Recently in how to fear correctly Category

i was something to say, made of my own language.

i just don't know what it was. i cannot remember.

ever discover inconsistencies in your own story? key facts in a major event memory, cleverly falsified, for no reason whatsoever?

i won the schoolwide spelling bee when i was ten. it took place in the office, over the intercom. i remember, i remember so clearly, the ending. it was down to me and a seventh grader. they gave him complexion. he blew it. i spelled it. i had to spell one more word. it was easy. it was chicken.

as i tell you this, i see it, i hear it, i feel it. painfully shy child speaking into a microphone broadcasting live into every classroom in the entire school, you don't forget that special kind of terror, like slipping gears into this unknown overdrive and the world turns into a blur around a single point of focus. this is my memory, an audio-visual recording of whole awareness at the time: the word, the microphone, my own voice. i remember being asked to spell chicken, and spelling chicken. i remember.

the word was poultry. i came across the newspaper article decades later, while sorting through one of my packratty boxes. i *remembered* spelling chicken. clearly. i told that story many times. from memory. from a vivid, multimedia production of a memory.

which my mind had edited. seamlessly, inserting a plausible but incorrect substitute, overwriting the original. and even now, even knowing that this editing took place, i cannot for the life of me play back the memory with the correct word.

i remember chicken.

if the article had been incorrect, i would have spotted that at the time, when the memory was fresh and unadulterated. trust me, *that* i would have remembered. there's nothing a nerdy know-it-all kid loves better than correcting grownup's mistakes.

i was something to say, made of my own mythology, and whatever it was, i should not call it forgotten.

it is all revisionist history. all of it.

what are words without feeling? and i cannot feel a thing. a little itchy maybe, a little ache around the edges, that's about it. i can't even take fucking pictures. i look at things that once would have tickled my eyes excited and think, and this is a direct quote, "eh."

it is a quiet life, narrated reckless jaded in a nicotine whisper.

yesterday i watched a cat die. peaceful in her owner's arms. relieved of a burdensome existence, had nature taken its course it might have taken her a week or more to finish starving herself out of misery. still.

have you ever watched eyes die?

i almost said 'avoid it if at all possible' then decided against it. it's a terrible thing, and important. it makes a difference.

which eventually will help serve to illustrate something in an entirely different light, when the time's right & the words occur.

· · · · · · · · · · · ·
something touched me spoke to me passed through me ghostly, something, maybe in music i've been living in lately maybe something less substantive, something blended in my blood a byproduct of breathing in this chilled air (why is it cold everywhere i go?) something like a future regret anticipated perhaps a fleeting feeling foreshadowed maybe, an eventual sadness that will of course happen in passing, something suggesting that i will miss this when i let it go.

if this sounds vague mild bland well then i've missed my mark. it's an overwhelming thing, maybe the most intense thing of all things in the past, it will be something, this feeling i think i'll feel. it will be the thing that completes my past, come to think of it. and i'm not sure if it should or could be different but it has me all wishful wistful wondering if there's any way to change it if it's too late or if it has always been an impossible thing.

i think it could be different / i don't think it will be / i can't tell you why.

· · · · · · · · · · · ·
i was right / i was wrong / i will soon

one from the vaults:
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·

strange freedom. it burns.

everything does choking on the ashes of our apathy burning is what bodies do to live a calorie is the amount of energy it takes to raise one litre of water by one degree celsius the energy is released during the burning.

perfectly normal then.
· · ·
consumed in this conflagration realization release it let it go let it burn i shook so fucking hard inside remaining motionless controlled on the surface it felt like liquefaction until it passed leaving me in this peaceful unrest

& i grieved & yes i cried, against all my will my eyes filled secret silent undetected except one little spill, flicked it away casually kept it perfectly to my self mine and mine alone

· · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
i'm much better now

crashed at chris's last night after doing additional mad drastic things to my hair. fell asleep woke up to him telling me his mom was out walking lost control of the walker fell backwards hit her head on the sidewalk they think it's bad.

he went into the bathroom and my sleepsoaked brain slowly slowly processed this information factoring in the facts she's six foot tall has bad knees would fall straight back. distance velocity at impact age physical condition bone density existing neurological issues ... i got up. he came out of the bathroom i asked to make sure: 'on the sidewalk?'

he said yes.
on the sidewalk.

we have to go trick-or-treat now, kurtwood and i.

bottle the first:
pain to ease the pain, burning to ease the searing, shivers to the illusion of warmth. if i had any fucking guts at all i'd take a needle no maybe that wouldn't be enough a scalpel but i don't have a scalpel - exacto knife? and i'd release the pressure. but i cannot bring myself to make the incision into perhaps the worst square centimeter of inflammed tissue ever to exist on my body. pain would ease the pain, but the best pain i can manage at this juncture is seventy proof and burns like peach.

bottle the second:
pain = answer. used to lick my lips too much. chapped cracked sore as hell and unattractive oh yeah fancy ugly, not just plain. insert large stainless steel barbell in tongue. walk out into the night floating on the pain and feel the tongue try to make a move on the lips. denied, courtesy of pain. dear b.f. skinner, you were right about everything, love, me.

there is no third bottle:
they were tiny bottles of course. to be honest i still struggle with bottle the second, i am not the wild irish alcoholic i once was. however who and what i am is mostly the result of various answers involving pain. punishment. rewards i take first undeserving even knowing i will turn on my self after. cycle circles around comes to rest like a knife at the base of the throat, thin line of shimmering red suggesting the worst yet to come. i do not know whether or not i ought to be struggling.

there is another answer. it involves pleasure. i will not ask.

i don't have a point. it's only a toothache.

