An Introduction

It occurred to me today that I could use this laptop, now it’s mine, to store all the information about Mohan and his world and Drake and whatnot that I have, and record more! It will be amazing. I will start to write little excerpts from his life as they come to me, too. But in the meantime I should introduce this mysterious friend of mine, and his world.

Mohan is about nine feet tall, and covered in light brown fur, very sleek (most of the time). He has a tail, about ¾ as long as the rest of his spine, the last few inches of which widen and flatten, resembling a hand made up of palm, but a little more flexible. His spine is a little more flexible than a human’s, possibly because it’s so long, but also because that’s how his species is designed. His arms are three-segmented, or nearly so—from the shoulder, they have an upper arm/bicep segment, proportionally the size of ours, and then a forearm, a little bit longer proportionally than ours, and then their wrists are little under one foot in length, and very flexible, almost tail-like until they turn into hands. Their hands only have four fingers, two with three joints, and two with two joints like ours, but they are in pairs of both, on either side of the palm, positioned a bit like ours but opposing each other.

Their heads are slightly more elongated, their foreheads a little more sloping back, their cheekbones a little higher, and their chins a little more pointed, most of the time. Their ears hang down almost to the base of the skull, and are shaped a little like elongated dogs’ ears. Their noses are very complex, consisting of tendrils which can be wriggled a bit, each of which has its own nostril. Their sense of smell isn’t as strong as a dog’s, but it’s as sophisticated—they can learn and identify more smells than we can, but are only a little better at picking them up. The nose design, I think, is less about smell, more about breathing. Their eyes are a little wider, the irises a bit larger and the pupils more narrow. They wear the fur on top of their heads longer, like we do; it resembles hair, a bit.

I think the gravity on their world is a little less than ours, which is why they’re so tall. A lot of things there are elongated.

Anyway, Mohan’s my friend; he found my mind more than a year ago when I was thinking about starting a comic strip entitled “Space Pirates!” The idea was a bust, mainly because one of the characters eased his way into my mind, showed me his name, and told me to write a story about his world instead. I obliged. I guess the ‘pirates’ thing is what attracted him. See, he left home to be a pirate with his cousin Drake, but the bloody life was too much for him, and he deserted after a dispute with the first mate, who was an exceedingly bloodthirsty jerk. My job is to write on his adventures, but the problem is that the nature of his world is just so that first, I have to figure out a way to tell that without… well, without too much of an infodump. I wonder, sometimes, if this is what happened to Professor Tolkien. Did something from that world just take root in his mind and demand to be written, and the stories followed? That’s what it seems like, only with him it was the language. And he was a much better writer than I am. Hopefully, I will do my friend’s tale justice, when someday I write it all down. In the meantime, he and Drake contact me through the haze of Risperidone when they can, giving me maps and charts and cultural notes and customs and traditions and religions.

They’re living at a house of their cousin’s (their family is a very extended clan from the mountains, so they’ve got a lot of cousins. They were raised together, they’re like brothers) now, and somehow that helps them contact me; I guess there’s a fair bit of arcane paraphernalia lying around for the use. Somehow, a few of the kittens that live there got through, too, but the Risperidone put a stop to that. I kind of miss them sometimes, but they’re probably big by now, anyway. I have a drawing of the house somewhere, and a bit of a map… kind of. It’s a little muddled, because I think it breaks the rules of physics in a few places.

Is this all real? I don’t know. Part of me wants so badly to believe it is, and part of me says that’s ridiculous, but the larger part of me says it doesn’t matter, in a way. I mean, it does. But not very much. The part that counts is the story, right? Mohan wants me to tell the story. Drake wants me to know the world. (Drake also wants me to learn the language, but I’m pretty certain that it can’t be fully communicated by the human tongue—we communicate by thoughts. I think our thoughts go through in pure thought form, and our respective brains translate them as best we can.)

Someday, I will do both.

But hopefully I'm not really a witch

You know, if I ever found myself being accused of a witch, I think I would wait for a moment when I was alone, probably on Death Row, and sing either Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah—and the whole thing, too, every single verse he wrote—or, or possibly and, U2’s Yahweh. They would both fit, though Hallelujah has a certain hopelessness to it… well, not a hopelessness. A futility. Like Johnny Cash singing Hurt, kind of, he’s run his course, “did my best – it wasn’t much,” and now it’s done, and what can you do but sing? Yahweh is more along the lines of “I walked this road, I know it was the wrong one, please show me where to go from here, I’m lost and all I can see is You now, and I’m scared but still full of love.” …or something.

