Stories

the thing is, i don't know if i want a normal life. i don't think i even want a normal job. i don't want to get rich selling juice-- or even sharing juice. i don't want an excellent business opportunity, i don't want to have a LIFE, in any sense of the word. i don't. want. anything. at least, not anything like that. and yet, you people continue to tell me that it is Necessary, and that i should Compromise, or at least look beyond whatever stupid world i'm living in in my head (okay, you haven't said it like that, but i think you want to, at least a few of you, a few times), and try to get some kind of stability before i try to be an Artist. here's the thing though.

I don't WANT to be an Artist. Or, really, a Writer. (I want to meet a very specific writer sometimes, but that's different.)

I want to tell stories. That's all, in one way. In another way, I want to LIVE, to feel the salt on my face in every way possible, to climb mountains like a goat like i did when i was young, to see forever the dappled sunlight on the forest floor, to hear forever the brook singing over rocks, to lose myself in the thunderstorms, spontaneous and forever. but mostly, i want to tell stories. I want to take all the characters floating around in my head, and all the landscapes that exist a thousand worlds over, and all the meadows and flowers and faires and sprites and genies and gargoyles and assassins and thieves and shepherds and everything. i want to live, live all of it forever, and then come back and tell people.

and that's often why i don't mingle well, or why i can't be coaxed to dinners and parties and things, and why you meet me in the mist and the dark, with no good reason for being there, and why i might choose a notebook over a car. because mingling, gossip about folks who aren't there, laughter, light, takes me away from the Stories, mine or someone else's, and life as it should be pales in contrast with life i want to live.

there is a part of a book i read that says something like "The thing about stories is, they don't mean a damn if there's nobody listening," which sometimes i kind of agree with. I want to go to the edge of the world, the end of life, and then come back and tell the stories to people who want to hear them. And it seems like that's not an acceptable goal, these days. And that saddens me.

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.

I don't want to write this paper. I want this paper to be written, I want to just pour all the shit that I know is IN my brain out onto the paper and have it be done.

But I don't want to write this paper. I want to stare out the window at the pretty, shifting clouds being windswept over the trees, and read Brave New World again, and look through every one of these books about World War One in minute detail, especially the Illustrated History, and wander around the library, and think up new stuff to do with my character, and write on my hands, and basically do ANYTHING but write this paper. Including type up this blog.

It's back to that old thing, where my brain refuses to tie itself down, and finds every possible way to distract itself, including staring at the fucking screen for hours, typing one sentence every five minutes. [it probably doesn't help being off meds though]

What the fuck, brain.

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."