collective presence of many people’s interpretation of a thing is what defines it in reality. This is of course subject to change through changing social attitude over time (ex. Anaïs Nin going from nothing to famous to defamed). The power of thought.

It’s easy to see yourself as one way, and one way only; To look at yourself as no good and without hope to change, while your mind is in hell. And yet, because you are on a continuum, *who you are* is a vast amalgam of all the people you’ve ever been. I can produce the same action while depressed as when I’m happy (Ex, complimenting somebody) and it will likewise be motivated by two vastly different attitudes, therefore having two completely different meanings in the context of the whole. When depressed, I may compliment someone because I think somebody I want to impress will overhear and think better of me, here it is motivated by ego and it is not good; Perhaps I do it because I feel so poorly about myself, that it is a type of jab at myself, because secretly I crave to be as good as them, or to be like them, making it motivated by low self-esteem and self-deprecation which is not good; or maybe, I say it because I love them and it cheers me to see them so empowered, in which case it is motivated by good energy and love and a will to build someone up.

This gets dangerously close to the Love/Fear approximation from “Donnie Darko,” which is not quite correct either, because it supports over generalization and a resistance to the complexities that are a reality in everyday life. Something motivated by love can still be horrific and grotesque – we’ve waged wars through a destructive love of one deity & way of life over another. Every action is quite subjective and complex because it is enacted in a specific context and BY a particular individual with the ever reaching bias of their previous experiences. The same action can have a world of different meanings or interpretations (which is why we must keep an open mind when judging others & why we must leave room for their different ideas/opinions and their subjective story). The antagonist from one story is the hero of another – “The Wizard of Oz” vs “Wicked”.

This is why I keep an open mind, because I know the reality of things is often a product of perspective, and often potentially so many things at once. This is why I strive for a positive mindset, because not only does it feel good and is conducive to a happier existence, it can signal and affect another’s existence. It is the path I take while creating my own reality, so that I might make the best of my own reality.

We must go into life with a positive attitude – the spiritual mindset.

 

 

 

 

Brothers

Jon and Zach have the same teeth and smile-cracked eyes

Zachary and Nick have the same neck and smile,

eyes always glint the same across families

if we’re attracted to anything in a mate, it’s the eyes

that first hatched into our view,

a spaceship pervading the strung mobile, spinning spinning

then novelty – tufts – foreheads — Faces!

the new spectacle tucked side by side

by flesh, enclosed in people, the eyes were the real entities, never

“daddy” or “mama!”

parents think themselves mighty proud for their visage to produce a label,

for this so-called understanding to emerge in their smart, smart babies.

But for the baby, it was only ever the eyes they spoke to.

when I’m despondent and depressed, I will not look into eyes,

when I’m confident and self assured, I speak only to eyes

when I tell you that I love you, I tell your eyes, because they are the ones that see me

I may find a blind lover, that they might love my voice, and my touch

but nary a love is started outside of the eyes.

Everything I Don’t Want People to Know About Me (Part 1)

Dear Brian,

I got your thoughtful note, in response to my startling revelation on Thursday night. We were going around the circle, sharing things we didn’t want anyone to know about us. Will, who’d suggested the activity to our Spiritual Seeker group, started off with, frankly, a lame ice breaking revelation that he hadn’t brought his dog to the past two sessions, because after it had growled and pounced at me [two sessions ago], he was embarrassed and felt it a poor reflection of his training. Basically, it was an illogical insecurity he harbored that we all instantly stifled with affirmations to how much we loved the mangy beast, and how a dog acting on instinct could never be a bad reflection of his training (Oh, perish the thought!), because dogs are individuals prone to fits of territorial paroxysms, just as humans can be (it’s a spiritual group, remember?). As everyone flooded Will with good vibes and chakra strengthening thought beams, I was incubating within myself a ploy to up the ante; to reveal something meaningful that many could relate to, in order to spur confessions that could get us somewhere – in order to reveal our deepest fears and anxieties that our insecure psyches clutch in crooked fingers, knurling into the fetal position with barbed knuckles divaricating about all that we want to remain secret, as we pull it behind the shadow of our physiognomy, brows and eyelids cleft and cusped, respectively, darting towards any threat to our private let-downs.

