You must join all on their own level. Everyone fatigues in due time. You must set the bar at a lower level than you can jump, to decrease expectation and increase the perception of performance. The feeling of weakness, tired, bloating, degradation, erosion, shamefulness, uneasy, distance from locus of control of body, these are all things that are bound to happen to some extent to all forms of life. One must feign these often in order to connect with those around them, but over exaggerate, exonerate, bluff a shitty hand and then show your cards as better than those around you. To show fatigue is such a necessary moment, our common thread of weakness, but always reveal it while holding the rope that is pulling upward, to then elevate from your fatigue, your weakness, your perception that you are the same as others (which you just felt!) and into your reality that you are the only one around you, therefore, you are much better than anything else. You are the pedestal, you created the rope, you are the everything that everyone talks about (of course). But you MUST be able to tactfully show your insides and insights, your ball of destruction and fright, just before you can come up for air.
i can't
I can’t conceive of life as a competition, though I learnedly know it is. Every principle of growth and development, from words to wealth, from plants to personality, from attention to knowledge, they all function on principles of evolutionary economy where competitive entities battle it out for the reproduction of themselves, living or otherwise. Yet I hear of such a thing and I back off. The most beautiful girl in recent memory alludes to others and I run away in my mind. I find something doing well and I stop my hand from reinforcement and move on, turn to something else. I can’t compete, as it only seems to be “trying too hard”, to be “all talk” when really it’s only action that I’m afraid of. My perception of evolution and growth through engaging subjects, opportunities, seems to only come from other sources, as I’m a conduit of forces that I can’t control. To reach out towards what I want has only been fucked in the past, has been a product of misperceptions and miscalculations. To sit and soak forces that come at me is to acquiesce to competition while not engaging it. The bottom line is who fucks who, I guess, who produces the word at the end of the paragraph. Ultimately, I write these words, but I don’t pretend to know where they came from or claim that I created them. For I can’t.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Thursday, June 16, 2011
bold bright feathers
There are certain people that translate their moments with you into a dense conversational economy. They see every interaction as a window into piquing your interest, and hence put everything on the table as soon as you walk in the door. So as you know it’s on the other side, as you put your key in and turn the lock to click, your mind kind of takes a large breath in because it knows of its needs beyond your control or comprehension.
The odd thing about mental illness is the way in which it is socially spread, seemingly. Ill thoughts heard from others are contagious in that the more one is exposed to them, the more they remain in the back of memory, a repeated reverberation. For instance: one who works with acute mental illness hears about suicide (grandiose thoughts of self-harm) often in a typical week from those around him. He then has a few thoughts go through his head that imagine suicide, where none were present before. This comes to consciousness, bringing the thought, “Did I just think of that only because I was exposed to the possibility more often lately? Who’s to say that having these thoughts [as the reflection on these thoughts brings a multiplying effect to such thoughts] is abnormal, and why is that thin line between thought and action such a huge leap from distraction to diagnosis?” Minute cracks of distressful thoughts get their foot in the door, and only the strong and educated avoid dysfunction, danger, deviance. The drugged and marginalized still live within a frame, but cracked and weathered.
Two jars sat next to each other on the counter. A man had things to save in them, and he tried to, but the jars had no lids, so everything spoiled. A woman next door had two lids, with much to save as well, but could not fit much into a jar that wasn’t there, let alone a mechanism for tightening thread. Just like water meets earth and sun meets skin, symbolic symbiosis is as substantive as anything tangible; we live in the metaphor. Hence, a man and a woman lay next to each other, stifled, wanting, waiting, but get captured by sleep and tortured inconvenience before any release can occur. A man and a woman touch skin, hand to shoulder, lip to lip, cheek to back, but still succeed in their curiosity, if for no other reason than failure and cessation bringing the two closer to each other. To know someone’s thoughts is to know their timidity and their trappings, as well.
