Enough of this.

After looking through this, I decided that there was altogether too much negativity, and it's growing like a tumor through the later entries. This isn't how this blog was supposed to turn out. And, as it happens, Mohan had something to say about it. He asked me. I answered.

"I don't know what to say anymore. It's like the microphone is melting in front of my face. You don't see it, but it's there. Or it's not. I don't know."

"You're ending every sentence-- paragraph-- lately like that. 'I don't know, I don't know.' What do you know? Don't say nothing. That's bullshit. What do you know?"

"I know about rocks. No, wait, that's not me. I know about the sky. You see faces in the clouds, sometimes. Some people take things to make them see the faces clearer. I know that some people eat fungus to play up their subconscious."

"Don't fall into self-pity, now. That's not what this is about, and I've had enough of your whining about seeing things. You see me, don't you?"

"Well, I hear you."

"Exactly. Is that so bad? Am I such a terrible friend?"

"No. You're the best friend I've ever had, for all your crazy ways. We should start writing again."

"Anytime, once we get this thing sorted out. You need to finish up school, you know. I wish you didn't, but like it or not, there's things you have to learn. People... you have to deal with people, that's more what this is about. You have to do this."

"Okay. I know that. I just wish I didn't. When are you going to start sending me lines again? I want to see more than just cliffs, I miss the skies and the mountains. I escape there, sometimes."

He smiles. "I know. When this is all finished, we'll start writing again. Drake has more maps, and David has been talking about his journey, and we have to get your anatomy straightened out, too. It'll be fun, this summer. You'll see."

So after a long talk with a friend, and then a long night playing guitar and talking to another friend, I thought of something, in response to/answer to this exchange:
["Alright, we have six minutes to fix your life."
"I think I'm unfixable."
"Bullshit. That's a cop-out."]

What if.

Maybe it is a cop-out. Maybe I want the answer to be "You're fucking diseased, give up and kill yourself before you kill someone else," becuase that means I don't have to try anymore. If I'm so far gone that I can't come back, if I'm a lost cause, it means I don't have to keep pushing, pushing, trying. Trying to change, trying to make myself normal, trying to make myself sane, trying to make myself happy, trying to be the person everyone wants me to be.

...they are still trying to change themselves to someone normal, someone healthy, someone they deem worthy of love.

I want to stop trying. I want to give up, I want to stop giving a damn, I don't fucking deserve happiness and it hurts to keep trying. Maybe everyone does want to be happy, safe, secure. I am not everyone, and although I do want to be happy, oh God do I want to be happy, I am tired of laughing. It hurts. I want to cry. I want to cry and I can't, that part of me is sealed off and whenever I come close to allowing myself some vestiges of emotion, some valve kicks in and I start laughing, and whatever connection I had, to another human, to myself, to anything, is abruptly cut short. She was right, those four years past. I am sabotaging myself and I don't know why and I can't stop and I don't know how and I don't know know don't know don't know fucking anything.

Yeah, so I'm a fucking quitter. What I don't understand is why they won't give up. They want me to be happy so bad that it's not okay to be sad anymore, because I can't even allow myself to be miserable because I'm not just a fucking quitter, I'm a fucking disappointment. I want to be happy not even for myself anymore. I want to be happy because because because it's what I'm supposed to be. I'm sorry. I don't know. I don't know anything. I'm sorry.

Glue in place of stitches

I want to destroy myself.

There's more, I guess, but that's the bottom line. That, and the point that it's not a random, abstract thought, and that I have reasons, and damned good ones, and the searing, slicing, stabbing pain in my heart whenever I am allowed to examine my mind and see, once again, what a monster I really am on the inside. Sometimes I wonder if I'm really even human.

I want to destroy myself, body and mind (and heart, just to escape the pain; and soul, just because I don't think I should even have one at this point.)

A strange and shitty night.