I wanted to blow this wide open, and I considered it a challenge to myself, to be the one to breakdown the barrier of the ego. As my mind flooded with ideas of what I could divulge to others and still save face with the contrived personality I had projected over the months, everything from the mild crush I had on *everyone* in the group to suicidal tendencies entered and were quickly chased out of my mind with a flailing dish towel that offered melee whips to my ego at the thought of revelation. The moment my mind flitted to the anorexia I’d combatted most of the summer, I knew it was the one. Easily relatable to anyone that has struggled with self esteem, and yet an equally difficult chink of my armor to be flashing at a bunch of strangers that I read and discuss books with on a monthly basis. I waited for the silence that followed Will’s submission, and staring straight at the table, spoke: “I’ve struggled with anorexia since high school, and still sometimes starve myself.” I waited for the stuttering admissions of self hatred, the staggered promulgations of other self-esteem motivated self-inflicted suffering. I heard silence. My vision burned holes of embarrassment into the table, while boiling the stress induced water that was never too far from my eyes. The craters of embarrassment quickly transformed into fiery portals to hell, as – still without a word spoken – Alyssa extended a box of Kleenex (with lotion) towards me. I waved it off, still waiting for anyone to speak – anything.

“Is there anything we can do to help?”  – except that.

Uh, YEAH. You can fucking admit to me all the fucked up parts of your life, so that I’m not sitting here feeling like the only person that’s ever done shameful things because I didn’t like myself as I was. ALYSSA.

“No, I’ve been really good with it for the past six months”

“Thank you for sharing your struggle, that took a lot of strength for you to say” Kera remembered her mouth, snapping her gaze from the floor to my tinged red eyes.

“No, it felt kinda…good.” Saving face, saving face – see guys it wasn’t that hard. I’m not screaming internally and perching my hopes like a Disney animated turkey vulture on your parallel self hatred. Half smile, to demonstrate how   *good* it feels to unsuture your festering personality in front of strangers so that they can gawk at the odors of decay.

“SO, were you ever bulimic?” —Stefan, not a week out of a mental institution, in his mental downward spiral often resembles a child in both behavior and physicality. Freakily enough, as the boyfriend and housemate of Alyssa, he has basically taken on the identity of Alyssa’s child, as she quickly turns to chastise him for such an insensitive question.

Just somebody go next, I’m tired of all discernments being fixed on my averted gaze, or *suddenly* agazed with the pillow cover at their elbow. Everyone is embarrassed for me. I shouldn’t have said shit. I should have dug up some meaningless obscurity about my life that no one will ACTUALLY care about, so that we can all go on pretending to heal our emotional wounds and drive home feeling *real good about ourselves for conquering our emotional traumas through sharing it with strangers*.

Stefan: “Well, you all know how my life has been for the past week.”

Alyssa strokes her baby on the head with a crook’d neck and soft doe eyes, “Yes, you’ve been dealing with a whole lot of paranoia, babe. But that’s all okay now” She speaks to him as though he were either hard of hearing or an actual infant, long slowly paced wording punctuated with understanding nods.

Stefan gulps down the last of a home-brewed beer out of a Ball mason jar. “Yeep, I’m on Seroquel now, BELCH”

Yeah, fair game Stefan. Fair game. Stefan is probably the winner of the activity, as we’ve all been pretty privy to the shit storm his mental state has been for the past few weeks. Hell, the past few years. He used to be engaged to a cute lil girl, until one day she came home to him rambling about the aliens that were contacting him through his dreams. Fast-forward three years, and it’s only gotten worse. He no longer talks about the aliens, but I suspect it has a lot to do with how many times people have told him it was all in his head. I think if I have faith for anyone, it’s Stef.