Anyway. With any luck I’ll never be accused of witchcraft, which is just as well because my voice rather sucks. With any luck, I’ll figure out just what it is I want to do, pretty soon. I don’t have the drive or the inspiration that I used to. It’s strange, it seems almost like my heart has closed itself. I can’t touch that part of me, the deep well of something resembling sadness, something touching pain, and something a bit like ecstasy. It was where I reached for words, for the flow behind the words, and sometimes it gave me tears. Now I laugh, and laugh, and laugh, and the worse life gets the harder that laughter comes, the more it hurts, the more I need it. Like someone replaced a drug I needed with some other drug that I’m now addicted to.

The thing is, now I’ve got no direction. I don’t need a career, I don’t need money, I don’t need a nice home and a car. I did fairly well without them for a fair portion of my life, ne? But I do need a direction. I want to just take to the road, live every Anarchist’s dream and one of mine—spend the rest of my life in a cabin in the woods with no one bothering me ever (maybe decades later someone will find it and be really, really confused), or bike around the continent until I find a place to rest. But I also want to help people, in a major way; I also want to write, and to express in words what this life has taught me, because I need to; I also want to sing, but that’s something I can do anyway from a bike. It’s not easy, or at least not as easy as singing normally, but I can and have done it, for miles at a time. Gives your lungs quite the stretch.

And then there’s the song “Lemon,” also by U2. This song makes more sense if you know the back-story, but it’s beautiful even if you don’t. The first time I heard it, it touched my heartstrings in that way that only Bono really can—I mean the rest of the band too, but it’s his lyrics, the rawness beneath the words, kind of, and his voice singing them—and I nearly cried. Maybe I did. I don’t remember now. I remember the video, Mr. MacPhisto, the devil in a rock-star with a microphone, clinging to that last strand of humanity, he doesn’t know why anymore, drifting from the shore… I don’t know how to put it into words. Maybe only Bono can. Maybe death is an easier loss than insanity.

Remind me never to have a family.

Time takes the toll of unwanted bruises on my pride.

So it’s late, too late, and it’s cold, and I’m shaking a little and so, so tired. The day plays over, scene by scene, in my head, what I remember of it. I wish I’d stayed in the mood I started the walk in, cheerful and invincible. Things dragged me down, as they always do—the tension that one out of three doesn’t feel, that helps, the lazy feeling pulls a little more gently, and next thing I’m wondering where my energy went. It’s just the way it is; I wish I had the energy to study for the Spanish exam tomorrow, but such is life. I will not force myself, possibly because I know that won’t end well. I might go through the English texts, but something tells me that the only way I can prepare for that exam is to pray for a miracle. English, of all things! So pathetic, so terrible, I should not be stressing over this.

But anyway the music plays, and it kneads the snarling masses of confusion in my head, leaving me with some kind of calm. My sister claims that I look high when I sing, in too good of a mood. Maybe I am, somehow. Maybe it’s enough, maybe it isn’t. I know there’s no options, sometimes—oh, how I envy the irresponsible in life. I mean, it’s not like I’m the best or the worst or what have you; I am very, very bad at being responsible most of the time, but that doesn’t change the fact that I have responsibilities, ones that I can’t shirk or drop or ignore. I wish I could be cool, relax, forget about it, have a few drinks and maybe a joint or two and let it all go. I wish I could just hang out, chill, have fun. But as hard as I’m laughing, there’s always a hard weight in the back of my mind; as much as I’m willing to let go, I can’t.

It’s why I’ve never punched a few people out, for things they’ve said to or about me; I’ve never gone to a party and gotten wasted; I’ve never hung out and gotten stoned. I can’t. I can’t afford to let go of this weight, it’s what ties me down, it’s what keeps me from falling out of this life. It’s made of a few different things; my past, the guilt that I shouldn’t really even have at this point, my family, things that I shouldn’t worry about anymore or at all, and constant worry about the future. The only place I’ve ever been able to let go is out, far away from this whole world, in the world I know best, between tree trunks and cliffs and mountainsides, and the sky that you can’t see from the streets.

[Who knows? Maybe I’m really not crazy. Maybe it’s all a lie, maybe I’m perfectly fine, but whether it’s real or not doesn’t make it any easier to deal with.]

