It's Christmas, which means it's almost the new year, and oh my god has this been the worst freaking year of my life, hands down, tits up, fingers still moving.
I had missed pouring my thoughts and feelings into the great, uncaring beyond. It has a feel to it, that surprisingly changes over the years based on the kind of enemies you think you have at different intervals of your lifespan as a derelict humanoid.
I have so many hopes for the new year, but I guess I could concatenate all of them under the umbrella concept of ground.
This new year's eve, I'll be in my neighbourhood church praying for a metaphysical floor collider. I definitely need to get out more, I hear that those who suffer from similar circumstances but have bigger communities often get the not-so-great-but-definitely-better alternative of a collision course and get by on momentum.
How do people make friends at my age anyway?
A moment of silence for my apt and suitable use of 'at my age'. I guess I haven't run out of firsts just yet.
And most importantly, how do they do it and maintain their mortgages? I barely have enough to feed myself and most of my upcoming expenses are already planned out.
I miss grandma, I'll happily trade a bunch of fingers to see her sometime soon. She's been infected by an inter-dimensional virus and her tongue swole up to twice its size. She can't speak and they're putting her on enough painkillers to make a small horse chuckle. Visitations are also not allowed because of Coronavirus and I want to slap a bitch because I can't keep gesturing to her through the door. It's not V for Vendetta.
I've been praying a lot lately, more in a spiritual way than actual prayer. I wonder if there's somebody out there listening, or maybe an entire pantheon of gods or an array of celestial beings sipping goblets of mead and smoking weed. Younger me would be surprised to read this, and a little concerned.
I missed out on Thanksgiving this year, which feels really weird because I haven't sat down and made a list of all the things I'm grateful for. I want to sit down and do it, but I don't think I'll find much to fill one line. It's really been quite a terrible year.
It's been so terrible, TikTok makes me sad because all I can think about is 'oh wow, look at them all happy and well-rested in their pretty house' or 'I wonder if I'll ever afford a couch' or 'I miss hugging people around the holidays'.
You've guessed correctly, I'm significantly sadder this year than I've ever been around the holidays. I hope things turn around soon, I wish myself the best and nicest of all things and would hug myself if I could because I know I really need it.
It's been a fucktillion centuries since I last wrote here. It's also strange writing when there's so much I can't write or talk about lest the promise guardians swing out their arms from the overarching celestial pockets and tear me a new one.
But I wanted to come here and flex my phalanxes.
I've been learning C# for the last month, and I went ahead and got myself a curved gaming monitor for Christmas. It's set to arrive tomorrow, here's to hoping the delivery guy is having a good day and it manages to put a smile on my face. My cheeks are in dire need of some stretching.
I made a decision to take the next month off, but I failed to abide today. Instead, I found myself applying to jobs and losing four hours into the fat folds of LinkedIn.
I really hate LinkedIn.
I hate how people talk on LinkedIn, it's so...pre-Quora.
Christmas is just around the corner, and due to extenuating circumstances, I wasn't able to celebrate December properly, and am now struggling to get into the holiday mood and out of the holiday blues. Maybe I need some Christmas socks, I'll think on it.
God save me from consumerism, I haven't had an income since April, so I'm basically eating away at my own flesh at this point, but that's alright. As long as it makes me happy, happies cannot be bought.
I'm also planning on going out this month, attending some art and culture events and making new friends wherever possible. I also have a couple of people I want to say hi to and check on for the holidays. All in good time.
Semsema is getting a lot bigger, she's twice as big as she was when I last saw her. I guess she's staying, I couldn't find anyone to take her and my parents are already super attached to her. Banana has changed. She's still feral, bless her heart, but she used to have a bit more wild affection than she does, I'll try and get her sorted. They were promised treats, and they shall get them.
Ludwig is still my favourite, but he's shakier than ever. Poor baby isn't used to violence and he is now forced to share his dump suite with two street urchins. I feel for him.
I wonder if they make Santa hats for cats, I'll have to check.
For all the insight Amazon is getting about people's mental states, they should expand vertically into the health sector and start issuing drug prescriptions by now. It would work better than five therapists put together, I guarantee it.
