The world is like a smashed hourglass with mirror shards for sand. A busted reality where time flows faster and slower at whim and where you see yourself and your past and your future reflected in moments that can never be assembled in a proper pattern.
Which is all very histrionic and maybe works as an analogy only when you are three whiskeys in. Which I am not, but I still think that is where it belongs.
My day was full. I did what I needed to do, I enjoyed bits of it, I was challenged by bits of it. I survived the whole of it. I didn't feel completely attached to it. Or perhaps I was in the moment often enough that I don't have a litany of thoughts here at the end of the day.
My mind is quiet. The jobs have been done and the tasks completed. All manners of punctuation has been attached and found satisfactory. And I worry about that. Perhaps it is because I need something to worry about, creating phantoms from every shadow to add dramatic counterpoints to a life lived so like every other. Or perhaps the alarm bells are clanging silently somewhere and their sound will only grow until I understand, too late, that there was an issue.
Or perhaps I am simply not good at settling for satisfactory. But if every day was fantastic and amazing all of my limbs would fall off from the force of all the gesticulating.
As I leave the day behind and move forward to the next, I imagine a discombobulated incongruous version of myself, floating with all of the bits gathered in a swirling cloud around my head, like the nucleus of an atom. And my arms and legs and torso electrons zipping about, collecting and processing energy, functioning and doing with only vague direction from the brain.
I can feel a warmth growing. A light. Somewhere in my life. I am planting seeds and watching the soil. And I fear and worry. Because I would rather be cautious and sad then rash and hurtful.
But what I really want is to be dynamic and helpful and wonderful and amazing. Like I know I can be.
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
Entry 15 - September 4, 2012
Speaking is the fastest form of communication. And that makes it the most prone to error. Chiseling a message into stone is probably the slowest, and the place where an error lasts the longest. Or so I assume. I only thought about it for a little while and then I typed it out. Writing resides somewhere in the middle, a ponderous form of communication that also can be done flippantly and swiftly.
Writing is about making choices, about revising and refining. It is about bringing a toolkit of craft built over the years and applying the contents to a problem. Writing can be wonderful, writing can be profound, writing can be profane and urbane and terrible and low and pointless. Writing can be what it is crafted to be.
I'm working on making changes in life. The kind of changes that are supposed to be permanent and positive. The kind of changes that I know will be painful and wonderful and temporary and permanent. Because change is usually all of those things. If you see the world as a long process of constant change it becomes easy to ignore the chapters and the verses that define who we were at a certain time. And if you ignore the content of each sentence then you ignore the meaning of the whole story.
It is an argument I have made before and an argument I will make again.
For tonight I am stamping my foot into the dust and saying that the things I did today mattered. The things that I have said today mattered. And that if I stomp in the same spot often enough then I stop just saying and start carving.
Whether or not I will leave behind a litany of errors is for the future to decide. My chapter and verse will be in the attempt not to do so.
Writing is about making choices, about revising and refining. It is about bringing a toolkit of craft built over the years and applying the contents to a problem. Writing can be wonderful, writing can be profound, writing can be profane and urbane and terrible and low and pointless. Writing can be what it is crafted to be.
I'm working on making changes in life. The kind of changes that are supposed to be permanent and positive. The kind of changes that I know will be painful and wonderful and temporary and permanent. Because change is usually all of those things. If you see the world as a long process of constant change it becomes easy to ignore the chapters and the verses that define who we were at a certain time. And if you ignore the content of each sentence then you ignore the meaning of the whole story.
It is an argument I have made before and an argument I will make again.
For tonight I am stamping my foot into the dust and saying that the things I did today mattered. The things that I have said today mattered. And that if I stomp in the same spot often enough then I stop just saying and start carving.
Whether or not I will leave behind a litany of errors is for the future to decide. My chapter and verse will be in the attempt not to do so.
Friday, June 4, 2010
Entry 14 June 4, 2010
Beware the discovery of lack. Beware the idle time you create for yourself that leaves you able to see what was not there. Beware what you will do to yourself, to your life, to others to fill that sudden and deep void.
I warn you about these things even as I plummet. I should have known not to open it up. Should have seen the signs.
Should write less cryptically.
I eschew that everyone needs a perfect person in their life. Some other of some significance that gives life meaning. Drivel. But everyone needs others. Non-descript others that we will hang significance upon at whim. We are never certain where they enter and we mourn their passing and bemoan their exits from the scene. We are sentimental and we need to make everything mean something.
