As much as being booger-ridden is generally considered horrible, it does don a nice afterglow to mundane things like watching a movie or lying in bed. Or maybe it's just me, I feel positively dapper, sitting here, fighting for breath and pausing the incestuous Noir drama I chose for the night to write.
My life is spiraling out of my control, and there's no way to tell my good decisions from the bad without the re-affirming nods of a nuanced coven. But in the middle of it all, in my moments of rare clarity peculiar to aftershock and explorative, late-night episodes where everything seems to apply - I am sometimes swept across the board by an overwhelming sense of liberation. Free movement is intoxicating, this is how Archimedes must have felt like as he ran butt-naked through the busy streets of Syracuse, cheeks flapping in the wind.
The problem is, I am not on the verge of a groundbreaking scientific discovery.
Lying in bed this morning, I was struck by my newfound ability to miss the days of the week. Mondays are the same as Wednesdays, the AM feels the same as the PM, Fridays are no longer the holy grail of the week. Hours fall off the clock in perfect levity, unaffected by their assigned meanings in the grand order of things. I found myself thinking, this is the farthest out that I've ever gone. The veil has dropped and I have passed through, will I ever be able to go back to a time where time held sway? In this rare, naturally-occurring case that is impossible to retrace to its causative method, time itself unwittingly contributed to its own destruction. Perhaps if it had all happened in shorter bursts, it might have been easier to wind back the clock and find my way back, through it all, to a place with re-assuring gravity, plausible vector and the primitive lull of a swing. Perhaps, that too, is merely a booger-ridden reverie.
Now, I notice my small distinctions as I talk, my split-second quirks as I move and the irregularities of my breath with no stimulus to condone it. How it all is just a tad out of touch. I also notice how the surrounding zombie horde twitches at the whiff of fresh-meat, and people's deep-seated discomfort at the sight of an unknown entity watching them from behind a curtain, extending a perfectly edible limb out in an attempt to find middle ground, higher ground, any ground. What does the grass smell like on your end? What does it feel like on your bare feet?
Most people don't really want the burden of the first contact, so they selfishly pull the rug from under your feet in self-defense and reflexive malice. 'My planet', they hiss at the threatening unknown, 'not yours'. And I can't blame them. They prefer their familiar place and floundering frequencies, for in its waves they've made a home and bought a cuckoo clock that tells the right time at least twice a day. How dare you peek through for a whiff of pie, freshly baked and alluringly bare on a picture-perfect windowsill?
My search for familiarity pervades the smallest of my daily chores, as I recreate the things I've done before hoping to recreate that brief, intoxicating sensation of familiarity. Instead, I slip in my oversized skin suit and hit my head on a brand new edge. Everything is so much thicker than it used to be, wading through it takes more out of me than I have in store, and I'm not as nimble as I once was.
Stupid teenagers, they don't know their superpower of forging a home in unlivable spaces. Snotty-nosed little pricks, holding the skeleton key and trying to shove it in their bodily orifices instead, hoping it would unlock something deep within them that they can destroy and use to build a new, unfamiliar nest. To have their powers once more, for a day. To spend an evening with entitled, open-ended questions instead of crippling final answers.
They never tell you what grief does to thought patterns, and how if it hits in just the right place enough times, it might short circuit a logic loop for longer than initially intended - a neural network transformed into a cabbage field with the ominous swish and flick of a misguided elder wand. The empowerment texts are easy enough - positive thinking, support community, putting the right foot forward. But what if you don't remember the right string of commands you used to move your foot?
What bothers me most is the constant feeling that I'm a half note off-tune, somewhere, and in the chaos of it all, I can't quite put my finger on which note is to blame. You lose your ear sometimes, walking to the sound of your own drum. It's in the fine line.
So I swing, trying to find the cockiness that would fuel this new place or the familiarity that would lead me back to old charted courses, and the motion sickness overpowers my senses - pushing me back into the chair. Sit, silly, you're going to hurt yourself.
I'm watching Mad Men and it got to this episode where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was shot dead on award night and everyone was so torn up about it. It makes me think about how there are absolutely no politicians that could incite this kind of feeling in us anymore. It's just an incredibly sad contrast of our time, one so devoid of hope and pink-hued delusion about the possibility of the world being a better place or people standing up for something without an agenda. Oh well.