I'll go back to Adventure Time.
Oh, and I'm 29 now. Yay? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-
I had nestled into a beanbag with a book when I felt restless. I was overcome by the urge to write exactly as I was appeasing the urge to read. I felt torn, I wanted to try and capture the moment, but I was scared of what might happen if I put down the book. Momentum is fleeting, and I was caught between an unstoppable force and an immovable object that threatened to move elsewhere.
I got up, and I reached for my poncho. It's an old poncho that I'm rather fond of, it smells like winter and old houses. I put it on because I needed to feel warm, warmer, but I wasn't cold.
I struggled to make a simple decision, to read or to write? What if in trying, I lose both? It was terrifying, and I felt very weak. I made it to the sink, and then I made it here. Now that I'm here, trying to pour my soul and find my voice in what feels like the first session of introspection I've had in years; I judge my writing. My form is weak, I've been whoring my pen out for far too long, but it doesn't matter. What matters is that I'm here.
I had a moment today. Well, I had a few, but I don't want to force it. This quick brown fox might jump over the lazy dog then run off into a distant foxhole and I wouldn't be able to write again for years.
This week, I spent 700 EGP on self-care products. The name irks me, it makes them sound like we have to buy them for our own good, when in fact, they were useless. A perfumed body lotion from Victoria Secret that smells like exotic mangoes and promises glittery evenings with shiny-torsoed men. A strawberry body splash that reminds me of an older, much younger, me. A spherical lip balm that tastes like crap but looks good when you apply it in the middle of a restaurant. Some fancy hand gel for nasty car rides and nastier public bathrooms.
I spent 1290 EGP on books; an extravagant collection of philosophy, sci-fi, poli-sci and contemporary angst, the synopsis of which can be compiled into one paragraph that others might post on Twitter as a subdued cry for help.
I splurged on a grilled shrimp meal for brunch one day, hoping it would make me feel full. I had Ludwig vaccinated for 600 EGP at the best vet in town, because I didn't want him to feel suffering. Or perhaps, because I didn't want him to feel suffering at my behest.
It's been years since I've spent that kind of money on myself. I spend many frustrating evenings, toiling away at a gig or other to make that kind of money. I file it away to my bank account and hope it keeps coming. Perhaps if I make it to the next digit, I might sleep better at night.
I look back on my weekly expenditures, and I run my fingers through them trying to track my feelings. It is a modern practice; seeking self-awareness through consumerist outbursts. Perhaps I should spend more, I tell myself. Perhaps I should spend less, I tell myself. I don't know which is true. Either way, I still don't know how I feel.
I had a conversation with a child today. She was bright, she liked writing and comic books, and wanted to be a bag designer when she grew up. I tried to share with her two of my favorite websites growing up; Neopets and Orisinal. She struggled to understand how a game could be a website and not an app, and didn't know what I meant when I explained that one of them made flash games. She didn't know what they were. Both websites were down, I felt very old.
It was a welcome change, because talking to her was absolutely terrifying. The weight of her soul was crushing; I couldn't bear her innocence and limited capacity for understanding, her openness, passion and awe. The responsibility scared the living shit out of me. I don't think I ever tread that carefully around a conversation, and I quickly realized that I didn't really know how to talk to a child.
When she said she didn't understand why some of the book sections at her school library were closed off to her until next year; I advised her not to read Russian literature before she was 30. She stared blankly at me and her mother laughed, I felt very stupid when I considered how meaningless and strange that sentence must have sounded to her.
When she asked me how to get better at writing, I spent 20 minutes explaining what writing prompts were and introducing her to Nanowrimo. She said they didn't take that in school. I said it's a new practice. She said she didn't practise any sports.
She said she took part in Spelling Bees. I asked her what the hardest word she had was. She said it was 'encore' and spelled it wrong. I told her it was a French word so it doesn't really count. Besides, word will spell for her anyway. She stared at me. I asked her if she knew what word was. She said she knew many. I asked her to spell oesophagus. She spelled it wrong. I said I didn't know how to spell it either.