What I really need is to get away. Not to Sacramento, to an unnamed forest somewhere far enough out that no one will bother looking for me. I’m so fucking sick of this whole thing! I’m sick of politics, I’m sick of anger, I’m sick of guilt! Why am I always so damned guilty about everything? I swear, I can’t fucking say a word about half the shit I want to because I’m afraid to hurt somebody’s fucking feelings, and then to the people I actually give a damn about, I don’t watch my mouth. I’m so sick of laughing when I want to curl up and get away, I’m so sick of wanting to curl up and get away! I’m sick of dealing with four hours of stress and friction in order to live half an hour of laughter. I’m sick of not having the words when I need them, and then they swirl around in my head and when I try to say what I mean, it’s the wrong words and nothing even makes sense.

I want to go somewhere where life is living, where I get by on doing what I need to make the day. I want to go somewhere where it doesn't matter what you think, what he said, what she did, why it's harder today than it was yesterday. I need to work with my hands, to throw half a day's worth of back-breaking labor and see not a paycheck, but something that I needed, a shelter, another wall on my cabin, enough firewood to get me through a few more weeks. I want to go somewhere where life is for the living, not for looking how you're supposed to look.

Shadows in my brain, part two.

It’s dark, and I’m thinking nightmares under the covers, nightmares that spring unbidden to my mind, and nightmares that I brought upon myself, one way or another. It’s too warm, too dark, I’m suffocating—I was never, am not, afraid of the dark. At least, not any more than I am of the light, and what does it matter when they’re invisible? Shadows, strangling, shoving, grabbing, terrified I shrink and shrink, but it’s never far enough. Imagination is a terrible, terrible thing. When you say imagination, unless it’s in a very specific context, people think of rainbows and butterflies and castles in the air. No one thinks about the writers who came up with horror films, or the kids who grew up reading The Brothers Grimm and Jack Chick. I’m not kidding, and I’m not exaggerating—if anything, I’m not talking big enough, because I… because the nightmares don’t go away if you talk about them, and the worst feeling isn’t fear, it’s guilt, and because I thought maybe I couldn’t lose my soul, maybe I could, because Hell hath no fury like the demons your mind puts together. They’re not always big and scary, except when they are. They’re sly, and slinking, and they don’t bother trying to scare you, they tell you what they want you to hear, which is what a part of you wants to hear, and they screw with your dreams, and your daydreams aren’t gold-edged affairs with that cute boy from whatever. They’re shadowy, and dark, and you’re alone in the dark and so, so vulnerable, and you’re not alone.

This is the part that really sucks, the part I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, the part that follows me through my dreams and nightmares and my waking days. And it doesn’t go away with medication. The medication helps, makes the nightmares less tangible, and light becomes my friend a little more, but they don’t go away.

Picture this. You’re curled up in a dark room, nondescript if it was light, probably, facing the wall because the shadows behind you might be taking shape. There are cold fingers stroking your back, like the epitome of a shadow on Midwinter’s night. You’re shivering uncontrollably, cold, so cold; you don’t feel it in your real body, because the part of you that’s real is toasty warm and suffocating, but most of you is cold, shaking. And you hate being cold, you’re never cold. The shadow is whispering now, things you don’t want to hear, don’t want to believe, things about yourself that may or may not be true, and you’re trying to tune it out but every time you close your eyes it’s the same thing.

It gets worse. There’s a part of your mind that is feeding off of this, not enjoying, per se, but… craving. And if you shut it off for long enough, it seeps through in your subconscious, and you dream things worse, and worse, and worse. When I was a little kid, I made a dreamcatcher with a circle of wood, and feathers I’d found in the land behind our house, and some twine, and it used to work, for a long time. But only for the nightmares. Things still happened when I was daydreaming, things still happened, if I let them.

Picture this. You’re standing in a corridor, awake and laughing, and suddenly behind the friend you’re talking to, there’s an immense, terrible shadow of something. You know what it is, but at least it’s not just the shadow—there’s a shape there, looming, for a split second everything blurs and melts in your vision and the one clear thing is a monstrous dragon. It looks at you, and then the moment passes, but you can feel it watching you now, and when the day is finally over, you find yourself racing, running as hard as you can through the park because it is Right Behind You, and no matter how fast you run, it always will be, and you’re terrified but you can’t turn around, because then it will be right On you. So you run, and run, and eventually force yourself to walk, and walk, and force yourself to stop thinking about it (impossible, of course), and you can’t see the shadow in the dark but you know it’s there, even if it’s not real, and that night, after you’ve gotten home and huddled down in the dark, you dream about it. And again, and again, and again, for weeks afterwards there’s a dragon chasing you through your dreams.