Post-war depression, misogyny and lack of voting rights aside, the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s had it better than us in that each of these generations had a world where they could dream about the possibility of a better world. They thought if they went to war they would change something, then they thought if they came back from war they would change something. They even went so far as to abolish war altogether, because they thought it would make a difference. We just got to the end of the stream and the color bars are rolling. This is it. The 90s had great music and great civil rights movements but I guess it ended real hope for change. We've all become too wisened to our own helplessness, and all the governments are too entrenched to budge. Well, most of them anyway. The third world is pretty much on its way down all the way to kingdom come.
Norway and all the rest don't count, part of me thinks they're not even real anyway. Maybe when you die you don't go to heaven, you go to a Scandinavian country.
It's a beautiful morning. The light is falling just right through the blinds, and Ludwig is sitting there taking it in, with not a worry in the whole wide world. To be Ludwig, for just one hour.
Dusting has never really been my strongest suit
I've been watching this TV show called "How To Get Away With Murder", and I have to say I'm not a huge fan of Shonda Rhimes. I miss the days when Amy Sherman Palladino was all that. She deserved it. She wrote complex female characters that made mistakes and redeemed them. Shonda Rhimes made a career out of extorting the pull of abusive relationships through intriguing plot twists. For all I care, she's the female Alaa Al Aswany. Besides, we don't really know if she means to empower; we expect too much of the things we like, and we assume goodwill. How do we know she means to empower? She could just be building an empire out of ash; burning bridges and depending on human nature to stay around for the fireworks.
She knew what she was doing though, because it worked. She found a winning formula, that's how she made it really. Do you think people will ever evolve enough to realize that? Or do you think our feminist narrative will be stuck in that place that only gets us more seats?
I don't know why people want to sit around anyway, so I must not be there yet. I'm just not a huge fan I guess, but I do appreciate the craft.
For the first season or so, it's just a matter of segmentation really. Geographically speaking, odds are you're going to check out shooting star Annalise. She talks at just the right speed, says all the right sounding things. You can't help but to want to be her, you know? Then Ophelia gets some screen time and you're like, hot dayuuuuum, now that's a VIP if I've ever seen one.
Even before the script made her likable beyond a reasonable doubt, at that point where they had an ultimate throwdown in the kitchen that just felt out of place in the natural order of Hollywood things, I had started blaming Annalise. And it wasn't out of deference to Ophelia's old age, I've never been a proponent of that. I found myself yelling at the screen, saying hey she loved you with all her power within her own understanding. You can't blame her for that! You should know better! I guess the scriptwriters thought 80% of the segment contributing to their ratings would appreciate a little more spark; so they added a long match and some quality racial drama. It's always good to go by the book.
That always works.
I'll give it to her though. Apart from George R. R. Martin, that brilliant brilliant man who never bothered to take out the second R. of his name for a couple dozen more book sales; Shonda Rhimes is perhaps one of the rare modern authors who put time into getting you invested in hating a character. I just hope she has the foresight to turn it into something that matters by any means other than deus ex machina. I'm really tired of those, life is full of them these days. Pretty overused.
Nobody needs a manic pixie Rebecca anymore, we've all had enough of those. Puppy sells tho, so maybe I don't know enough.
Well, I've had a bunch, but I don't quite trust my ability to record them at this point, you'll know why once I muster up the guts to actually get into it. Hell, I don't even know how to get into it. It's been a really long time, I'm so out of practice.
Let's try and retrace my steps. How did I used to do this? Oh yes, I sat here and I opened up into the all-accepting cyberspace, and at one point; words started to hold on to each other's shoulders, form an orderly line and do the cha-cha!
Oh lookie, I got a spark!
But let's not get ahead of ourselves here, and most importantly, let's stop beating around the bushes.