Meanwhile, I struggled with my own vocabulary. I replaced each fuck and shit with bad. When it came to concepts, I didn't know what to replace, and what to replace them with. I tried to remember what it was like to be her age, and I couldn't remember being aware of school libraries, spelling bees and fashion apps. She was very calm and possessed. I am 27 years old, and I am still not.
I walked home from the bookstore, and my mind wandered as I dodged near-death on the newly-installed highways. I couldn't imagine what it would be like to have a child, more so now that I've talked to one. I thought of my friend, her mom, and I tried to put myself in her place. My mind exploded with scenarios and immediately shut down. I shuddered and thought instead of the road and my impending death by a swiveling car. That, I could deal with.
I jumped over the sandy underbelly of the loch ness bridge that now sprawls over my home. I was grateful for my Timberlands; the same ones every one made fun of when I purchased. "When are you going to stop buying boy shoes?"
The issue of how I look has taken over my thoughts lately. I was aware of a gigantic chasm between how people my age dressed, how people my age dressed everywhere, and how I dressed. At this point, experimenting with my bursting femininity through changing style would be met with ridicule. She is desperate, they would conclude. I would feel uncomfortable, even more so than I do now with my horrible fashion choices and outfits that are somehow always wrong for any given occasion. I should have done it years ago, back when I still could and get lost in the crowd. Now I'm stuck, and it is ironic, because unlike back then; I am not comfortable in my current style anymore.
It is baffling that I am at an age where I care for style. I hate it here, mid-twenties I mean. Everything holds meaning, status and context. Everything is a test. Everyone is always watching, and they are never kind. I barely know what's going on half the time. The other half, I'm positive I don't know what's happening, and have accepted the fact that I have no way of knowing.
Today, I had another moment. I have spent too long reaching out to others, trying to find a point of similarity or common ground. Perhaps there is none, and perhaps I should stop trying.
Perhaps I should be honest to my experience and try to give it voice, again. After all, there is nothing else I could possibly do about anything. Perhaps, I might even enjoy it.
It's been a gajillion years since I sat down to write, although I write every day from morning to night. Blank documents scare me, they distort my pen and force me to yield to best practices; often set by tired, underpaid writers elsewhere who are only writing to make rent.
I fear so much. It is a sign of growing up, to learn to fear the right things. Some days still, I wake up fearless, and I take a leap of faith into the great unknown, driven by the rush of the fall and the calming knowledge that it can't possibly get any worse than this. Then it does. I laugh, and I am grateful that I still can.
In the same week, my career peaked and unceremoniously spiraled to a mute end. Unlike the last time, I am at peace. I have come here of my own accord, and I hope that I can still think of something, even though I can't get myself to write.
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
The way things have been happening lately, there's a metaphor everywhere I look. A truck full of Christmas trees following along the curve of the road leading up to a dingy u-turn in a shady neighborhood that somehow swam with soap bubbles. Church bells in late afternoon traffic on a normal Tuesday. Dogs that get up on two legs to hug you with no intention of humping your leg or stealing your food in the middle of a horrible fight. Ending up at a Korean restaurant after escaping the clutches of a wrongfully empowered Korean cook. Borrowing a frenemy's pair of socks after running out of clean ones. Getting free credit for reporting an entire department of customer service agent smiths. Meeting an actual Asian who fulfills the prophecy of listening to Beethoven every night. Getting Chinese takeout on the first night after moving for the second time in the same month. Breaking my anti-bug-murder policy with a small Auschwitz.
Hell, my blog is snowing, and no one can see it because it's white. A metaphor to cap the metaphors!
Where do I begin?
Let's try this; I'm getting a cat. A temporary cat; I cut a deal with a friend to take in her stray if she let me give it back in a month. I'm allergic and can't see past my nose financially. In my defense, having a cat while being allergic to cats makes sense in the bigger scale of things. After all, I am an asthmatic who smokes and can't really live with the idea of accidentally killing a dog.
That didn't work, let's try again.
Cable guys are NOT sexy, porn lies just as much as fairytales. Neither are electricians, carpenters, plumbers or construction workers. They're all sweaty, hairy, blood-sucking assholes that deserve to die at the stake of their own PVC pipes.