Zach spoke. “Some of you who know me,” the man I spent Valentines Day with, frantically copulating in the field that introduces my house, underneath a pine tree that played more of a role in the love making than I’d care to admit, followed by a two hour drive to Cape Henlopen during which I unsuccessfully sucked him off, eventually skinny dipping in the frigid Atlantic, then nakedly cuddling about a fire on the dunes, was hopefully now going to cover my pride with an equally humiliating confession “Know I’m not even on a speaking basis with my parents, and I spend most of my time alone in the woods. So, what I don’t want anyone to know about me is that I am extremely incapable of being vulnerable.”

“Same,” Alyssa tacked onto his “confession” quick as a fly swatter.

*Cue sarcastic applause in my head.

Well, well. That sounds like something you should have said when Will was ensuring everybody would be comfortable participating in this activity. It really isn’t that difficult to say, ‘Hey, you know what Will? All the tearful admissions of internal guilt and shame and fear sounds real nice and all, but I’m just not feeling it right now. Let’s play Buddhist Monopoly instead,’ now is it??

Now that everyone’s gaze was agreeing with Zach’s pussification, I allowed mine to rise from the table and reel about the traitorous faces. They settled on yours Brian, still fixed disquietly on the floor, flooding it with anxiety. If I’d been observing you in any other context, Brian, I would have been certain from your stare that the floor were actual lava which you were frantically, within the statue of your body, deducing the best way to maneuver. I sent accusational darts into your soul for a comfortable 30 seconds, knowing you wouldn’t dare let those brown orbits settle on mine. I would have sent them into your soul for longer, dear Brian, had my lover man not risen from his seat on the floor and squeezed next to me in the armchair, offering a comforting cuddle – most likely out of shame for not having the strength to admit part of his struggle in my presence as I had. As I took in the resumed shameful quiet, the cynic in my head marched about with freedom, careening in threatening circles around my internal victim. The town crier of my soul became the drunkard at the bar who slurs in the faces of Flyers fans when they inevitably lose a game, proclaiming his own team’s victory in boastful insinuations. Oh, so that’s it. I’m the strong one, eh? Of course everyone here’s struggled with self esteem – but the self abasement by admitting it? ‘Nah, we’ll leave that for whoever goes first. Let them be the “strong” one,’ except I’m not strong and your silence proves it. My so-called avowal was probably one of the most gilded confessions I’ve ever had. To be perfectly frank, I wanted to hear some dirt on all of you – EXPECTED to hear some dirt on you. And that’s exactly why my revelation was anything but strong. You can bet to hell that I would have kept my Irish-Catholic-Shame mouth fucking SHUT if I thought you were all gonna pussy out on me.

Will Spoke. “Well, I have something to share,” you already went? “A couple years back – some of you’ll remember this – when I cashed that bad check?” I’m not one of those people, bud. Will nods, eyes meeting recognition in Zach, Alyssa and Stefan’s faces. “Yeah, I actually considered suicide at one point. I was in a really bad place with all the court proceedings and explaining it to my parents and da-da-da.  I was paranoid man, every time I heard the gravel crunch on the driveway, I knew it was the cops. I remember standing in front of the judge and he was just talkin’ at me and talkin’ at me, and I couldn’t understand what I did wrong, you know? And that was just the first court date – I didn’t think I could do it – livin’ with the feeling that at any moment a cop car could just pull up and..   take me away.” Will let his eyes sink to the floor, normally such an emphatic talker. “Yeah, one night I got really close and I ended up callin’ a suicide help line,” his expression, still on the floor changed slightly. “Yeah, they put me on hold – – it was a really fucked up experience” alright Will, I see you. I see you lifting the mood by loosening everyone up with your story-telling ways while simultaneously calling my anorexia ante. You’re not so bad, Will. 

