Blush Writes a Blog

Trying to Keep Warm

2012-01-11T15:10:00.000-08:00

It's afternoon, far too late to start anything.
I am just trying to keep warm. I have retreated upstairs, because there is better insulation up here.
I'm in the same spot where I was a year and seven days ago, only now I actually live here, pay rent and everything. Well, there's other stuff too. At the risk of this seeming entirely like a diary entry instead of a day-in-the-life, I totally have a rad girlfriend now. Very much in love.
At any rate, its pretty cold up here too, not really much warmer than downstairs, where I had intended to sequester myself for some typing. No one uses the living room, and it hadn't really occurred to me but this is likely due to how goddam cold it is in there.
So, upstairs here, I'm not exactly alone tho. My housemate is puttering around with his science experiment. I would go into further detail but I'm fairly certain its totally illegal, and therefore, entirely none of my business.
My ladyfriend is in the kitchen having a boisterous phone conversation with an old friend. I can hear her laughing from here. There is no secluded place in this house where I can be alone. This is unfortunate but not entirely unexpected.
Too much noise, sound, activity, it's a little hard to think, let alone compose thoughts into anything coherent.
Like I said, I'm in the same place as a year and seven days ago, trying to start up and complete a story. It's not off to a running start. This one is to be much longer, if not more involved, and I'm on a pretty tight timeframe.
I have a deadline.
My ladyfriend is excited because, like many industrious women, she loves to give men things to do. Making schedules and chore lists is like her favorite thing. Usually she does this for herself, because I am a profoundly lazy man who does chores as needed, not by assignment. If the dishes in the sink are not bothering me, I will not clean them. If my carpets are not dusty, I will not vacuum. She will vacuum and do dishes and do laundry according to her list, whether its strictly necessary or not. For her, a thing's being listed and prioritized is reason enough.
I'd like to say that my laziness is an outgrowth of something profound (thus, profoundly lazy) like a deeply rooted acceptance of the beauty of existence for its own sake, or a kind of transcendental naturalism that celebrates the simple act of being, or perhaps merely a radical self-acceptance that requires very little of me to feel okay about myself.
Could also be your basic perversion: fuck your chores, your alarm clocks, and your bullshit. I'm a grown ass man and I'll do what the fuck I please.
However, novels do not get written this way. Well, perhaps the 'do what the fuck I please' part is needed, but a man has got to have some kind of structure to his life, and nothing good was ever built or created that didn't have some sort of structure to it.
Long and short, I have to start getting super busy right now. I do not have 100% confidence in this project. It's been over a year since I finished a story and I'm not feeling very creative. I have a long list of excuses and distractions to ignore. There are, in point of fact, better things I could be doing with my life.
But the fact is that I have enough money in the bank and just enough motivation and just enough time to see it through, and this, I guess, is the other side of the careful planning argument. Sometimes you don't have time for a good plan, or any plan, sometimes a schedule is only going to misarrange your priorities (misarrange is a new word... you're welcome, english language) because sometimes, by God, you've got so much in the way of resources and you just realize what's possible.
Discipline and rigor and set schedules and good habits will have to come later, as we go. Right now, what I have is a bunch of factors that add up to one opportunity, so why not, right?
Figure I got about a month, maybe two before I must go back to gainful employment and refill the coffers for the next ill-advised adventure, whether is the action-go places-do stuff adventure or the test your limits-do something for yourself type adventure.
I suppose then that that's about enough of this. I gotta get to some serious typing...
Something tells me it wont be done up here under this sleeping bag reclined on this futon.
I need coffee and smokes... Possibly drugs...
-blush

It's Cold Out There

2011-01-04T03:36:00.000-08:00

Damn cold outside.
Twelve degrees.
I'm in Reno (still) for the long New Years celebration. Folk came in from all over, and most are gone by now, and most of who's left will be leaving tomorrow. It has been days of drinking and laughs and just being around this bizarre little family I've got.
I really hesitate to use the word 'family'. I have a family. These people are not related to me, but I do love them just the same.
It's like almost four in the morning and I'm in the TV room of this old house, and they are scattered on every couch around me, snoring over the tapping of the keys.
I haven't typed in days, and even tho I'm sure someone is lying awake in the dark profoundly kept awake by this sound, there is nowhere else and I just have to do some typing.
I was just outside for a smoke, which is how I know how very cold it is. It's been snowing here.
Five in the morning on the first day of 2011 I saw snow falling for the first time in years. Ordinarily, I am against snow, both philosophically and morally, but it can be awful pretty. Ordinarily, the cold only saps my strength and will, it annoys me in its persistence, I can never seem to have enough layers and the only thing that does to defeat cold is fire. Here I must settle for shelter, but its been a few days and enough time alone with anything and I suppose I'll get used to it. Just now it was somehow soothing. So quiet, serene, some deeper level of night time.
I am the only person awake in this house...
So, stupid story time.
This isn't going to be profound or probly even worth the time.
We watched movies instead of drinking ourselves stupid tonite. One of them was Mallrats.
I love anything with Jay and Silent Bob. Years ago, I suppose close to a decade now, it was a different set of friends, but I did love them just the same, and we would pile up in someone's living room to watch Kevin Smith movies together.
Seeing Mallrats again reminded me of those times. Strange, since its not exactly a masterpiece, but it connected me to something that's passed. I haven't thought about the old days in a while. Remembering those times it seemed we would always be together, always know one another. Now, of course, all the old crew is scattered. They've all moved on to whole other lives, far away with careers or marriages or children.
I remember back in those days, I had this notion that eventually, no matter how it seemed, it would just be me.
So, here it is twelve degrees in Reno, and none of those people are here.
And here I am out in the blistering still cold, smoking a cigarette in silence, separated from all those people who meant so much to me.
Of course I still know them. I see them when I can. But it will never be like it was again.
I have to wonder.
What of these people around me now?
Very important, old man, to hold onto these things. Do not let them simply fall away. It is the stuff of life, the parts that matter. Even if it hurts, this will pass and it will only have meaning within you, the memories you hold and the person that they've made you into.
Eventually, old man, it will be just you.
But not today.
Not yet.
Out in the freezing cold you can still turn back to the perfectly good shelter, warmth, and comfort that's available. You have a little more time with the people you love, whoever they are right now.
You will have a few more chances yet.
Do try not to waste them.
A good time for warmth and rest now.
goodnite
-blush

The Rain Ceased!

2010-12-22T12:22:00.000-08:00

Woke up today and for the first time in a week no rain!
Don't let the exclamation point fool you, I wasn't really that excited. Still, there's a clumsy metaphor there. Solstice ends and blam, rain vanishes. Word is there's an even bigger storm rolling in for the weekend, but today, even tho its not sunny, at least it's dry.
Got a late start today. Cat got into my room around six am and snuggled up, so I ended up sleeping in. Finally booted her so I could smoke cigarettes in here.
It's because of the cat that I started smoking and drinking my tea on my front porch as a matter of routine. It's such a shame to move a sleepy old kitty at any time, so I took to just leaving the house to smoke, because sleepy old kitties have delicate lungs and I do not want to kill another cat.
Several cats have died on my account. Not exactly my fault, except for one. They were all good kitties, and its a damn shame. But, cats die, that happens, they die and disappear and run off and sometimes just go live with other people.
I'm going to try a little experiment today. Ima get high, all by myself, at 12:30 in the afternoon, like a goddam pothead, and devote and inordinate amount of time to this. I think I know what's going to happen, but it just seems like a good idea right now. Going to spend an hour typing.
Here we go...
Man, this weed... is in bad shape... all dried out, been stashed away here for emergencies. Months, at least, some of this shit is even older. Its scattered around in my desk drawer here, the half smoked bowl, a baggie that seems slightly newer, and the little inlaid box that my Mom got me when I was smoking a lot-- yeah dude, my Mom, was a birthday present, she got it for me so that I could hide it on the long drives from Humboldt. I mean, its pretty obviously a place to stash weed, like, what else would I have this tiny box for? Spare keys? In any event, its the first fuckin thing a cop is gonna check, and as a matter of fact by then I'd already been busted on the way up to Humboldt once, and that was all it took... its a funny story, you should ask me about it some time...
Anyway, the Armageddon stash is in bad shape.
I did not come up with that term. My friend Rick is responsible. We would go to his house to get high as fuck and play Dreamcast, mostly Soul Caliber, and he had this strange habit of smoking half of the bowl and tossing the leftover into this gigantic jar. He called this the Armageddon Stash; should the supply dry up, or he lost his job or something, or civilization collapsed, he could still get high for at least a month.
The disaster came earlier than expected, however. I can't remember what the problem was, but for a long time, nobody could get any goddam weed. Nobody. I was pretty friendly with my dealer, so I got a trickle of nugs for free, but I was dating a serious pothead at the time and they pretty much all went to her. But, one day, we were out, and we went to Rick's, mainly to smoke his weed but also to play his video games and kick it with him, only to discover that the Armageddon Stash had been used up. It was the passing of an era, I'm sure, but I was likely too stoned to give a shit.
I kinda miss that. Being too stoned to give a shit... Time to smoke this dry sorry ass weed and try to come up with something...
This is an age old mistake. Weed does not make you more creative. It can relax you, though, and let your mind do the work without your self getting in the way... Sometimes. Sometimes you just get bored and hungry and end up looking at stupid internet memes for hours on end. I'm sure it won't end up that way today, tho. I can't handle my smoke anymore, not on my best day, not even when it counts, like I can't even get that high. I just fall asleep way before I go completely stupid. Kind of a shame really. Might be nice to burn off some of that stupid, so that it doesn't build up and make me do some downright retarded shit. I will refrain from making a list, as I'm sure you are well aware of the retardation I am capable of.
Another reason to get high today is that I have only one cigarette left, and I don't feel like going to the gas station. I'll get a little high instead and drink some tea and remember about 30m from now that I wanted to smoke a cigarette.

So, I totally promised a friend that I would get an original story to him by monday for his online magazine. He is desperate for material, says he'll take any kind of submission. I like those odds! Really, its probly that no one reads the thing, but, a gig is a gig, and as soon as I started talking to him like a real editor he started acting like one, so... game on I guess.
Really trying to come up with a story, something new.
Shit, rain started again... Hasn't rained like this in years...
Usually, I can pull a story out of my dreams, but last night I only had a dream about my cat having a kitten.
This was, however, a highly unusual situation for several reasons. For starters, the cat is old, and long since spayed. Secondly, one kitten? Cats do not give birth to one kitten. I've had several cats bear litters, have raised said litters myself, and I have yet to see just one kitten. Thirdly, the cat was not pregnant-- it was a miracle kitten! Finally, and this is kind of out of left field, the kitten in the dream was about the size of a gummy bear and crawled around on my hand like an insect, but with the awkwardness of mammals who have not yet learned to crawl.
This is the only thing I can remember out of my dreams last night, and if you can make a five thousand word narrative out of that, I will give you fifty dollars cash money right now.
Although, the adventures of Jesus the Cat might be funny for like, two pages... A cat, born from a virgin, telling the other cats that he is the way, the truth, and the light, and the only way to cat god was through him. But then, I don't think cat god is like people god in the slightest. He's likely to be way more capricious and fickle and if he bore a son, they would hiss and scratch at each other until one achieved dominance.
No... Animal Jesus of any kind is just not funny enough for the risk of real blasphemy. It is raining, after all, and a storm approaching-- lightning is all too handy to be screwing around with blasphemy...
Now the sun is out and its still raining, and the wind is picking up. Some weather we're having down here. Still beats snow.

