Of Cities, and Unfolding Minds

So I’m sitting in the top bunk of a nifty little bed in a hostel room, second floor, first living floor, and typing up a summary of… well. Honestly, I just wanted to write something. I’ve been missing it.

To my left, there’s a lovely view of a rooftop, and a wall. On the rooftop, there’s some kind of dark brown vent-pipe, and, if you lean, a gray lighter, a beer can, assorted seagull feathers and cigarettes and the like. The wall’s got some sort of triangle on it in black spray-paint, and if you lean far enough out, you can see a brick building, maybe four, five stories, and beyond it, sky and skyscrapers. In the hostel room itself, there’s two bunk-beds. Mine’s the top of the one on the far side of the wall, next to the window, and the other one is against the side wall, long from the door. There’s a longish mirror, and four plywood lockers, big enough for a duffle bag, which is all I really need. Oh, and a towel hook. That’s rather important.

My first roommate is an older woman named Kendra who travels the world doing… something. She doesn’t have a home, she says, and seems to enjoy it. My other roommate, who only arrived two nights ago, is a bit younger, maybe a few years older than me, named Kim, from Australia. She’s very cool, seems to spend most of her time traveling. I guess that’s what hostels are for, and when Rebecca finally goes traveling next summer (she’d better, anyway), she will enjoy the company, I think.

I was wondering if there was something wrong with me, as I did not seem to be completely overwhelmed by this city. I was expecting, what with the mountains, and the hills, and the trees, and the fountains, and the architecture (so crazy! so, so crazy!), to be just staring goggle-eyed all about, but somehow it just feels… comfortable. I like this city. I am not overwhelmed, I do not feel like a tiny, insignificant prawn lost in the shuffle of bigger, more important lives. Dwarfed by the mountains, and the trees, yes, but the streets are wide and the skies are big and there is water. I could spend some time here.

…I could spend a lot of time here.

Quite honestly, I would not mind living here for a while. And that is partly the awesome geography, and the topography, and the architecture, and… well, it’s also largely the fact that these streets I have wandered down, I have been wandering down them in very excellent company. A beautiful city is nice, but it is infinitely nicer to have someone who… well. Someone to appreciate it with?

We’ve passed the stage where we both mutter apologies when our hands brush up against each other. I’m rather glad for that. For all the mockery of Those Puritans who freak out about holding hands, it is actually rather a big step for someone who just isn’t a physical contact sort (though hugging? hugging is awesome). And last night we talked about mental illnesses, and minds, and… mine. And I kind of just talked and talked and talked, and told him all (well, summarized) the stuff in my head that I cringe from, and some of the stuff I’ve embraced, and the stuff that’s a blessing and the stuff that’s a curse and the voices of doubt and the voices of hate and the voices I love and the voices I’ve run from and all the things in my past I have bled over and bled myself over and been terrified to face for so, so long and he listened, and commented occasionally, and we walked through rapidly darkening streets and below bright lights very quickly up very steep hills and it was dark and a bit chilly and the breezes and my mind opening up to someone who I’ve known for five years and less than a week, simultaneously, and it felt…

Really, I don’t know.

Maybe that’s okay?

This was originally about depth perception

The skky is so three-dimensional, it's more complex than anything humans could make, except that it would probably be difficult to sculpt the sky anyway-- sculpt the sky, should be the goal of every philosophy, ever artist's dream: to sculpt the sky. It's a statement that could mean The Sky-- you change every aspect of life, to the extent that you have sculpted the way people look at everything, no one even looks at the sky the same way anymore, or you could take the easy way out and just sculpt the sky itself, or sculpt a copy of the sky, which makes more sense, potentially.

What you kind of have to wonder is what's up there in the sky, in all three dimensions and even the fourth, but the thing is there's so much to really contemplate even in the three dimensions we can perceive as humans that it's difficult to understan why people are always trying to find a fourth; what, is what we've got not good enough? I really think if you open your eyes to the world around you, to the absolutely limitless potential for shapes, static, kinetic, it's impossible not to be overwhelmed, and, perhaps, impossible to retain sanity-- which is probably why we can't, or don't, do it. Like whatever-it's-called, the eternity code or the eternity paradox or virus or the reality bug maybe? that essay that was all about how people would read this code-- and, of course, it's been confronted by literature of all kinds, in all methods-- and their minds would just shut down, because the sheer eternity of the thing would overload them. The debate, I believe, the major debate was over whether they had transcended reality into a state of pure bliss and omniscience, or whether they had just lost their mind completely, sanity wiped out-- but some people hypothesized that it all amounted to the same thing. Like the paradoxes which shut down computers, but the human brain... instead. The closest thing the author had said came was a sentence written in which a word was deleted, but the author let both the word and the deltion stand. Personally, I think if that's the best we can do, we might as well hand over the keys of reality to the birds-- ah, if only we had them.

If you sold the keys of reality, what price would they fetch, and what price would you want, and who exactly would want to buy such a thing, as though our own perceptions of reality were not enough, as if our own perceptions were too much, which, of course, they are, and that's why we can't even take those and we step out of them and we step into other perceptions either with drugs or omniscience which is shut off by sheer willpower or lack thereof because to know eternity is simply frightening as the lunatics know from their experiences with the great wonderful world of wild wonder eternity or something like that, it's like when you contemplate the sky and not just how far it goes-- limits and eternal stretching is the easy part, even when you think about the fact that the universe is (supposedly) expanding constantly, and perhaps even exponentially, but then you think about every shape that could be contained in that-- the abstract, the cubist, the natural, the sheer impossibility of it blows your mind simply because it is actually possible after all, the shapes are there-- we just don't see them because they're all the same, like if you connected every molecule of nitrogen with opaque or translucent lines and made them not transparent (except that they probably aren't, it's just that the atoms are mostly empty space, especially since the cloud of electrons is spread out and the molecules are so far apart because it's the nature of a gas-- if you compressed it to a state of solidity would it still be transparent? I think liquid nitrogen is opaque), and the shapes would utterly blow your mind, just as the shapes of clouds, except if we could perceive them in three dimensions, rather than the two which come with the lack of depth perception induced by seeing them from such a great distance, as is the natural state or so they tell us.

Maybe that's why we watch sunsets, because we can't bear the daylight sky, and it gives us such great pleasure to see it finally ending, and the imagination of our overworked minds can finally take a rest on the night sky and start contemplating stars, which are infinitely more complex than clouds unless you take eternity into account, at which point everything is equally simple and complex, and you spend hours just staring at a rock, because the rock is so interesting, infinitely more interesting than some strange philosophical doctrine (that sentence, by the way, was written that way partly because I tried to write it while Born In The USA started playing and the lyrics just carried over), even if that philosophy is about how everything is equally complex, because at some point every philosophy starts talking about actual people, and how you or they are supposed to behave, and after a while it just gets depressing-- you've got the idealists, the cynics, the Christians, the atheists, the existentialists and the nihilists (who claim, or are claimed by their critics, which makes it probably more true than the former, at least according to someone (possibly Gilbert Keith Chesterton) that they are merely the logical end of the existentialist philosophy-- though I must protest that existentialism only turns to nihilism if you're utterly cynical, which, of course, is half the point) and the optimists and the Marxists and the modernists and the postmodernists and now, you've got the pretentious sort of artists who look back at postmodernism as, somehow, not postmodern enough (or maybe just too postmodern, depending on the day of the week and trend), and turn out making things that are, honestly, just strange, which I always thought was part of the point of postmodernism (to be fair, that's only part of it-- strangeness in and of itself must be more than simply itself, or less, or only just, because if you are being strange for the sake of strange it's post-postmodernism, or maybe post-post-post-neomodernism, or neopostmodernism or something, but if you're being strange to prove that, say, life is strange, or life is not strange, or people are strange, or people are not strange but society is, then it's postmodernism, or sometimes just modernism, depending on your overall point, point of view, and whatever critic happens to be talking about your work), but I guess that's only if you really don't care what the critics think, unless you do.

The -real- reason to run away.