Blood on my mouthpiece, still straining to hit those low notes, usually it’s the high notes that get me but that hasn’t been the case lately, and the lower register is really tough to reach. I’m sick of mellophone, which Microsoft Word corrects as “cellophane,” amusingly enough, and it’s only been two or three weeks now. Three days would be too long. I haven’t played horn in long enough, that’s the problem. I need to get back to caring, back to pouring my soul into the brass. Or at least forcing out a few tunes a night. I’m angry, though, angry and hurt and apathetic and I don’t know where to turn now.

This is a shitty blog post, I am fully aware. I’m in a shitty mood. I’m feeling like a shitty artist, with no vision, and I want to seek meaning but I forgot how to seek. And my hair is shitty, because I haven’t had a chance to wash it in about three days, possibly more. And my eyes are shitty, as usual, except that lately contacts keep falling out of them, and my nails are broken and jagged, and my lips are chapped and split and broken (thus the blood on my mouthpiece) despite the balm I put on them, which is gross and made with honey, and I just want life to be over.

Today, or this evening, I guess, it was well after sunset when I left the library, I took the roundabout way home, and when I passed by the highway there was a man doing something, sending up a huge fountain of yellow-orange sparks, wicked bright all over, and they cast his face into relief, even twenty feet away at the bottom of the bank, maybe further, I could see. And there was a huge white spotlight shining at the scene, it nearly blinded me. I watched the sparks for a while and then a car came, and I shook myself loose and kept walking.

Before that, turning onto that roundabout road, I saw a possum going to cross the road, but I came too close for comfort, and it bolted in the other direction, past the bank sign, into the woods. I say bolted, but it was really more of a rolling lumber.

And now I will go to sleep and hope that nightmares don’t haunt me too long.

I don't have so much a vendetta against dragons, these days.

Sometimes it annoys me how much he’s right, that he sees so much. The thing is, I know what’s there, I just get really good at blocking it out of my mind, and he doesn’t bother with that. But I guess that’s what friends are for—they cut through the bullshit, and see past the fronts you’ve put up, against yourself or the outside world. The half-hearted excuses you use to keep yourself from trying for happiness don’t hold up in any amount of light, and a real friend is someone who won’t let you hide that kind of shit in the shadows. That’s something I’ve always thought of, when I see those stupid “A good friend… but a BEST friend…” stickers/pins/t-shirts/bumper stickers at those stupid stores.

A good friend will laugh with you. A best friend teaches you to laugh at yourself. A good friend will find you the right parties, a best friend will skip the parties with you. A good friend is someone you can talk to, but a best friend is someone you can be quiet with. All that good shit. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that it's not the physical things, even the physical actions, that define a friendship. It's not even, really, how much you can trust them (it is, though), it's something else, I don't know. A best friend is someone you can drop the mask to, or someone who forces you to drop the mask to yourself.

Honestly, I don't like the label 'best friend,' and am using it here out of convenience. In my mind, it conveys the image of cheap jewelry in the shape of a puzzle piece, of giggles and doing each other's hair, and I know that's a stupid prejudice. When I say 'best friend,' I mean just friend, someone who matters to you... more than most people? I don't know. Friends. You know what I mean. I think.

My closest friends don’t so much influence me as they free me from the influences of the rest of the world. I feel more myself around them, and that has good and bad consequences, pleasant and unpleasant both. I see faults, things I hate about myself, more when I’m talking to a best friend than when I’m alone, than when I’m with anyone else. I unveil more of myself, which means I’m more easily hurt. But the few close friends I have, I wouldn’t trade for anything.

It’s late, and I should probably go to sleep or something, especially since I kind of want to be rid of this lingering fever. But it’s not often I decide to listen to a U2 album, full through, and I’m on the third now, in descending order by year. (How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb) Something about an album isn’t complete unless it’s listened to full through, in order. I don’t know why. Certainly songs can be appreciated on their own, and in a different, more individual light, without the context of their album covers. Holistically, though, it’s like… Like looking at the pages of a sketchbook. They can be appreciated on their own, but if you look at them altogether, there’s a bigger image.

Anyway.