The engine revved up a little there, but we still can't get the good old baby to write about this. Let's try again.
I missed my own birthday again this year. It flitted by me while I was coiled up in a strange bug-infested bed halfway across town with my feet jammed through the arms of my lavender jumper for warmth. I also missed Christmas again this year, I was hosting an irresponsible C-level asshole and his harem as my friends watched awkwardly in their designated corners. No turkeys were harmed in the process.
Funk is hard to get out. Scrubbing a fridge will teach you that your skin can peel off faster than the funk will. My grazed knuckles are proof that violence is not always violent. A month ago, I was scared of the dark. Today, I walked happily through a dark corridor carrying twice my weight like a brave dung beetle because relativity applies in life just as much as it does in particle physics.
It's the 29th of December at 5 in the morning, and I have three homes, three doors to legally go through and three keys to prove it. It's been such an incredibly weird month. December, oh sweet December; you've always been an oddball.
Doors are very important, locked doors even more so. Going through said doors is equally important, especially with a mug of coffee and your fuzzy pajama pants in the early morning chill to prove something to yourself and get used to all the damn silence and all the damn birds. Where I live - one of the places anyway - the birds chirp so much you'd think they're on speed. But that's not what's pissing me off. What's pissing me off is that I'm at the home that has the 420 songbird, and the bitch didn't chirp today. Here's another metaphor for you, go figure, go fish, go fuck yourself.
Funk. It's really hard to get out; even with all the love and all the lasagna that comes with it. I got three keys in multiples of five and I'm really bad at Maths. I used to be better at it when I was young, but things don't always happen to you in the right order.
I need to buy milk and call my ISP for some lung practice.
Santa was wrong; Christmas can be bought. As a matter of fact, not only can Christmas be bought, it can also fit in a sedan with room to spare for an elf hostage or two if you're into that sort of thing. Here's another myth-buster for you; you CAN have enough Christmas lights, especially if you can't afford the juice to feed them. Adults should not be allowed to celebrate Christmas. Christmas is for people that are too young to know what an electricity bill is, or how to count. I'd happily lose a tooth if it means I can see Christmas lights in blue, red and green again. The spectrum is blinding me.
Funk is hard to get out of, but maybe not impossible. I have one functional TV channel and no internet to access my Netflix, but I choose to see this as a metaphor. Metaphors are nice; they teach you things, but they can also fool you. There's a whole bible of them somewhere that confused people into ax-wielding murderers for the better part of a millennium. You must never underestimate the power of a metaphor, but you'd die if you did anything but.
I need to slow down. I'll get some sleep and try again tomorrow. It's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life; here them sing!
The problem with 60s-70s music was that when I was listening to it, it was because my parents were listening to it, so naturally, snotty teenage me was like lol they're so old what is that they're listening to?
So now when I listen to it almost exclusively, because they are now my main jam, it's very ironic.
The thing is with music from that time is that they're so fucking silly. Even when they're iconic, if you listen closely, it's just an innocent national anthem of their boyhoods, and their singers became relics of the time; even when they were snotty teenagers.
Which also gets me thinking; 50s women really knows where it's at.
50s women knew where it's at, 60s women thought they just found out where it's at, 70s women were like oh where is where and what is at it.
But we're here like
You know?
Life has been very fucking creative lately. Talking about burning itches, I thought that growing up as a gymnast would make it easier but it somehow made it worse because now I have to hear my spine crack to know if the old cog is still juicing it up. People don't understand how painful it is to sit still when you've grown up as an athlete. I really need to get back into sports. A sport.
I love bird memes, they're so weird. I also love birds, they have such a basic instinct it makes sense why they're so angry all the time. If you know how to deal with a parrot, you know where it's at.
They are just angry chickens.
My room is so girly now it freaks me out sometimes. I grew up as a pig, I don't know how I became this organized. Now I depend on the order of things, because I can navigate them. But it doesn't really matter because I appreciate the strawberry scents of all the goddamn products. Now, it sometimes feels that when I walk into my room, I'm walking into my personal bubble, and then that bubble became a world and spread into life itself. Growing up is a bitch.