I think I need to run away and find the part of me that makes up stories again. Just leave, leave this whole town, house, state, region, life, find some place that’s going to be new and fresh and what I’m looking for. I want to be a storyteller again. Where did my soul go? The sky is grey, featureless, unshining, unshadowed, unsmiling like a blank slate, but I’ve had enough, I’m ready to soar, I’m ready to leave contrails of fire and a comet’s trail and make you think so hard your head explodes. Hell yes.

My best friend gave me an endless scene for Christmas/New Year’s/whatever we’re calling it, she’s Jewish and I’m Christian and our other friend is Agnostic/indescribable, so I’m really unsure, but it hardly matters. I’m ready to dive into another world, make things stop making sense, start letting the world run away with me again. We’ll see.

I’ve been having dreams, by the way. Disturbing dreams. The night before last, I dreamed that my dad gave me a plate of eggs, and I got halfway through and he pointed out that I’d also consumed half a slice of ham, and I was horrified partly because that’s meat, I ate it, why did you give me a plate with meat on it, and partly because I hadn’t even noticed, or maybe my subconscious had and had kept eating anyway, and now I’m freaked out because I don’t know what my subconscious is trying to say, but I woke up with a really gross feeling, like… unclean, and now I want to go vegan more than ever. Last night I dreamed my dad and I had a huge fight about David – this came on the heels of a strange and beautiful dream in which I took this friend to prom, despite her not being bi or anything, and the fact that I not only am straight, but also have never had a crush on her. I drove a Bentley. I don’t know what that means. I also was about as masculine as I’ve ever been, and I don’t know what that means either.

Discovery, and a journey with no destination is still a journey worth making.

Well, I started writing something full of self-pity, and anguish or angst, and this torn, hurt, lost feeling that’s been growing inside of me, like a little jagged sword-blade, slowly ripping the hole wider, little by little as the months pass. That’s a better description than listing the reasons and environmental stress, like the first post did. Why I’m here… well, it matters, but that’s not what it’s about, really. It’s about getting out, or at least living with the world I’m in.

The fact is… mostly, I want to leave. I want to take my guitar, my laptop, and my cat, and just go… away. Somewhere. I can’t – I have no car, no money (at least, not enough to get away), little momentum – just the urge to go. But there I am again, complaining. Basically, today I sang a song for a friend, and he seemed to like it, and he showed me a bunch of cool stuff on the guitar and now I’ve got even more to do to take my mind off of all this crap, so… yeah.

I wrote this walking to see a friend, when I stopped to have a drink at Starbucks: “The impossible things we see by the side of the road – ghosts of fallen leaves, shadows left on the pavement, like a footprint; bubbles rising from the solid ground beneath a puddle; your smile, on a bit of jagged glass, there and gone like a sunbeam’s flash;”

Later I made it into a song.

Impossible things
found by the roadside (wayside?)
starlight, trapped in frost,
all crystal, distant,
cold as the fire that sparked it,
bright as a hole in the sky,
impossible, oh, impossible things
glass, soft as a candle,
shifting in the winds
like a sea of cattails,
singing beneath the streetlights,
oh, impossible, oh—
and a smile in your eyes,
brighter than sun and star and hellfire,
like the rhythm in your voice,
oh, those long days
impossible,
impossible things
we find on our journeys,
impossible things
the gems in the coal mine,
rainclouds in the desert,
oh, impossible—
the songs you sing,
the broken wing of a soaring bird
oh, oh, oh…
impossible things, found by the wayside
impossible, ohhh… impossible

I dunno. Maybe it’s crap. I kinda like it, though, and if I can find a good guitar part, I’ll try and make it a song worth singing.

So I’m still here. There’s still roads I haven’t walked, there’s still trees I haven’t climbed, still trails to hike and paths to take and songs to sing and stories to write and so, so many things to discover. I’m tired of going nowhere. Maybe I’m not looking at this the right way. I can whine and cry about still being in this town, this state, this ugly little nowhere and this house all I want, but there’s so much that I haven’t done, it seems useless to just complain. I think I’ll start taking new roads, when I’m not working. Not really Going Somewhere doesn’t mean I have to be going nowhere.

Of snow, forgiveness, new beginnings to eternal cycles.

This night, I walked out into the air, clear and cold, and went to a quiet place, a clearing in a wood, covered in snow and quiet. And I knelt, there, and prayed for forgiveness for all I’ve done this year, all I’ve thought, all I’ve felt, all I’ve said with malice in my heart. There’s a lot of it. I prayed to be forgiven for all that I am, underneath the grin and laughter, all that I am instead of what I could, should be. And I said that this year, I will do better. And I meant it, and still do.

And then I stood beneath the lights, walking away from that quiet place, as snow began to fall from the sky in little, whirling, crystals, and I caught them on my sleeve and marveled at their beauty, their crystalline perfection, and I stood with my head thrown back to the sky and watched a dance older than any can say, a new thing each time it begins, and I laughed, and spun, and caught the sweetest of life’s moments one at a time on my tongue.

This is the same planet as it was yesterday, as it always has been, and this sky is the same as it has been, the stars still shine as they have always, the snow still falls the same way, but this is a new snow, it is a new night, it is a new year and a new life, and I am forgiven, and I will start anew.

New beats, repeats, endings and beginnings--

So it's New Year's Eve, and I just went on facebook and friended a guy I met last night who I really wanted to get to know. Today and yesterday I looked at a handful of choices for food and chose vegan ones. Last night and the night before I was up until about two in the morning with friends... but that's less to the point, I guess.

Look, my point is this. It's a new year. I don't believe in living by the arbitrary lines of a calendar, but it's a new year, all the same. By the end of this year, I will be full-on vegan. I will be in college, one way or another. I will have finished at least one novel, and will be writing every single day, outside of college stuff. I will be able to sing and play guitar, and well. That's just... what's going to happen. Will I be happy? That remains to be seen. But I'm not going to sit around and let life just happen around me anymore.

2010 will be a year of grace, mercy, forgiveness; 2010 will be a year of faith, of confidence and spirituality; 2010 will be the year I stop existing and start living.

It made sense in my head.

Good grief, is it really necessary to psycho-analyze every damn quirk in this twisted little brain? Because it's getting annoying. And a little disturbing. Things don't look right when you look at them closely.

I know I have some weird kind of approval complex. It probably, if I look for the most sensible (if Freudian) reason, is because:
-growing up with the idea of striving for unattainable perfection as the only way to live
-a lack of obvious pride/support of any kind from my father, for the most part
-a deep feeling of self-loathing, traceable to any number of sources
-impossible standards because... ? that one doesn't trace either...

Baaaasically, when there's someone I respect, I go way the hell out of my way to be... whatever the hell my brain has decided I'm supposed to be. And then when I (predictably) fail in the juiced-to-the-maxcore insane standards I've set for myself in that ...role, or whatever you want to call it, I go apeshit on my own brain, and go into full-on self-loathing/abuse/destructive mode. It's kind of a bad thing. I'm getting better at managing it (read: I'm getting better at hiding the evidence and shoving it the hell out of my conscious mind), but it's obviously been very blatant in the past, because it's led certain friends/bosses to be wary of telling me I've screwed up, because they're afraid FOR SOME STRANGE REASON that I'll take it way too hard and OH MY GOODNESS beat up on myself about it. Sigh. Which leads me, or at least my more rational parts, to be all "What is this about? Tell me what I screwed up, so I can... not screw it up next time! It is not a hard concept my friend! I am not a fragile butterfly! I am Coyote and my medicine is stronger than yours! and I can -take- it!" The bit I don't mention, often even to myself, is that I will feel like shit about it, but the honest truth is that if you don't give me a reason to feel like shit? MY BRAIN WILL MAKE ONE UP. I'd rather beat myself up about something that actually happened, which will lead to actual self-improvement in the long term (Don't argue, it will), than to beat myself up about things that aren't even real, and wind up depressed over nothing. t'ain't worth it.

