Thoughts

Hold me on the dark

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Every choice I make has love at its core. I take actions from desire. From the desire to see a better future. Not one devoid of relationships, not one alone, not one where I sit in some glorified tower surrounded by a parade of pale delights. Always with an eye towards love.

I think that is why I have such a heavily scarred heart. Because while love and passion was wearing off, hitting that three month endorphin deadline, my love was building based on knowledge of the person. Each fact and thought and action building to a fuller picture, reinforcing my choice to love.

Because that’s what love is, a choice. A choice we make anew each day. Not some heedless rush of need to this conclusion of sex. Not some taste test to see if the person will last a bit longer in that endorfun gold rush.

But I get it, we want that instant connection. And the story I tell about Morgan is all about that. But it’s not a full picture. It wasn’t the meeting, it was the continuing choice to keep meeting. To not accept a one night stand and agreeing together to look and stay for more.

And that is love too. The choices we make together for each other. Not for ourselves. And not in the vacuum of our own hubris but in solemn, giddy, and laughing discussion of what we want and how we’ll get there.

It’s we. Rather than I. Not saying there isn’t room for I, but if it’s not we, then it’s not real. If it’s not we then it’s desire and obsession masked as love. A heady combination which never quite lives up to the firework you are expecting.

And still, there are fireworks. Love is what we should all choose to be. What we can choose to be. With whomever we want, provided they feel the same.

Love, it’s why we are here.

This is a broken world
But I am not broken

And the way forward is always love.

Six days to shed the dark

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There is a song whose lyrics are ” l want you so badly my bones start to ache”. I’ve felt that destructive desire. That reckless, heedless rush of need which only cares for itself. It’s a fire that burns hot. Consuming all of the self in an effort to ignite the world. In a vain attempt to start a fire in the heart of another.

But I’ve been misremembering the lyris as “I love you so much my bones ache” because that is what the banked fire of love feels like when a smile or a word feeds oxygen to the flame and it ignites.

It’s like the singer was so close to the real. So close but so completely wrong. Love is a well tended flame. It doesn’t consume. It can’t. Instead it’s a nuclear reaction hitting the threshold needed for a sustained and steady force. Is it fire that can hurt? Fire that can burn? Does it hurt sometimes looking for a way to be expressed? Certainly. It’s the reaction at the heart of a star.

And like a star, it can last forever. I’ve found this to be a true thing. At least for me, and I am aware that I am…different. When I yield my control to love. Allow love past my defenses…past unbelief that I am worthy of love…past the pain of lost love…past dread of some future where the face of love wears disgust instead. When I do that, I love forever.

Like a runaway thermonuclear reaction.
Like a star.

I have burned many with that heat. There seems to be a limit to what most can stand. And yet somehow, love finds a way.

Maybe that matched fire is the only way. I’ve been looking for Earth’s when I needed a Sun.

Anxiety dreaming

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I had an awful horrible dream. I was downtown for first Friday(an art and food thing) but I was also down there to retake a class in grade school. As myself not as a kid. And the teacher had reserved me a place right at the front. Then an adjacent classroom played a famous jazz song super loud and she started acting and singing like a jazz singer but completely out aync with the music and she had somehow transformed into a 1930s flapper. And the room transformed from a classroom to an upperclass parlor. Her manservant came in and offered her cakes and food and she declined all but a black and white. Then I was driving. I parked an headed to work but not before reminiscing with the crossing guard that this area used to be all construction and I remember drinking beer at lunch with my father on the job(never happened).

I was then in an elevator up to my futuristic bedroom and I met my older brother there and we talked about the woman I was seeing. After I talked to him for a bit I found myself on my phone. Scrolling through various messaging systems and I realize that this person I’m seeing has ghosted me. And I feel heartbroken and lost, like one does. I wander and find myself in a music shop where I meet a DJ who is demoing progressive drum and bass but who buries signal for some underground movement in it. I go to buy a copy but to do so you have to get it mailed an I don’t have any stamps. I pull up google maps on my phone and we have an argument about big data. Then I head off and I decide fuck it. I don’t owe this guy anything so I head back to my car with the intention of going home. I arrive at my car and find the windshield plastered by pseudo official tickets because there was a blue arrow painted on the ground to indicating handicapped parking. That’s not a clear symbol or a legal one, so I’m like fuck it. Then the security guard wanders by and she says “thought you could slink away, huh”

Then my alarm rings. And I’m left with this feeling of failure and sadness on waking.

Holidays are approaching

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I’ve stayed up way too late doing nothing in particular. Watching strange shows from Brazil with great English voice dubbing. Looking at my phone wanting to feel connected…
Then it flashes me the battery warning and I think, “probably time to go to bed.” My cats asleep in the middle of my bed and I’ll displace her so instead I remember I need to write a post for tomorrow.

This week is Thanksgiving in the USA. Another holiday that has its roots in blood. As if all holidays aren’t problematic icons embodied in a yearly ritual to enshrine the victory of one group over another. I mean it’s hypocritical to teach that it’s about some historical togetherness and all but I question whether or not that actually matters. Knowing the truth about history is a good thing and it can help avoid past mistakes in favor of all new atrocities.