Everything already has an inherent meaning. A meaning that does bend to the whim of positive or negative thinking. But we can invest a lot of ourselves into the possibilities and the certainties (presumed) and we can dash ourselves upon the rocks of hope.
Buddhism expresses a need to purge hope. Which is a form of mistranslation. They are not anti-hope. They are anti-miserable-unstoppable-unattainable-want. To hope is to believe that tomorrow holds something worth working towards, worth staying alive for, worth being around to see. AMUUW (I'm not typing the hyphenated phrase another 10 times) is about greed and a refusal to accept. It is selfish and beyond reason and has no place in a world or a society. AMUUW is a sense of entitlement. And we all know what happens when you give in to a sense of entitlement.
So, for my life I have found myself suddenly remembering what it is to have something outside of my solipsistic nonsense. To see myself through the eyes of another. To think of myself not as a single unit against the world but as a part of a continuum and a whole.
As one person might have put it, a circle. But I'm going to continue to be angry at her and declare circles a bad philosophy without a concrete vector or any sense of temporal space. Fie on them!
I warn you about these things even as I plummet. I should have known not to open it up. Should have seen the signs.
Should write less cryptically.
I eschew that everyone needs a perfect person in their life. Some other of some significance that gives life meaning. Drivel. But everyone needs others. Non-descript others that we will hang significance upon at whim. We are never certain where they enter and we mourn their passing and bemoan their exits from the scene. We are sentimental and we need to make everything mean something.
Everything already has an inherent meaning. A meaning that does bend to the whim of positive or negative thinking. But we can invest a lot of ourselves into the possibilities and the certainties (presumed) and we can dash ourselves upon the rocks of hope.
Buddhism expresses a need to purge hope. Which is a form of mistranslation. They are not anti-hope. They are anti-miserable-unstoppable-unattainable-want. To hope is to believe that tomorrow holds something worth working towards, worth staying alive for, worth being around to see. AMUUW (I'm not typing the hyphenated phrase another 10 times) is about greed and a refusal to accept. It is selfish and beyond reason and has no place in a world or a society. AMUUW is a sense of entitlement. And we all know what happens when you give in to a sense of entitlement.
So, for my life I have found myself suddenly remembering what it is to have something outside of my solipsistic nonsense. To see myself through the eyes of another. To think of myself not as a single unit against the world but as a part of a continuum and a whole.
As one person might have put it, a circle. But I'm going to continue to be angry at her and declare circles a bad philosophy without a concrete vector or any sense of temporal space. Fie on them!
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Entry 13 January 31, 2010
One of the little understood facets of the night is how quickly it flees from you. The world is not a place split in half, if anything it is split in thirds and the night only occupies one of those thirds. So it is not surprising to see the days come and go and the nights to pass by in a haze and a flash.
So here I am, haven't posted in over two months. Which is not say I have not been up late at night, that I have not stood on my porch and looked out at the city lights, the night sky, the dark haze that permeates all aspects of life. I have been out there from time to time. I have stared into the dusk and the dawn.
I have had profound thoughts. I have forgotten profound thoughts.
But pith is a trick of the light and the shadows know better. But the shadows also know enough to keep their heads down and murmur and not raise a stir about how pith looks like an idiot when he's not on.
There is a quiet at night, an empty head-space that gives thoughts a place to reverberate and speak up and shout and fret without worry that the light of day will make them feel small and weak. The night is a time of strength for the smallest of things. Insects teem, star light shines down, dreams are given life and time. Night is the time of inner creation, a time to produce intangibles.
A place to hide from certain harsh lies told in the day. A place to let your eyes close and that feeling of exhaustion and bustled hopelessness to drip from your fingers like a warm rain.
The night is a silent and constant friend that will always be waiting for you at the end of the light, a darkness filled with more warmth then anything the sun has to offer.
And it will go away and it will return.
Just like you.
So here I am, haven't posted in over two months. Which is not say I have not been up late at night, that I have not stood on my porch and looked out at the city lights, the night sky, the dark haze that permeates all aspects of life. I have been out there from time to time. I have stared into the dusk and the dawn.
I have had profound thoughts. I have forgotten profound thoughts.
But pith is a trick of the light and the shadows know better. But the shadows also know enough to keep their heads down and murmur and not raise a stir about how pith looks like an idiot when he's not on.