Anyway, it leads to situations like this.
Me: *screws something up*
Other Person: Dude! What the fuck?
Me: Ohshitohshitohshit!
Other Person: ...relax, no big deal.
(some time past)
Me: *screws something up*
Other Person: *makes some odd and vaguely disparaging joke about it*
(rinse and repeat for about three hours)
Exit Other Person
Me: *angrygrumblemutter* Jerkfacealwaysalldownonmeyowhatthefuck*
Subconscious: Except that, hey, cares about you, right? Wants you to be a better person? Only has good intentions and would never jerk you around for no reason?
Me: *grumblemutter* Yeah, but knows I take shit too seriously.
Second-conscious: Except that you keep saying all "I'm not a fragile butterfly, I can take it, stop treating me like a puppy or something," so you have nothing to complain about. Either face up to the fact that you are apparently too thin-skinned to handle even the most gentle, joking of criticisms, or stop fucking whining about it and fix your fucking mistakes so there's no problem.

Of course, if I hadn't been such an idiot this morning, early morning, most of this could've been avoided.

Fuckin' coyotes. We never know when to quit.

Besides, the music made everything worth it, and I mean Everything.

My laptop died as a result of a few things thrown together into one occurrence, that is, the event of a liquid coming into contact with certain parts of the laptop which were not meant to have such exposure, and consequently, the device no longer works in the way it was designed. Fortunately, to counteract this unfortunate chance happening, I have broken down the machine into as few parts as I could manage, to allow the remaining liquid to drain or evaporate, as necessary, which should in the best scenario I can imagine, result in the laptop working as it had prior to the accident.

I drink coffee every morning, which is a bad idea because it’s generally not all that healthy, because it has developed me into dependence, which I strongly dislike, because most coffee is not fair-trade certified and therefore, makes a hypocrite of me, and because it’s an expensive habit, because I really just shouldn’t. But I do. I have an addictive personality; aside from this (I dislike the phrase ‘addictive personality,’ because to my brain it implies that my personality is addicting, which is, I believe, not the case at all) being an excuse for poor willpower (yes, I am guilty of that use; I am sometimes a hypocrite, but will own up to that), it is also an actual thing. After less than a week drinking one mug of coffee per morning, I will get a headache without that cup. After one cigarette, I crave another for a week. Thus, every time I decide to quit coffee, I am shortly back on it after a few bad nights of sleeping, which I can expect more of now that I’ve run out of meds. Sigh. Not an excuse. But still.

So the morning before yesterday (haha, that is a doubled sort of meaning. Could it not mean the morning that began yesterday, since the morning did indeed come before the day?), I put a cup of coffee—a full cup of coffee—down about half an inch away from my keyboard, and reached over the laptop and desk to open the window. My cat, anticipating an open windowsill to sit on, leapt up to the desk, reached over the laptop, and put her paws on the sill, as is her wont. Unfortunately for me, she also lashed her tail once, and knocked the cup of coffee over. Or maybe her leap did that. I don’t know. Anyway, she knocked it straight onto the laptop keyboard. So now I am sitting at my dad’s desktop computer, which he doesn’t mind me using, fortunately.

I don’t understand why so many things in my life want to go wrong lately. First my mp3 player quit, the same evening that I mentioned in a conversation to my grandpa that I’d rather go without a cellphone than an mp3 player, since music is one of the closest things to my heart, and otherwise my walking soundtrack would be traffic. The replacement never worked at all. Then I ran out of medication, at the same time receiving a significant bill from the hospital which writes the prescription. In paying off the bills for contact lenses and driving school, respectively, I overdrew my account and was charged a subsequent fine… which made it crystal clear that I could not afford to renew the prescription for medication… which has no refills. Then I spilled coffee on my laptop, on which reside all of my stories, poetry, music, photos, drawings, ramblings that I have not posted online, et cetera. In between this all was the concert to which I had looked forward for about a year. That provided a week-long euphoria, and also a permanently changed outlook on life. Maybe that’s why, despite what the words of this blog might lead you to believe, they are spoken in a fairly cheery tone of voice—and if not that, at least a matter-of-fact voice. I’m not even mad at the cat (it’s my fault anyway). Strange.

At any rate, that’s life right now. The positive side of this is that 1) it is no longer convenient for me to spend that much time on the computer, 2) without my music, I am forced to use online radio, which brings cool music to my attention that I otherwise neglect, 3) I am hearing it through proper speakers, rather than laptop speakers. The negatives are fairly obvious. But I won’t dwell on them.

Nothing to Say

I don't know if it's wise to post this here. But I figure like I should post it somewhere, somewhere public, somewhere where I will see it whenever I look through the archives, and remember, this is why you fucking listen to your conscience, this is why anarchy is bullshit, for all it's a pretty picture on paper. Everything looks nice if you have the right people talking about it. I'm not falling for this philosophy bullshit again.

I feel used, betrayed, lied to. Rational or no, that’s how I feel. Now, that would be bad enough, really. But I also feel guilty, horrible, like scum of the earth. So it’s… hmmm.

A friend stole from her workplace. In her mind, I believe, because the owner was a jerk, because the store was a part of the hierarchy she rebels against and hates (as do I, as do most people in one way or another), because she wasn’t treated well there, it was justified. This, I would not judge her for, though it goes against my personal code. Part of my code of life is not judging others by my own morals, ethics, what have you. It’s hard, but I believe it’s right. But, but, but, things are never that simple. She took food that would’ve been thrown away and distributed it, through us, to needy and homeless people in the city, along with the donations the group collected from supermarkets. I suppose if I had paid attention to any sort of detail at all, I would’ve known that she had no authority to do so. But she eventually left, and was subsequently banned from the store, for whatever reason, I didn’t pry. She told us we could continue to take expired food; we did. Start to present, this was about a year.

Yesterday, a new woman stopped us, called the manager, who told us that the man in charge of deli food had said no “in the past” to expired food being taken. Knowing the man, knowing that he’s been taken advantage of in the past, and knowing that he and our friend had never gotten along, I rather understood. Also, I’d always been fairly certain that the owner of the store didn’t know about the whole situation. I figured the chef had a newborn baby to take care of, his job was on the line, I wouldn’t press the issue. The woman told me to take it up with him on Monday. We left without food, except what I’d brought from my garden, some green beans and some basil, as well as a melon from my friend's brother. It was fine, there was plenty of supermarket produce, and we helped cook up a meal and handed everything out at the park (except the green beans, which didn’t find a place). I type up an e-mail explaining the situation to the entire group, and then spend the entire night worrying about the chef, whether or not he will hate me, if he will understand, if he will think I’ve lied to him or used him or tried to deceive him. This is irrational, but I like the guy, a lot, and don’t want to hurt him, or for him to be angry at me, only partially because he is sometimes moody and the very idea of him angry scares the shit out of me, partly emotion-wise, partly just because.

Monday morning, I wake up significantly pre-dawn, continue worrying for a few more hours in bed, and eventually get up and get coffee and see my dad off. With my little brother in tow (the library was in the works for after I got everything sorted out), I headed off to the plaza in which he and I work and the friend formerly worked, worrying the entire way, of course. I head into the store, and run into (not literally) the grocery manager, a man who I don’t know very well, but has a reputation from plenty of friends for being a mellow, very nice, very generous guy. He tells me that the owner and manager are angry, the weekend was bad, they never condoned the food donations at all, and are contacting the group over it, and so on. I wince, tell him I am sorry but understand; he is not happy either. My little brother pipes up “But it’s expired food—” I tell him to shut up. The grocery manager tells me that the deli food was not, in fact, all expired, which shuts me the hell up, too. I am stunned, shell-shocked, apologize, and leave the store a very, very confused person indeed.

After talking to my very good friend who I work with, my brother takes off to the library, I am stricken with conscience and guilt (far too late, I fear), and return to the grocery store to apologize to the chef. He is behind the deli lunch counter, asks me what’s wrong, had no idea I was involved in any way with the goings-on. Tells me he does not blame me, that it is really the friend’s fault, she has an attitude problem, she should’ve told us, I swallow. I am still her friend. I will not judge her. He says not to worry, they will take care of the judging for me. She was banned, you know. …She was what? Oh. Oh, um. I’m really really really really sorry. He tells me not to worry. I tell him I promise I never would’ve taken food that wasn’t expired; he knows that, don’t worry. He doesn’t think the manager or owner know about my involvement, he definitely didn’t, I am still welcome, don’t worry, just don't mention it to either of them. I feel like shit.