So, I totally need a story. I have one idea for a fantasy story, but I'm not ready to tell that one just yet. Needs more time, I haven't come up with a central conflict yet, tho I think I know how its going to go. Have all the characters and settings all in my brain, but no plot to speak of. That's fine I guess, plots can kind of write themselves, the best ones usually do... or you end up with Stephen King like stuff, where the plot seems to be driven by mysterious psychic abilities 90% of the goddam time. Pet peeve of mine, and an easy plot device. I read his book On Writing, and he admits that he does not plot. He just lets characters do stuff, and I think this might have something to do with the recurring psychic bullshit premise. Not that I should criticize, I mean, what the fuck have I ever done? But still... Just sayin.
Rain has stopped and the sun is growing stronger.

On a side note, I completely lost a pair of pants. Vanished. I don't even know how long they've been missing, nor remember the last time I saw them. Good, serviceable Dickies jeans. Gone now. I'm sure they'll turn up.
Also (we are veering towards a point, I can feel it!) I figured out how to make the chia seeds I've been putting in my oatmeal taste good. They were hard to stomach for a while. Today, however, I added a little extra water and after the oatmeal was cooked, and there was this extra hot water, I dumped in the seeds, and they must have cooked a little bit, because they softened and became buttery and delicious... Well, delicious is a strong word, but edible.
Also, the rain just started again, like super hard. This is what our rain is like down here. Still, unusual amounts of our sporadic rain. usually comes a little later too.
Also, noticing things like missing pants and properly cooked food, noticing all these little things that annoy/surprise/delight me in my immediate environment here, like this cigarette I just lit and the excellent taste it makes mixed with the weed, and man how I miss that, well, all of it is continuous and makes me wonder where the hell have I been?
I haven't been paying attention to any of these things, they've been slipping right past me. Where was I? What was I thinking about? How had this seemed so little? There's kind of a lot going on, even when nothing is going on. Maybe that's just the nostalgia and the weed talking. I used to be really in tune with the minutiae. Crazy, miniscule details were totally fascinating to me. Still are, I guess. It's like those super tiny miniature Arab paintings. Men went blind painting these exquisite little things, so crammed full of detail and color but forcibly unrealistic. It was forbidden to portray things exactly as they were, something about making icons and idols, or maybe how man should not try to recreate the work of God. So the images had to be symbolic in nature, but of course the artistry just got better and better, so you have these super elaborate little paintings with no perspective or realism. All symbols and abstract trying to render a real picture.
Sun is out again...

My tea is almost done and somehow, nearly an hour has passed by. There have been frequent pauses to drink tea, smoke this super tiny nugget, and light this cigarette that keeps going out.
Still have no idea what this story is going to be.
Guess its gonna have to be off the cuff. Shoot from the hip, as it were. I have til my Monday self-imposed deadline, and he only needs five thousand words at the far end. Could be much shorter, if I could manage to tell a story in less than that. Its happened before.
Not sure I'd like to work up a personal anecdote tho. Not in the mood. Don't want to have relapse into depression for the sake of getting ten pages into a journal no one will read.
Oh, something like... a blog maybe... now there's a worthwhile endeavor, right?

Well, the experiment so far has been somewhat unsuccessful. Though I did not get in my own way or censor myself or get caught up in some inner dialog and forget to type, neither did I come up with a good idea for a story. I'll just start with a hooky sentence and see what happens I guess. Homeboy didn't sound too picky.
What did get accomplished was that its closing in on 1:30pm and I'm totally relaxed, with a whole day ahead of me. I even have errands to run. My mother really wants to know what I want to do for my birthday, and wants me to go christmas shopping. She will be disappointed. I don't want to do a damn thing for my birthday and I sure as shit ain't goin christmas shopping.
Maybe I'll tell her that what I want for my birthday is to have lunch just me and her, so we can have a talk like normal human beings. When they feel like they don't have much time with me my parents tend to just shoot advice and orders at me. It's best to give them time to ramble, tell stories, be themselves. Still, its like my mom always starts off with the advice and stuff and then slowly gets human, where my dad goes the other direction, like he just can't contain himself after a while and has to start suggesting what to do with my life. All perfectly fair and reasonable. Any concerned human being who gets a gander at what my life is like is driven to tell me to do something better with it. Not to say it doesn't get old in a hurry, but I'm just sayin I understand where it's coming from.
Hell, I discuss what to do with myself almost every goddam day. Maybe that's exactly why I feel like I don't need to hear it all the time from everyone else. It's not as though I won't come to you for advice when I need it. I have done so over and over, I'm surprised you're not sick of it by now. I'm a reasonable man, and I do listen to what people tell me.
Most of the time anyway. Some things I simply remain intransigent about.

Hah, totally hit publish before I was done.
Not quite anyway.
Tea is done, my last cigarette is done, and the bowl is dust. I am good and stoned, and its kind of ironic that it took this long. Just long enough to spend this hour, typing at the internet. Wonder if anyone will read it. I always wonder who's going to bother.
I always hope that someone will make a comment. The last comments I got were rather intriguing, I still mull over them. No one ever does tho, probly because even when wandering, my thoughts are so structurally sound, it probly seems like I had a clear intention in all my writings from beginning to end... right?
Like, it just makes so much sense and seems so thoughtfully put together that it must seem that there is nothing to say in response...
Yeah... Yeah that's totally it. Gotta be.

Seriously, though, I need to come up with a story, and now I'm all high and still I got nothing. Perhaps its time for the dreaded walk across the street to buy smokes and a cup of coffee and sit down at the starbucks, possibly in the rain, with my little notebook and start from the beginning, as is customary. I think I'll take the red notebook today. Or maybe the orange. In my mind they each have a clear category, but I find it very difficult to name what specific purposes the little books are supposed to serve, other than that they are for different kinds of writing.
I think its because one went to the desert with me and the other did not. The red one is half full, the orange is barely touched.
Tough call, for a guy as superstitious as I am.
Ah, the high is already starting to fade. Nice while it lasted, but I do have shit to do today. Sort of. Not really...
But, I will still do stuff.
Just for form's sake.
Man, still drawing a blank for a new story... It's not a block exactly, its just a blank.
Hrm...
Oh well. Off to work I guess, I'll figure it out eventually.

Raining again...

-blush

Nothin but time

2010-12-21T10:00:00.000-08:00

I have time.
All day, in fact.
It's Solstice. Last night was the much vaunted Lunar Eclipse that I had wanted to see, and of course, it rained. It's been raining for days solid actually.
Figures.
Anyway, I hope you saw it. I felt like I kind of needed it, that whole Solstice, Eclipse, changeover thing. I'd like for life to turn a new leaf just now. I will have to settle for getting back to my daily routine. Seems its time again to turn inward, away from the world. It's debatable whether this is healthy or fruitful, but if I'm going to be this alone, I might as well play it to the nines.
I recently unwittingly bought myself just the right set of books for the occasion.
In order:
The Guide for the Perplexed, by Moses Maimonides. This is proving difficult to get through. It is a scholarly and philosophical work from the 12th century by a very famous, very serious rabbi from Muslim Spain. I might have the date wrong, and I'm pretty sure it was written in Egypt. It is very long. To be honest, I got this because when I saw it in the bookstore, an inexplicable laugh came out of me. I'm not sure what's funny about Moses Maimonides, but for some reason, when I laid eyes on the book, I laughed out loud and said 'Maimonides? No way...' and decided I would get it.
On God, not by J. Krishnamurti exactly but a collection of excepts from his talks. It's difficult to take Krishnamurti out of the context of his speaking. This dude is an interesting fellow. He was supposed to be a kind of messiah, the 'world teacher' of the Theosophical Society. As soon as they handed him the reigns, though, he renounced his messiahood and dissolved the organization, telling them that truth was a 'pathless land'.
The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran. I think I spelled his name wrong, but the book is in the car and I don't feel like going all the way outside in the rain to get it. It's not like you really care anyway. I kept running into little quotes from this book, I even used one, and I decided that I should read the damn thing if me and everyone else was going to quote it. Not sure how I feel about it after one reading. Might have to give it another. He is also an interesting fellow.
Tao te Ching. I realized that I didn't have one, and felt at the time like I needed some boning up on my taoism. How right I was. If things are about to turn the way I think they are, the way it seems they are, I had damn well better have my way straight. This one is written by a dude named Lao Tzu, but this isn't really a name, it just means 'Old man' or 'old fellow' or 'old boy' like in the friendly sense. The story goes that he was the royal librarian in some great city in China, but as he got old he couldn't take any more of the court politics. So, one day he just bails, and on his way out of the city he's stopped at the guardhouse, and the guard says to him before you can leave, you have to write down all your wisdom. So, he sits down in the guard house and writes the Tao te Ching. I really like that story.
Finally, I got In the Arms of the Beloved by Jalal al-din Rumi. Rumi was real popular a while back, and I admit I went with that trend. I got myself a book of his poetry and read it through and then gave it away. For some reason, I felt like I needed it again. It's not as popular anymore, but its still good. This guy was also around in the 12th century I think. He's a sufi dervish, the dudes who commune with God (they call him Beloved) by getting wasted on wine and whirling around in circles. I could use a little bit of that. If it works with wine, it should work with Miller Genuine Draft, right?

So, those are the texts that will hopefully get me through five or six months of solitude, poverty, chastity (got my fingers crossed that this will prove unnecessary, but its never really up to me) and silence. None of this is exactly my idea, I did not want it to be this way. I had a whole other plan. But, this is where I am and this is what is happening, so, come January, down the hole I go. There is no other side, and I will be sending messages through. It's not complete isolation, I'm not in the joint, but in review, as my next birthday nears and I have to take stock of the previous years, it would seem that this is the next step. I have taken measures to secure some better options on the other side of these long months coming up, but there is no avoiding this.
Thing is, I'm feeling very lonely. It isn't usually like this around this time. Usually, I throw myself a party, I'm picking out little presents, joyously scrambling from event to event, making a great effort to see everyone in this very special time.
Not so this year. There is no tree, there are no lights, I did not throw myself a birthday party and there is nobody around to see who won't be there after Christmas is over.
I'm not exactly complaining either. Truthfully I'm not really in the mood.
But, I gotta say, there has been a lot of me standing on my porch, alone, smoking a cigarette and drinking tea or coffee, just wondering what the fuck is going on, where the fuck it all went wrong, talking to people who aren't there and whom I am unlikely to see again, trying to work it all out, and its winding down to just silence and occasional remarks to myself that have no bearing on anything. There's been a lot of forgetting and letting go on my front porch.
It's an empty feeling. Kinda hurts. Makes the mind go crazy trying to find some way to fill it up, ease, soothe. It's not even a thing though. This is how it works. It is doing what it is supposed to do. You let things go, you get used to your own weight as you settle again, deal with the scary adjustments to new gravity.
Well, I guess it depends on what kind of person you are.
I know that the porch is getting to be its own kind of rut at this point, and its time to make a move. Jump in and let the current take me somewhere new. There are several options available to me, but again, which one I take depends mostly on what kind of person I want to be, where I want my time to go. And to answer this, I have to look to the world around me. Where do I fit in, what direction is the current flowing, etc, etc. Its a pretty lame metaphor. I could juice it up with all sorts of incidents and anecdotes about river encounters, huck finn style, but, fuck it, you get my point.
None of those options are up yet anyway. There are months before it even matters.
So...
Into the hole, til then. I got books about God and time on my hands and look, I've started my compulsive typing again. I have just enough money to last til there's more and nothing pressing down on me. No one needs anything from me anymore, and lord knows no one wants anything.
There is nothing going on except... well, everything. If there's some difference between now and the last time I was in a similar position, its only that this time, there was a whole lot more to let go of, the emptiness that much heavier. Eventually, it will not feel like I've lost anything.
Just a matter of getting acquainted with myself again. I know I'm there in that emptiness.
The whole secret is in that silence.
It's going to be this way whether I want to or not, so I might as well take what advantage there is and learn something, go a little deeper than before.