After everyone had a laugh at the prospect of a suicide help line prioritizing their suicides, the atmosphere was less forced, and the group quickly transitioned to what the next meeting should discuss. It was then that I realized that two of the seven members – Kera and you, Brian – would not even trouble themselves with any admission at all. I greedily returned to the rage in my starvation-maintained stomach.

So that’s it? BULLSHIT. I know all of you have struggled with SOMETHING – if not low self esteem. I meant to say what I said as a conduit for you all to express things you’ve been repressing. I’ve never told anyone, including family, about my *struggle* and what would really make me feel better about it is to know that I’m not alone, or for someone to relate THEIR struggles with self esteem and destructive habits. It would have felt far less humiliating to know that you guys have also grappled with that type of shame-induced behavior. I only realize how un-strong I am from seeing that expectation go unfulfilled. It would have been an ACTUAL strong action of myself if I had been able to admit to being so insecure about getting fat to the point that I starved myself without needing others to admit things on par with it, and I didn’t realize that fact until just the opposite happened. I can understand people being uncomfortable with making themselves vulnerable, but I also feel as though that type of insecurity should have been disclosed before anyone else admitted to something, uh idunno, seriously embarrassing like that – In fact, I feel kind of bamboozled that my admission was met with a handful of tentative confessions of inability to actually participate in the activity. A bunch of cop-outs, really. Will described the activity (that he’d done the week before in Men’s group) as a tear jerking time where everyone divulges their deepest secrets – everyone. From that, I thought my divulsion would be the first of seven, and it ended up being the first of two. Ha-ha that’s not to say that I don’t feel different from it – no, sir. Now that I know the world is full of a bunch of pussies, I certainly will not allow other people’s cowardice to make a fucking fool out of myself. And that certainly doesn’t mean that I’m going to keep my secrets inside in the future – should you be so lucky. Nope, I will continue to reveal uncomfortable parts of myself to others – for the same reason of helping them to feel less shame in their own lives – but I’ll do it without the expectation of hearing any of their trauma. And without further ado, here’s everything that I don’t want anyone to know about me:

(continued in Part 2)

When I Have Nothing to Say, My Lips are Sealed

Right on, David Byrne! I don’t know why people feel the need to rattle off the boring nuances of their lives either. The problem seems to be people thinking they have something to say. What in God’s name makes you think that your co-workers give half a shit that your cat’s been puking lately? Like yeah. That sucks. Take him to a goddamn vet and deal with it.

Do you want sympathy? Is that it? You want someone’s jaw to drop a little, as though they’ve just been informed that eleven rodents tumbled out of their ass, and for them to become emotional on your behalf, holding your hand and muttering, “I’m so…sorry,” because what can you say to a travesty like that? I mean clearly there’s nothing they can do to fix any of the trauma that’s been done, all they can do is hold your hand through it, and give you hope for the future.

When I’m shivering in the broken down ghost town of a dining room before the sun’s even risen, the slimy maraschino cherry on top that shatters THIS camel’s vertebrae is when you (starring for us today in the role of Sharon, the waitress) ask me about my day in the cramped nook that contains the only three crusty coffee carafes and more importantly, the only heater; all the while with that cheery sneer wedged between your cheeks while pouring overstewed coffee into a mug with the awkward fifth grader attempts at smiling faces of your children stamped into its pixelated curve.

For future reference, a list of things that I couldn’t give two shits about, but smile and nod through because I see you, annoying coworker, more than the people that I’d like to see:

that you’ve been gaining weight; that you’re trying out this new diet that’s s’posed to be really good; that you just can’t resist the girl scout cookies on your way into the grocery store; that you find it a humorous anecdote that after the girl scout cookie excursion, you bought a bag of chips and ate the whole thing in one sitting; that you’ve been feeling self conscious when you look in the mirror lately and do I think you’ve picked up a noticeable amount of weight around the tummy?; that the children you teach at your day job are stupid fuckers – they’re in fifth grade and only you sound stupid for making fun of them, Sharon; that a friend of yours made a rap channel on youtube but the catch is he doesn’t rap very well; that you bought a new hair dryer and it has a funny smell.