But being mad about a holiday seems pointless. Get together and change it if you need to. Change the name and people’s cultural relationship to it. But mostly, it’s an excuse.

That correct. All holidays are an excuse. Mostly it’s to take a day off. For those lucky enough to be able to afford it. And even for those who can’t, its the opportunity to say fuck it, I’m taking this time for myself. For my family, if you’re into that kind straight laced social structure. It’s a way to be irresponsible in a state sanctioned corporate sponsored commercially acceptable way.

And it’s a time to say hi to that cousin you only vaguely remember. To try to restrain yourself, or maybe this is just me, from getting into sociopolitical arguments with people capable of only spouting talking points and appeals to authority. (Headline-If you are making an appeal to authority without data to back it up, you’ve already lost the argument.) And eat food you wouldn’t normally eat.

Some people, mythically to my mind, get to hang out with friends and have fun. I’ve never seen it, except on Single person Christmas, aka Halloween, and even then that a socially awkward sexually charged powder keg. It’s one overly fruity mixed drink away from making a pass at your married boss with his wife right there. Or laughing at someone’s use of fetish gear as costume and demonstrating proper flogger technique in front of people you know are friends of friends who will spread that like wildfire.
Not that this is a bad thing, I just don’t like awkward conversations about what drunk, no filter me, said when I am sober slight filter me.

Maybe I’m just not who these Holidays are aimed at. I know there are people who love this stuff. Love the gossip about nothing and the skirting of taboo topics at least until someone says grace.

Another thing I don’t do. I’m fairly certain my lip service Christian family would neither take a blessing from my faith nor would my faith be likely to bestow blessings. Honestly, if asked for a blessing, I think the proper response would be something like, “The choices we make have consequences. Whether those consequences are good or bad depends on where you are standing when they occur. This means that whether we act or not, either is a choice. Make sure you make your choices wherever possible. Don’t allow your choices to make you.”

But there is no appeal to a higher authority which seems to be the point of prayer.

So maybe I just don’t get it. Or maybe I do. But in any case, Holidays are meant for people to pause and see. To look around in the frenetic drawn out scream, and maybe, for once, listen.

But what do I know? I’m just a man who needs to move his cat, so he can go to sleep.

The flensing knife turns inward

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I’ve been creatively burnt out for the last few weeks. It’s not entirely anything to do with the big things like work or relationships. It’s the little things that I have let eat away at my free time. Leaving me with no time to sit and be. No time to experience the world as time slips away.

Being so busy that any time…and here I have to stop and redirect because work crept in. Because it’s gotten to be insidious. It slips into any crack which if I turn it off, it becomes that I was unreachable and that is the issue.

Which is why I am writing this at 4am.

In alot of ways work is better, my relationship is better but my friendships and my writing and my actual life seems to have all suffered.

I have never been one to strike a balance. I throw myself completely into things. And that passion sees me through but it also breaks me.

It’s the inevitable, inexorable schism between what is needful and what is best. And much as I thrive in the situation where the world is burning and every action I make can turn the rudder, eventually…the boat sinks and the drowning begins.

And I am oh so weary of dying by inches in that way.
Something has to happen. And I don’t know if I have the mental fortitude to make the life choices required.

It seems like I was so much happier when I was a villain. But maybe it was just that I was young and didn’t see the terminus. The inevitability of less ahead than behind.

Ghost lives in ghost houses

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Sleep has become my favorite thing. That oblivion where reality no longer holds sway and I can make choices which have real and lasting impact. Where I am no longer bound by the rules of conventionality and can, finally, make the choices that matter most to me.

I used to read. Novel after novel. Several a week. I used to play PC games for hours and get lost in being the chooser. Master of my own destiny. Even if that destiny was to find soda cans and fight giant radioactive scorpions.

I feel like my world has narrowed down to wanting some future I am uncertain of. To saving money so that I can be alive at some future date.

When I was younger, I was completely certain of my expiration date. That the lifestyle I had chosen and the way I had chosen to be would most assuredly result in my life being over by the time I was thirty-five. So I squeezed life from every day. And lived in the hollow agony of some of those choices.
In the stillness, as if the world itself was hushed, waiting for my next choice. In the terrorizing beauty of living as if tomorrow was, at best, a distant horizon. Both inevitable and irrelevant.

Some of this is the waiting for a future. Some of this is the sheer uncertainty of life. Knowing that I’m, at most, one bad month from terrible consequences. Of losing everything I have gained.

And maybe that is the crux. I have something other than my life to lose. And truthfully I never put much value on that. So in oblivion I was free.

And so I sleep. And make money and work at making money. And play games to make money. Because, our world requires, it. Money for security. Money for freedom. Money for choices. Money for shelter. Money for food. Money for medicine. Money to help others. Money and money and money.