God but it is lonely, though.
Think its a good time to get out on my porch, stare at the rain, and think about what the fuck happened to my life.
Or just think about nothing at all.
Either way, best to get used to being lonely; its gonna be a while...
-blush

Nope.

2010-12-01T12:39:00.000-08:00

So, what we've got here so far is nothing better than the scattered pieces of a strange man's short life. You may have noticed a lack of clear organization. These fragments are all that's left of him and I don't know where to put them yet. I would imagine chronological order would be clearest, or perhaps take a page from my friend and express them in terms of relevance. But it's hard for me to know what's relevant. I sort of feel like I don't know much of anything right now. I had a lot of hope for him, for his future, and now that he's gone and I know for damn sure that he's dead, it seems like all of that was really part of me that died with him. I feel this incredible sense of loss. Irredeemable loss. So that's what all this is about. This is me, trying my damnedest to put a band aid over a bullet wound, putting a plug over a hole of infinite depth, tossing the little bit of light I have down into a well of infinite dark.

It's December now. This bitter year is about to end. It wasn't all bad, but you know, one or two major setbacks can offset a lot of laughs. It's less about your surges and more about how you finish anyway. Maybe you were pulling ahead here and there, but how did you show at the finish line? It's not looking so good, but that's no reason not to make one last effort, dig just a little bit deeper, throw away whatever it is you have left to lose and set aside that you might die trying. Also probly best to forget that you could die failing too. Forget everything except carrying yourself forward.

God help me but its been a rough year.
Just a few weeks left to make a decent showing at the end.
God help me indeed.
-blush

-ps none of this is relevant to anything and I apologize. It is literally just gibberish.

Quick like a Bunny

2010-11-27T19:31:00.000-08:00

I don't have time in abundance to just type on and on right now.
But there is some time to kill, and since I wasted my day turning my brain off and playing video games, and not getting more sleep like I promised my brain I would, so now, I'm technically on the clock but not getting any calls. I'm tenth in line and its moving slow, so I won't get beeped at for a while. Least 20 minutes, probly closer to an hour.
That means I have some time to type some nonsense. Going to drink this cup of tea and smoke a cigarette and see what I can do here.
My unhappy brain is being disagreeable with its lack of sleep. As punishment, it won't leave off its thinking about old girlfriends and past failures.
So it goes.
What does a guy gotta do to stop being at odds with himself. Whence comes this self sabotage.
Whence... stupid word. It makes everything that follows it a total joke.
Plus, in its proper usage it should only apply to time.
I suppose I didn't really use it wrong, but tonite is no time to be dwelling on the past. The future looms pretty heavy just tonite. But, it's just that time of year. Winter. Solstice nearing. Long cold nights. Year's pretty close to the end and its only natural to take stock.
I have a renewed determination to do something with the last month of the year. Pressure has worked for me in the past, but it has to be focused, it can't just be a generalized storm of worries and impendings. Gotta have a clear point of relief.
With a clear point of relief, I can effectively shunt off everything between me and that single point of contact. God help me, I have a plan again. I might even be thinking clearly and prepared to act. God help us all, really.
First thing that's got to go is this application business. First thing next week that's getting handled. Second thing is calling various insurance companies and changing policies or just telling them to fuck off. Third thing is to take my last week as a cabbie at a reasonable rate and get as much money as I possibly can before I tell them as well to fuck off, but in a way that won't burn any bridges. Lastly and beyond that, the host of personal issues plaguing my frazzled old thinking sponge and my weary bleak heart will have to be tossed into the big bag of dicks I'm leaving out for all those old monsters of memory and doubt to eat in lieu of my soul.
I'm going to need it for some important projects that I let slide in the mistaken belief that I had better things to do.
Cigarette is done... Kind of want another one right now... I get that way.
I'm going to resist, because its going to be a long night and I will doubtless smoke too many cigarettes, and there's no sense starting that any earlier than necessary.
Still have this tea, and its only been 11 minutes.
Still some time...
I should go check on my queue...
7th now... still creeping along. Won't really get moving til 10pm or so, and then its usually busy til about 3am. Those are the hours I can't miss. Still some time. Fed the cat, opened up all the windows and doors to air out the cab from the stink of drunks and their garbage, removed said garbage, and took all of 3 minutes.
So very conscious of time, aren't we Blush...
Fuck, I might have to have that second cigarette. That's a bad idea. I should really resist that impulse. Chain smoking is for the young and dumb. I'm too old for such foolishness.
Still, I'm going to do it.
Damn. Four left in the pack. Motherfucker.
It occurs to me that I haven't let slip all these things that have been so prevalent upon my mind to anyone who gives a fuck. This is likely because I feel distinctly that no one does give a fuck, nor should they. Blush reacting poorly to the incipient responsibilities of life as a normal person is not news. He hasn't given normal a real serious try in quite a long time, though, so let's cut the old boy some slack. He's not quite right for the world he's born into and he can't quite get with the program. I mean, if you really knew him, you would expect that he'd have some trouble with regular ass kind of stuff, like dealing with insurance companies and his family and the government, things that most people, normal folk, take for granted.
No, Blush needs to figure out a way to make his needs as few as possible. He must go deep down under the nonsense in order to be free of it. Rising above is not an option. Affluence is one way to escape these pressures, extreme poverty is another. The ideal solution would be to work land somewhere, fish his meals out of the ocean or reap them from the earth.
It's a nice thought, but that probly won't materialize either.
Ah, damn, I've almost gone on too long. I really need to get back to work.
Look at me, dicking around on the internet while I'm supposed to be working!
That's like, totally normal, right?
I guess talking about myself in the third person for two longish paragraphs probably counteracts that, though.
So, two cigarettes and a cup of weak Lipton tea later (I bought a hundred goddam teabags for 3 bucks... its not good tea, but its something, and I have enough of it to last) I have turned out more useless words for the useless log of my useless thoughts on a useless Saturday.
Compulsive typing ftw?
I just felt like I had to put something down, even if it was nothing really. Just had to think into my fingers for a while. Just needed the act itself, even if it was fruitless.
The practice will bear fruit, I swear.
As will this poorly placed faith in myself that I've dusted off.
Wish me luck,
-blush

More Thanks.

2010-11-26T12:38:00.000-08:00

Wow, 7 views today, and its barely noon.
Who is reading this?
Whoever you are, thank you. Thank you very much.
Staring at a blank page is hard enough. People always talk about this fear in connection with writing, but aside from being a little cliche, its totally true. Sometimes staring at a whole lotta nothin leaves you at a loss. Lotta time just staring at it, or throwing something at it and then just erasing it, going back to nothing. I remember I once knew a guy, this dude from one of my writing workshops. He was good, and he read really exotic stuff that was incomprehensible to most people. At the time, he and I were the best in the workshop, though he seemed more the type to find immediate success. He was good looking and personable and he had initiative, led his own little poetry groups and readings and the like. I went to his group twice. It was held on Main Street in Huntington Beach, that drag that's pretty much like a mall but is mostly bars and surf shops selling board shorts for fifty bucks a pair. It was mostly high schoolers and rejects from the punk scene, and homeboy did most of the reading. I remember the first time he read from Rabbelais, like anyone gave a shit, and also a cute high school girl who obviously had a huge crush on him, reading three or four poems about crying... literally, all about crying and feeling sad and crying some more... I think the word 'tears' came up about twenty times in fifty lines.
The second time, some random guy with a shaved head and tattoos walked up off the street wanting to read his poetry. He had a stare like he was about to shank you right there, this random, and he read his stuff like it was a slam. If you ever get the chance to go to a slam, btw, skip it. It's lame. Anyhow, so he spit and roared and growled out his poem. It was long, and it was about a woman that he hated but could not stop loving. It was frightening and forgettable except for one line, that I laughed at and I don't think I was supposed to. It was something about revenge sex, in fact I'm pretty sure the title of the poem was Hatefuck, but I specifically remember the phrase "sound of your anal sex screams".
Anyhow, that's kind of neither here nor there. I was talking about the blank page thing.
See this fear of the blank page thing comes up with people struggling to write and of course it came up in our workshop for beginners. And this dude, who usually had a comment, and I could forgive him some mouthiness because he was actually a good writer and had actual good, constructive criticisms to offer, he offers that he does not feel intimidated by the blank page: he feels awe.
At the time, I was like, wow, what a great way to look at it.
But, now, well, that's backwards. It's the source that awes, not the medium. It's not the page in front of you, its the light behind you casting your shadow on the world. Now look at me getting mouthy.
Point being, difficult as it is to start with nothing and turn it into something, not even to speak of something of value, it is worse to feel that one is doing this for nothing. The sense that your words are only scattered into oblivion is a harder thing to deal with. It's not immediate, like the blank white void. It's a futility that arises in your consciousness later, much later, and forces you to question where all that time and energy and the little bit of yourself that you let out goes to, what you're doing this for, why you let this compulsion rule your life, whether its as relevant or meaningful as it felt at the time. Makes you feel like you're fooling yourself.
So, whoever you are, I'm glad at least someone glances at this from time to time. You may or may not care, you may or may not even read it all, but I'm glad your visiting. Mind you, since I'm not exactly sure who you are, I can't really just up and give you what you want, but that's an old story and applies to all sorts of human interaction.
So, here we are, interacting, in a cool, distant kind of way, but here it is, we have this together, and even if it's not much, it's something. Makes us more than mere strangers for the little bit that you look at my thoughts given form here.

Some of the people looking at this, in fact all of them, must know me though, or at least be acquainted with me. This shit isn't tagged to any keywords except my name, and why would you be trying to look up my name if you weren't at least acquainted with me?
So, I have to figure that a few of you just like to hear me rant. This is good. I like to rant. Some of our best times together, surely, involve me jabbering on and on about something, probably a woman or just the general unfairness of life, or something about Burning Man, or maybe about some obscure sidenote of history, or maybe something longer, the real story behind the birth of Imperial Rome or the Crusades or maybe I told you the long version of what happened at the Hot Gates, and maybe you think that Hot Gates is a euphemism...
Either way, I feel sure that anyone reading this has talked to me before, or at least been talked at by me before.

Anyway, thank you. Seriously. It's nice of you to come by and listen for a minute and I do hope that you're entertained. Even if its just my little warmup or me just trying to get some words down for the day, or as happens on unfortunate occasions, this silly blog acts as my personal diary where I communicate feelings in order to understand myself, it is really encouraging to have even a tiny audience. Not that I'm putting on much of a show here, but I really hope you enjoy it. I wish I had some better stories, but I don't get out much, and I'm already getting sick of talking about the weirdos I pick up in my cab.

So, thanks guys, whoever you are. I suspect I know, but the count is a few less than seven, so there remains some mystery...

-blush

Thanks!

2010-11-24T16:31:00.000-08:00

Four days? Seems like way, way longer...
If I recall correctly it was some claptrap about doubts and pressures and such, and how I shouldn't give a shit, how some things need to slide.
Turns out that doesn't really work.