Fuck anarchy, fuck anarchism, fuck the higher good and high ethics and the greater cause and all the bullshit that’s kept me all high and mighty all last year. Fuck it all. I let ideology blind me to my own conscience, and that’s a mistake I won’t make again. I can’t believe I was so stupid to ignore everyone in my life who warned me about idealism, and living outside of reality. The worst part is, I knew they were right. But I figured, maybe someday I’ll look back on this stage of my life and laugh at the foolish kid I was, or maybe I’ll figure out a way to live by my conscience and make it work. I didn’t think I’d wind up stealing from someone I care about, or, for that matter, stealing full stop.

I walked to the library, feeling hurt, angry, stupid, guilty. I found my little brother, laughing under his breath at Stephen Colbert’s book, and dug up a Terry Pratchett book for myself, and proceeded to get lost in the life of Samuel Vimes, Night Watch. Good book. It was five-thirty before I put it down, having seen my brother off some time ago. I called my best friend and told her as much of the story as I could, in as much detail as I could muster, having called my sister on the way to the library, seen my other best friend at the store where I work during the whole ordeal, and having decided (after all this) to e-mail my other best friend the story later on. Then I walked back to the plaza, buying a bottle of glue and applying for a job on the way there, and also stopping for a bite and writing this: Fuck anarchism, fuck the greater good, fuck higher ideals and all the bullshit that comes along. Whenever I get suicidal, I take two options. One, look around, decide the world, life, is too beautiful, amazing; two, it’s the easy way out and I’d let people down. But right now I’m finding it hard to care about either. I concluded that if life was about conscience, appreciating beauty, working hard and loving with all you’ve got and so on, I could take it. I could take heartbreak, pain, physical and emotional, but I can’t take all the moral-gray-area bullshit that comes along. I can’t take fucking philosophy.

Anyway, I got to the store where I currently work as my friend was closing up, accidentally scaring the shit out of him in the process, and went with him to both stores he needed to go to, me radiating apathy and depression, and him trying to cheer me up in various ways, in varying degrees of success. As we left the second grocery store, I got a call from my sister telling me that my brother, a drug dealer who my dad had kicked out at the start of the summer, had broken into the house, and she’d found lights on all over, and the black plastic hat that had held about four months’ worth of my pocket change (at least ten bucks, probably closer to twenty) empty on my dad’s bed. I thanked her for the news, hung up. Walked home laughing, about as painfully close to tears as I ever want to be, laughing and unable to stop. I stopped in the park for a while, saw a bat flying around, apologized to my God and for what I did to both the owner and the chef and God only knows who else, lied in a tree and wished for death, jumped out and walked home, where I found that my brother had also taken with him about two meals’ worth of food, and kicked in the basement door. My dad surmises that it is me he truly hates, and I do know this to be the case.

But all I could do was laugh, figuring how can I hate him? What I’ve done is so much worse.

And that is why I feel like shit right now.

Camping Journal

(This is the uncut version of what I did for most of the week we were in Mt. Desert Island, camping. I'll post the edited version on Facebook. There's only one real difference, to keep my dad's wrath from pouring onto my head, other than that they're the same. Note to self: Not located in blog folder.)

August 12, 2009; morning

Well, this is day one. Full day one, at least. We got here yesterday afternoon/evening, and set about setting up camp. It’s a pretty small campsite, but not as small as it looked when we first got here; we fit both tents in alright, and the van in the driveway, without too much cramping. Right now Ruth is glaring at me across the picnic table for playing music on this thing (Everybody Always Leaves, by Matthew Ryan). I thought she might like it, but she refuses to give it a chance. It’s a pretty gray day, a little tiny bit of humid chill in the air, but that’s okay. I’m honestly so happy to be here I couldn’t care less what the weather does (within reason, of course). But it’s pretty, and it’s nice enough. We went over to Robin and Bob’s house last night, after dinner (spaghetti; Sheila kind of burned the sauce, for which we can blame the dogs). That was cool, I always know in the back of my mind how much I miss them, but it hits home when we actually get to see them. Hope we get to hang around more this week with them. Last night, we walk into the porch, we’re all standing around exchanging greetings, and I look over to see Peter looking at Aunty Robin with a strange sort of look. She’s like “Got a problem? What’s the matter, Pete?” And I looked down to see that she’s standing on one of his shoelaces (untied, as usual), grinning. He’s like “…Um. You’re… you’re standing on my shoelace…” She’s like “What? What, your shoelace? What’s the matter?” It made me smile.

So the dogwalk here is a tiny little fenced in place, but there’s tons of places to take them, so I’m not worried. (Listening to U2, now.) Dad is making pancakes, Ruth just took out her sketchbook, the dogs have finally settled down a little, RJ is setting the table, Peter is watching me type, Sheila is doing something in the tent. Well, their tent. We’re splitting one tent, and Dad and Sheila are splitting another one. (Hurr hurr hurr) Peter is now angry that I will put this up somewhere. Hurr hurr hurr. I probably won’t leave this on or out much longer, since the sky is so gray and threatening.

Little kids are running past our campground, afraid, because before we had tied up the dogs, Lucky chased some kid off when he walked past. Poor guy was like… three feet tall. He ran and ran, and when we finally got Lucky off, (s?)he started crying, just standing there in the middle of the road, crying. It was pretty bad. But I should wrap this thing up and put my laptop away. Peter wants to look up the location of some torture museum, but I refuse to use WiFi unless absolutely, completely necessary. I did not come to Mt. Desert Island to hang around online, or to look at torture museums. Perhaps after a few days, this weekend, I’ll do a quick Facebook update or something. Otherwise? NO. I refuse to be a technology-addicted symbol of teenage dependence. Ruth, Peter, and RJ fill that gap just fine (they deny this). And for crying out loud, Dad was more concerned about me bringing charging-apparatuses for various electronic devices than I was. But anyway.

So that’s pretty much it. Ruth is sketching something that looks like fur around an eye, the pancakes are (hey, it was a furry eye!) about ready, and I don’t want to run my battery down. More later!

August 13, 2009; afternoon

We just got back from a four/five hour hike. We set out around eleven, got back just now, plus maybe twenty, thirty minutes of waiting while someone gave Sheila a ride back to the car so she could come get us, and then driving. So maybe four and a half hours. It’s a little chilly today, and I forgot to pack a sweatshirt (predictably enough), but still pretty nice out. We’re going to Robin and Bob’s for dinner tonight, but we’ve got two hours to cool our heels and shower first, which is a good thing, because we’re all pretty sweaty and gross. Hiking for four hours will do that to you.
The whole time, I kept wanting to take pictures—literally there is unspeakable beauty in every single direction. But I settled for the especially scenic things. And the mushrooms, of course. Most of the hike I was up ahead of everyone. I’m not sure why; I’d just start walking, normally, and when I looked back I’d be alone. Not sure exactly how that works out, but it was pretty fun. We ate lunch at Valley Summit, and then hiked up to the summit of St. Saveur, and down to Echo Lake cliffs from there. A very nice hike; our original plan was to go along St. Saveur to Mt. Acadia, but in the end it turned out we were a little unprepared for that.

Last night I built a fire, it was cool. Everyone kept building it, I eventually just went to bed. But there’s the sky here. It’s so beautiful! The sky is so black, and there are stars, brighter than you would ever see them at home, everywhere. It’s amazing. I saw a shooting star in a clearing a way down the road, a veritable comet, I swear. It had a thick glowing trail, it was bright… amazing. Then I went to bed. My sleeping bag was damp though.

So it was a good day. I dunno how else to describe it. Beautiful mountain, nice hike, good weather so far. The dogs are dead tired. For that matter, so am I.

August 19, 2009; morning

Wow. So this journal was a good idea in theory, but honestly, I’m camping. Who the hell has time to sit around on a laptop typing in such a beautiful place? Not I, for sure. So, in order of things I remember, what’s been going on:

Last night, we had tacos for dinner. They were actually pretty good. I had guacamole, everyone else had ground beef. Before that, Dad and Sheila went out to Sand Beach, up in the Northeast corner of the island (we are in the Southwest corner), and then to Rubber-Rock Beach, which is actually called something else… but no one remembers it here. We played cards around the campground and stuff; before they left, Peter went with me up the street about a mile, to Ship’s Harbor, which is a cool little path to a muddy shore, which then goes to a rocky shore (infinitely cooler). It was ninety-five degrees out, but for some reason Peter was cold.