Things I would love to hear you nonchalantly utter over bad coffee at 6am when nobody wants breakfast, much less breakfast in the frigid dining room:

that you stabbed your new husband with a steak knife last night because he thought the filet was a bit more medium well than he wanted, and can you stay at my place for a few nights because the police have already checked your parents’ house; that your nipples and taint are turning chartreuse; that you snorted blow out of a hooker’s ass crack last night, tapped her one the ass and made sweet love to her in the bed of a truck as it flew eighty seven mph down three oh one; that ever since joining that cult you’ve been having memory lapses and woke up at 3am last night/this morning covered in purple paint, cackling over the corpse of that guy that’s running for office; that one of the dumbfuck children you teach math to is an alien from Saturn and he revealed this to you frantically after the other children had left, because it’s your mission to bring his people to glory; that your cat is doing well. I have a heart; that you crowd surfed at a freddie mercury cover band concert buck ass naked and were so drunk that you pissed on the crowd, but they were so drunk that they just kept lawding you about until your bladder ran out; that you got a lift here this morning from a trucker that you met while hitching in Michigan and boy was it a long drive, especially since you rocked a humdinger on ‘im every third town; that you lost your savings, car and stamp collection in an underground russian roulette gambling ring; that you got the car back by agreeing to be the sole sled dog of a middle eastern man the first tuesday of every month – but it’s not that bad, because mostly he’ll just drive you to church and the grocery store for gogurt; that you’re worried about your growing adrenaline-addiction to eating massive amounts of prunes and laxatives before your state trooper husband gives it to you on Saturday nights at 7pm, because last night he tried to get creative and boy would there have been a mess if you didn’t distract him with oral sex; that you’ve finally reached your personal goal of fitting seventeen golf balls up your twat; that since somebody is above taking it in the ass from a man in a Winnie the Pooh costume, you have an opening in your posse of hookers, and would like to offer me the prestigious position of side bitch.

I mean, you don’t need to rattle off one of these verbatim, these are simply some examples from which you can construct more interesting waitress station dialogue. And I won’t walk away mid sentence, should you slip in a parable about the fulfillment you get from teaching the next generation of minimum wage slaves, from time to time. I’m one of those people who believes in second chances.

A Note on Identity

Very few people are themselves. Most people are a well balanced equilibrium of the people they care to impress that are currently present. Well behaved in your parents presence, discussing through an array of charming anecdotes that demonstrate what a moral and responsible member of society you’ve grown up to be -cut to- several shots past drunk, chain-smoking cigarettes in a basement that very well may harbor tortured girls just beyond the unfinished cinderblock walls, spouting stories of good fucks, bad fucks, and any drug story – any. Who exactly is yourself?

Yourself is always honest, it’s constantly perched back there in the shady crook of your brain, palms pleasantly intertwined over its large, you-shaped belly, dropping insensitive comments you were conditioned to produce at a young age, judging people the way your mother used to in pedagogic observations, grumbling cynically about the ill-truths of humanity your fellow humans display, checking people out, loudly reminding you of whatever you momentarily forgot to crave, bleeding a little bit when it loves, when it becomes attached to things. But going around and being yourself is considered bad manners and cockiness.