Today, though, today will be different. Today it will truly be nothing. I have nothing to talk about.
It's nearly Thanksgiving! Let me say that as though anyone who still bothers to read this doesn't know full goddam well that Thanksgiving is tomorrow.
I'm thankful for many things. I say thanks all the time. I say it to the sky, presuming that God is up there somewhere, I say it to the moon because its bright, sometimes I whisper 'Glory glory glory' over and over, like at the last full moon, just a few nights gone; it was half hid behind clouds but still glowing through and lighting up the world like a cold sun, while to the east, the clouds over the city collected the limpid orange light of countless streetlamps into one sulfurous glow, a man-made twilight preceding the first wake of dawn by hours, a smoky, lurid diffusion over all the sleeping earth within my view. After a long and mostly wasted night it was something to see and I was grateful I could be the witness.
Still heaps of bullshit and no shovel, and death is creeping around again, illness won't leave us alone, the world is growing cold and dismal even here, even when something needs to be said I can't seem to say it right, but mostly there is nothing to say; no words have enough power. Lotta problems and no solutions.
I'm sorry everyone. I wish I could help. I'm here if you need me, tho. I am not going away. I am resolved to stay until things are... well, resolved.
See what I did there? Clever right?
I am such an interesting fellow...

The space above is unnecessary, since we're not really talking about anything and therefore, there is no need for me to give the reader a break to collapse the preceding lines into a cohesive thought to be carried to the next. The thought is not over yet. I'm not really thinking much at all, if we're being honest (and for heaven's sake, let us at least be honest here).
I say that a lot, and I like to put it in parentheses, but I leave a lot unsaid too. I just don't know who to tell. No one who wants to know really understands and anyone that understands doesn't want to hear it.
What I can say for now is that I got coffee a little bit ago, just a small cup here with me and my cigarette and it is NOT decaf. I got the real deal.
Man, I feel like I should just sit here and enumerate my troubles and get them off my mind, but I just don't feel like it. They are numerous and grow more complicated.
Got word from my mentor today. The gist of his unusually long email was: the most important thing is the 500 words a day. Yes, as it turns out, he seems to agree with my original synopsis made over a year ago that the most important thing I could do, my best hope, is to have very few needs and to write a whole lot. Go figure. I panicked and thought I had to have something done by sometime, that I had to make a career and money out of it, but nope, all of that will come. There will be deadlines and there will be money, and he even said I was good enough to pull it off. He ought to know. He's a little bit famous.
My other mentor encouraged my seeking a higher degree. She is also right. She believes I am talented, gifted even, but she does not live in the hills nor hunts for her food. She lives in the world and agrees that given my grades the odds of me getting into one of the really prestigious writing programs is pretty slim.
So, two dissenting opinions-- why settle, and be realistic. And these are the writers who taught me how to write. Theoretically, I should fall somewhere in between. I might be getting too old to bank my future on miracles and long odds, or I might be too old not to. There is little time, I feel that, clock is ticking, but on the other hand, I might have already found my path and just lack the will to really let it be, which is to say that perhaps I let the world's expectations color and distort what I know to be my actual destiny.
Strong word, destiny. Might be giving myself too much credit.
Still, looking back on my years, at a life that is likely half over already, I can see it leading to something. Maybe I know what that is and maybe I don't, or maybe its some variant of what I believe to be the right life for me.
Impossible problems, unlikely solutions.
I've never been much of a gambler.
But, if you know who you are and you know what you want, shouldn't those two factors determine your existence, your 'path' for lack of a better term?
Then, of course, one must admit that not everything is under your control. But suppose the deterministic factor was in the development of the person you've become, shaped those dreams that drive you.
That's like destiny, right?

None of that matters. Lest I forget, there is much suffering loose right now. Out of my hands entirely, but wallowing in solipsism is hardly an appropriate response.
I did pray, I swear I did, I prayed hard and I meant it. Either nobody was listening or the Lord or whoever answers His messages had to sadly RSVP in the negative. I am no one to question the plan, and lord knows I'm not smart enough to figure it out, but I can humbly ask for solace for those who must face what can only be for us mere mortals senseless and cruel.
God help us, even while he's giving with one hand and taking with the other.

Happy Thanksgiving!
Be grateful!
-Blush

Like an Old Friend...

2010-11-20T14:12:00.000-08:00

A choice comes around again upon which many days and nights of my life have pivoted:
Write or sleep?
The context changes but the choice is always the same.
Do I devote time and energy to this work that no one will read, or at the most a very few close friends might enjoy, and I might enjoy doing...
or
...do I get in the required rest to perform my duties for the machinery of the world, oil myself for the task ahead of being the best damn cogwheel I can be?
There is satisfaction in both paths. Only one leads to profit, and only one leads to fulfillment.
The hero, of course, would choose both, but I'm fresh out of heroism today. It's gonna be one or the other. I suppose I could try writing until I just had to sleep, but the way my sleep patterns have been, I won't have to sleep until its time to go to work.

I had to admit to someone today one of the things that I really dislike about myself. Admit probly isn't the right word, as its not exactly a secret, but its one of those things that others don't like about me either. They'll call it something other than what it is or mollify it if they don't want to hurt my feelings, but lets face it, I have an obsessive personality. I really dwell on things. It's great when I need to really concentrate on something, and its horrible when I can't direct it properly and it just chooses whatever kink my monkey-brain is chewing on at the moment. Means any small thing can turn into a problem that involves my whole mind.
I think this might account for my lifetime of troubled sleep patterns. It's not all the time, but it is most of the time, that I just don't sleep right.
Exceptions are few. There are a number of people who will assert that I have no trouble falling asleep. ;)

Its like if I get into something, get involved, some part of my brain just inhibits a full night's sleep, and I'll wake up well before I'm rested. Lots of people do this but its wholly unnatural. Sometimes even when I'm completely exhausted and really need a good solid eight to ten hours, I'll only get five, or three, or whatever, and just keep going, building up a deficit that eventually causes a crash. Then there's days of rest ahead, and I can't spare days of rest anymore.
If only I could rest at the proper times...
What I end up having to do is set aside and adhere to plans for sleeping. I have to plot it out like meals or exercise. Or fun or anything else, I guess. Time must be made.

Today I took some time to relax, and it was well that I did. I had a nice meal at a restaurant I've never been to, I smoked some cigarettes and drank some tea at my favorite coffee place and just sat outside thinking of nothing at all, watching cute girls walk by.
But now time is short again, and its the old choice again.

When I was younger, maybe ten or twelve years ago, it was a different sort of thing, but the exact same decision. Do I stay up all night, popping painkillers, smoking weed, drinking coffee and chain smoking while writing out pages and pages and pages of the expansive, melodramatic fantasy plots for the handful of readers following my forum, or do I get some rest, do my homework in the morning and get to jr college on time for once.
I don't know to be proud or ashamed or just resigned, but expansive fantasy won out nearly every single time. It's fairly well forgotten now, but a few people still speak of it. Some people still visit the old place and revisit the old adventures, even if a lot of the writing is manic and pretty lousy. It was tons of fun tho. For everyone, I hope.

A couple years later in big boy college it was similar. High as fuck around midnight, wondering if I should go ahead and spend the next few hours picking away at that story for workshop, or some piece of creative non-fiction based on quiet observations at the pond or in the woods or at the coffee shop or the bar or anywhere really, jotted down hastily in a beat-to-hell composition notebook bought for an entirely other purpose, or get some rest and hit that 2500 word paper due at 11am in the morning after some donuts and redbulls.
Typically, I had to do both, and I think that towards the end that started to really take its toll. Cost me a girlfriend and a cat and a timely graduation and some good grades and possibly my chances at getting into grad school.
Worth it?
Hard to say.
I found it edifying, though, and it was the best part of college, those nights. Hard, and hard on me, but those were the times I really felt like I was doing something up there.

Most of the redbulls and donuts papers were shit, but, what can you expect? My disinterest should have been clearly evident to any instructor even half paying attention. I should have been graded on a curve, according to my lack of giving a fuck.
The important thing was to become a better writer, not spit your bullshit literary theory back at you with a slight twist to give the illusion of independent thought.

Last time I had a 'real' job was a long, long time ago, eleven years actually.
I remember my last day pretty clearly.
What happened was, the day before, it was a Wednesday (what is it about me and wednesdays??) I woke up with a vision, and I sat down and wrote a twenty page story about a Necromancer who summons a demon by accident that ends up saving her life. It's still one of my favorite things that I've written. I ignored all the phone calls from my boss, locked my door, no coffee or drugs or cigarettes required, and some hours later, I had a whole complete awesome short story ready to go. Wasn't even for a class or anything. Just came up.
I'd been writing little stories for a long time, and had always wanted to do it, but up until then it had been the crazy shit in the forums and abortive five page efforts. It was a new thing to have something of reasonable quality just form right out of my brain.
The next day I went in, and my boss, who was a super cool guy, just smiled, shrugged, showed me his palms and was like, "Where were you, dude?"
"I have to quit," I told him.
I kind of told him why, but he just laughed. Work had been super slow anyway, and he didn't really need me. Yesterday he had needed me, but today he didn't really. It had been like that for a while. So he let me go, so I could go put some effort into school and trying to write fantasy stories. It didn't go precisely as planned, obviously, but, once again, there was that choice, and I opted in favor of the unrealistic assertion that what I should REALLY be doing is writing shitty stories about Necromancers and demons.
Well, that one wasn't so shitty, I still like it a lot.

So, yep, here it is today, and now I've been typing for on around 30m and that's something. Maybe I'll call that enough for today, because I only have two hours...
Hrm... I should really take a nap. Got another 12 hour shift to pull if I want to make any money for the weekend... Tonight will be all profit, or mostly profit, but it takes a lot of time...
On the other hand, I just had this really good idea for what happens next and there's no guarantee that it'll keep...
Hrm...

-blush

Titles are for Jerks

2010-11-18T21:18:00.000-08:00

Yikes.
Lotta pressure right now.
Half of my day got taken up driving around. Not for money. Woke up before 7am to take my father to get his herniated umbilicus taken care of. Aside from being a chore (though its always nice spending a little time with my father) this reminded me rather directly that the day is swiftly coming when care for the old man will fall to me. Didn't help that he spent the whole time talking about his retirement plans, or lack thereof. He didn't wast any time getting down to serious business. I was hoping for just some light chit chat, instead it involved how very soon now he will not be making near the amount of money he is right now, and its not all that much to begin with. He's been floating me a long time while I figure out how to make the world work for me, and the time is very near when I will have to float him. How much time have I got? A few years, at best. Need to have shit together by then. Some manner of success or at least stability has to be in place by then, and that is absolutely not my strong suit.
And its not like I can just bail and go be a bum somewhere.

It was supposed to take three hours his surgery, but it took 90 minutes. I thought I would have some time to write, at least that, and I suppose I did. I got some pages down, finished a section. That's what I'm trying to do now. Instead of counting words or pages, focus on completion. I knew I wouldn't have heaps of time so I got some coffee and got motivated. I did finish, but before I could start the next (always good to get a little bit started on the next bit before you wrap it up, so that you have something to work off of when you get back to it) I got a groggy call from dad saying that it was time to come get him.
I was out of gas.
While I was filling up, my brother called me from the airport. He had landed from his trip to Honolulu to inspect the campus. Airport was near, so I jetted over there, thinking that it was a five minute detour, and I wouldn't be too late.
Wouldn't you know it then that as he called me to let me know he was coming out of the terminal, a sheriff spotted me talking on my cell while driving.
So there was ten minutes of the sheriff talking on the radio, staring at my information. He lectured me on not changing my address on my license (I was still living in Eureka last time I renewed) and let me off with a warning. Still a dick, but at least he didn't give me a 200 dollar ticket. So, late now, I drove up to Los Alamitos again (30m drive) to get Dad, listening to my brother the whole way say not one positive goddam thing about his trip.
And when I tried to give him something positive to go on, mind you with little enthusiasm because I am not feeling particularly awesome about my own prospects, and quite frankly I admire my brother and his success is a great hope of mine, he gets uppity because apparently everyone is trying to encourage him, and he's sick of hearing it.
Honolulu is a shitty town he says. He likes his cave he says. He's full of doubt (no secret there) and he feels like he's such a huge piece of shit now and he's not sure he can do it. I try to tell him that everyone is saying that because we're all pulling for him, and something about how he's not a huge piece of shit and all his bad habits will fall away once his life has purpose again, and how he isn't going to leave anything behind that won't be waiting for him when he gets back-- girlfriend, his little bit of business slinging weed, his cave...