I've been having such a horrible time lately, and it felt like I had lost all sense of hope in things, people and myself. In fact, even as I was inspired, I resolved to wait for 24 hours just to see if the flame will actually twinkle down to a kindle and eventually get pissed on by an unaffected defense mechanism passing by on the way to the bathroom. Then I realized, hell, it probably will, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't try and keep the fire going. It's the most I've had in months. If I can hold it off for just another 24 hours, by Odin I'll take it. It's a good start, it's a place to start. So here I am, trying to verbalize what the hell happened in my head and why it was so starkly different from everything that has taken place over the past year.
Growing up is a real bitch, in a number of ways, but perhaps the worst part about it is that grownups forget what it's like to be a kid. They forget the magic, the awe, the misplaced hope. But most importantly, they stop themselves from trying because trial and error taught them not to, after a certain point anyway. Grownups forget! I've been growing up, I forgot, and revisiting some of my old posts on here jolted my memory to many things that fell through the gaps as I parried life's attacks on my sense of self and understanding of how things went, as they go.
My days have been the same, but today was one of the hardest. I had slumped into bed after virtually flinging myself at about three dozen unexpected employers; using the powers of power lines to bunch myself up into a cannon and launch it across the Pacific, tunneling through the cross-continental wires and probably landing on a bored HR manager's desk. Statistically speaking, a middle-aged 'she' would likely dismiss me for being that far and requiring visa sponsorship, and I would wallow deeper into the same hole of despair that led me to apply abroad in the first place. I had simply applied to all the jobs available within borders, even the ones that I didn't want, and came to the conclusion that my career was over.
My slump was the mother of all slumps, I wasn't even mentally punching it out anymore. I had, for all intents and purposes, merged into the beanbag and started watching Scrubs for what must have been the hundredth time since I first met John Dorian on TV after school and realized there was someone out there who was like me, in every single catastrophically strange way. It had become my restore point, and many a breakdown was spent hiding it out in my stinky bat cave with an endless junk food supply and a variety of exotically roasted coffee beans. I was down, and I had given up. Then I came across this.
I had written this when I graduated from college. I remember that day really well, I spent extra time on campus trying to get some form of closure, trying to find the gold buried at the end of the rainbow, and spent the whole day flitting back and forth between both ends across campus without finding any. I ended up spending my last day with two friends that I actually was not that close to, and I took three polaroid pictures with them; two of which never came out. I kept the overexposed film anyway.
I also remember how I felt that day, but I didn't remember what I was thinking about or why I felt that way. It took me completely off guard that I struggled with every single situation I worried about in that painfully young post, for months, when I got my first house. I just forgot that I started worrying about it that early. But that's not the point.
The point was in how I looked at things around that time, and how different it is from how I have come to see things.
It made sense, retracing my steps. I followed the breadcrumbs down my own timeline and briefly stepped into my younger self's shoes on the trip to the observatory, quitting my first full-time job, getting my first iOS game out, getting my heart broken by a thousand friends on a thousand and one nights, and generally getting torn apart by loss and grief over grandma and everything that happened down that yellow cobbly road; feeling everything all over again, exactly like I did the first time around. I actually got the rare gift of seeing myself grow up, shatter and get here, and somehow, here doesn't feel as real anymore. It has lost all power over me. I've seen how it came to be, and the monster is not as big as its shadow; I've just been cowering in a dark corner on the wrong end of the candle for too goddamn long.
And I forgot, because grownups forget.
I forgot so many things. In fact, there are entire areas of my life that are now lost to the ether because I didn't write about them here, but it wasn't just writing that I was doing when I came on this thing. I was figuring things out, I was verbalizing how I felt about things, but most importantly; I was clawing at the debris avalanche, digging magic, awe and hope out of the horror of everything and burrowing my way back to the surface. I will be coming back to those later, I will make time, if I can find the courage. But this is toil for another day. Now, I'm trying to string some words together and remember how I did this.
Writing for a living really was the worst thing that happened to my writing, but that's NOTHING compared to what it did to me. I completely lost my voice over the years. I got...old. Listen to me, no space metaphors, no stubborn grumpiness, just complete and total resignation. Shame on me, the world went ahead and turned me into a goddamn pleb. It reached into my soul and took out the small oxygen-rich plant I kept hidden at the back of my head for dark days when my exo-suit ran low and I was too far away from my starship; with no jet fuel to spare for remote vehicular recall.