Birds are amazing because they are the evolution of our native organism, so they still have all the goddamn instinct. It's basic biology, the literary way.
I'm sorry, I'll stop posting bird pictures now.
I can't wait till winter is back. I'm soooooo fucking TIRED of summer. It has almost killed me way too many times. Who would have known you could actually be allergic to the fucking weather? Of course, if my body is taking in the whole weathercast, I will be my own little mother nature.
Mother nature has to be there to stop this. December, come soon.
I have decided on the song I'm going to listen to at 12 o'clock on New Year's Eve of 2019, and I will with thee farewell, oh 2018. You have ended now, you can't hurt me now. Bitch.
I was watching random things on YouTube the other day when I found this scary, "The Shining" kind of gem.
I'm not sure what's scarier, the feminism of it under incredible, sarcastic tyranny, and the Indian tv show type of haughty post-colonialism refined men.
Today feels like a school night, but in a good way.
The evening doesn't feel rushed. It swings on with weight and grace as my parents talk over a movie that they forgot on after lunch. The TV fills in the gaps of the fragmented conversations with that electric, white noise of home.
Dad turns 58 today!
He refuses to celebrate his birthday, but we will lovingly disrespect his wishes and buy him a surprise cake tonight.
I realized how important hammocks can be, and I realized what it feels like to have a friend break your hammock.
I realized the importance of mock crochet, and how each stitch is messy and beautiful and can be undone in any second because it was never meant to make anything lasting.
I realized the importance of having extra cash, but I also realized how cute it can get when nobody knows what they're doing.
I realized the importance of Gaviscon - oh ye holy medicine candy. That sweet white walker lava spilling down your throat and eating the fire in the belly of the beast away.
I realized the importance of (Cocoa Butter - Aloe Vera) After-Sun lotion, especially after the pasty piña colada that passes for Malibu sunblock.
I realized the importance of cheeky sunglasses; they really do make you see the world with new eyes.
I realized the importance of fixing things creatively, and using your resources to make your environment more interesting - in infinitely creative ways.
That's when I realized the importance of fixing your hammock - you know, the one that your friend broke - creatively.
I realized the importance of sitting on the beach, huddled up in all your comfort items, next to a book. That book can be a stolen beach book retelling the story of a little girl who still believed in monsters, and that book can be the majestic "Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad - and other stories.
I realized the importance of having a friendly bald friend who knows how to play games with you and keep them up for days - even when you're not
I realized the importance of having a friendly female who knows how to pick dresses and can do wonders with coconut oil.
I realized the importance of coconut oil on the beach.
And the importance of fixing sunglasses.
I realized the importance of having someone around who insists on making, creating and recreating inside jokes - for the pun of it.
I realized the importance of having a flow-y scarf that knows how to stay put on a beach one night, when a very old wanderer came and asked us questions about life, the universe and everything - then left us with an inside joke about quantum physics.
I realized the importance of letting go every once in a while - even if it's on a hammock with half of my butt out into the wilderness and my fingers remotely calling out weird music in the sky.
I realized the importance of insects to men, and of men to insects.
I realized the importance of taking an extra minute to make sure you're comfortable, and how good it feels to wake up to a beach instead of the brazenly hot asphalt.
I realized that hanging out with a friend inside the water is a whole other island of Pokemon that I hadn't explored yet.
I realized the importance of having electronics within reach, and the importance of having electronics out of reach.
I realized the importance of frying pancakes, and what that means in the bigger picture of things - especially when said pancake is well-timed.
I realized the importance of having nail polish on hand, for whenever you can splay comfortably enough in your seaside cave.
I realized the importance of bungalows, and the importance of the complete absence of urban landscaping in open space.
I realized how that can throw you off, and on again with the swing of a hammock - until you fall in the middle in perfect equilibrium, and figure out how to go to the bathroom without being stalked by any manner of wild beast.
I realized the importance of fat copybooks, and the importance of having mathematics splayed out where your snorkel gear should be.
I realized the importance of Mr. Incredible, and all those sweet animation videos that we view or make in self-defense.