Happy Mother's Day, in a way.

I left the house just to go to the park, the pond, just to think, because there is this place where an artificial cement slope dips off of the path, and it forms a little hollow next to the pipe that channels the pond from one side of the path, underneath to the lower pool where once I sat, transfixed, in a nearly full moon some time after midnight, and watched a beaver circle, displaying and splashing in the blue light and black darkness. I just wanted to be alone, to think, because Mother’s Day is a sad day for me, when I remember the woman who gave birth to me, who used to be able to pick up any musical instrument, any instrument at all, and ‘bang out a tune on it,’ in my father’s words, in a matter of minutes, who used to be able to cook the most amazing cakes, whose calligraphy was a near perfect art, who rescued me from the mulberry tree where I stranded myself when I was a child, whose pale skin and deep affinity for this Earth I inherited, whose mind is now a twisted wreck, which I also inherited.

On the way down, I blocked my cell phone number and left her a ten-second voicemail, just to tell her I loved her. I don’t know why. No good can come of that, I told myself as I continued walking, but it doesn’t really matter. So I walked down to the pond, slipped down into my little hollow, and sat for a long time, thinking, hurting. And then I smelled the two dandelions growing out of a hole in the cement, but they were far sweeter than the ones in our yard when I was little, and the scent brought back no memories. So, after a time, I sprung up out of the dip, and continued walking, down by the shore of the pond.

And accidentally started up a Great Blue Heron, which is a kind of bird which many people desperately wish to see, and not many do. It flew across the pond, and I sprinted alongside on the bank, on the other side of a line of white pines, obviously not matching its speed at all, but quick enough to see it alight on the opposite shore, where it strutted around in the water, eventually standing still. I knelt on the muddy bank, next to this huge oak tree on the point, watching and talking softly to it, as is my wont when it comes to animals, and waited to see it snap a fish. In vain, as it turned out; I stayed there on the bank for a long time, and when I finally got up and walked a little to the cement block a few yards from the shore to sit down, I turned just in time to see it shaking its head, sending a spray flying.

Then my sister texted me to come home, since my dad would soon be there. I got up and headed out of the park, taking the higher path this time, the one that cuts directly between the white pines and the deciduous trees, farther up. I was maybe twenty feet from the edge of the woods when an Oriole flew up and over my path. That’s another bird people strive to see, and I kind of understand why, now. It was the most vibrant orange you could possibly imagine; the thing all but glowed against the wild rosebushes. So, so beautiful. I was happy enough, on my way out.

And then a bullet-headed hawk flew out of one of the pines on my left, shot straight across my path, not two yards from my face, and soared up into another pine tree, a little farther, to my right. I was exceedingly startled, and swore, not angrily, more admiringly and surprisedly. It was pretty amazing. Not a red-tailed hawk, I definitely checked out the tail as it flew up, and not fast enough or red-eyed enough to be a Cooper’s. I’ll have to look it up.

So that’s what I did on Mother’s Day. Soon, we’ll head off to see my grandparents, down by the shore, to wish my grandmother a happy day, and then to my dad’s girlfriend’s house, where her mother is coming over. I used to be all jealous, but that’s fading as I get older.

Focus, Allegories, Subconscious rulings.

I should be working on studying for the English exam—the one exam that you really can’t study for, at all, besides general preparation and looking at terms. And the terms won’t even really help you unless you can apply them. So I really should be studying for History (Spanish isn’t even worth studying for, at this point. I will get a two, and I am resigned to that fact and have moved on with the intent of passing the two classes I actually care about) right now. Especially since I left the house a few hours ago, walked to work, worked for a few hours, and then had dinner with a friend, and now am procrastinating by starting up a blog entry… and I only have two hours of library time left… and the exams are Thursday and Friday, respectively…