I hate dragons. Hate them, hate them, and if I ever write a novel with a dragon in it, the dragon will be the monster that chased me for so damn long I was afraid to sleep, not some pansy feathered lizard with telepathy and magic sparkles.

So anyway. “What’s it like being in your mind?” Now you know. This is how I write, this is where my words come from, they are forcibly wrenched from a mouth by the shadows behind it. And I laugh, when the imaginary cobra rears out of the pile of grain at my head, because I know it’s not real, because after spending the night hiding from my dreams, the blood that splatters across my mind’s eye, the explosions around my imaginary mind, are almost a breath of fresh air. Not quite, but you get the point.

I don’t want to post this, but it doesn’t feel right posting the other one, the happier bits of my brain, and leaving this out. So, yeah.

Safe enough in the shadows of my mind.

or, "what it's like to be in my head"

There are snowflakes falling, it’s dark and they shine orange-yellow in the streetlight against the dark sky. I crane my head to look, crane my neck to catch them on my tongue. It is a little cool, some might say terribly cold, but the wind in my face makes me feel alive, and I’m actually warm, or at least, comfortable, as long as I keep moving—no one believes me when I tell them that, but it’s true. I prefer cold, I prefer chill, nothing makes me feel alive like ice. Anyway, the snowflakes are falling, and I twirl and stretch to catch them—it doesn’t cross my mind that I look quite the fool, until it does and I reign in my laughter and return my wandering gaze to the sidewalk. But before long I’m caught up in the sidewalk, the pretty crystals, catching the light like a field of diamonds—not like a field of diamonds, though, like a path of snowflakes and ice crystals. Every image is like itself, a little like every other image, but most like itself. That occurs to me, and I smile at the simple complexity of it. Simple complexity, simple complexity, com-plex-it-y, simple, simple plan, it’s a simple plan! Not like the band, though, like a simple plan, they never turn out to be as simple as you first thought, do they?

Sometimes my mind is a scary place to be—imagination isn’t as bright and fuzzy as some people seem to think—but moments like this I wouldn’t want to be anyone else. The beauty of the moment strikes me, the orange streetlights on the ice, the brown of that little clump of snow against the white, the snow on the trees, the cold air like a long drink of life, the moment is beautiful. It’s the night that brings it out in me. I’m never as calm and wild and content and restless as I am walking in the cold at night. It’s why I want to move somewhere far North, where I’ll always have a cold, dark night to walk in.

Back five minutes.

I’m laughing, laughing at the sheer craziness of it all. I know I locked the door, I know I locked it at least once, but I’m still bent on checking on my way home, though it’ll add five minutes to my walk. I remember locking it, but what if that was on the first trip? No, it wouldn’t make sense that I locked it on the first trip, I knew we were making two trips, wouldn’t he have reminded me? No, I definitely locked it. But what if, what if, what if I didn’t? Worst case scenario, someone breaks in and robs the place stone blind. Second worst case, the unlocked door is discovered in the morning and we are both fired; third worst case, I am fired. But this is all folly, because I locked the damn door.

Or did I? I laugh aloud again. Life would be simpler, I remark aloud to the empty air, if I just wasn’t so crazy. Laugh, laugh, it’s all you really can do—I am amused by the futility of my reasoning, amused by the inanity of my situation, amused by the cold and the walk and the idea. And I am walking to the store to check the door, which is, of course, firmly locked when I get there. The snow, which I assumed to be blowing out of the trees, begins to look more like a snowfall, and I laugh because of course it starts snowing as soon as I am resolved to walk the extra distance.

Back another several minutes.

Barnes & Noble is a pretty nice place to sit and read, even if it is cliché and whatnot. This coffee is a little too sweet, but that’s okay. I have a new book, and that makes everything better—it’s one I’ve heard about several times online, but not by name. I recognized the characters when I flipped it open to a random page and started reading. I only know the names, and that one is an angel and the other, a demon, but that’s enough and it’s by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett—do I need any further goads? It’s in my price range, and that was proof enough.