People whisper about individuals, half out of fear and half out of infatuation. The real you stretches into your entire body on psychedelic trips. The trip you is you. Insecure, suspicious of everything, unbreakably enraptured by the cheap plastic flower vase in the corner, and the way it pushes itself into that space underneath the naked light bulb, and when you aren’t tripping, all you can see are the scratches on it that reveal its inferior material, and the brusk edge where Joe knocked it off at least once a month, but tripping, it’s so complete and glowing and you want to be inside of it, in it, to be it, but you are it and it just keeps – “oh,” you take the bowl being passed around and hit it, immediately forgetting the overpowering love the real you just had for a parsimonious attempt at home decor, and just as your gaze settles again on the aforementioned Joe who has been staring at your nipples for the past hour, the little you at the back of your head stretches its helices and glares at his disgusting male face, jaw partly open because god knows what is seducing him into a hardon in his brain, his awkward autistic mind that just hates to ask if you have any weed to throw in with whatever niggardly stem he decides to drop on top of the nug I always offer up – out of courtesy and social responsibility – never kindness, that same blank expression that has been jaggedly picking up mannerisms and phrases from the overconfidently attractive asshole in the gang, the same classic Italian that you hate to sit next to when he’s drunk because he chews with his mouth open constantly belching and snorting and stinking in his beer breath, and as the effervescence of you touches fingertips and toenails inside your psyche, you begin to loathe him and allow yourself to think of him as an inferior homunculus while the latent part of your brain begins to piece together from its dusty eternal cabinet of filing folders each and every way which who you are actually resembles him, and how if anything, you’re worse because you hide all these characteristics away like a cowardly hypocrite and pretend to be pure and perfect to everyone else, but only the real you knows that you aren’t and you’re just as bad, so you take this half deflated balloon collection of uncomfortable thoughts outside with you to burn a camel and slowly suck the stagnant air from each day-after-a-child’s-birthday-party edifice, until you’re weak from asphyxiation, so you light another fag and it occurs to you this is actually your third fag, so you may as well stay outside on the damp bench with the curiously reddish clouds swirling on top of twinkling diamonds laid in zaffre, and you begin to get lost on hating yourself and fall into the complex dervishes above your head so that when Thomas comes out for a smoke, you realize that you are much more horizontal than he is, rising obliquely from your hip bones, because you’d unconsciously laid out on that green wet minefield of splinters, once again to fall in love with strange beauty. So you sit up and find the energy to be not yourself for a cigarette longer (the fourth in a night that has not yet reached its chain smoking threshold, you’ve already made your amends with throat cancer), so that he’ll leave without question and you can go back to relishing in the exhaustive self hatred and should-haves. That’s not to say the real you is simply a child with love and curiosity and confusing rushes of emotion in inappropriate circumstances, the real you wants you to be better, and the two of you get along when you clean your room and do the laundry and wake up on a schedule, so as to accomplish things throughout the day, because the morning wake-n-bake, coffee from the dingy diner you half waitress/half prostitute yourself at every weekend for rent money BELIEVE IT OR NOT is a self perpetuating routine because it makes you feel like shit, and shit is as shit does, and hell, I always get the sticky bun and two refills of coffee, so between the weed and the coffee and the fiber and the cigarettes you smoke to cover up the weed, the only guaranteed high point of your morning IS shitting. The real you knows this, and whispers lasciviously from inside your ear to use that tea the homeopathic doctor suggested, and to run for just ten more minutes even though the old fart on the treadmill infant of you keeps glancing back no doubt at the sound of your labored breath grunting through the stalactites that have built up in your nose from the dry greasy atmosphere you work in every day, and wouldn’t you be happier if you didn’t have to wake up and step buck ass naked sweaty dream feet onto the soil and stone granule from yesterday’s shoes that have embedded themselves in your carpet. Wouldn’t you like a clean room?

The real you knows exactly where it’s going and what it wants, but is consistently burdened with concerns of the flesh that heap up around it in cells and tissues and organs and cosmetic products that stay on the top of your skin, though the bottle said ultra-absorbing and the flickering glances that size you up and sexualize you under the hushed discussion that halts when you round the corner, that sink in though you tell them the bit about the duck’s oily back and its history with water. The ones that want you to be like them tell you that your identity is just pipe dreams and dormant failures so you believe them, because company is as addictive as the bowl ride on the way home from work. The real you is shouting inside to SHUT YOUR EARS TO THE ROARING OF THE VOICES, GEORGE WILLARD AND GET THE HELL OUT OF WINESBURG. Sidenote: Why is it Ohio has so many famous towns? Winesburg, Xenia, Defiance, etc. The fuck’s Ohio have that Delaware doesn’t?