That morning/afternoon, Robin and Bob took us out (we are about to eat breakfast, scrambled eggs and bacon; Peter’s idea of setting the table is, quite literally, putting spoons out and then leaving someone else to do the rest. He’s very tired all the time, and we suspect dehydration, which makes pretty good sense.) to pull traps (now I am eating eggs with a spoon. They are good.) and we did a little fishing, too. That was mad fun. I can’t remember the last time I was out on a boat, plus it was pretty cool to watch Robin pulling the traps up. She’s definitely the coolest person I know. And it was just awesome being out on the water. Once you get out of the island a bit, things get really cool, but that’s the way I like it. I put sunscreen on my face, because I’m not always an idiot, but then I rolled my sleeves up to the seam and got my shoulders burned, so sometimes I am.

Also, I finished A Clockwork Orange yesterday. It’s a good book, really it is. Then I started on the Vonnegut short stories, and those are cool too. I think my favorite is the one about Bernie and Big Nick, the mafia guy. (Peter is urging me to eat the rest of the bacon. “You’re on vacation!”)

(We’re taking the dogs for a walk at Little Long Pond, since Carly has finally gotten over her exhaustion from playing with Zach. That dog is so freaking energetic, it’s crazy! But he was tired when I went over the other day, which leads into what we did the day before yesterday…)
So the day before yesterday, everyone wanted to go to the lobster hatchery, but I’ve seen it twice now, once as a little kid and once with Aunty Robin, the time I stayed up here with them for two weeks. I was trying to remember what the deal was last time I was there, and I remembered that foggy morning when I got in a fight with Grandpa (because he is a racist sometimes. I know he'd never act on it, and if he knows a person personally he doesn't judge them at all like that, but it does NOT excuse the kind of things he was saying that day.) and needed to get the hell out of the house before I punched him or something. So I mentioned that, and Dad got pretty pissed at me over that, which I didn’t realize at the time. But I knew I didn’t want to go to the lobster hatchery/museum, so I looked at the map for a good hike, and found Beech Mountain looking pretty good, figuring I’d go up the cliffs, down the West Ridge Trail, and then all the way around Long Pond to Robin and Bob’s house. So I took the sandwich Sheila had made for me the day before, and a cereal bar and a package of peanuts and two water bottles, a trail map (that’s really, really important), the bus schedule (just in case), and my dad dropped me off at the Echo Lake entrance to Beech Cliffs. We kind of had a fight on the way over. Like I said, I had no idea he was so pissed about the slight to his dad. He was. He told me I was hypersensitive to racial and class-like things, and needed to examine myself because he doesn't think my heart is in the right place. I was furious.

But we kind of got over it by the time we got to the cliffs, which was good. So from there, I went down and took a long drink from the water fountain at Echo Lake, and headed up the cliffs. Those were nice, that’s a beautiful trail, if strenuous, and I was panting pretty heavily when I hit the top of that trail, up towards the summit. (I have to hurry this up, I only have an hour of battery left and kind of want this for music on the way home) So I made it from there down to the parking lot, then up a less steep trail to the fire tower at the summit (but forgot to take a picture of the summit sign), and from there I took a bit of a wrong turn and wound up taking the South Ridge Trail. It wasn’t that much longer of a walk, and I still wound up on the shore of Long Pond (different, notably, from Little Long Pond. Robin says “Us Mainers really know how to give names, eh?”), so it wasn’t too bad. The walk around Long Pond was very nice, I wound up drinking a little from the far shore, the one at the base of Beech Mt., mainly because it was so rocky and clear. When I made it around to the pump station at the end of the pond (it really is long, not round; the station is at… the south end, I believe, I was coming from the eastern shore), there were people around, and the water looked muddier. On the western shore, there were people swimming, so I didn’t even think about drinking over there.

At some point, the Long Pond Trail cut up away from the pond, and my original plan was to just skip off the trail and follow the shore of the pond all the way up to the path that goes up to Bob and Robin’s house. So I left the trail, and at first I was worried, and then I noticed things that made me certain that someone, not all that recently, had done this. There was reindeer moss with a boot-print in it, and a few other clues, but nothing really concrete. So I made it down that trail for a while, maybe ten minutes, and I started getting thirstier and thirstier; at this point I’d been walking for a few hours and only had half a bottle of water left, and the pond was all muddy and had lily plants growing there. At some point, it occurred to me that if I cramped up from dehydration on the trail, someone was bound to find me, but if I got stuck out there, there was no guarantee. (this was right about the point at which I stopped taking pictures and concentrated on moving) With that in mind, I beat my way back through the bush to the trail, and on the way became convinced that someone had not quite made a path, per se, along the pond edge, but they’d definitely found a way through. I don’t know if I can say why I was so certain, because like I said, there was no real concrete evidence. But anyway, I made it back to the trail, and took the Long Pond Trail all the way uphill to where it forked with the Great Notch (called the ‘Western Trail’ on the trail map, which threw me for a second).

At that point, I was incredibly thirsty, praying under my breath that I’d make it up to the fire road, had one mouthful of water left, and really starting to worry. I made up my mind that the next people I met, I’d swallow my pride and ask if they had any water to spare. So I did, and a lovely Quebecois couple poured half a bottle of (heavily chlorinated, NOT that I am in any way complaining) water into my empty bottle, and I made it up the Great Notch to the Fire Road on that. I drank the last mouthful of clear water on the Long Pond Fire Road, and had a few swallows of the other stuff left. So I walked up the fire road, and eventually hit Hodgdon (pronounced HOJ-dun) Road, and drank the last of it. From there, it was straight up the road, except for one triangular fork. But I checked the map there, and made it all the way to Bob and Robin’s house, where Robin was outside making dinner. So I stayed there, they gave me water and some potato salad (honestly I think her potato salad is some of the best I’ve had, because usually I’m not a huge potato salad fan; every other one I’ve ever had is overpowering on the mayonnaise) and we talked for a while, and Zach was so tired he pretty much laid around, which was adorable. He kept putting his head in my lap, and it is so soft! Such a cute puppy; he’s only one. Other than that time, I have never seen him not energetic. Visla, they are an awesome breed.

ETA: (what i would've said had i the battery power then, in summary: I told Robin about the fight with my dad, and she said "Bullshit! He is too a racist!" (on my grandpa.) it made me pretty glad that at least i knew i wasn't crazy. when i was showing her my route on the trail map, she pointed out that I could've cut across the shore of Long Pond, and said that she'd actually done that before and I went "Ha! I knew someone'd done that." It made me pretty happy.)

(Just realized I only have twenty minutes of battery left, switched to Power Saver mode, which means ten extra minutes but also that I cannot but hardly see the screen at all. Apologies for spelling errors.)

So they dropped me off at the campsite, and I laid around for a little while, and then everyone else got home, we ate supper, and I went to bed. That concludes… Monday’s adventure. Now, what did we do Sunday?

Ah, right. On Sunday, Bobby took Ruth, Peter, and RJ out fishing. They caught quite a bit of fish, and were proud of themselves. Peter, predictably enough, had some serious trouble taking proper care of his line, but he was very good at filleting the fish later, and when he’d done that, we had them for supper the following night; they smelled, looked, and according to everyone else, tasted like something you’d have in a restaurant, owing partly to my dad’s excellent cooking skills, partly to Peter’s excellent fish-filleting skills, partly to everyone’s fishing skills, and very muchly to Bobby’s fishing-teaching skills and taking them out on the boat. So that was cool, while they were doing that, Dad, Sheila, Robin and I took all three dogs out to a walk around Little Long Pond, which is a nice spot on Rockefeller land, which means dogs can be unleashed and bikers are not allowed. (Lucky hates bikers, and on this island they are often rude, so that’s a good thing.) That was a lot of fun.

So after that, we took the fish to Robin and Bob’s house (which was where Peter filleted them), and only left to take the dogs home to feed (which we forgot to do while at home, but got laundry done and fed them with the food in the dashboard), then went back for hamburgers and hotdogs. (and veggie burgers. and turkey burger, for Robin)

I have to call Robin and let her know we’re set to go walk the dogs, and also I am almost out of batteries. I’ll do the rest of this later.