Now when bad things happened, I said of course. How else would they happen? I was no longer outraged. The bitches had finally got to me. And I don't even get to have a beard to make it worth my while. Oh, the utter disgrace.
Growing up had done more than make me forget and lose my sense of awe, it had gotten to me at my job too. I no longer found joy in learning. Things like status, respect and office politics took priority over what I wanted to do with my life, and consumed my energy. I was burned out, and I hadn't worked in years, not mere months.
I got old. I'll bet if I buy a copy of The Economist, I wouldn't feel 20% of what I felt back when it meant something to me. I lost my holy grail in the ageing typhoon, and then I went on and forgot what it meant to me. What's worse, I went on and forgot how it came to mean that much; the process of it all.
Growing up also got to me in all the places that no one should get to. It had seeped into the hidden reservoir that hosted my entire spectrum of emotion and poisoned it with an unadulterated sense of permanent dread. I am scared of everything, and everyone; because I am now aware of the amount of damage they can do to me. It is true that you can take so many blows in a row you recoil so far into yourself that you forget how it actually looked like, or how it was supposed to look like. My forehead is wrinkled, my face has sagged. I have to constantly remind myself to unfurl my eyebrows and curl my shoulders back into their proper location. My back is killing me from all the stress hunching. Public transportation is not exciting, it's season 5 of Fear Factor with just a touch of season 4 of American Horror Story.
Things have changed so much, but they have always been changing over the years. I couldn't find my way out this time because I had changed so much. I lost that kid, and that kid was wonderful and doesn't deserve to be hated for the mistakes that she did along the way. She was trying so hard, so honestly, so dorkily and - at times - so brilliantly, that it shone through the years and came through to me.
It's funny to think that in the end, I would be the one that ends up helping me. I will still give that 24 hours. But first, I must find the manual. There has to be a chip somewhere where I stored those parts of me, and there has to be a way that I can access it now. I might just go crazy in the process, but I'll still take that over how I've felt for the past few months.
It felt like there was no way out, like that was really it. Nine years of working my ass off, burning through what felt like about a trillion nerves, sawing my health down to a fraction of what it one day could handle, losing so much of myself and so many people I cared about to get here, had simply been for nothing.
Then I realized, that shouldn't have happened in the first place; simply because I never actually remembered getting to a point where that was my goal. It had happened naturally; I came here because I was frightened. I didn't choose this. I shouldn't choose this. This is not how I should go about this. I have put on the ring on my way to Mordor, and forgot to take it off. That led to me trotting about for several months mumbling "My Precious" and eating the pinky finger of whoever got in my way. I must throw the ring into the lava before the lava swallows me up!
I don't think that applies anymore. It hasn't been for nothing, I just got lost. That happens. I can find my way back to that healthy headspace, back to a place where the world didn't feel that small and hostile, back to a space that had a thousand sources of inspiration wherever I looked.
Growing up does horrible things to you if you don't keep it in check. It can eat up entire galaxies, munch them down to their very wavelengths until it felt like they were never really there to begin with. I can't let that happen, there was so much beauty there. There still is, I just have to try and remember how I used to find it. I had a process, I have a process for everything. Maybe I could follow the landmarks back home.
And even if I don't, I have to try, because this is the first time in months that I feel there is actually a way out of here. It's been so dark. I hate the dark, you can't see shit and I'm half blind already.
So much of us is lost when we start to view ourselves in context; another horrible byproduct of growing up. Everything is a competition; how well you live, how well you work, how well you lead your life and how well you handle your conflicts. It's been a tirade of self-doubt, endless comparisons and loss of path. I don't remember the last time I followed a Patronus through the Forbidden Forest. Hell, I don't even remember how that felt like. Growing up has been starving me of everything that I needed to survive, and I had everything that I needed right here. Distracted by people at every turn; friends, boyfriends, colleagues, bosses, enemies, frenemies and everyone else across the shitstorm scale in between.
I haven't dorked out in months. Years?
I haven't spaced out and entertained a thought that kept me company and made me feel fuzzy on an evening where the light fell just right through the blinds. I haven't drawn stupid metaphors out of any personal sidequests. Hell, I haven't gone on any solo adventures down the side streets of Cairo in...yes. It really has been years.