I can't go out no more.
There's a man by the door
in a raincoat
smoking a cigarette

i have such a complicated relationship with reality, which is why i spend so much time here, in the internet. when i venture forth into meatspace, i am so easily overwhelmed by the normalcy i perceive. sitting outside the school yesterday afternoon as other mommies and daddies gathered, even though i blend in well and you can't tell, i still felt this intense difference between myself and everyone else. times like these i am seized by this fierce wondering, this what if i had grown up when i was supposed to and led a responsible existence, what if i had settled into the world as opposed to flipping and twisting and thrashing through it as if i'd been washed ashore here, drowning in this unfamiliar atmosphere, what if i'd behaved like i was born here and belonged?

the difference isn't visible to the ordinary eye but i am not feeling it with my eyes, i sense it in the deepest layer of my skin. and i sit quietly wearing my awareness thinking wondering what it would be like not knowing what i know, not having gone where i have and not now being someone who is from where i've been.

i wonder if they appreciate the quality of their stress. i wonder if they realize how luxurious it is, having ordinary middleclass problems. i wonder if they have any idea, any at all. and why should they? and why do my thoughts take this tone? there is no unfairness here between us, we are merely the results of our different decisions.

and can't help it this is the sort of thought process that brings the litany of regrets rolling like credits across my perspective. doesn't obscure anything that isn't indistinct already in my watery eyes, but serious selfpity is never about the vision, is it? it isn't. and in this case, the introspection concludes with a few words from one of the more bitter aspects of my self, spoken in a voice one might mistake for reason: this is not unfairness. you had your chances, you made your choices, your life is your own ... here the reason ends, and the abuse begins, which makes this as good a place as any to stop all this whining, doesn't it? it does.

* * * * * * *
what a lot of words that was, when all i really had to say was this: i have reclusive tendencies, because i am weird and i have many issues and complexes as a result.

i often wish for the ability to reliably explain my self and have that work out as in message received. but no. it's always a process of fits and starts, of mistakes and retractions, of reacting to reactions that i didn't expect because the reactions reflect something i didn't mean to say in the first place. it's better with time to think, to compose, but even then, even if i take hours editing and clarifying and distilling the essesnces it's still like beaming a greeting into an alien civilization and it turns out 'greetings from earth nice to meet you' translates phonetically into the equivalent of 'your mother fucks transients for a couple swigs of night train'.

so i suppose the upside is when i'm in fullon inspired mode and not writing anything directly to anyone just expressing things generally, there is this abstract feel about it and that's been called poetic, which i've always found odd since to me it's just the most basic journalism, just me reporting the facts as i see 'em, as plain and direct as i can manage.

and there is so much more than i can say, since it must be said with these words which are of course defined by other words and all of this is contained within flat spaces, screens and pages, while these things i have to express possess additional dimensions, depth and extent that is not available within this thing we call language. sometimes i think i should have gone into physics instead, i have ideas like mulitdimensional arrays plotted in curved spacetime and illustrated in terms of spectral frequencies. i understand these things by the way they displace the living energy within me, in fact this phenomenon is the source of many things i perceive and cannot explain, you might call it an extra sense, though it isn't extraneous at all. and i can be on fire vivid eloquent and describe what i envision to perfection, and it is received as an abstraction from almost any other perspective, a symbol without a referent.

and you know, i can't complain. in the course of trying to explain i've found a truth, that is, i wouldn't have it any other way.

something in what i just attempted to express has resonance in this, in a way, not one i can explain:

what it is

there's a purpose, there's a goal,
there's a virtuos, and immoral,
there's a reason for all of this,
and I don't know what it is

I am one, and plural too,
I accept them but they exclude,
I could make sense of all of this,
but I don't know what it is

the seeds of inspiration never germinated in my mind,
the beacon of awakening is somewhere that I can't find, so
I don't know what it is

there's a beginning, and there's an end,
there's a climax, some would contend,
there's a way to signify this,
but I don't know what it is

~greg graffin, bad religion

the day drifts down mean to its own end and bitterly settles into memory. i drift into this dazed sense of ennui punctuated by spikes of fight or flight like whitehot sparks. and more and more i find i'm defined by the pinholes this leaves burnt into my consciousness, and yes there is a pattern, a loop slowly closing in on itself. and what am i doing while being undone by some recursive reference? well, at the moment, not a fucking thing. to calculate why, you would need some numbers, as in years spent relentless against this error, raised to the power of all the things i lost in the process divided by the things that passed by while i was incapacitated by the futility. divide the answer by the sum of my past, then subtract the resulting percentage from what i have left of this life, and maybe you'll understand when i say i'd rather accept this decaying orbit and its inevitably messy ending than waste any more of my self struggling against it.

i just want less loss.

i used to carry this around with me in a notebook, long lost. most of it i'd memorized, but i needed the whole thing, so i ordered a 99¢ copy of 'the franchise' by peter gent (a novel about football, same author as north dallas forty, which i also read) just for this.