I realized the importance of having secret conversations, and being able to have secret conversations, with your bear-bae.
I realized the importance of post malone, and I realized the importance of pre malone.
I realized the importance of man buns, and the importance of admitting you like them.
Oh, and did I mention the hammocks? I really want one in my room, lol.
i looked in the balcony today and looked at the trees the way i did as a kid
it made me realise how much of a weird child i was. Sitting there, looking at trees, in my free time.
the crow nest i was watching is gone, nothing left of it now. i guess the grandsons decided pursuing the family home wasn't important. It was just a hollow in the tree now, and the tree became less of a life jungle thing and more like a dead log standing there like RGB on paper.
Grandma loves oranges. I have vivid childhood memories of her slowly peeling them, taking her time to groom them as she would had she been brushing a baby's head. It's how I knew winter was here, back when I had no concept of seasons, or time.
I knew oranges meant winter before I knew I spoke two languages, or what it meant to look at a person and feel safe.
I remember looking at her, as she achingly peeled those oranges for what felt like a small eternity. She wasn't bothered by me watching her, she wasn't ignoring me either. Her presence contained me, her act was inseparable from its environment.
When she was done peeling them, she would make them into little "cat ears", as she called them.
She never faltered while peeling them to take a bite, or steal one of the little pieces to satiate her craving. She always took her time, and she always finished the process.
And then she would give them to me.
Even as a child, who is born selfish, I always tried not to take them. I would lovingly manipulate her into eating them by giving her an ultimatum that I wouldn't eat unless she did, or that I wasn't hungry or felt sick. I would always fail.
I never really liked oranges. They were a lame fruit.
And I ate an orange field growing up.
Today, I came home to find a platter of oranges.
I wasn't supposed to come home.
I was supposed to be with grandma, but I couldn't go.
She said she needed me. They said I was the only one who could help.
I ran through an orange field to get home, only to come home to a platter of oranges.
She wouldn't have done the same.
She would have peeled them too, for me.
Right now, grandma cannot peel oranges.
Or eat them.
I don't think she has for a while, back when she could, because we always forgot to get her some.
I sifted through some of my recent blog posts before I started writing this. It seems that my primary complaint about life for the past months has been the same; the rush of it all. Ironically, I've come here to talk about how it wasn't fast at all, because if it were, then I'm in a whooping whirlpool worthy of being the entry gate to Atlantis.
Will Atlantis be there on the other side? Now that's a debate that takes a few thousands years.
I have a dentist appointment tonight. My second this week, after I ran out of the first. You see, I am phobic of dentists. My phobias are an assortment of pinata candy; they have nothing to do with each other, but are equally explosive if quite harmless. Of all the horrors that pervade our war-torn, famine-shred and drug-ravaged reality, my biggest fears are of the following: The dark, babies, balloons and dentists.
I cannot trace any of them to a viable starting point, and I'm not sure it would help if I can, despite the insistence of scientific method. Would it help much to know that you're actually just afraid of the knife if a violent stranger is waving it at you? It wouldn't help much, even if you were otherwise just distraught by his shoddy use of language or hobo-chic fashion sense. I know phobias are basically neurological wires that accidentally connected in your brain, and that it takes a whole lot of turning it off and on again for dissociation, but who the fuck cares? I'd rather save my virgin wires for a problem that means business.
Meanwhile...
I feel older with every passing day. I wish I didn't understand as much as I do. I wish I understood more. But most of all, I wish I didn't have to understand it.
My boyfriend tells me that when I'm upset, I tend to sound like Tumblr then change the subject. I feel that food should generally by less chewy and shipping be subsidized.
I have a lot of running around to do this week. A friend I knew from back in college is getting married, it's surreal. I need to buy a dress, and wear it. It's all very confusing.
I'm trying to find my inner JD. He ran off a couple of months ago and I haven't seen him since. This is my first tree poster.