The real me keeps seeing foxes when I drive home at night, or when I drive to the friends house after work, though I’d rather be at home studying, as long as it isn’t for a grade. They dash in front of my path and I never hit them, I have a jumper sticker that says “I Break for Bunnies” with a pink little Peter Cottontail thumbs up on the right. They walk towards me sometimes ,but mostly away from me, and I wonder if they don’t have my scent caught in their pointed snouts. A Native American adage claims the fox to be a wolf, bearing flowers, and you know they had that shit down, so who am I to disagree. The real me knows these foxes aren’t just foxes, because I’m the one who’s seeing them and it’s crazy and I’d never explain it to my friends, but it’s the only time the voice in the back of my head shuts up and listens, like she does when I become infatuated with dollar store vases and stormy April nightscapes. She’s listening, because she knows that she is in the presence of something sacred and couldn’t bear to gab over a cosmic gift, for fear she’d stop receiving it and still not know which direction to steer the wonky tires in.

The Age of Time

I think I know things now. Half a decade ago, I had the same mindset, with just a few incertitudes, of course – nobody’s perfect~ Finding myself with a very blurry idea of where I’ll be in even five years, I’ve allowed myself in the quondam present to snuggle into my confusion, and as a result, have found myself become wiser of it.  In the happening of time, I forget it, until I happen across a whisper from that person that used to be me – an old crumpled up to-do list or snippet of awful high school love poem; a photo that I’m smiling in but remember in sobs; a saved text message with the words and phrases I used all the time and just about figured I’d say forever. I crave that person, to talk to her and hold her close and tell her it’ll all be okay, although half the time you’ll still question that it’s so. Her urges are no different from mine, just less weathered. She’s the Honda Civic we received upon graduating high school, and I’m the fender mangled mess that still works, and hey! even a bit better now than before because I learned how to drive it the way it needs me to.

See, as much as she knew, she didn’t know enough, hadn’t experienced enough of life’s pain to relate to me, but every day she got closer. The minutia in the monotony of living a day-to-day existence changes us. I’m balancing, suspended in a pyramidal  glass cone, being struck by the same sands each second, becoming enraptured in the timbre of certain flecks striking my scalp. Reflecting fondly on the sounds they make and made, I forget often that their origin hovers above my head, an ocean of sand slowly sculpting my skull. I feel as though I must have been in this hourglass for ages when I sift about the everforminng puddle at my feet for one memory. Just a years’ worth of grains, a treasured few having truly altered me. Time seems to go slowly everyday, though it also feels like its speeding up, and we miss the little nuances that slowly turn left into right.

I’m becoming all the time. Each decision I make, each failure and success affecting every new attempt. The ideologies that ran my life when I was twenty fall short now. I’ve evolved them into different doctrines, aphorisms taken from day to day experience, always generating questions from artesian novelty that are only answered after they’ve sunk back to the alluvium, deposited under the silty layer of fresh confusion.

Looking back to when I was in the shoes of that teenager who’s too advanced to fit in with their peers, but too unexperienced to be anything but a groupie of older crowds, I remember desperately wanting to understand my older acquaintances because they felt closer to me than my peers. I was still too weird, too serious, too sober to be anywhere but in between these people. Though self-consciously attuned to the fact that something (time) was still missing from my equations, I sought out the lives of those I admired, trying to identify which laws landed you on which paths. I knew what I wanted to be, but always found myself treading water in who I was, unsure of how to swim towards my goal – I was still in high school.