The odd thing about mental illness is the way in which it is socially spread, seemingly. Ill thoughts heard from others are contagious in that the more one is exposed to them, the more they remain in the back of memory, a repeated reverberation. For instance: one who works with acute mental illness hears about suicide (grandiose thoughts of self-harm) often in a typical week from those around him. He then has a few thoughts go through his head that imagine suicide, where none were present before. This comes to consciousness, bringing the thought, “Did I just think of that only because I was exposed to the possibility more often lately? Who’s to say that having these thoughts [as the reflection on these thoughts brings a multiplying effect to such thoughts] is abnormal, and why is that thin line between thought and action such a huge leap from distraction to diagnosis?” Minute cracks of distressful thoughts get their foot in the door, and only the strong and educated avoid dysfunction, danger, deviance. The drugged and marginalized still live within a frame, but cracked and weathered.
Two jars sat next to each other on the counter. A man had things to save in them, and he tried to, but the jars had no lids, so everything spoiled. A woman next door had two lids, with much to save as well, but could not fit much into a jar that wasn’t there, let alone a mechanism for tightening thread. Just like water meets earth and sun meets skin, symbolic symbiosis is as substantive as anything tangible; we live in the metaphor. Hence, a man and a woman lay next to each other, stifled, wanting, waiting, but get captured by sleep and tortured inconvenience before any release can occur. A man and a woman touch skin, hand to shoulder, lip to lip, cheek to back, but still succeed in their curiosity, if for no other reason than failure and cessation bringing the two closer to each other. To know someone’s thoughts is to know their timidity and their trappings, as well.
Monday, June 6, 2011
"this place sucks without you."
A bartender; a bartender is not your friend or your brother, or your confidant, or your television screen. But it feels like it sometimes, and if that vision in front of you cooperates with your dreams, it makes the line become a square. but a bartender, and this one who is a thousand, yet still my own, who has the most amazing cheeks and hipline and quips and eye contact and stories and teeth and SMILE and, well, tactical smile. and personality and “personality” and discounts and gifts and just the act like she really cares about my reaction to her stab at consistency in nicknames for me, me being the occasional bar patron. A bartender who solidified my attention more than the drinks did. A bartender was had, named [sonya].
A bartender was lost. I visited only sporadically, mostly Sundays, when she worked. And then I was out of town a lot, not drinking a lot, but thinking still of her a lot, doubting my thoughts of her as much as I doubt my own sense of sex. I keep going in now, seeing other people, people who can’t mix drinks well, people who focus on themselves and their own shitty ironic tattoos, people who focus on their own relationships as if we give a shit what came before. “It’s my birthday next week, and I’M WORKING…of course! I’ll be TWENTY-FIVE! Well, it’s ok, I’m single now, and I haven’t been single since I was 15. Yeah…” From her I ordered a gin drink that was weak and tasted of sugar. She poured another for a separate customer, the lead bartender saw it, took it back, made another. A song came on that I didn’t like. I was polite and I paid, and I just realized what I had taken for granted.
The walk uphill: 8 blocks of steep sidewalk leading from the Broadway bar to a more comfortable place on 15th. The wood in this bar has a dull glisten that is perhaps more perceptible to our skin and arm hair and breath than it is to our eyes. The rubber of my feet met sidewalk continually, skidding often for feel. I was very comfortable in the night air, the place and sense of direction; the more at home I feel in a walk is the more I feel I’m in a dome, even the atmosphere seems closer and more attainable. I stated years ago while in the depths of home: ‘my room feels like my skin, and this town feels like my room’. I don’t think I want to feel that again, because it feels like a betrayal of the moment I had. Yet I can’t go back, because I no longer feel that same sense of home in that exact place. Seattle is a shell of a city, but the alienation of change keeps me comfortable.
The fucked up thing is that I wanted that bartender so bad that I couldn’t show any affection whatsoever. The fucked up thing is that I can’t even call the friends that I want to talk to the most because a phone conversation just won’t cut it. The messed up thing is that I censor myself out of the consideration of no one. The thing is that I don’t care enough to keep up any kind of drive for preference, and I actually think that’s beautiful, reconciling, a return to an all-we-have.