Spring is young. It gets caught up in its own feelings. It feels, untuned, and without ear, merely following the rhythm to an uncharted location. Following where the roads takes it, for the sheer fuck of it. It's full of energy, that's burned up by a good powerful poem, but is delusional enough, drunk enough on youth, to use the awakening as a transition into another state of equal delusion. Different, is as close as it gets to awakening. I envy Spring, in its hopeful nihilism, in its violent shamelessness. It's cocky and impulsive, but when it doesn't have an audience; it usually takes a couple of minutes to catch up to itself, and see through the delusion.
It takes it time to feel. It feels by default. It feels because it lives, it lives because it feels; it knows no other way to live.
It makes mistakes, bold and unattended, albeit sheltered and inexperienced. It's drunk without stimulus or matter. It is living matter, in volatile state. A volcano, without shame.
It grieves without grieving, it creates beauty by destruction, that doesn't destroy. It is infinite, in wearing a cape, stored from last halloween and brought out on April 3rd at 2pm in a fit of disbelief. It is Schrodinger's cat, it is life. Breaking life and reassembling it on a quite afternoon, for no reason, for all reason - unknowing - in violent passion.
A force of nature, without force. Tender in its violence, vulnerble in its ferocity, and young in its closure. Closure without Reason. Self-centered closure, reached only by need, just as it started. It is the beauty of unadulterated force; in its contradiction, in its confidence, in its reason, that has gone mad and lost its path from reason. Completely independent, completely crazy, and completely destructive, with 0 collateral damage. With 0 actual damage. A cold war, made cold by its unrequited, unnatural nature. Made cold by not finding a worthy opponent. Made cold by not finding a willing opponent. Made cold by not finding an opponent.
Spring is young, in its readiness. Readiness for battle, that isn't there. Readiness for love, that doesn't exist. Readiness for heartbreak, that's been rendered obsolete by time, convenience and crippling civilization. Readiness for everything, rendered useless - and impotent - by time. Readiness that grieves itself, and only itself, in its joy for everything that's no longer needed by time. Readiness, that isn't needed. A futile, but beautifully powerful, existence.
Does it know? It doesn't. It's still too young.
Thoughts on Piazzolla: Summer
Summer takes its time. It thinks it's older. It's certainly taken up enough time. It's neurotic enough. It's confused enough, when it's not looking. When it lets its guard down, traces of spring seep in. In its intensity, it becomes too much of spring to be anything but Summer. Then it catches up on itself, and grieves knowingly. A new feeling; pity. Self-consciousness. Where, on the timeline of living things, did it pick up this terrible habit? It grieves its youth, by being young and not knowing. It grieves its youth, instantly, wasting more of it.
Because it's young, it enjoys the walk. A walk filled with grief. A walk, heavy with feeling. Feeling, unknown to the old and knowing. A walk that's heavy. It now knows anger, but doesn't know how to contain it effectively. It lets it out in short bursts that are equally young - if not younger - than how it started out. It grieves that too, ironically.
Then it realizes what it's done.
Summer is bipolar. It rejects is extremity with fashion, leftover from olden times and sheer habit. It talks too much to drown itself out. It doesn't know what it's capable of, because it's too busy grieving what it used to be, and reacting to how it got there in the first place. It thinks it's trying to understand, but it's just lashing out. Like a 19 year old, that just got a license and thinks it needs to use it for something for it matter. Like a 19 year old, that thinks it needs to use something for it to matter. Like a 19 year old, that cannot accept how futile life is, and is still trying to trace the reasoning of adults, along alice lines and rabbit roads that don't exist. It's too young to know that adults don't know what they're doing. It's too young to know that adults are adults because they see no reason; and still wake up the next day. It's still too young to know how to live without reason, or why to live without reason. It's too young to be old, and it still doesn't know it. It's too old to know it, but not old enough. And somewhere down there, it knows it's not old enough. It knows that's the real reason it's grieving, but it's too young to know it loudly, and the sadness comes out happy, and lively, and full of hope. Hope of understanding the past, which isn't true. Hope of knowing what to do, which it doesn't. Hope of seeing, which it's too busy feeling to see for what it is. Hope of feeling like it used to, which it grieves too much to realize that it is. Hope of feeling, which it grieves, not knowing that it's still capable. Hope. Distraught hope, fueled by the confusion of youth, one that thinks it's too old too hope, and doesn't know it's distraught.