We pick up my father and we're driving back, and now its all repeated again. Now he's talking about how trying to find a job and an apartment there is premature, how he's going to put it off til summer. And I can't abide by this. I tell him: "Don't hesitate. Don't wait. It's only going to make it harder. The sooner you get out there and adjust the better. If anything you should go early."
And this makes him pinch the bridge of his nose and lower his head.
Goddammit.
When did he get like this?
This is supposed to be my gig. He is successful at school. He is capable. I just don't understand, but everyone keeps coming at me like 'You need to talk to your brother about going to school' and 'Has your brother talked to you about his drinking?' and 'You need to keep on your brother about this that or the other.'
None of this is my job. I know he's my brother but he's my OLDER brother. Why isn't he talking to me about not giving up on my dream or not worrying about all the failures and disappointments?
Top this off with a discussion about how eventually we will be paying the rent on the land that the house sits on, as though my father expects me to spend the rest of my goddam life here, and this is how my morning goes.

Rest of the day I'm just trying to write, just trying to get a coherent story onto the page and it isn't working. Eventually I need to sleep because I absolutely must work tonight, because I've been shirking all week and found out yesterday I need to drum up some road trip fundage so I can have a 30m talk with an old teacher about writing me a letter. Couldn't talk on the phone, heavens no...
And making money driving a cab around here is not easy. And whats worse is that its not hard either-- its not like I can put in more effort and make more cash. Only more time, and even then its not a guarantee. Just dumb luck, random number generation, and man I hate that. I should be able to work harder to accomplish more, but nope, nothing in my life seems to work that way.
If its not the creative process betraying me, depression and self-doubt blocking me, the people I believe in suddenly unable to believe in unable to believe in themselves, its some other goddam nonsense.

Like rejection and facebook drama, and my own complicated emotions.
Essentially, shit I can't deal with.
I have my own goals to see to, and I'm not sure I can handle outside bullshit and inside bullshit at the same time.
There is a list of things that I must do, real pressures, having to do with what really matters to me and what must matter to me, that I really must attend to first. Or, only. I don't even see why telling my brother to grow a pair or telling facebook friends to worry about someone else for a while or my father's plans for his house five years from now should even be on my goddam radar.

-blush

The Right Time

2010-11-17T23:42:00.000-08:00

It's going to be one of those nights, I can already tell.
There will be no sleep for Blush.
I ought to be out making some goddam money, instead, I'm feeling some shirking coming on.
I feel a little buzz in the back of my brain that makes me nervous.
Someone suggested I write children's books today...
Somehow, I'm not sure that's the direction my work is going in. Call it a hunch.
It's going to be a busy weekend, so tonight is all I've got. I've wasted a lot of time already, but what else is new?
What's on my mind and should be exorcised before I make another futile attempt to tell a coherent story is that tomorrow my father goes in for surgery. He needs me to give him a ride there and back. At around the same time, my brother Jon comes in from his trip to Hawaii, where he went to go see his graduate school. He apparently still feels like he needs to make a decision. I thought the decision was already made. His girlfriend tells me that it is not so simple.
She has her ideas about why he is dragging his feet and hesitating. I can't say how well she knows my brother, or how well I know him these days. Seems no one has a complete picture of the man. Everyone on earth is like that tho.
She says he drinks too much. He might. She seems to think this is what's holding him back, making him think he can't do it. It is his doubt that keeps him from committing totally to the endeavor, and if his vices have become the source of his doubt, then they of course must go. Why people feel that I'm the one to talk to him about it is beyond me. I can't tell anyone to stop drinking or do anything else. Especially to stop drinking. Not that I drink that much, but it is my favorite vice and I engage in it with gusto when I have the time and inclination.
My brother tho has apparently been hiding bottles around, and drinks all day long. This is troublesome. This is what drunks do.

My father's surgery is for a herniated navel. Not that its any of your business, but he doesn't really know that I put my thoughts into the ether in this way, and once again, no one reads this shit, so it doesn't matter.
Anyway, yeah. Herniated navel. His bellybutton went from innie to outie. Kinda gross.
I can only imagine how this happened.
That, I think, is none of MY business. But, I imagine it has to do with his eating habits somehow. That or some sort of medication that he's on. He's on a lot of medications. He's growing old. This is what happens to you. Don't think it ain't comin for you, pal.
I can already feel it happening. My lungs are killing me. I cough and hack at random. My appetite is dwindling, I don't sleep right. This probly isn't old age per se, but these are the signs of premature aging.
Anyway, the surgery is minor, and my brother is not such a drunk that he can't dry out. I hate to see him so full of doubt. I have no idea how he got this way. I don't think I want to start trying to figure it out right now either. In any event there's nothing I can really do to help him, other than encourage him to make the right choice. Really, he doesn't have a choice. His path is leading him one way, and now he's kind of locked in.
This is another thing that happens as time passes. Gotta set yourself up right, or you get locked into the wrong thing.
Don't worry about old Blush, tho. He is a man of destiny. He will be tapped for his purpose soon, I'm sure.

I found an interesting little treasure earlier in my living room. Someone left a guitar pick with the Burning Man sigil on it. This must he Killackey's. He was sleeping on my couch, borrowing my car for a while, so, now I get his pick. Its a sign of encouragement, I think, to re-acquaint myself with my Uke. I've neglected it for weeks.
There isn't really time for it right now, of course. But soon there will be.
I have spent a lot of the night zoning out and letting myself daydream about the future. Some of these visions might have merit. The longer I let my imagination work on it, the better it gets. Some of this vague future enterprise will require a fair amount of courage on my part.
I had thought all my courage exhausted, but it would appear as though it only requires a calling. One doesn't dare unless there is daring to be done.
Soon, then, there will be new adventures!

Fuck. I really ought to be out trying to put some money in my pocket. That would be the wise thing to do. But I know there will be little business tonight, and I don't feel lucky. No sense trolling around for the magic fare. I have other things to worry about. Letters to write. Information to distribute. Words to get down.
Plus, I have to get up in the morning.
There is an old man to get to his hernia operation and a nervous brother to pick up at the airport. I think being needed, being tasked with things, really brings out the best in me.
I mean, everyone likes to be needed, right?
Well, no, I know that to be untrue. Some people fucking hate that.
Generally, world-wise, its much better to do things for yourself than to be forever serving others. You aren't much good to the world until you've made yourself ready to serve, after all. Not everyone sees self improvement as a means to better serve the world tho.
Hrm. Does anyone really?
Do I, really?
Maybe I like to help because it lets me focus on something other than my own shortcomings?
Food for thought, but that feels like enough for now.
I have an incomprehensible story to write.
-blush

More Ablutions

2010-11-17T11:23:00.000-08:00

An ablution, if you were wondering, is a ritual cleansing.
Mostly it precedes prayers or meditation, but it can just be a daily hygienic ritual too.
Before answering the call to prayer, one is supposed to clean one's mouth with water three times, and each nostril. I like to hit my eyes as well, and even though I don't have anyone on a minaret hollering at me, I get around to it a few times a day.
It's a neat word, and I've always liked it. Ablution...
Sounds more important than it is, but it is important.
Samurai are supposed to do this too. Clean themselves up, make themselves presentable even if no one is there. About being prepared, having a little respect for yourself.
Romans did it, of course, but they made it dirty.
Greeks did it, and I'm pretty sure the Romans got all their dirty ideas from them.
There's a very long tradition in humanity of bathing or washing to symbolically make oneself pure before one's gods. Rivers, springs, fountains, baths, waterfalls, any kind of water had a reasonable chance of being called sacred and used to make a man holy enough to speak with the divine and perhaps even be the earthly voice of the divine.
I could discuss the progression of man with god>man as god>man speaks for god>man speaks with god>god speaks to man, but that's not really my purpose here.

Recently, I made an attempt to clean years of junk out of my room here. I planned to stay this time, so I had to clear it out. A PURGE, I called it. I got almost done, then got a shitty job and other worries started eating up all my spare time.
This will have to be completed. I did get rid of a lot of shit and much was stowed away, but my books are still disorganized piles, worse now-- there's small piles of half-read volumes accumulating on either side of my pillow, right on my bed. By the time I go to sleep these days I'm too goddam tired to care how much tossing and turning room I have.
A lot of purging was done, but not quite enough. I left it unfinished. I begin to understand why.
I neglected the most important element of the PURGE, the very reason such things must be done. My catharsis remains incomplete because I did not clear out my mind or my heart. My soul remains cluttered. I left the physical work unfinished because I was not prepared for the mental task. Exterior will inevitably reflect interior, and vice versa. There was only enough time and energy and heart for half of it, or a little more than half. So inside, I remained a mess, and I let my surroundings slowly catch up.
Now, all my shit is a mess again.
I'm determined to get it finished this time, so I started with the inside.
Everything must go.
All this shit?
Gone.
No more nonsense. There's too much to do to worry about everything going in its proper place. It's got to go, and I can sort through boxes of shit later, when it matters less. It can grow less important to me just as easily (if not easier) stuffed in a box and set aside until I have time and inclination to deal with it.
Just now there's entirely too much bullshit in my way, and the main thing is to get the fuck rid of it. All of it. No pawing through it all, trying to decide if its worth a damn. It's not. Anything that is not part of the solution is out.
There isn't even really time to be sad about it.

I need me a good, serious ritual ablution tho.
The ocean is right there, I suppose I could go bathe in it. But the ocean does not leave one feeling clean, and besides, its super, super cold.
Fire works too, but fire isn't really my element, much as I respect it. Besides, can't get a fire big enough or hot enough this time of year to do the trick. There's a time and a place for that, and for my personal cosmology here, the back end of autumn isn't it.
Air can't really be used for this. Although, a scouring wind might be just the thing. Unfortunately the winds are almost out of season. Perhaps one last gasp or gust will howl through. Even then, though, it's a hot, unpleasant, challenging kind of wind, not a purifying breath.
Earth is good. Earth might work. If you can't find water before your prayers, you're allowed to use sand or a stone. But I connect the deserts with the earth element, and not only have I had quite enough of deserts for this year (tyvm) but its super damn cold out in the lonely places right now. Much as I would relish some time alone out there, I hate the cold. Besides, giving sorrows and sins to the earth takes time. It's slow and really forgiving and sometimes feels like its not even working. Not sure I have time for it. Can't pencil it in.

That only leaves us some meta-quasi-pseudo 'does that even count as an element?' elements. Metal, Spirit, Light, Life, shit like that where you're not entirely certain they're elemental so much as organic, chemical, or energetic. You know, the sort of shit that is actually made by elements.
Of these, I think there is one that might work.
It's not a quasi-element so much as the absence of element.
Emptiness.
I will cleanse myself with Emptiness.
Purged by silence, hunger and the void, with stars and streetlights for altar candles, to go alone before God.

Out With It! I Got Shit to Do!