But instead, I find myself fascinated by the way in which these exams have completely overrun my consciousness. Seriously! And that got me started thinking about how my consciousness is in general often overrun by some obsession or other, and that I really am driven by my subconscious. These exams right here? I have been revolving around them for the past month. Everything I hear, after the initial processing, is processed in terms of English Literature and Composition, and then related to European History. And it is driving me crazy. We’re playing Peter and the Wolf, and I found myself noticing that the composer’s name is Russian, which made me pause and check the date at the bottom of the page, which was 1937, which made me start thinking about what the Deeper Meaning of the song could be. And I came up with this whole extended metaphor (which there is a term for that I don’t remember, and should) about how it Must Be! That the Wolf is Germany, and the Duck is Austria, and Peter is Russia, and the Hunters are Britain and America and probably France, and I don’t know who the Bird is, but now that I think of it, probably either Italy or the Underground, which means that whichever it is, the Cat would be the other one. (On further contemplation, I decided that the Bird was France, and the Cat was the Underground throughout Europe, or possibly Italy.) The Grandfather is probably the League of Nations, or possibly… the Grandfather is… well, let’s see here. The Bolsheviks had had to make some embarrassing concessions to get out of WWI, and the peace was never easy between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. So possibly the Grandfather is Lenin, and Peter is Russia under Stalin. Or the Grandfather is that original ‘alliance’ between the Soviets and the Nazis.

And everything is like that right now. What is it, I wonder, that makes my mind so easily aligned with a single concept, or a certain set of ideas?

Normally, with a topic such as this, I would take a walk, and articulate it fully in my mind before presenting whatever I’d found to a close friend, and we would joke and discuss by turns, and then I would turn all that over in my head, and take a long walk or something to articulate that, and then write it up here. But instead, I wound up punching in with my friend to unload a bunch of hardware at work, and then we talked about money and power and freedom, and how those three are related, inter-dependent, opposed concepts. And although it was an excellent conversation! I have no long blog post, because alas! My mind is focused on European History and English Composition. And perhaps I could free it to talk of the subconscious mind, for a time, but maybe not, and I need the focus, as detrimental to others’ perception of me as it is.

So anyway, there you have it. With enough stretch, anything becomes a metaphor for anything else. This is what it’s like being in my brain, where I can break literally anything into symbolism, and if this really is a book someone’s writing, they seriously need to let up on the symbolism. Who do you think you are, James Joyce?

I would never cry out without a strip of duct tape safely in place.

In long-belated response to a question half-jokingly asked by a friend, "So... how do I deal with a schizo?" Because sometimes I want to say this, but never would, not out loud, not to anyone, but for whatever reason I am blessed or cursed with being able to spill my emotions like blood all over a page in ways I never could to a person. From personal experience, because never could I speak for someone else.

The same way you deal with normal people, in all things except that you remember that they are not normal. Remember that they are acutely aware of how fucked-up they are, moreso than you can possibly imagine, and that chances are they hate themselves for it. Understand that every time they demonstrate some habit, some quirk, some slightly dangerous tendency, and it is pointed out, they kick themselves inside because they are still trying to change themselves to someone normal, someone healthy, someone they deem worthy of love. Know that sometimes they laugh when they want to scream, when things hurt the most, because it's easier. Know that if they knew that you knew that, they would suppress it whenever possible, because they don't want you to worry. They don't believe themselves worth worrying over, and nothing you tell them will change that, at least not permanently-- your state of mind is far more important than theirs. Sometimes they betray themselves by telling you something shocking about the state of their head, and are unsure whether they wish you would be upset or take it in stride. Know that sometimes they want nothing more than to pour their heart out, as vulnerable as can possibly be, but they swallow it for fear of looking weak, for fear of driving you away, for any number of reasons, they hide their vulnerability and make sure they're laughing if you ask what's wrong. Know that they're only half joking when they talk about seeing dragons, that they're not joking when they talk about voices in their mind, and remember that those things aren't as funny or fun as they're made out to be by pop culture.



Treat them like normal, but remember that they're acutely aware of how different they are, and they don't know whether it's worse to have the immense pain in them completely unacknowledged, or to have it pointed out at every turn.