how to fear correctly: August 2003 Archives

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.