There is a quiet at night, an empty head-space that gives thoughts a place to reverberate and speak up and shout and fret without worry that the light of day will make them feel small and weak. The night is a time of strength for the smallest of things. Insects teem, star light shines down, dreams are given life and time. Night is the time of inner creation, a time to produce intangibles.
A place to hide from certain harsh lies told in the day. A place to let your eyes close and that feeling of exhaustion and bustled hopelessness to drip from your fingers like a warm rain.
The night is a silent and constant friend that will always be waiting for you at the end of the light, a darkness filled with more warmth then anything the sun has to offer.
And it will go away and it will return.
Just like you.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Entry 12 November 22, 2009
Always be true to yourself.
It is a simple phrase and one that has been uttered a few million billion times by this point. It comes in different flavors and dialects depending on the day, but the message is carried through the same way, piss poorly unless you are the one saying it.
And you will say it, usually after you have accepted it as fact and are trying to pass it along to the next person, who, like you, will ignore it until suddenly it becomes a thing of Truth.
A Thing of Truth. A beast with an identity and a meaning so far outside of the simplicity of words and communication that it looms and thunders as it is said. Internally, usually, nothing changes much in the face of the general rest of the world, but internally the resounding ring can last for minutes to hours.
Always be true to yourself. Be who you are. Do what you do. Don't deny the world your extra greatness. All of that.
I have spent most of the day in a slump, unable to properly focus, eating and shitting and drinking the day away hour after torturous hour, wondering why it was that I could have a whole day and feel no use for it. Of course, in that, I was terrified of the idea of tomorrow and as tomorrow looms only a few minutes in front of me I am finally at a sense of peace and excitement, soon it will be a new day and I will tackle it at the knees in a display of poor sportsmanship and avant gesticulation.
That's just who I am now.
But as for today and its many and varied horrors, to thy own self be true. I did not write first thing in the morning. I gave myself a pass, thinking I was being nice, thinking I needed the break. I shot myself in the metaphorical foot. I don't write to work, I do not write to live. I live to write. I am not actually getting anywhere, not actually moving through the day until I write.
That's just who I am now.
It is a simple phrase and one that has been uttered a few million billion times by this point. It comes in different flavors and dialects depending on the day, but the message is carried through the same way, piss poorly unless you are the one saying it.
And you will say it, usually after you have accepted it as fact and are trying to pass it along to the next person, who, like you, will ignore it until suddenly it becomes a thing of Truth.
A Thing of Truth. A beast with an identity and a meaning so far outside of the simplicity of words and communication that it looms and thunders as it is said. Internally, usually, nothing changes much in the face of the general rest of the world, but internally the resounding ring can last for minutes to hours.
Always be true to yourself. Be who you are. Do what you do. Don't deny the world your extra greatness. All of that.
I have spent most of the day in a slump, unable to properly focus, eating and shitting and drinking the day away hour after torturous hour, wondering why it was that I could have a whole day and feel no use for it. Of course, in that, I was terrified of the idea of tomorrow and as tomorrow looms only a few minutes in front of me I am finally at a sense of peace and excitement, soon it will be a new day and I will tackle it at the knees in a display of poor sportsmanship and avant gesticulation.
That's just who I am now.
But as for today and its many and varied horrors, to thy own self be true. I did not write first thing in the morning. I gave myself a pass, thinking I was being nice, thinking I needed the break. I shot myself in the metaphorical foot. I don't write to work, I do not write to live. I live to write. I am not actually getting anywhere, not actually moving through the day until I write.
That's just who I am now.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Entry 11 November 15, 2009
I somehow missed October altogether. Which is an odd thing to say, given that I was around this October. Conscious and aware. Not hidden in the depths of myself and the deep and unsettling pool that I sometimes manage to sink into. I have lost four of the last seven Octobers to a depression that works like a waking dream. Everything is fuzzy and indistinct. Nothing seems to matter and my control over the situations I find myself in is loose, easily changeable and in the end a matter of particular memory and perception.
Which is a word-heavy way to say that I do poorly with a from of seasonal depression. Which is also a way of saying that I am doing better in life and don't actually know how to deal with it. Associates congratulate me on my accomplishments and I don't feel great. I feel contempt and anger at their kindness. I see a duplicity behind each mention of my improved state. They don't mean anything by it, they are not accusing me of anything. But I reach into myself and pull out all of these bitter black chunks of dead that lurk inside.