2010-11-10T10:20:00.000-08:00

Tired as fuck today.
Long night last night, and not terribly profitable.
I do have one somewhat interesting story.
It doesn't start off interesting so bear with me.
So, I take a call from San Clemente. Drive all the way down there at mach 3 and dude isn't there. Scooped. Lame.
I get another call immediately from Laguna Niguel. Mach 2 this time, because I'm figuring nobody's there again. What I find is a drunk dude and a totally fuckin wasted chick. They get in the car, and this chick can't remember her address. It takes 20 minutes to figure out the following:
The dude she is with cannot come with us, because chick's husband is home.
Chick has no money.
Chick lives 15 miles away in Mission Viejo. Somewhere. We're going to figure that out as we go.
Complicated? Sure started out that way. Once I got dude to cough up 20 bucks (for a 30 dollar ride, tyvm!), I start taking chick home, and she starts crying in the backseat.
She attempts to tell me what's wrong and I won't bore you with the murky details of her explanation. Suffice to say, she loves both her husband and her boyfriend and feels just terrible about it, and she has bad friends. That's the most I can figure out.
It's a long ride and I'm a friendly dude, so I give her the best advice I can; I brightside for her. Hey, listen, people go through rough patches all the time, if you really love each other you can work through it. Lots of people go through your situation, it'll pass. You'll be okay. You just have to communicate, make sure you both know each others needs so you're able to do your best to meet them.
Long ride, like I said. I had to say something.
Finally we get to the place, or what I must assume is the place. It's the address she finally gave me at any rate.
She's already paid up (NO TIP, tyvm!) and she feels bad, even if dude, asshole, didn't believe me that a 15m, 20m ride was gonna cost 30 (and there it was on the meter, I totally nailed it).
I assure her that its not a problem and wait patiently, smiling, for her to get out of the car.
And this is where she reaches into the front seat and embraces me.
She holds me there, in my cab, and starts crying into my shoulder.
This goes on for minutes, until a call comes in...
This involves loud, loud beeps. I have 30seconds to take the call...
And chick is crying on me.
Not just that, but like, breathing on my neck all weird and like, smelling my hair.
Now, I buy the cheap shampoo-- sure it smells nice, but not that nice. If she were even slightly less hot, I'm sure I wouldn't have put up with this sort of thing...
Or would I?
I missed the call, and for driving her ass missed another from a repeat customer (this is bad). She finally let me go, but couldn't get the door, I had to go out and around and release her from the cab. She stood there wobbling, waiting for something, a hug I guess, but at this point I was slightly annoyed and weirded out and somewhere in the back of my head afraid of jealous husbands, and feeling somewhat bad for him too.
I just said, friendly as hell, gnite miss, and good luck to you, like we'd just finished a dungeon in WoW or something.
Fucking bizarre.
I might be too nice a guy for this business.
It doesn't necessarily help with tips, and it leads to situations like this... oh, can't leave her here, she's totally wasted... oh, I'll just do a flat rate, its not that far... ohhhhkay, I guess we're fucking crying now...
Actually, nobody fucking tipped me worth a damn last night. Cheap fucks in OC on a tuesday.
Oh well.
Fuck me anyway.

-blush

God, the Bartender, and Everybody

2010-11-09T14:04:00.000-08:00

Well, its 2pm and somehow I lost two hours of my day to absolutely nothing. Two cups of tea and a cigarette, some time with my cat on the porch, and my breakfast.
Only three hours til its time to get back to work.
It's like my life is just an interruption of my job...

It's been a week since I said anything here. I've been busy. Got myself a cab, made a grip of money over the weekend, spent most of it leasing the cab for another week, paying off some debt, and drinking with friends.
I really, really wish I could tell you all kinds of cab stories, but the story is pretty much the same every time. I picked someone up, used my small-talk superpowers to liven up the ride as long as I could, was friendly and professional, dropped them off, got my money, and went on to the next.
There were a number of characters. A few girls were flirty. Most of the dudes were douchebags... It is Newport Beach, after all. Seeing the toolsheds in my back seat, seeing them at a distance as it were, sort of divorced from their humanity by the fact that to me they are only a fare, does lend an interesting perspective. I wonder just how many times I have seemed like a dicknose in the back seat of a cab. People will put on a little show for you sometimes, even though you mean nothing to them. For their own sake they will present themselves as what they want or perceive themselves to be, and it is seldom flattering.
It is mildly amusing, however...

So, I had a goddam long weekend. I must have worked at least 30 hours over friday and saturday, shuttling people around. The real bread and butter is lots of short rides to the bars. The meat and potatoes are the hundred dollar fares to places far off. It's nice, because usually you are actually doing these people a favor. They are stuck, and you have rescued them.

Monday night, last night, I got out there a little late. I took a fare all the way in San Clemente. No one is ever working down there, whereas here close to home there's always at least four other drivers booked in. Means a lot of waiting.
I picked up this nice couple from the Metrolink station. They had missed their train and were stranded. Had to get back to Riverside, like fifty miles away. As I am new, I thought this would be about 100 bucks, so I told dude that I could get him there for that, maybe a little more. He took this to mean that the flat rate was 100.
Now, I didn't have to let this slide. We have rights. We can argue. For the first half of the ride, I was looking at my meter, watching it slide up past 100. I even turned the timer off, was running it purely by mileage, which technically is the flat rate.
But, they were in my back seat, talking about the wonderful day they had. It was a date, they'd gone to the nice little beach town and done nice little beachtown stuff. They talked about church, about faith, about the bible, and the longer they went on the more I realized that dammit, these were genuinely good people. I mean, first thing they did was offer me a sandwich when they got in the car.
So, when I did get them to Riverside, I let them slide. I did take the sandwich tho, because I was hungry as hell. Peanut butter and jelly. Probly cost me 40 in gas just to get them there, so I made all of 60 bucks last night, which means I paid 40 dollars to be a cab driver.
So it goes. Being good to people is not always profitable.

I can only hope that karma gets me back for that one. But then, expecting anything out of karma is a mistake in itself. It doesn't really operate on the give and take model. It's just a model of give and take, a way of interpreting ups and downs. You win, you lose, you gain, you suffer, and it tends to even out. But it is not, as so many like to think, a simple equation of doing good gets you good in return. That is an article of faith.
Faith I got, though, so here's hoping.

I should tell you about Sunday though...
I didn't get much sleep over the weekend, and Sunday was no exception. I went out for a while, got no calls, was just sitting in my cab. I had to take it to the yard for new tires and some maintenance, and once that was done, I wasn't getting any calls.
So I called it, went home, tried to sleep, but couldn't. I ended up exhausted around 10pm, and decided then that I should just say fuck it and go enjoy myself a little. Celebrate getting an honest job for once.
I went drinking in Long Beach, and it was well. I had a little money in my pocket still, having paid everything down, handled all my finances, and I spent that money. I bought shots for my friends. I got good beer, rather than the swill I usually drink. I put songs on the jukebox.
My friend was bartending, and he was proud of me. I could tell just talking to him that he had a little more respect for me. There was a bit of that going around. The usual crowd suddenly saw me a bit differently, which is strange. Its not like anything about me has changed. I just found a new way to kill time.

I should mention the money thing...
See, I really don't care about money too hard. Its probly a product of my upbringing. I'm sure I've discussed this elsewhere. But, even making a little bit hasn't really changed the fact that its not terribly important to me. It's like a weird game. You pile up this resource and decide strategically how to spend it best. Real Time Strategy. I really hope that this doesn't make me into a materialistic grasper. I struggle with grasping as it is, though its usually for ephemeral things, like truth or love or meaning.
I don't want to expend energy and time and precious life in striving for something as meaningless as cash. Still, it is satisfying to make a little scratch. It's honest, at least. Its not like I'm pimping or dealing cocaine. I'm a cabbie.
That's all just an aside tho, and likely just me adjusting to being a more normal human being. One must expect this to take some time and prompt some odd thoughts, revealing just how far from ordinary life I have been these past few years. It wasn't necessarily easier, the odd, dream-driven, wandering life, just a different set of priorities.
A different game, as it were. Wasn't really any more or less fun than the money game, for that matter.

Back to Sunday...
I'm at the bar, getting drunk, and Lolis puts on Bleeding Love. Of course, I know all the words, and I'm a little wasted, so I belt out a find rendition, joined by the tall pretty black girl and the big-assed mexican girl. We linked arms, dancing together in a slow sort of wobble, and I would extricate myself to make overly dramatic gestures in time to the melodramatic lyrics.
It was pretty funny...
Directly afterwards, tall pretty black girl says rather loudly, while holding both my hands, "We should have sex!" right there in front of God, the bartender, and everybody.
To my credit, I did not laugh in her face or stammer, but with only missing half a beat said, "I completely agree! Been saying that for a while. Just posted on facebook about it today in fact."
I thought this was pretty funny, but then again, I was pretty drunk.
This is when Lolis, ever the helpful wingman, chimes in about how much I love to eat pussy, something about how I'll do that shit all night, proceeds to ask me, right in front of God, the Bartender, tall pretty black girl and everybody, "How long were you at it the first time? Like, six hours or something?"
I was, of course, mortified. This is not something one asks in polite company, but, remember, we aren't exactly in polite company. I mean, once some drunk chick blurts out "We should have sex!", manners are kind of already out the window.
But still, this is somewhat personal, so I hesitate to answer that it was, in fact, eight hours, and proceeded to have to tell the story to tall pretty black girl how the first girl I ever loved, kissed, or slept with, was a bisexual and insisted I learn to perform cunnilingus properly. To that end, we did it until I got that shit right. It took literally all night, but by the end I can confidently say that I was certified by a professional. (funny story, we actually went to church immediately after this marathon oral sex session... I'll save that one for another time tho)
It is a skill that has done me yeoman service in the many years since. But, I didn't really take tall pretty black girl seriously. She was shocked by this knowledge and said, "I... I need to sit down and just think about that for a minute. Or take you back to my place right now."
I think I said something affirmative but noncommital, because I didn't really think she was planning on actually taking me home with her. In any event, I did not go home with her. I went home with Lolis and our other friend (the mexican girl with the LA booty).
That's when it started to get a little weird, but not unexpectedly so. Still, I never see these things coming.
I don't know how much to say about what followed, but, me and the girl start drinking southern comfort while Lolis goes and passes out butt neked on his floor.
We get totally wasted.
She starts getting a little fresh. Not unusual, not even unexpected. I've known her for years, we've been down this road before: she gets drunk and horny and there I am, the last man standing, completely unsuspected even though I should be totally expecting it.
Instead of expecting the inevitable, I'm just focused on getting as fuckered as possible. I have to work the next day, and we're talking about 12hr shifts, so this is the most fun I'm gonna have for a while. I'm out on the porch, smoking, thinking of someone else even though I really ought not to be-- supposed to be over it, but fuck it, I'm too goddam drunk to keep the cat on the leash right now. So I start talking, barely aware of the girl next to me.
I'm not sure exactly what I said. I was pretty wasted by that point. I think it was something about how hard it can be to let go, but how we have to, because the longer we hold onto things, the farther away they actually get. Something like that. It was probly something more directly related to exactly how I was feeling just then; a little sad, a little lonely, a little confused, mostly numb and slightly amused, and how all of this somehow connected to something larger, but for me it was all just trying to find a little piece of my heart that recently went missing.
(These are the moments I really wish I could save... Filters off, inhibitions removed, no longer keeping my feelings or thoughts under strict control. In wine there is truth-- in whiskey, there is a human being laid bare. Angry ones will be angry, sad ones will be sad, happy ones will be happy, worried ones will worry, and some will be a mix of all manner of things, puzzling out the workings of the human problem.)
Then, she took me to bed. Her pants immediately came off. We fooled around a little, but like I said, this has happened before. She gets fucking wasted, I get fucking wasted, she's horny and I'm sad and she takes me to bed. In all honesty, I must have just let it happen. Why sleep alone? Besides, we were both too drunk to fuck; she passed out immediately.
We fucked in the morning.
It was just as the hangover was starting to fade. I had a headache, but she got my pants off and got things going, and before I know it... well, yes.
Thing is, I don't want to be crude here and I don't think anyone needs to image of me having... intimate congress... embedded in their minds. I'm not trying to get pornographic here.
But...
There is something that I feel worth saying. I will be delicate.
The experience was empty. I just sort of went with it, but once it was happening, I wanted it to stop. Just mechanically humping away, a fleshy machine with no purpose. I felt nothing. This woman has been my friend for many years, and we have done this before; she was trying to comfort me, a little gift, a nice gesture and I did appreciate it, but, alas, something had changed.
I just couldn't do it. I was pumping away just wondering what the fuck I was doing. There was no pleasure in it for me, though she seemed to be having a good time (not a total loss, I guess). I'll spare you the gritty details, but for one:
I had to fake an orgasm.