Trapped by the choices past me made. Living in the moment. As if tomorrow didn’t matter. Present me wants to yell at past me and say, “You idiot! You survive. With a few simple choices, you can make your future easy. A few less things now will secure a future that you cannot imagine. The one where you aren’t trapped. Where your cage is balsa and you can break it at any time.”

But I can’t do that. So I try to do that in the wreckage of past me. Try to shed the habits of spending money to make my day suck less. Try to invest and save. Try to pay off this shrinking mountain of debt.
And lament that my art. And my choices, all come down to money. Trading minutes of my life in exchange for the ability to live another day in the hopes that tomorrow I’ll be free.

The world is backwards and we have only ourselves to blame.

Fog descends when pressure fades

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Can it be called writers block if the words flow easily but tepid and sluggish. Feeling like syllables instead of the flutter of butterfly wings against lips. No pouring of life onto pensive page, instead just the slow chime of waiting. Of being dragged down into sleep, again and again

Pawns of a waking dream

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There was a time when I thought I could teach the world what it could be
Thought that shaping words and connecting thoughtss
Invoking emotions and making manifest not just desire but forming reality to will
Would somehow resonate and works its way beyond my borders
Would transform those it touched and somehow reshape a world dying

As days and years passed
I gave up on those thoughts that bloomed as a redolent flower which strutted and strived
Glitzy and hollow
Grip slowly relinquished as new life broke the mold of what was making me into what would be
And in the chrysalis of new beginning
A blow to the heart set me spinning away from one path as time and history rewrote itself
And I
At junction
At crux
Was cast out
Flotsam on the river of causality
Chrysalis hardens to shell
And denied outward growth
The only way out became down
Deep through pain and loathing
Into depression which had always nibbled at the edges
And now gloried in being centerpiece for a captive audience
Deeper
Core out each piece
And discern crystal or flaw
Raw and wriggling
Pink remora leaving behind fresh wounds but dying alone on the cold pavement
Each passing year a broken memory until tattered cataclysm in shredded throat torn again and again
feeling as blood and pressured release
Scream frequency finding harmonic resonance
In shell long past useful
And burst outward infecting
Killing what it touched
And still a bit remained
A blade sheathed beneath bone
A weapon of times long gone
Master no more and wielded wild-eyed
Agony as all walls fall and what was out caresses newly formed akin
Until pleasure and pain are just two ways of speaking and both hold no discernable sway over the other
Instead, both in their firmament
Gods bestride a world of flesh
And I mistress and master
Betrayed broken and each broken rib pierced breath
Imperceptibly easier

Until anew
A person looks out
Wondering at a world they didn’t live through
A time traveler taking the longest route through blindness to arrive in a fight that cannot be one
With coping skills that say to take a simple action
One that heart and eyes know will be unforgivable but effective
Begging anyone willing to give permission for the monster inside
Blade buried in bone
To be let free
Afraid to be allowed to be
And watching as it all burns
Silence let’s go its grip
A wave forms seeking cross and disruption
Seeking amplitude match
And growth
Seeking
Voice to voice
Until all of us
Throats raw and bleeding
In notes crystalline from cores of reflected shatters
Speak
Sleepers
Wake!

I missed a post.

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It occurs to me that I missed a post on Monday. For the first time in more than 3 years…

On the one hand, I can justify it by saying that yesterday was a crazy day and I stopped at the end and just passed out.

On the other, I have to decide if that is just a bullshit excuse. If being tired and busy excuses a failure of honor. Of a promise made.

And I have to say, it does not.

That may seem harsh. That lapses occur and that things sometimes fall apart.

But

The reality is that I thought several times yesterday of writing or posting something and I chose not to.

We make time for the things that matter to us.
Fundamentally, that is what this is.
While my writing matters, it is the interaction with others that I miss. And my page has become a ghost town of likes thrown out like flowers. And I sit by the passing parade, alone.

I’m more connected now than I have ever been and yet I feel so alone. I feel like I’m just getting my feet as those that I love are moving into new phases. And leaving me behind.

And I feel no jealousy for them…but I do feel this dull ache of everything changing and being lost in the background.

A fallen leaf, once part of the community, drifting down, away from succor into the dying light of autumn.

Evolution by jerks

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How can blindness be a choice? To disregard reality in favor of the half truth happy and defend that position. Never seeing others experiences, never seeing others. Living in that echo chamber. Fed scraps of food coated and spun into full meals. Mostly consisting of false nutritional content. Selective memory of the shining past. Like it was a wonder of enlightenment instead of the brutish truth.

We are flawed liars. Picking only those truth which most suit our narrative. Resisting any deviation from the TRUTH. As if truth did not slither and shift as new facts are gained. As if, from minute to minute, reality itself didn’t change.

People quote, “The only constant is change,” while forcing their eyes closed and covering their ears.
And when confronted with a different opinion, stamp their feet and throw a tantrum.

A world full of people unwilling to see. Unwilling to hear. Unless forced to. How do we survive our own willful ignorance? I’m not sure that we will.