[I can’t write what I think. I can only write what I feel. I get lost in the night scene, drink to sleep, wake up with coffee and find myself staring out of the kitchen window.]
Twisted naked tree branches sprint out of main trunk, at a much darker rate than sky behind. Sky is dark as far as sky is concerned, but still much lighter than the tree. The rapid and overbearing tree limbs spray out until the window’s threshold stops them with a clean off-white barrier. The light from above slowly filters into the window, lying on drapes and table, but steadily declines with the drink upon such surface. The phone rings and throws off the balance of contrast. The wind outside in the natural environment encases ideas of movement, but a thawed inside seats frozen warm muscles. The only fast movement is that of blood, and movement of blood mimics highways, street legs, only a mechanical basis of function, not blue oxygenate to any neuro-chemical center, only the traveled upon routes, just to keep a place awake. Photos cover inside walls, late winter shadows on black and white pictures equate space, not busy, but soft straight layered sugar.
We all want a place that is completely our own.
A bartender was lost. I visited only sporadically, mostly Sundays, when she worked. And then I was out of town a lot, not drinking a lot, but thinking still of her a lot, doubting my thoughts of her as much as I doubt my own sense of sex. I keep going in now, seeing other people, people who can’t mix drinks well, people who focus on themselves and their own shitty ironic tattoos, people who focus on their own relationships as if we give a shit what came before. “It’s my birthday next week, and I’M WORKING…of course! I’ll be TWENTY-FIVE! Well, it’s ok, I’m single now, and I haven’t been single since I was 15. Yeah…” From her I ordered a gin drink that was weak and tasted of sugar. She poured another for a separate customer, the lead bartender saw it, took it back, made another. A song came on that I didn’t like. I was polite and I paid, and I just realized what I had taken for granted.
The walk uphill: 8 blocks of steep sidewalk leading from the Broadway bar to a more comfortable place on 15th. The wood in this bar has a dull glisten that is perhaps more perceptible to our skin and arm hair and breath than it is to our eyes. The rubber of my feet met sidewalk continually, skidding often for feel. I was very comfortable in the night air, the place and sense of direction; the more at home I feel in a walk is the more I feel I’m in a dome, even the atmosphere seems closer and more attainable. I stated years ago while in the depths of home: ‘my room feels like my skin, and this town feels like my room’. I don’t think I want to feel that again, because it feels like a betrayal of the moment I had. Yet I can’t go back, because I no longer feel that same sense of home in that exact place. Seattle is a shell of a city, but the alienation of change keeps me comfortable.
The fucked up thing is that I wanted that bartender so bad that I couldn’t show any affection whatsoever. The fucked up thing is that I can’t even call the friends that I want to talk to the most because a phone conversation just won’t cut it. The messed up thing is that I censor myself out of the consideration of no one. The thing is that I don’t care enough to keep up any kind of drive for preference, and I actually think that’s beautiful, reconciling, a return to an all-we-have.
[I can’t write what I think. I can only write what I feel. I get lost in the night scene, drink to sleep, wake up with coffee and find myself staring out of the kitchen window.]
Twisted naked tree branches sprint out of main trunk, at a much darker rate than sky behind. Sky is dark as far as sky is concerned, but still much lighter than the tree. The rapid and overbearing tree limbs spray out until the window’s threshold stops them with a clean off-white barrier. The light from above slowly filters into the window, lying on drapes and table, but steadily declines with the drink upon such surface. The phone rings and throws off the balance of contrast. The wind outside in the natural environment encases ideas of movement, but a thawed inside seats frozen warm muscles. The only fast movement is that of blood, and movement of blood mimics highways, street legs, only a mechanical basis of function, not blue oxygenate to any neuro-chemical center, only the traveled upon routes, just to keep a place awake. Photos cover inside walls, late winter shadows on black and white pictures equate space, not busy, but soft straight layered sugar.
We all want a place that is completely our own.
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