I’m sitting there, sipping the “tall” mocha and popping little balls of chocolate-mint-stuff and laughing to myself at Crowley, barely aware of my surroundings, except for the guy at the table across from mine. We’re facing each other, on opposite sides of our tables. He’s using a laptop, a Mac—we made brief eye-contact when I walked in, and he’s hovering in the back of my mind now. He’s tallish, wearing a white and blue plaid-type shirt, medium-length curly blond hair, and has shadows under his light blue eyes that suggest a lack of sleep all too familiar in this corner of the world, surrounded by bookshelves and quiet regulars who prowl the pages like hawks on the wind. He’s handsome, looks like late twenties, early thirties, and I kind of wish I wasn’t too shy to look up and smile at him. He smiles at me anyway, when I look up, and I smile back. When I get up to throw the coffee away and go, he asks me if I was popping coffee beans and I laugh and explain. I wish, I wish, I wish I could get to know him.

Back about half an hour.

I’m flashing you the peace sign over my shoulder as I take the crosswalk and he drives off. It’s a good night, it’s a good night, I’m laughing more sincerely than it’s been in a while, the deep snowbank that I sink right through doesn’t faze me, it’s a good night for a walk in the clear air and the soft snow. In my ears, it’s “Lemon,” and I ignore the deeper feelings that song pings in my heart and focus on the beat, a good beat to walk to.

Back several minutes.

He’s counting money, careful and generally organized and so on, and I’m leaning up against the counter, distracting him with mindless chatter. Eventually, I run out of words and fall silent, but not for long. I’m never silent for long, when I’m in these moods. It’s kind of a pain. But this was supposed to be the inner monologue, so yeah.

After all this time, I’m used to the store with the lights turned out. It’s not too dark to see, not up front, and I’m wondering if I could juggle if I tried. Of course, the answer is no. I knew that, I’ve known that for a long time, but it’s never stopped me before. As I go to pick up the nail files, I see my friend and boss mark down another number on the sheet and stop. The scenario plays out in my head, I mentally see the tired head-shake, and the exasperated sigh, and start laughing instead. He looks at me, looks like he might ask what I’m laughing over, and then shakes his head and goes back to counting. I grin. The rhythm starts playing in my head, and the inside of the first knuckles of my thumb, forefinger, and middle finger start drumming it out on the counter. It takes me a few moments to realize that he’s stopped counting and is glaring at me, and another moment to figure out why.

“You can stop that any time.”

And so I pull up short again, and turn from the counter. I pull a few bags of seed forward to fill gaps on the shelf. There’s something about the surface, the cool plastic bulging with seeds underneath, that invites drumming, or juggling, but I restrain myself. The intense mental image hits me, of the bag bursting, a force of seed bursting out like an explosion, and I grin, and then start laughing as the picture solidifies. He rolls his eyes; I don’t have to turn around to know that. I grin and turn back, and the inevitable follow-up image is a bullet exploding into the back of my neck, out of my forehead. Or some forehead, anyway. It’s a pretty awkward feeling, the imagined senses it drums up in my skin. I shiver a little bit, and stop thinking to watch him count. He eventually notices that I’ve stopped pacing and looks up, making a strange raised-eyebrow face at me watching him. I grin.

The next image is the little digital computer-register clock shattering. I can see it, fragments of bright turquoise numbers flying, and black glass all around, the little tinkling sound. I snicker again, picturing the fragments embedding themselves in the five and ten pound bags—somehow that amuses me. He shakes his head—I’m a lost cause, but I think we both accepted that a long time ago. At least, I did.

Back an hour or so.

We’re talking U2, both more excited than we’d probably care to admit to anyone else. He’s talking about his life and Bono’s, and I kind of see how the dovetail could be. I wish, I wish, there’s so much he could be. I hope more for him than for me, sometimes. Often, actually. If anyone deserves to make it out of this purgatory, it’s him. What I wouldn’t give to see his name in lights—my name, my name I would see on a PO box in a village somewhere on the edge of the wilderness, but that’s a dream I would do without to see his face on an album. Man, it’s crazy how life pulls us.

I’m trying to unscrew the whatever-it-is; this is a copy-and-paste situation; today, it was a pole and a bolt. He can’t find the right tool, I can’t find it either; the solution is to either leave the task undone, indefinitely or until the tool can be found, or to improvise. He’s for leaving it; I’m trying to patch together a solution with spare parts. He’s pointing out the fallacies in my logic; I’m ignoring him. He’s usually right, but it’s worth it for the sparkling moments in between where whatever half-baked crazy scheme I’ve come up with actually works.

Back another hour in time.

I’m sinking into the snowdrift, laughing because although it’s cold and wet, it still feels fluffy, and it makes me smile. An image flashes across my sight, blood splattered across the white and brown plow-snow in a pattern of bright red, turning dark. I shake my head to clear it and keep walking, smiling still. The images barely even bother me anymore, I turn up the music, it’s Bob Marley and the Wailers, which is nice after something like that. The cars whiz by, and the suggestion passes my mind to leap in front of one, and the sensation of my bones being crushed against a high-speed fender whispers. I ignore it as best as I can and keep walking.