This is not a journal of despair, this is a journal of hope and the quiet thoughts that occur in the evening when the sun is gone and the stars shine and the moon gives us its presence. I mention these things not because I want to say that I am depressed or really to remind myself that I once was. I'm just thinking out loud. Poking at something I cannot otherwise explain. There is a danger within to fail. We are all a collection of impulses and outcomes and I can't seem to convince myself to add up the figures each time instead of simply guessing the answer from the knowledge that I have been in the general area before.
Which is a lot of long winded hooey.
It is late, and I am tired, as great men are heard to say. I admit that this is not what I intended this journal for and I hope to do better in the next go-round. But I am proud to have been here to share what I can with those who will seek it out. The need for humans to write and send their private thoughts into the digital void is silly to me. Do we expect answers to questions, do we expect someone to care and to reach out? Or is it simply a matter of producing work and placing it where I am accountable, where I can't so easily take it back, where it becomes hard to admit that I did not say that or feel that at one time or another.
I'm asking the rhetoricals here, so it is obviously the latter. But it had to be said.
Which is a word-heavy way to say that I do poorly with a from of seasonal depression. Which is also a way of saying that I am doing better in life and don't actually know how to deal with it. Associates congratulate me on my accomplishments and I don't feel great. I feel contempt and anger at their kindness. I see a duplicity behind each mention of my improved state. They don't mean anything by it, they are not accusing me of anything. But I reach into myself and pull out all of these bitter black chunks of dead that lurk inside.
This is not a journal of despair, this is a journal of hope and the quiet thoughts that occur in the evening when the sun is gone and the stars shine and the moon gives us its presence. I mention these things not because I want to say that I am depressed or really to remind myself that I once was. I'm just thinking out loud. Poking at something I cannot otherwise explain. There is a danger within to fail. We are all a collection of impulses and outcomes and I can't seem to convince myself to add up the figures each time instead of simply guessing the answer from the knowledge that I have been in the general area before.
Which is a lot of long winded hooey.
It is late, and I am tired, as great men are heard to say. I admit that this is not what I intended this journal for and I hope to do better in the next go-round. But I am proud to have been here to share what I can with those who will seek it out. The need for humans to write and send their private thoughts into the digital void is silly to me. Do we expect answers to questions, do we expect someone to care and to reach out? Or is it simply a matter of producing work and placing it where I am accountable, where I can't so easily take it back, where it becomes hard to admit that I did not say that or feel that at one time or another.
I'm asking the rhetoricals here, so it is obviously the latter. But it had to be said.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Entry 10 September 28, 2009
I am weak of late. Sure, there was a bout with an actual illness. Fires in the local area caused sinus pressure that caused insomnia that caused sinus infection that resulted in three days of drifty drousing. But more than that there has been a complete lack of focus in the things that I have been doing.
As they say, out of danger, out of work.
I'm not sure anyone says that. But someone should. It is so much easier to get on and about life and the important things in life when you feel pressured and afraid of what will happen if you don't. But eventually you will lose focus and start doing whatever to pass the time and fill the void in your life left by not spending nearly enough time doing what is important.
As always I know in my head and in my heart what I want and the path I must take to get there. Which in no way stops me from taking the wrong and stupid paths because it is late, and I am tired.
I harp on people being too weak and simple for their, or anyone else's, good rather often. But for all that bravado and nay saying I am aware that it takes too much effort to be anything but. And I will not fault people for being unable to keep up the effort necessary to be decent.
It isn't just exhausting but outright haunting.
And to sleep one must be free of worry, and to be truly awake one must be constantly full of it. So we cycle daily between having the energy to make a difference and being too beaten down to care.
And I'm not sure we could function any other way.
As they say, out of danger, out of work.
I'm not sure anyone says that. But someone should. It is so much easier to get on and about life and the important things in life when you feel pressured and afraid of what will happen if you don't. But eventually you will lose focus and start doing whatever to pass the time and fill the void in your life left by not spending nearly enough time doing what is important.
As always I know in my head and in my heart what I want and the path I must take to get there. Which in no way stops me from taking the wrong and stupid paths because it is late, and I am tired.
I harp on people being too weak and simple for their, or anyone else's, good rather often. But for all that bravado and nay saying I am aware that it takes too much effort to be anything but. And I will not fault people for being unable to keep up the effort necessary to be decent.
It isn't just exhausting but outright haunting.
And to sleep one must be free of worry, and to be truly awake one must be constantly full of it. So we cycle daily between having the energy to make a difference and being too beaten down to care.
And I'm not sure we could function any other way.
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