I want to sit here and tell you that I don't know what my problem was, or say that I was just dehydrated and hung over or my head hurt or maybe I was still a little drunk, or that I'm just not big on morning sex, or that I only like her as a friend, but lets be real here, these things haven't stopped me before.

I guess my heart just wasn't in it. I need something more. Something real.
This leads into a whole other talk that I don't have the time or emotional energy to have right now. Spilling my guts like this is tiring.
Guess we'll just have to be patient, and wait for the realness to come up in its proper time.
Til then, I think I'll pay more attention, and not have random, hollow, forgettable sexual encounters for a while.
Now is a season for long, quiet talks with the last one standing, passing the whiskey back and forth in the small, cold hours before dawn. It is a time for consideration and care, and letting things be what they are, instead of reaching for what isn't there.
Good thing to know about myself, though. I suppose it wasn't entirely meaningless, given that I learned something, or at least demonstrated something that I knew already. Just not into sex without intimacy, hell, maybe I even need actual love at this point.
Scary thought. I am not in a position to have such a high standard.
;)

-blush

Mucho Trabajo!

2010-11-02T11:49:00.000-07:00

The other day my father planted a new tree in the front yard.
This was Saturday, in fact, and there is nothing new about the tree. Only its location has changed.
It's a weird little tree tho. It's kind of a big ball of bark near the ground, with two trunks coming out of it with bushy tops of long, thin, drooping leaves. It's neat. We've had it for many years, through many moves. Way back in the day, and I suppose still, my mother had(has) a thing for tropicals. This is one of the rarer ones that she cultivated and cared for. She told me once that it is an ancient species, dating back hundreds of millions of years. Dinosaurs ate this fucking tree.
There were a few of these extremely ancient species in her collection.
At any rate, when we lost all the money and had to move from the big house, and my parents split up, mom took most of the plants with her. But, you see, there were so very many. So, over the years, as she has moved and we have moved and at last she settled in a place and we settled in a place, the plants have moved back and forth until now, we reach a happy medium.
My father, when he was still bitter about the split, complained bitterly about all the goddam plants. Constant reminders, I'm sure, of what he'd lost. Over time, however, especially now that he owns his own home again, he's come to enjoy them. My brother, too, used to hate all the plants, because my mother constantly wants us to transport and exchange them, but now he waters them every day and, he being the most like my mother of all us boys, seems to have a knack for it, a green thumb. They flourish under his care.
It is one of the ways she keeps close to us, the plants.
It is one of those things that is so very much my mother, these plants, her gardening. She's a lawyer by trade, but her true calling has something to do with making backyards into jungles.
I am not much of a plant guy. I am most like my father of all the boys. I struggle to break away from his bad habits, and accentuate the far more numerous positive qualities of the man-- generosity, kindness, patience, compassion.

My brother and father were out there putting the tree into a gigantic hole they'd dug in the front yard. The first I knew of this, my brother knocked at my door while I was alone in my room watching a movie (Predators, which turned out to be as awesome as I had hoped, and my hopes were high!). I threw a shirt on and answered and he, with droopy bags under his eyes from staring at a computer screen all day (goddam civ 5 again!) says, in short clipped tones that still kind of withered with his desultory half-wakefulness:
"Dude, dad dug a huge hole in the front yard," *shoveling motions* "Could you come out and move some of the dirt away?"
I of course complied. I do whatever these two want me to. I live to serve. However, I did insist that I see the end of this movie first, and he agreed.
So, after the movie, I go down to the front yard and indeed, right in the middle of the grass, there is a huge hole. My father is standing there, sandals on his feet, hands in work gloves resting on his hips, and my brother has the sawsall(SP?) and he's cutting away the pot that the ancient plant has been in for like a decade. Beneath the green plastic, it is all roots. One must wonder what it was feeding upon with no soil.
When he's made his cuts, I rip the plastic off. Dad is old and Jon is scrawny, so all heavy lifting invariably must involve me; this plant has got to be sixty pounds at least, this gigantic root ball. I grunt and shift the plant so we can tear all the plastic away; we settle the soil in the hole, the good potting soil going over the sandy stuff just under the grass, check it for depth, and then with a mighty heave I lift and settle the tree in its new home.
Now, our lawn is complete. On one side, the plumeria, which is doing well, and now on the other, this nameless million year old tree.
I mean, not the tree itself, but you know, its lineage...

My father was pleased. My brother was pleased. In the end, I didn't have to dig anything. The dirt was on a tarp, and given that I did the heavy lifting, my father decided to take care of it himself. He is always looking for a chore, and he has always liked gardening.
I remember when we used to live in Santa Ana, renting the big old house with the den that became the legendary Game Room (walls studded with nerdy posters, stained with the smoke of countless cigarettes, a separate fireplace, right next to the kitchen and with room enough for twelve people to spread around the big table for sixteen hour marathon D&D sessions... it was a glorious time, and we shall never know its like again!) and the pitiful little front lawn, my father decided one day to spruce up all the plants around the back yard pool and the front yard, which had become somewhat overgrown through neglect. We were renting, and at that time didn't care about the front or back yards and neither did the landlord.
My father got himself some actual gardening equipment, ripped his shirt off, and went to with a weedwhacker at everything.
Like, everything.
There was an old lawnmower that was there when we moved in. He got that working too, to trim our pitiful little stretch of crabgrass. Then he attacked that with the weedwhacker too. Everything got the weedwhacker that day, and my father loved it.
I remember being in my room, writing about something... If I recall, I was in a writing workshop at the time, and my teacher wanted me to write something personal, about my family, for the little anthology we put together just for the class there. It was full of all kinds of trauma, because that's mostly what we remember, right? But, I didn't want it to end that way and was trying to finish on a positive.
So I was working on that, near the end, when my father comes into the house, shirtless, sweating, a little sunburned, hair all fussed, with little bits of grass and leaves and twigs stuck to him and tangled in his beard, which was a spectacular kind of salt and pepper affair in those days. He shaves it now.
"Mucho trabajo!" he hollered, laughing, "mucho trabajo!"
He was very amused.
This is the scene that finished my memoir-- mucho trabajo! everything turned out just fine, and we were all good people in spite of how we'd failed and hurt each other.

Now he's a little older. He didn't take his shirt off and he didn't holler 'mucho trabajo' but he was pleased, because he had a good idea to improve his house and get one more plant out of the backyard. The prehistoric tree will flourish out there on the lawn, and let me say, it does look damn fine out there opposite the plumeria.

-blush

Thinking is the Great Enemy of Perfection

2010-11-01T07:16:00.000-07:00

Well, today, its up way too damn early.
5 fucking 15 am.
I didn't get out of bed for a while, hoping to get back to sleep, but by six, I knew it was a losing battle.
Worst thing was, it was just my brain waking me up. No noises, certainly nothing close to enough sleep, not even a nightmare. Just plain old fashioned... well, I don't even know what to call it.
I don't even know if I can be honest with myself enough to say it, let alone display it all over a public space like this. Not that anyone is paying attention or even gives a shit, but still, it would be embarrassing. Give me a moment to wrestle with my shame and perhaps I'll get around to it.
I'm not going to sit here and say that I hold myself to a high moral standard, but I try. I'm constantly reminding myself that I'm better than all of the petty, venal, low thoughts that come out of my mind. Yet, there it all is.
Lascivious desires waking a man out of a deep sleep he desperately needs? You bet. At five fucking fifteen in the goddam morning.
Nevertheless, carpe diem, right?
So, I laid there for a while, tossing, turning, trying to turn my mind to something else so I could get back to sleep. Oddly enough, I keep thinking about demons. Not because last night was Halloween, but because that's what I'm working on right now, a story about a demon. Least there's a demon in it.
Yet, every time I could soothe myself with imaginary monsters punishing wizards for daring to enslave them, I would begin to drift off, and my mind would come off its leash, and bam, there's all these thoughts again of things I cannot have.
45 fuckin minutes of this, first thing in the morning.
I was resolved very definitely to NOT do anything about it, if you know what I mean. There was a very simple, easy solution, but it would involve me giving up my mind to these thoughts for a while, and that I refused to do.
It might have been the right thing to do, though.
I'm probly not going to explain this right, but there are two sorts of enlightenment.
One involves kind of getting above it all, the other is getting completely involved.
I'll fuck up a perfectly good parable in trying to paraphrase it, but it goes something like:
A dude has a demon outside his door. He is afraid to leave his house. He can't face the thing, its so terrifying. Every day there it is, trying to get in, and he spends all his time trying to keep it out. Until one day, in a moment of satori or whatever, he up and opens the door and invites, INVITES, mind you, the demon in. He doesn't just give up and let it crash through. He asks it to come in, makes it tea, makes friends with it, and eventually it leaves.
That's definitely one way to handle it. It works too.
Maybe I should have handled it that way. Suffering comes directly from desire. Particularly, desiring shit you can't have, but I don't think its exactly framed that way in the literature.
Maybe next time, instead of trying to be stone buddha, I'll just give myself permission to rub one out and get on with my life.

I suppose waking up horny isn't exactly equivalent to a spiritual struggle. Maybe this is my entire problem. Thinking too goddam much about everything. I read a passage by Joseph Conrad last night about how reflection is one of the worst contributions civilization has given to mankind. It slows instant action. I should quote it huh, book is fucking five feet away...
Ahem...
Mind you he's talking about something else entirely but:

"I don't mean the courage of self-assertion, either moral or physical, but the mere way of it, the trick of the thing, the readiness of mind and turn of the hand that come without reflection and lead the man to excellence in life, in art, in crime, in virtue and for the matter of that, even in love. Thinking is the great enemy of perfection. The habit of profound reflection, I am compelled to say, is the most pernicious of all habits formed by the civilized man."
-Joseph Conrad

Word, heart of darkness guy.
In fact, I am sure this is my problem. Overthinking. Then again, the last time I didn't use my thinking, it really bit me on the ass.
I guess a guy just can't win.
Mothefucker needs to meditate or some shit. Stop thinking altogether. Clear the mind.
I think I'll go write about demons instead.
Next time this shit happens, I might just crank it and go back to sleep tho.
I'm a human goddam being, goddammit, and there's no reason I shouldn't feel or more importantly act like one.