After all, it's still young enough to get carried away, but is old enough to be exhausted by it. Old enough to be hurt by it. Old enough to not notice how young it is, unless it's in retrospect. It still has fight, and doesn't know what it's for. It's too old.
Thoughts on Piazzolla: Fall
It's now had enough time to think, and grow a little older. It's had enough time to know better, in the ways of living, but not in the reason. In the course of life, it forgot that was the real reason. It's had enough time to take its time to know the reason, and sound like it, without knowing.
But on lonely nights, it still gets hit by bouts of sadness. Existential sadness, without reason. Targeted sadness that has lost aim. Scheduled sadness, that forgot why it made an appointment in the first place. Sadness, for the sheer fuck of it. Without reason, with all the reason in the world. Enjoyable sadness; filling time, making time, the only way it knows how.
It doesn't know why it's here, but it is anyway, and it's too old too question it, but it's young enough to get angry about it. Repetitively, ferociously, without apparent reason, like an old lost battle being replayed in a retired general's head, only the in the general's head, he's still at war. He's at war, but gets lost trying to get to the cupboard. He's at war, but he's forgotten why he's fighting at all. Too old to question itself, even in its incessant grief. Even in its constant torture, and elaborate pain. Tequila for consciousness, and a machete wielding mad scientist for a heart, one that's forgotten why it started dissecting. Young enough to keep up the fight. Old enough to forget why he started fighting in the first place. Young enough to fight anyway. Young enough to continue fighting, long after he's forgotten the reason, long after he's forgotten he was after a reason, and long after he's forgotten he's kept fighting to remember that reason. Long enough. An ode to time. An ode to life, that can't recognize itself, but remembers it shouldn't be ashamed to feel it, even if it doesn't remember the reason. An ode to life in anger, anger that doesn't stop itself. In its old age, it's not old enough, just yet.
An ode to the fall, and its real glory. An ode to the fall of a good life; remembered, forgotten, and still remembered, on a visceral level. One that's too important to need reason. One that deserves being angry about, without shame, or the shame of reason.
Thoughts on Piazzolla: Winter
It's now old enough to take its time. It's now old enough not to question why it takes it time, or to judge itself when it slips. It still questions, maniacally. It's already had its fall from glory, it's known how glorious it was, and it's confident that it doesn't need glory, but grieves it all the same, and enjoys it all the same. It's old with reason - long forgotten, but never let go. Reason enough, it thinks, in its existential torture.
It remembers the anger, but now the anger is enjoyable. It has aged enough to realize the beauty of temporal states - ones without aim. It's old enough to relive, without the joy of living taken away. It now knows the beauty of aimlessness, and how they can't be avoided, no matter how old you get. Especially because of how old you get. It takes pleasure in reliving; not because of defeat, but because of ultimate understanding of the uselessness and aimlessness of life, and the realization that it's found its true and only meaning in wasting its life trying to react to it, rather than understand it. It's now old enough to know that's the only way to live, without really knowing it. Knowing is no longer the aim.
It sings its last victory, in the face of imaginary enemies, with equal vigour and happiness. It exaggerates its wins, and their fluency - all the while grieving a perfectly well wasted life. A perfectly well felt life. A perfectly well lived life.
It gives itself space to have a tantrum, one that's quiet, and tender. One that asks for the sake of asking, asks for the sake of feeling, completely and utterly, and never asking for the sake of knowing.
Ageing, in its original form. Ageing, for its original reason. Living for its only reason. Ageing, that doesn't affect wellness, but improves it. Ageing, that doesn't affect dexterity, but improves it. Ageing, that doesn't affect reason, but annuls it. Ageing, that fulfills.
It knows its time has come, a long time ago, and its sings itself to sleep, in its own time, and at its own uninterrupted pace.
It has lived, unjudged, and with complete laughable feeling.
It has lived, without reason.
It has lived, with all reason.
It has lived, for a reason.
It has lived, for the only reason known to man, since the dawn of time, since man knew life for what it is, and never really knew what it was for. It has lived, and accepted the futility.