So, lately, I get to thinking about all the things I never thought I’d do. And even better — all the things I didn’t even consider. Sure, I never thought I’d actually BE the valedictorian (the only time it came to fruition was in a free college program with only a few hundred underachievers skipping class, but hell, I count it); never thought I’d try LSD, much less trip through a summer into the land of ethneogens; never thought I’d kiss a girl… certainly never thought we’d have sex and date happily for a few months. These landmarks in my life were questions five years ago, and it feels like ages. And yet! Even better, it didn’t even register that I would get arrested, or be addicted to cigarettes or smoke weed every day, or drop out of school. I was certain. I had this picture of who I was in my mind, unaware of how influenced that image was by my family’s expectations, my friends’ future plans and goals, my own belief in myself. Chance played a huge part – as evidenced by the fact that I never thought a feature film would be shot on my street, or that I would work the whole summer in the crew of that film, and realize myself as a woman after the whole ordeal – in altering the things I never believed would happen, but still I’m shocked when it takes the reigns. Though I know from the past that Chance was cast in the play, I always have a docile suspicion that its understudy, Routine, will fill the role of my day to day life.

Now, I cherish memories from childhood, because I must reach so much further to grab hold of who that person was. Her breath still falls from my mouth on cold winter mornings and when I’m caught in traffic, yet it seems to be something she does to me and not the other way around. Her memories are plastered in stone, and my cement is still drying, but being the child she is, she can’t help but lay a handprint in the serous sidewalk, and all I can do is laugh and love her imprint on me. I think people must have children when they finally lose sight of their own child – speaking of things I just know I’m never going to do. It scares me sometimes. How I know I’m never getting married or having children because my whole *angsty* being is against such things, I can’t help but hear centrifugal echoes of laughter at my aversions to participating in society. The me of what is to come, reminding me never to take myself too seriously.

On the Wild Woman:

“without her, women’s inner eyes are closed by some shadowy hand, and large parts of their days are spent in a semi-paralyzing ennui or else wishful thinking. Without her, women lose the sureness of their soulfooting. Without her, they forget why they’re here, they hold on when they would best hold out.” pg. 10 Women who run with the wolves

Naturally. Naturally, I read this in a time of confusion and automatically feel an affinity and senseless need for these words.

Naturally, we live in a society where this very genuine glimpse of what it is to be a woman is buried under God after God.

It’s so difficult to remember to fight for your own rights, because it’s so easy to forget that you, alongside everyone else, grew up in this society that doesn’t value the honest irrational female as much as it values the projection of the perfectly controlled, perfectly fantastical male figure.

It’s difficult to step out of your own ways and look at the tracks you’ve mad on the dirt.

It takes watching 90s art films about the truthful darker side of youth, and how it’s [youth’s] a constant reproduction of all the horrible trips mom and dad raise[d] them on. Watching disgusting teenage boys aggressively corrale damaged women into sex and giving them pleasure.

Now I realize, as far as we’ve come since the 90’s, I’m still that damaged woman being corralled into the fantasy of infantile men.

Taught to feather play the egos of the attractive and masculine.

Taught to be pleasant.

Taught to be accepting.

Taught to be the moral ones.

Taught to be pretty, always pretty.

Taught to be taught.

Taught to be wrong.

Then questioned when we’re confused.

We’re being knitted, eyes wide open and screaming from lid to lid,

into this 1950’s hang-over-the-couch tapestry

with a farmer and his wife and dick and jane and a white picket fence and, hell! a dog named spot. With pearls in the ears and noosing the throat. Batting a delicately drawn cat-eye.

One hand behind his back and one on his great chest. Her man. Because that’s what makes her feel like a woman. Being his. And being impregnated by his dominant sperm and spewing out so many more copies with values and ideals just like mommy and daddy’s.

“your mom must be stupid if she doesn’t know. either that or so far under with denial.”

“she’s never questioned it, because he’s my dad”

“my dad is my dad”

Naturally I should be amused.