It’s a good day for it, after all.

Another day of untried freedom

So this morning I woke up and, as though my body had somehow sensed the urgency in the air, fell back asleep. Oh, how I love days off from school. The air is clean, the sky is pure, even in the clouds and patched fog, the ground is covered with enough snow deep and sparkling to get lost in; I have boots, I have a skin thick enough to hide me from the wind, I have a day with nothing in it yet. It is a feeling like no other, not quite endowed with the straight freedom feeling that comes of actually skipping school, but with many of the possibilities. Maybe it’s the lack of risk that changes it, I don’t know. I mean, yes, I could be called into work—that’s one of the things you don’t get with skipping—but also, I could take the dog down to the park and romp! I could spend two hours playing horn! I could watch Into the Wild! I could… could do pretty much anything. I probably won’t, besides playing horn, and/or guitar for as long a time as my chops and fingertips, respectively, can take. This will be after the music now wears off (it’s Radio Nowhere right now, New Year’s Day before that) and my fingers start itching worse than they are now. In the meantime, I write.

Yesterday, we got a new president. There are quite a few people freaking out, doomsayers, and the occasional orgasm of rhetoric. Personally, I couldn’t—well, I could probably care less if I tried. But I spent the year leading up to the election trying to figure out what the big deal was, and alternately trying to figure out which of the two evils was worse, because they’re both pretty damn bad. And at some point, it became not McCain vs. Obama, but the party who believed in Saint Wizard McSuperpants versus the party who believed in His Evilness the Doom-bringer. And that made me sick. It was absolutely insane, and at some point I was wondering exactly where the hell everybody’s sanity went? I mean, you guys aren’t all crazy! I wanted to take several people by the shoulders and shake them until they resembled my friends and family again. My dad was one of the worst, telling me over and over on the way to school how Obama was pretty bad, pretty bad, pretty awful, he did this and he believes that and he’ll do this and that and this, and one friend from US History was the other, going on and on and on about how wonderful this guy was, never with any reasons or back-up, only constant speeches about how damn awesome he was. Fortunately, two people I knew seemed to retain some sanity, and my friends on complete opposite sides helped me out—my friend the vegan, who wanted to vote for Ralph Nader, and my friend the vegetarian-hater, who wants to take over the country and remake it in the model of ancient Rome.

If I had to do the thing over again, well, I’d probably just say fuck it all and leave. Or I’d cast a blank ballot. But anyway, Obama’s in office, the country is torn between wildly celebrating and committing suicide, and I’m inclined to tell them the whole thing is absolutely ridiculous. He’s just another politician. When has a Harvard or Yale graduate in office done our country any good? What we really need is a revolution, but then I’m just a schizophrenic on a laptop on my day off from school spouting nonsense. Anyway, enough with the political gibberish. Long story much shorter, I have a day to do stuff, and do stuff I will!

On to the waiting horn.

Like a Caged Animal I Wander.

This is my world, right now: the smooth, cool curve beneath my hand, I can almost feel the brass color against my skin. The world is the smooth circle that touches my lips, the narrow bell beneath it against my tongue, briefly, the buzz when I feel, rather than play, the tones that flow through, not from, my throat and down the mouthpiece. The silvered keys beneath my fingers are on the fringes of the world, making up the edges of the horizon and the parts of the universe that we feel and cannot see. The symbols I read before me show a way, the steps I take in the sound and the air, the time ticks on through the baton. My world is the cool brass, more than metal, the energy carried through the wind, I am an instrument in this world, and I carry life into this world, warm energy on the coolness of my horn.

The world is cold, and there is the noise of a thousand shattering plates of ice when my foot touches the ground, the dark spot for a moment against the shining white surface, before it breaks through and the snow is soft beneath. The shadows dance, deceiving; even in daylight, this world seeks to twist the mind and sight and it is easy to get lost. Even easier, now, with the only light the ambient blue from the nearly full moon that fills the gaps between the snow and the dark tree-trunks, turning the entire world into a maze of blinding shadows, black or blue or white in the moonlight…

These are my dreams, when my eyes close under the lights behind the bars. In the meantime, my heart beats to a time I don’t pretend to understand, something plays me like a harp, and I laugh under the raw pain beneath my ribcage. The people move around me, they wear the ropes for protection, the guards are there for protection, the walls keep them in for their own good and I keep the snarl beneath my face hidden. I am what you are protected from, I am one of the things in the daylight, all straight grins and playful shoves and punches to the gut, one of the things that glides through the night that you saw through your window, that rainy night.