What happened? Did I fall into a fucking wormhole? Was I abducted by aliens and had my sentience overridden by a hostile species and just recently experienced a brief sense of awakening because an antibody got there on time for once?
Where the hell have I been? And how do I get that little kid back?
Should I even try to get her back? Or should I try to figure out who I am, at this day and age, following a different path? I sound so different, and it hasn't been that long. It would be a real shame if I survived all the crap that life flung my way thus far only to break over this. That would be like Voldemort's unfortunate little incident with an Expelliarmus charm towards the end. There's no glory in that, just bad nose jobs. I will not have it. Gosh, golly, I like my nose!
I think I know what to do. It involves a blanket fort, some maps and a whole lot of fun readable material.
The pieces of my life are in constant motion; shuffling to find balance only to realize they were never puzzle pieces. They were just pieces.
It was a lifetime ago that I came to write here. I never actually got around to introducing you to my cat. He's a magical little shit, I swear to you on all that is holy and hairy, and possibly the only cat in the universe that doesn't give me allergies. There will be another post for that, I don't want my fluffy chonk tainted by stinky mortal problems. He's way too good for that, little enchanted ball of mischief.
So yes, back to the pieces.
This is gonna sound like the intro to a low budget horror movie where the relatable protagonist - or the person we thought was the protagonist - dies in the first 10 minutes. Unfortunately, this is not what happened here.
The scene opens with Shandy; a klutzy, chubby brunette stumbling on old furniture in her dusty attic. She's going through some files in the god rays, then she gets distracted by a ballerina music box on her grandmother's old nightstand.
"2019 was not a good year for me. It was the year that my life decided to pull a premature ScarFace. I lost my house, I lost my job, and I lost my three-year boyfriend. At 26 years old, I moved back in with my parents. My days blurred into a sea of endless weekends, candy and artificial sweetners; retail therapy was really the only kind of therapy I could afford. In February, I got this snazzy ballerina box on sale for only $5.99! Sweet deal, right? Except that sometimes, late at night, I could swear I heard voices coming from the dark corners of the room, saying horrible things. I'm sure it's nothing, the box isn't actually speaking, it must be the central heating. It's been off for a ..." Sound of a machete falling into flesh and bone. Blood-curdling scream sounds off-screen. Cut to black. Transition to blue sky on a scorched desert afternoon. Country music plays and a Cadillac drives off into the horizon.
But like I said, that's not what happened here. It's because the pieces were never really meant to make up anything. They were meant to make...anything.
Except when we're young, we look for our choices in all the wrong places. That's the great thing about shocks, traumas and unexpected turns in the road that lead you off a cliff. For a split second, your head rebounds out of the frame and you see the whole picture right before it falls apart, and for a glitchy split second, the potential liberates you. Then it breaks you, and you forget about it. Head trauma is a bitch like that.
But that's too morbid, let me draw you another picture. I now know that I can.
So much has changed, again. I keep expecting it to stop somewhere; that's where bad scripts come from I guess. We get that tube-fed into our subconscious from a really early age. The plot thickens, then the mic drops. The guy gets the girl and the bad guy gets what's coming to him. They walk away from an explosion in slo-mo. The credit rolls and you jizz a load of adrenaline all over the screen, then you get up and go about your day. You are a cobra, you just shed your skin of disappointments and your endorphins hold you off till the afternoon.
Then you crash. Because you're not a fucking Cobra man. They're so much cooler. Our skin falls off eventually, except it sags off of us without ever letting go until it eventually takes us down with it. No phoenix, no fire, no rebirth, no punchline. Just a bunch of shitty stretch lines, if you're lucky.
I spent so long chasing things, running away from things into other things, running at things. We're not meant to move that fast.
They say you really grow up when you realize you became the stereotype you hated all your life. Getting into a long-term relationship out of my second year of college was a mistake. I should have focused on my career, made more friends, was less of an asshole, was way less honest. Nobody needs to hear what you have to say anyway. We have a voice but we don't really know how to use it. Evolution says thou shalt not get yourself into troubleth.