August 19, 2009; afternoon

It took so long to check e-mail while I was here charging my laptop that I forgot to finish the bloggish entry thing here. Oh well, now we’re going to Rubber-Rock Beach (also called Hunter Beach, which Robin remembered when we asked her on the walk today.)

August 20, 2009; late morning/early afternoon

Well, we just finished packing up, just about ten-thirty. We’re dropping by the dock to pick up lobsters and say goodbye to Robin and Bob. I am terribly sad, and really don’t want to leave. But life goes on, and I know we’ll be back. Soon, I hope.

Very little battery left, so I guess this is the end. Carly’s got her head on my leg; I think she’s as sad to leave as we are. Alas, alack, but life goes on.

Things in my life, literal and otherwise

On my desk, which has finally been organized, I keep a handful of rocks. There is a dark gray rock that fits almost perfectly in my fist, which I kicked along the park once, and decided to keep; the feel of it, solid, cold, heavy in my palm reminded me that I was real. The second rock is a polished tiger-eye, very reddish in color, compared to most stones of that nature. It’s very pretty, and it reminds me of Mohan, my friend. Then there’s a little piece of clinker, very dark gray, like a shadow on the bottom of a river, it glistens in the right light; I found it in my favorite park, by the riverside, upstream. Two more rocks my best friend gave me, smooth and flat and elliptical, one more tawny and one more gray, a pencil-gray, both the right size to hold in my hand at night. The sixth rock is a small lump of pink granite, black-flecked, that I found at the beach; the seventh is a tan, white, dark rock that I picked up from the sidewalk on my way home, last night, after a friend told me everything that was in my own heart, poisoning me from the inside out. I’d known; before leaving, I’d written something along the same lines, bemoaning my inaction and resolving to get off my ass and do something. But hearing it from someone else was kind of painful, which I should have seen coming. Perceptive friends are a double-edged sword.

I loved the person I was on the road to becoming; I wanted to be that person, I want to be someone who lives life to the fullest, someone who cares and creates and loves. I hate the person I am, I hate the person I am becoming now, instead. I have no creative energy, I waste most of my days daydreaming without doing anything about it, I sit around and do nothing. I am, quite simply, a waste of space right now.

There is a lot of shit being thrown at me in life right now. I’d love to use that as a shield; in my own mind, I have been, have been excusing all my lackluster as an effect of the world around me. This is basically complete bullshit. There are so many things that could be worse in my life, I have been so lucky, and there really is no excuse for my situation right now. I’m not going to college because I fucked up my grades and then didn’t apply to enough schools. I’m not going to Sacramento because I didn’t get a second job soon enough, didn’t save carefully enough. I’m still living with my family—well, because I’m not going to college and don’t have enough money to move to Sacramento. This is no excuse to laze around and whine.

There’s a mirror on the dresser, to my right. I don’t hate the person looking back at me, most of the time. I used to. I hate the potential there, and I hate the lack of energy. I hate the potential because it forces me onward, because I don’t want to waste the few things I do have. I hate the lack of energy because it’s my own fault, because I could do better. I hate that people see more in me than is really there. I hate that my friends think I’m so damned smart, I hate that I can’t hide my faults from them, I hate making an idiot of myself so often. I hate the irresponsibility, and I love the foolhardiness. I try not to hate myself. That way lies madness; most ways, actually, lead to madness. I try not to think about that too hard, or I wind up curling up into a useless ball in a corner for hours. I wish I was joking. I wish I wasn’t crazy.

One of the things I hate about mental illness, one of the major things, is that it really is a life sentence. That’s one of the first things a friend told me, when I told everyone what the diagnosis was: she said, “It’s not a life sentence.” But it is. It changes the way people look at you, even your best friends, even the people who accept you. For the rest of your life, people will expect certain things from you; for the rest of your life, if you show some quirk in behavior, people will ask, “Have you been taking your meds?” And if you say yes, they will roll their eyes in semi-disbelief, or wry acceptance, and if you say no, they will sigh hopelessly and either give you a lecture, or simply be content with quiet disappointment, far worse than any lecture. And it will never go away. And you will never be normal, and you will never be accepted, and you will never be able to fit in.

But, for all that, there’s really no excuse for sitting around whining about it. The only way to get around something like that is to take the shit you have, and do something with it. So, even if this story is horseshit, I may as well write it, if for nothing better than to satisfy the characters.

Rain, life, it's actually quite simple.

The rain is falling quite prettily now; the drops are so fine they’re almost mist, but it still soaks you if you stand in it long enough. It’s pretty, but it’s not my favorite kind of rain. I love the raging storms, gales that ravage the landscape, leaving leaves strewn across the sidewalk, hurling sheets of water into your face even under an overhang, deafening you with thunder and blinding streaks of lightning across the face of the sky. I feel so alive, with a storm so fierce in my face that they spawn tornados and hail and think nothing of it. It’s a rush of adrenaline; it’s the marrow of life and the core, and the lifeblood of my soul. Even as a child, I feared thunderstorms but was drawn in by them. Logically, I knew they could kill me, burn down the house, anything. But I loved that feeling. It’s something that hasn’t gone away; if anything, that’s grown stronger as I got older. I seek out that feeling now, the rush of life.

When it’s dark, and cold, and the air is thick with swirling snow, I slip out the back door, and only manage to keep my hood up for a few minutes before I need more. I love the silence, the breeze in the icy air, the snow in my hair, the flurry just visible in the orange light here and there, at just the right angle. On days in early winter, when the sleet comes and the ice pounds my windows, I rush out into the biting evening, and chase the twilight through the sidewalks, quiet but for the crackle of frozen leaves and the ongoing rattle of tiny droplets of ice hurtling onto the ground. There’s ice in my hair, and on my coat, and in my eyelashes, and I’m wind-burned by the time I get home, but it’s a good thing.

Someone wrote the newspaper to complain about those punk kids who lurk around at night, and I smiled, seeing their preemptive anger concerning preemptive vandalism, and register with amusement the annoyance at all those stupid fools who come out of the woodwork on summer nights. Yes, teenagers roam in the summer nights. But you haven’t lived until you’ve wandered the streets in the middle of a raging winter storm; when the summer thunderstorms come, it’s best to lie on the ground, or lean on a fence, and let the rain wash your worries away.

It’s a pretty, quiet rain tonight. That’s probably why I’m sitting here, listening to music and typing up a blog entry, instead of curled up against a rock in the park, watching the drops fall.

So it turns out Neil Gaiman really is that amazing.

Sometimes, my life feels like something out of a nightmare. I came home from food-not-bombs yesterday to find three lawnmowers at random places in the backyard, the shed door open, and the light inside on. Sighing, I went into the house to find corn kernels drying to the floor and counter in the kitchen, living room, hallway, and bathroom—only, in the bathroom they were accompanied by a fist-sized ball of crushed up hotdog roll in the sink, also slowly drying to the surface. In the kitchen and parts of the living room, they were accompanied by sparse handfuls of cheerios. On the kitchen counter, where there were no dishes, there was a plastic bag of taco shells, a container of cheerios, an open bag of hotdog rolls, a nearly empty jug of iced tea, and other unidentified debris. In an attempt to clean some of this up, I started by taking out the over-full garbage under the sink, rescuing two glass bottles and an empty milk jug in the process, and found that, outside, there was a smashed glass all over the patch of pavement behind the steps. The irony to all this is that, that very morning, my brother, who is one-and-a-half years younger than me, had called telling me that my father had agreed to lend him twenty dollars through me if he mowed the lawn and did the dishes (which entails cleaning the kitchen to some extent). When I had left the house, the only messes were that the lawn was a bit shaggy, and the sink was full of dishes (with some overspill on the counter, I’ll admit).

It is scenes like this which make me chant under my breath, “I hate my life, I hate my life, I hate my life,” as though verbalizing it somehow makes it a little easier to bear. (When my brother came home, at seven-thirty, demanding twenty-five dollars, as he had mowed the lawn, he applied the very excellent method of asking me to babysit two eight-week-old kittens, smaller than my head, as a surprise for his girlfriend, so I really couldn’t say no, because they were SO CUTE.)