You think my laughter frightening, you call me out for a lunatic—but you’ve never seen me in the full moon. Maybe if we met in the true world, far from these gray borders and lines, out and away from the walls of our respective prisons, you would understand. Perhaps you would not fear me, if you heard my song in the wild places; perhaps you would fear me all the more. You think I’m a fool, pacing and spinning on my heel, possibly because you have never seen a wild thing in a cage before. My howls resound as laughter, high and loud and insane, and you smile in that shifty way; you aren’t sure whether to be amused at the joke you didn’t get. The joke is the life, the collar tight around my neck, the joke is the escape of final leaving, a release from this far too tame body, the joke, when you heard it, you weren’t sure what to think, you told the wardens I scared you. The joke is these bars, with all that you’ve brainwashed yourself into seeing as escapes scrawled on the spaces. I am a fool, yes, for laughing, and I play the fool with wild abandon, and for a moment, the joke is on you.

Dudes Who Are Awesome

So, after an episode of Mythbusters sparked an elaborate daydream where hiking met helicopter crash met abandoned government facility, complete with rusted fense, I wondered, who are the most awesome dudes I know of? Not know personally, but know -of-, and they'd probably be awesome to know personally. And it would be really cool to somehow save their lives, just so I could feel like I helped the world out a little today. Or something. So. In no particular order,

• Jamie Hyneman (yeah, Adam's cool too, but Jamie is... awesome)
• Paul Hewson
• David Evans
• Tom Waits
• Eric Hutchinson
• Cory Doctorow
• Neil Gaiman
• Randall Munroe
• Ryan North
• Jeffrey Rowland (this guy might just be on the top, except for Bono)

Actually, the whole bunch of webcomic artists that I know of (except for Tim Buckley) seem like pretty awesome dudes (and Jeffrey Rowland is awesome even by webcomic artist standards), and I should probably not be proud of the fact that I could probably quote more than many Dinosaur Comics verbatim, but I am because webcomics are perhaps the coolest, most alternative-but-not-in-a-bad-way (is there a Dark Side to the force that is subculture? yes, and its name is Hot Topic... when subculture goes Culture, or just... well, that's a whole 'nother subject, one I'll probably tackle when I get my brain organized [HAHAHAHA] or at least manage to gather enough interest and material on the problem), form of media that there IS, except maybe zines and mail art... or perhaps Indie music. Then again, who can compare them? Apples to mangoes, or oranges to strawberries. Or something.

And, on that note--

An empty book would be nice

I’m beginning to wonder if I will ever be a competent storyteller. It’s who I am, what I’ve always done and always wanted to do, but… lately I find myself with nothing but rambling pages of… well, nothing. It makes for somewhat… interesting… reading, I guess, maybe, but even so, that’s not what I want. I can ramble on to my friends (until they get bored, or annoyed, or they want to ramble in which case I listen and am interested). Hell, I can ramble out loud, or for that matter, keep a blog. …Right, exactly.

What I want, like I said, is to tell stories—to tell A Story, something big, something that matters, but I’ll settle for amusing people with five-page drabbles. I just want to WRITE. Stories.

When I was maybe four or five, I made up the story of “The Wawa Penguins,” which was exactly the story you would expect from a five or six year old with a voracious appetite for literature, who could only access literature approved by her strictly Fundamental Baptist parents. (Also, “Wawa’s” was the name of a convenience store that was pretty much everywhere at the time, we had one two blocks from our house, and they sold the BEST ice cream, which was the focus of the story.) But my parents, as parents of five/six year olds are wont to be, were tickled pink, and proud, and whatnot. Once, in a long ride to Queens, New York, I amused the other three kids in the back of the car with a story about a gigantic red horse, whose farmer owner constantly entered in high-stakes races, until people got suspicious and started trying to catch the horse’s secret—he was chased to the top of a very, very tall tower, and it was discovered that the whole thing was an illusion, created by the use of magnifying lenses. (I remember that my throat was sore and I had run out of twists and just wanted the story to be over, and even then I was annoyed with myself for such a Deus ex Machina ending, and also, though this didn’t occur to me, how the magnifying lenses gave the animal super speed is anybody’s guess.)
Now, I have about six different short stories only four or five pages in (which are going to be way too long, when I finish them in the shadowy realm of Eventually), and a novel that I started for NaNoWriMo 2008, and, predictably enough, never finished, and a mind full of wanderings where I see stories and can’t transcribe them for reasons I’m not entirely sure about. And now, apparently, I write like an Pre-Revolutionary French Scientist (have you ever read their papers? Their sentences are longer than their paragraphs! Text blocks o’ Doom galore.). Man, I just can’t win these days. I should go pick up Sean and play until someday I’m Edge-quality, and then I’ll just hang around outside the recording studio panhandling until maybe… I don’t know.