Thou shalt keepeth your mouth shut, smileth and noddeth along.
We tend to say that kind of shit to ourselves when we're in pain, but it's really just a load of shit. We think it means something because it makes a pretty pattern, and we like patterns. They ease our existential dread as a species walking the black lands in scattered groups and marching off into extinction. We use it to tell stories that have a plot, but somewhere along the line, we forget that stories don't exist in nature. We never walked into the woods and found one hiding under a low hanging tree. It's not naturally recurrent. We made that shit up. We made a crap cracker and put a cherry on top, then we ate that shit.
We make so much shit up to survive reality. We hold on to it and we build a virtual life around it. We put on pretty filters and we sound self-righteous to ourselves. We make patterns out of patterns, weave those patterns into other patterns and connect them to pre-existing patterns. We swirl into the patterns in a frenzy of kaleidoscopic colour and light until we lose all sense of ourselves and all the shit that hurts, scares or confuses us. We feed off the colour and the light because we're too afraid to look up. If we did, if only for a split second, the frame would glitch and we'd see we were down all along.
The movies got it wrong. Morgan Freeman shouldn't have been narrating all those blockbusters. If something had to sound off destiny's trumpets, it would have sounded a bit more like A$AP ROCKY, or like a really bad Alexa recording. She mixed her shopping list and killed you instead. She played A$AP ROCKY right after though.
Your ghost floats off, tripping and shit. "What does it all mean?", it wonders. For the first time in its short life, it is gender-confused and now identifies as it/peeled banana. A$AP ROCKY materializes, clad in holy bling. "It means nothing," he says. "It just sucks, for no reason and for a really long time, and then it catches you completely off-guard and sucks differently. You just gotta drop down and get your eagle on." He then goes off and disappears in a typical dude move, leaving a feeble puff of stage smoke in his wake. You cough your heart out, that damn asthma.
I think if we try and remember that outside of its usual two-minute window, it might give us a whole new outlook on life. Except that outlook will not be like the outlook Yoga gives you, it might not sit well with your dinner. Your mom's spaghetti, etc.
My train of thought had another accident there. Let me try and grab on to some rails.
Cue camera two
They really don't tell you enough about your late twenties. Textbooks are all on that thirties and forties shit. Your twenties are like your unicorn phase. Peak body, peak career, peak sexuality, peak physique. I'm da bomb, homie. Never met a motherfucker fresh like me.
Well here's what they don't tell you.
Your twenties are a volatile state. You're constantly forming, moving along and thinking you got it right. Problem is... there are just too many sparks flying around, and before you know it, a spark catches on to the polyester kitchen curtains and causes a gas explosion. It's an iridescent marvel of leaking colour, rendered in low light. You're exhilarated. It's so beautiful, you have never seen anything like it, then your skin catches living colour and burns you at the stake like Joan of fucking Ark. As you perish in flame, you grab on to the nearest cause.
And just like that, you're saved.
You won't get it until it happens to you, it's just one of those things. I guess that's why nobody ever bothered writing a book about it. There's no way of getting that information back down the generation line. We're just not there yet. Arachnids are. Alas, we're not that cool either.
Here's how I was saved. I realized the futility of it all. Isn't it funny and moronically ironic that the answer was in the bible all along? "The wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more." Stage direction, hidden in plain sight.
There's something to be said about losing the things that you use to define you. Can you really tell yourself apart from your career? How would your twitter bio sound like if you take out your title, pet and fandom mentions? We box ourselves into so many things, we take comfort in them and they make us smaller. It takes an invasive procedure to get you out, except your skin is not used to all that light. It shrivels up and hurts you in self-defense. What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. What doesn't make you stronger, gives you hella perspective.
I should try my hand at vampire fanfiction. I got all the gore flow down. Tumblr would eat that shit up like hot popcorn. I can tag it with all kinds of things like #depression and #asexual and make friends that look like my leg after a long winter; hairy, pale and desperately in need of a manicure.
To be continued. Subscribe below to get notified when the next issue of "Clockwork Vampires: Dragging Your Life Out of the Coffin and Into the Scorching Light" comes out! xoxo