Anyway, I soon gave up on the mess, went into my room, and wrote something on my other journal about Neil Gaiman, and his super-inspiring powers which bring me back to the passion of writing that I had so many years ago. And, being a little curious about this amazing writer who pretty much is a huge part of why my life is bearable, I looked him up on TV Tropes, which told me that he is One Of Us, which is pretty obvious, and linked me to an interview with Stephen Colbert (which made me first smile, and then laugh aloud), and also told me that he has remained kind and very nice to his fans, which was… not surprising, but kind of surprising to read. Know what I mean? It wasn’t that he was nice that surprised me, but that he was so nice that it was a mentionable fact. Curious, I checked Wikipedia, and found that he had his own blog, which I immediately headed over to, and started poking through.

About six hours of reading through his blogs (after the first three entries or so, I went back to the start of the archives, where he’d begun it as a project for American Gods, and started reading chronologically, which is a bit of a hassle with the scrolling, but definitely worth it), Neil Gaiman has skyrocketed to the very head of my list of Awesome Dudes, about even with Bono/U2 (they’re awesome, but they’re not geeks; also, they’re awesome, but they’re rock stars. I will never be a rock star, lacking as I do any real skill in that area). Seriously. As though his amazing writing wasn’t enough (and, I’d bet my last dollar and a whole lot more than that), the guy is basically the sweetest, most personable, amazing person imaginable. And he feeds birds. And loves his kids, and his dog. I am now even more determined to go buy a copy of Sandman, or at least Coraline, or one other of his books or WHATEVER. He’s freaking amazing. I am determined to meet him one day, and after I found myself too tired to continue reading, laid in bed and wrote him a fan letter, which I may or may not be too embarrassed to send, written as it was at about three in the morning, and thus lacking any kind of self-censor. (Not in the area of crudeness, but… squeeing and generally rambling. And stuff.)

So yeah. Neil Gaiman? Awesome Dude.

Choices, Scenery, Guilt

The window is open, before me. Outside, the rain is falling steadily down, and straight down, which is good, because otherwise I’d have to shut the glass, and I like the breeze. I’m just about eye-level with the bottom of the screen if I sit up, but from my slouched position, I can’t see the top of the shed—just that maple, I think it’s a sugar maple, and behind its fairly skimpy branches, a shorter, but thicker, red maple. There’s a tree larger than both of them, with four main trunks, to the left, and to the right, I can just see the tops of the trees on the other side of the block. There are maple keys sticking to the screen, wet and limp. They’ll probably be stuck there all summer, or until it rains again, possibly tomorrow. On the white part below the sill, there’s a picture of my sister with some girl I don’t know, and another shot of the park in Hartford, the ink washed strangely by rains long past. My desk is littered with objects: a red pen, a purple pen that writes black, two empty plastic bottles, a paycheck, a watch, several coins, broken headphones, a bead, half-filled coffee mugs from a week ago or so, a sketchpad… On an index card stuck to the wall, it says “And if you’re looking for the answer, and if you’re looking for the Light that leads the Way, take my hand and I will lead you where the torture and the pain will drift away.” At the end it gets all small and scrunched up, because I have problems with margining. There’s a vaguely demonic-looking picture on the jelly-cabinet-turned-bookcase, to my left, and above that, a sketch of a broken chain with six links. Actually, ‘sketch’ is being generous. My cat is sleeping underneath it, on a nest of plastic bags that I don’t have the heart to throw away. My sneakers are wet, as are the cuffs of my jeans; my t-shirt is dry, because I wore a sweatshirt when I went out to get some cash from the convenience store ATM at the bottom of the street. I remarked, amusedly, when I left, that I was turning into a human, doing crazy things like wearing layers in the rain. On the wall to my right, just before the corner, there’s an oil painting that my mother did: a red-haired woman walks a grey pony which pulls two warmly dressed children (this is unrealistic; I usually ran out into the snow in a T-shirt or somesuch; also we definitely never had a pony, and there were five of us) on a sled, through the snow. In the background is a hedge of holly bushes that turns into a stone wall and cuts away, back towards the right. There is a swing, hanging from one of the trees in the background. The snow is very realistic. In blue, it says smudgedly “Lo…” in the bottom right hand corner, where it would say “Love Mommy,” but the paint smudged in the rain when she gave it to me. Under that, on my dresser, is a plastic black hat which has a bunch of pennies in it.

The house is quiet. Everyone’s off, to one place or another. I don’t really mind, not today, and I’m getting used to it. I need to be here because I have to work tomorrow, and I suspect rather strongly that I won’t be on time if I go with my family, Friday nights.

I’m lonely, and angry, and I wanted to write a story about two crows who were given the choice of safety or freedom, and they made two different choices. And then I decided “Fuck the metaphor, why don’t I just write what I feel?” But I don’t know if I can. Besides, this is not a choice I made. All the important choices in my life have been made for me. Oh God, I’m sorry.

Life and Love

Life, measured in summers, in moments of laughter, in breezes that fill the lungs and skin and hair, and leave you with memories of something beyond sight, touch, hearing, life fills your eyes and seeps into your bones and the days are full. Life, measured in scraps of poetry found in old, long-forgotten corners, in magazine pictures, glossy and over-edited and full of a longing for something that doesn’t quite exist, in the many smells of paper, of the powdery, reincarnated souls of numerous trees, life gets into your blood and lends your skin a glow that’s more than natural. Life steals, it takes of your heart like a poison, and before you can grasp it, you are addicted, and you need it, and you cannot ever be without it, and you will fight and struggle and kill to keep just a tiny drop, too little to taste or even see, just to know you have it still. It doesn’t register that you don’t have it anymore, if ever you did; life cannot be had; it has you.

Life is a lot like love, in that regard. You meet a person, and the next day you see them and you smile, and later, you are talking, laughing, and then before you know it you look forward to seeing them, and the image of their eyes—so unlike anyone else’s— settles, like dust, in the recesses of your memory, the places the wall of protection, the brush of indifference, cannot touch. And when the day comes when you will not see them again, and when you can never look forward to seeing them again, you reach hungrily, painfully, desperately for that brush of indifference to protect you, to make it so that their laughter, their voice, their way of talking and the things they say does not matter to you. But there are things that cannot be forgotten, and love does not care for your pain. Love does not need your consent to take root in your mind, in your heart, and is a force greater than anything, even than the ever-consuming need that is life.

Life flourishes in the most unlikely of places; in high places of rocky crags, where the winds tear anything loose away and the clouds freeze if they venture too close, there are small things growing, in the cracks and the crevasses. In the desert, where the sand is all and end and start and all, and heat rules the day without mercy, and cold rules the night without give, life survives.

And where there is life, there is love, and both are the most necessary thing, the one thing that makes you human, or more than human, or less, and neither are kind, and what can you do but give in?

Things about the very end of school.

1) I had no idea I could get so attached to so many people so quickly. Where the hell did this come from? There are people I’ve known all four years, five, in some cases, who are so much a part of my life that it’s hard to imagine not seeing them every day… and then there are people who I met this year, or last year, and somehow they became a seriously important part of my life in… what was this, eight months or something?

2) For four years, I have felt imprisoned, like a wild animal in a cage, struggling and pushing and scratching at the bars, and then all the sudden, I’ve been released, and the outside world is actually kind of scary. But you know what? I’m glad for the challenge. I don’t need no steel bars—or white bricks—to keep me in, and I don’t need no boundaries between me and the real world, and I’m glad it’s over.