Was I saying something? Oh, right, storytelling.

Yeah, anyway what this world needs is another Hans Christian Anderson, and everyone’s going to hate me but I Don’t Care neener-neener-neener, Freedom Of Speech1 and so on.
Anyway, I keep trying for stories but they don’t seem to go anywhere, I wind up with a paper to write… I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t know, I should just find Jeffrey Rowland and demand that he tell me what the secret to his Awesomeness is, or just go panhandling in Northampton in disguise until I find him, and then kidnap him and… I don’t see this going anywhere good either. Damn. I can’t even come up with a good crazy plot of action! I could ask Serra for help or something, but her style and mine are critically different. She doesn’t need things to be story-shaped, or at least, her story-shaped things are shaped differently from other story-shaped things… I don’t know. I write like …nah, that doesn’t work either. Comparing Serra to Dali or Picasso is fair, but exactly whom do I compare my own writings to? DaVinci? The man was a genius! Escher? Again, a genius—same with anyone here really. I’d have to look up some crazy artist who tries to paint wildlife from a house in the suburbs but can never finish anything.
1Note: Freedom of Speech® is subject to change and adaptation and other possible improvements and can be removed at any time decided by USGOVT© or modified if content is determined to be of some possible non-beneficial consequences to the general public or USGOVT© itself.

A Long Night to Wonder

So here I sit, with a glass of champagne and a half-empty mug of chai tea, listening to Panda and Child, typing at random because I’m still afraid to face the future. To my right, there’s a telescope on a tripod, my little brother’s, it looks pretty cool but isn’t calibrated yet. To my left, through the doorway without a door, there’s a beautiful little tabby cat trying to figure out how to open the dishwasher, or something—she’s acting a little weird, lately, actually, I don’t know what’s up. In front of me, occupying the rest of the table, there’s a huge stack of newspapers, and magazines, and stuff. I shoved it into a huge pile because it was in the way of a card game that came up earlier.

There are only two songs on this CD, ‘we must avoid these mistakes,’ that I just don’t like, and this is one of them—it’s called “twice is nice,” and… it’s something. It’s frantic, it’s a little too frantic for me, I guess. Shouting yourself hoarse at a world that just doesn’t want to listen, is what it feels like, and I’ve done too much of that already. I think. Well, not really. When I find a point that sticks, I’ll try again. I guess that’s just it, I don’t know. I used to spend hours wandering, in any direction, just… walking, looking for something that resembled an answer. Sometimes I came home at peace; sometimes, I don’t. The cold winds wake me up, the darkness clears my mind, and the stars call to my heart; when there’s a full moon, I revel in the pure light that coats the ground, brighter than the streetlights.

Yes, the verb tense confusion is fully intentional. [Oh, come on, you had to notice that.]

What I should’ve done is taken out my horn or my guitar (Sean, by name) and played until my muscles—lips and fingertips, respectively—were too sore to continue. But now it’s late enough that horn would be too loud (oh, how I hate living in proximity to people) and guitar… well, no excuses there, really. I should, probably I will before I go to bed. What I should’ve done is clean up, my room is such a mess it’s becoming hard to find things. I did clean up, the living room, partly, and the kitchen, mostly. My brother left the place a mess, and I didn’t want to clean up while my friends were here; we all came here for kind-of-lunch and hot chocolate after spending the afternoon hurling ourselves down a snowy hill on sleds. It is pretty cold in here, now, the furnace is off- oh, there it goes. What I should’ve done is finished applying to the rest of the universities, it’s really bad that I’ve left them this late and now I might not get in, but I’m doing this to avoid thinking about the future. Oh, oh, if I keep putting off these thoughts they will trap and kill me. Oh, but if there’s no way out why not bang your fists against the cage until the scars are enough to kill you? I’ve tried that, too.
In the end, I’ve no one to blame but myself.