3) For the better part of four years, like… three and change… there’s been a pack of wolves at my back, ready to rip into me when I showed the slightest weakness. A crowd of girls—well, mostly girls—who were outright nasty to me, every chance they possibly got. To this day, I’m surprised there was no bloodshed; I almost got into a fistfight with one girl, but a teacher stepped in with a yardstick and talked us out of it. (Or me, at least; I don’t think her heart was in it to begin with, their strength seemed to lie in gossip and bitchy insults.) So, what’s the point to this?
Not a single one of them will admit to any of this. And I didn’t confront them, not even a little bit, actually. It’s really not that important. But, but, they’re all asking me to sign their damned yearbooks! Why? Why, why? I asked them. None of them had a real answer, and not a single fucking one of them remembered any bad blood between us. Oh, there was a little nastiness, but nothing really serious, right? I wanted to scream. And the worst part, on my part, is that I smiled and said that it was really both of our faults, I was pretty nasty to them back.
Bullshit.
I didn’t do a fucking thing to them. I’d fight back, every now and then, if I was in a bad mood and they pushed me too far, but at the rate things were going, one of them at least thought I was going to bring a fucking gun to school, three years ago. If I had significant cause to actually do something like that… eh. Whatever. The fact is, it doesn’t really matter, not anymore. It just boggles my mind how much of it was blocked out completely. Do they really not remember, or are they just lying to themselves, or me? Again, I don’t think I care. But, but, anyway, that’s something I needed to get off my chest.

4) I wrote the above three points before leaving for work. On the way to work, I was struck by a sudden burst of realization. I am FREE. I’m free! After graduation, there is no claim on my life whatsoever! I can go anywhere, do anything, be anyone! I can ride my bike to Cotton Hollow every single day if I want to! I can spend hours just playing guitar, I can do ANYTHING. Oh, I am so looking forward to this. Even more once I get out of Connecticut and have my own life—I’m free, and nothing in the world can take that away from me.

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?

The Flip Side of Freedom

The funny thing is that to most people, this is the regular side of things—the panic, the scary feeling in the pit of your stomach, that What If I Don’t Make It feeling, is the flip side. And I guess it is to me, too, because I was excited for this time for years before I was afraid of it. Kind of like an iceberg, in the distance—you see it far away, and it’s so pretty and so cool and you just want to explore it. As you get closer, you start to realize how big it is, and then you look down and realize that it’s even bigger, under the surface, and you wonder what, exactly, you’re in for, here. And then, if you’re like me, you panic, but that current that you were so glad for, before, carrying you in, is now even stronger, and you’re stuck. And, if you have good friends to talk to, then you start to realize that it’s a really good thing the iceberg is so big, because that gives you way more space to explore.

Of course, that’s all writing from the viewpoint of a young seal or something. If you’re approaching an iceberg in a large ship, well, you’re screwed. But it’s probably way more fun to live life as a Weddell Seal or something, than aboard a ship. When have you ever seen a seal acting all depressed? Nah, seals know what life’s about—like otters. I bet you’ve never seen a depressed otter, either. Man, those things know how to live. Floating around on their backs all the time, rolling around in the surf, barking up a storm… man, otters know what it’s all about. I wish I was an otter.

But hey, not being small and furry and able to swim like a fish and still breathe free air doesn’t mean I can’t have fun with my life. It really is just… a whole world out there, waiting to be explored, waiting—I can do anything. Anything! What can’t I do? Well, I can’t fly. I can’t turn into an otter, I can’t do magic. But outside of that… I could do anything! I could spend the rest of my life as a starving artist on the streets of New Haven! I could start growing a garden, a little bit at a time, selling whatever I could, and eventually wind up with my own farm. I could spend my life stealing apples from orchards at night and selling them on the black apple market! I could START the black market for apples! If there isn’t one already.

In all seriousness, though, there’s a lot out there, and I think I’ll be just fine in the end. My biggest fear is that I’ll get caught up into some rhythm, some cycle that I don’t like, or don’t agree with, and wind up doing that for the rest of my life. The daily grind—I don’t want to trap myself in something that’s going to grind my life down on me. My second biggest fear is that I’ll start living with money as an end, rather than a means. I already have to check myself on that thought process—it’s part of what attracted me to anarchy. If I could live without money for the rest of my life… I mean, I can. But I don’t know if that lifestyle is for me. I do know that I will not find happiness if I start thinking like a businessman, which is why I freaked out when my friend started talking about opening a business. If I had the option to make it as a business owner, eventually owning this huge company, this corporation, I would… probably turn it down. I hope I’d turn it down. That life is too easy—no matter how difficult it is to do the business thing or whatever, I would fall into it, the material comfort, the lifestyle, and I’m terrified I wouldn’t be able to let that go. I don’t want to be that person. I don’t want material comforts, I want a challenge. I want to live, I want to breathe air untainted by perfumes or chemicals or burning flesh, I want every day to push myself to the limit, body and soul, I want to sing my heart out, I want to fast in the desert, I want to live. Spending my days in an office on a tower, no matter how luxurious and big, and my nights in a luxurious apartment, with whatever material things I wanted at my beck and call, is not, in my opinion, living. It’s existence, yes, it’s technically being alive, but… it’s a life that I think epitomizes the verse “Gain the whole world and lose your own soul.”

So that’s what I’m afraid of, in a nutshell. I’m afraid of falling into the trap of a pattern; I’m afraid of becoming fat and happy; I’m afraid of not living a life that will fill my soul, or a life that fills my body, and not my soul. I’d rather die tomorrow than wind up in that board meeting thirty years from now.

But, what I’d forgotten is that I have that choice. No one’s really pressuring me into anything (unless you count a serious pressure from friends to do something that will make me happy), it’s not like I’m already on that path. I just have to… live. Which I will be more than happy to do.

Freedom is a scary thing

I don’t know what I want to do with my life anymore. I’m starting to wonder if I ever did, if I wasn’t just fooling myself. I know that the only place I feel at peace is away from the world, but in this world that doesn’t mean too much. The more I try to figure things out, the less things seem to make any sense. I know I don’t really want to live anymore—not under this world’s rules. But what choice do I have? I’m a sorry excuse for an anarchist; I’m just kidding myself there, too. In the end, I really have no idea whatsoever.

No wonder kids my age make such easy targets for cults, the army, whatever. We literally have no idea what the hell to do with ourselves—we have all this youth, this energy, our passion hasn’t been killed off by the grind yet, and people are constantly telling us to use it, because it won’t last, etc. But we still aren’t set in our identities yet, we still don’t know. I don’t know ANYTHING. All this fire in my soul has no outlet—it’s just burning me, right now, consuming me from the inside out.

That, and every time I turn around, someone’s trying to push some huge choice on me. “Do you like going to school—would you rather spend every day working in a factory for sixteen hours?” I did not realize those were my only choices. “Work hard in school, or you’ll wind up breaking your back struggling for a living for the rest of your life!” Of course, that’s what you’ll do anyway, this just gives you more choice in how. And then there’s living on the fringe, refusing that whole ‘work for a living’ lifestyle. Which, in the end, is just as much of a prison, and it doesn’t last indefinitely anyway.

I don’t want to live like this. Part of me really wishes I could die before I get into college, so I don’t have to make these choices. Then I realize that that would mean that this would have been my whole life—misery, basically, with little cracks of light showing through here and there. If I don’t get out of this house, I’ll wish I died the day I was born.

So that leaves me right back where I started from, with a day of freedom looming over my head, but no idea what to do with it when it gets here. I have no plan, I have no idea, I’m left clinging to this island of stability that I’ve been trying to get off of since I was dumped here. I should just abandon myself to the current, I guess, and let life take me where it will, but that’s not an easy thing to comprehend. What, just let go? Let go of this life… it’s what I have to do, I guess. If I don’t have a plan now, I’ll just… figure something out. Take things day by day, I guess.

The thing is, no matter how hard I try to think rationally, there’s this seed of panic in me that will not go away, and it’s a pretty scary thing. The rational thing to do, or at least the emotionally rational thing, or at least the thing I would normally do, is talk to someone older and wiser, who’s been here, and ask for help. But I know what they’ll say, I think. Maybe not, but for the most part “Yeah, no one really knows what they want to do at your age.” Most kids switch majors halfway through—I used to have the statistic, but I no longer remember it. “Just take things one step at a time; you’ll be alright.” Depending on who I talk to, I’ll get variations of that, along with different advice and ideas and whatnot. My dad might be upset with me, he doesn’t know how much time I’ve wasted in school, and his reaction would be the most surprised, but he’d wind up saying the same thing.

And, once more, right back where I started from. Stuck in a panic, about to be set adrift, with no idea whatsoever what I’m going to do with my life.