-blush

Morning Ablution

2010-10-31T10:30:00.000-07:00

Woke up late, way late.
It was my own fault. I slept in on purpose, trying to hold onto an interesting dream I was having. It didn't work.
There will be nothing profound or interesting today. Only the cobwebs I'm clearing out.
Playing some trance music. Seems a little early (even if I woke up late) but I like it.
Yesterday it was all slow, sad music. Today, I will have beats.
Breakfast made. It is the usual: half-cup oatmeal, raisins, protein shake.
Food of life! Well, its like food. It is non-distracting sustenance. To say I 'like' or 'enjoy' this breakfast is a bit of a stretch. But, with vitamins and probiotics and a good hot cup of tea, it is a good start to the day.
Isn't this fascinating? Aren't you just fucking riveted by my breakfast and music choices?
Well, like I said, nothing profound is happening today.
I could tell you what I did last night, but its super fucking boring too.

It was saturday night, day before halloween, when everyone wants to party, problem is, nobody I know is doing anything interesting. If they are, I am not invited.
This isn't really surprising. I'm not a fan of costume parties, or of grownups dressing up in costumes anyway. Always feels like we're trying too hard to have fun if we have to put on an elaborate getup. However, girls like dressup, and we like having girls at parties, and so, costume parties will continue to the end of time.
I, happily unfettered to some woman who would force me to play dressup for her amusement (like putting bonnets and sailor suits on cats and small dogs or babies) am vocally against it. When costume parties are mentioned I grimace, say something derisive, and give a dismissive hand gesture.
Well, that attitude got me alone on the saturday before halloween, feeling like a loser. Nothing good on TV --not even a goddam scary movie, what are the odds?-- and sick of all my games, it was too late to start pounding coffee and working, so I decided that I would hit the bar.

My place here is called The Helm, and its a shithole. That's not like, they don't serve food and there's clean sawdust on the floor. This is not like, 'oh, lets go to that dive!'
This is a fucking dive. It serves no food, the lights are always dim, the booze is cheap, its not terribly popular, the bathroom stinks, the stools are falling apart, shit the whole place is kind of falling apart. It is a filthy little shithole, and I used to love it there.
I spent a good year or more going into this place twice a week and getting blindfuckdrunk on gin and tonic and wallowing in the depths of real serious self-hate. Like, you might think that I'm a self-hatin motherfucker right now, but you should have seen me then. I was utterly hopeless, a creature of absolute despair, a wretch. This was many years ago, mind you.
Mind you, I never have had the funds or the constitution to be a genuine alcoholic. But in those days, I considered getting drunk enough to puke and pass out miserable behind my car in the parking lot, or by the dumpster, a kind of victory.
Yeah, I know. I'm not sure what twisted sensibilities made me love it, and being there again last night, I had to wonder afresh, what was I so attracted to?
Its been enough years that the bartender knows my face and tries to converse with me. But last night the music was too loud and we couldn't talk. I just ordered my cheap beer and went to the back room to drink it, scribbling my notes and wondering what the fuck I had hoped to accomplish coming here.
Just wanted to see the old joint, I guess. I mean, I'm back now, for reals back, so I should find the regular places again. The coffee shop. The bar. The sandwich place. The chicken burrito joint. One needs to be involved in one's place.
But, my bar, my dive, it sucks.
I drank two beers and bailed.
Still better than the wannabe shithole next door tho.
Maybe that's the ticket. Its just that the Helm is more real by comparison to the other lame ass bars in Newport.
That's probly it.
It's only in its small context that the place is great. A genuine dive where there are none and people sneer at the idea, or just think its cute.
But, I've been about a bit and seen shithole dives all over, and I can tell you that everywhere they are necessary. Sometimes you gotta go deep, deep into your drink. You can have no pleasant distractions. There can be fun, but it is not to be good or clean or well-lit. Some of us, well, all of us at one time or another, have no place in the brightness and joy of the surface.
Better by far to be under. It's quiet down there, and they play better music.

Oh right, I almost forgot.
It was halloween party night or whatever.
People were wearing shitty costumes, Like I Give a Shit.

Tonight is Halloween, but once again, I have nothing to do and don't really give a shit. I'm sure later, bored, lonesome, I'll be all like 'aw fuck, its halloween, i should be doing something!'
But, if I'm being honest with myself. I have never once enjoyed a halloween party. well, once me and a girlfriend fucked in costume, and another girlfriend let me do stuff to her wouldn't let me do otherwise just cuz it was halloween and id been a good sport about donning a costume. Those two were all right.
Other than that, never had a bit of fun at a halloween party.
I do like handing out candy.
There are no children in the trailer park, or I would.
I like handing out the candy because 1) Children are the ones who should be enjoying this holiday. We're dressing up in costumes for christ's sake, talkin about scary ghouls and shit; its for the goddam kids. You get to ask them, 'What are you supposed to be?' you don't get something over clever (that hardly ever pays off, though I must admit I've seen some good ones) or "sexy(insertanythinghere)", you get: Pirate! Ghost! Princess! Robot! It's genuine imagination, not forced cleverness or an excuse to dress like hooker.
2) Kids go nuts for fuckin candy. You can tell. Remember? Remember how fucking awesome free candy was when you were a kid? On halloween, not only did you get to pretend super-hard, with the full uniform for pretend on, but you got a fucking BUCKET of free candy.
I like fun that isn't forced, and its mostly kids who are good at that. It's a good thing to see, a nice reminder that things were not always thus.

Now CHRISTMAS! There's a holiday I can get behind! and THANKSGIVIN! love me some thanskgivin. I do it every day, and a whole day of cooking a feast for loved ones to show just how grateful you are, now that's right up my alley.
So we'll talk more about those things as they roll up here pretty soon.

-blush

Pizza Night

2010-10-30T12:26:00.001-07:00

I was dreading dinner with my family.
I didn't want to answer the "So what are you doing?" question twenty times, because all I have for that is some things that aren't happening yet, the same old shit that's going nowhere, and a sad story that I'm sick of telling.
Plus, it wasn't like a nice dinner. Since everyone was bringing their kids, it was going to be pizza. Kids are picky like that. (Not good pizza either. Laventina's Big Cheese pizza. This is the place on the peninsula with the five dollar large pizza. We used to rip them off all the time, calling in with different voices saying our pizzas were fucked and we needed another, forcing poor delivery guys to come back on their bike's again and again. One night, we did it three times in just a few hours, and they caught wise, and my house got blacklisted.)
This was unavoidable, however. My mother had called me three times this week about it. I had to go. Gramma was leaving. She'd moved here from Las Vegas because she was having trouble breathing out there. She lived in Aliso Viejo the past few months, but was bored and lonely at the retirement place there; everyone goes to bed at 7:30, do nothing in the afternoon, and my grandmother, still active at 88, likes to do things and meet people.
So, she's going back to Vegas. I think its good but my mother disagrees. She seems to think she is the only one of her mother's children who can properly take care of her. I feel this is debatable, but my mother, she has what you'd call a negative outlook for the most part.

So there I am, out front of my mom's place, talking to myself.
"I can not do this right now. Fuck. I don't want to talk to my mom about it. I can't do this right now. My whole fucking life is a story of failed hopes, disappointment, wasted potential, solitude. I can't do this right now."

It is very, very easy to say, 'nah dude, it's not that bad, I was just feeling a little depressed' but from a certain viewpoint, my life has been wasted. It can take a lot of effort to see the bright side-- any sort of good that I've done, positive influences on people, rare moments of true love and actual happiness are too few. The tally of my life, the sum of it, does not paint a good picture. I have accomplished nothing of value, achieved nothing of worth, and my dreams remain unfulfilled. It is hard to avoid this conclusion, and truthfully I really do just want to give up on life sometimes. Lots of times. Truthfully, I really don't see the point, when I let myself think about it too hard. Seems far too late and far too gone.

This is how I'm feeling walking into my mother's house on pizza night. First thing she sends me off to the store for sodas and beer, and thank God, because I am not ready yet. I find the 7-11 nearby and continue to iterate my own dissatisfaction with my life until the instant I exit the car and there's the slightest possibility of anyone hearing me whinge.
There is a huge line, and three 2 liter bottles and a case of beer are heavy. It is a long wait. Finally I get to the counter, and the mexican lady ringing me up asks me how my night is going.
I almost want to tell her the truth.
"Just fine," I smile, noticing that my voice is low and of the exact timbre that might tell anyone who knew me well enough that indeed, things are not just fine.
Still, I'm polite by nature (proper raising) so I ask her how her night is going.
This woman at the 7-11 is full of positivity, turns out. "Oh, busy," she smiles-- the line is still long behind me-- "But nice customers. Nice day..." she went on about her nice day and feeling lucky to have work.
"I like your attitude, lady," I told her.
She smiled, bid me a nice evening, and I went back to the car, immediately returning to my self-contained dialog (not a monologue, I'm having a conversation with myself, it goes back and forth... maybe sometimes its not so off base to think I'm slipping a little) about how pointless and rotten and wasted my life is, how little I have to look forward to, how grim my prospects are, how little this all matters.
Lots of littleness, on my way back to pizza night...

I should tell you that this didn't exactly come out of nowhere. Aside from the broken heart bullshit there were some other setbacks and uncomfortable moments that day.
First was in the morning. I have been slowly coming back to the work I abandoned before going into the desert and the unfortunate misadventures that followed. That morning I was determined to get at least a thousand words, not nearly enough to be called productive but a start, the beginning of a real disciplined practice. I was 500 words in when the power went out for an indefinite period of time.
I hadn't been inspired or coming out of a place of genius, but it was working. I wasn't writing garbage and the story was progressing forward. Sentences and paragraphs were forming, one at a time, a slow steady pace, my pace. And then the goddam power went out.
Still determined to make something of it, I decided that, as a measure of last resort, I was going to go be asshole writer dude at my coffee shop. I don't like being this guy. It's damn near impossible for me to write with any dignity, quality, or purpose when people are watching me do it or even in the same room with me. Best I can do is solipsistic ramblings like this, or rather, the seeds of my solipsistic ramblings.
Just as I'm leaving the house, my father stops me for one of his strange little conversations. He seems to think that I've been cleaning my room for the past two weeks, when really it just took me a few days. That's fine, because I don't want to tell him all my plans. He has a way of somehow intruding on them and ruining them-- smothering would be a good word. I love the old man, but he needs a hobby that isn't me.
At any rate I noticed that he was slurring a little... not slurring really, but he sounded like he had cottonmouth.
"Sounds like you got some dry mouth there, dad."
"My medicine," he says. He's in his sixties, he's got lots of medicine.
"Which one?"
"Celexa."(? might have been what he said, I have no idea... medicine names are cobbled together from nonsense syllables meant to sound like futuristic chemical compounds)
"What's that one for?" I feel the need to ask this because my father is getting older, and given the three brothers I've got, it's unlikely that taking care of him will fall to anyone else but me. When that time comes, I want to have some idea of his health. It's a ways off, and thank God because I am not ready yet.
"Depression," he answers. Surprise must have registered on my face, because I saw a little bit of shame on his, and this in turn made me feel ashamed for making my father ashamed. Fuck, I'm more depressed than anyone I know, I barely manage to keep myself from jumping bridges or driving off the edge of those flying freeway interchange ramps. I know the man has had some problems but I thought those were far behind him.
"I thought you were doing all right these days," I say maybe a little too casually.
"I am! I think I am!" he responds. I can tell he's trying to assure me. He goes on for a minute about how he keeps himself busy and happy, and what he's going to get when he goes to the store today, and with more shame crawling through my insides I nod, listen, and dismiss myself hurriedly, grabbing my briefcase and making for the door.
Just then the power comes back on, but by then, I've got to get the fuck out of there.
I got nothing done at the coffee shop. I got a sandwich, some decaf, and I think somewhere in there started some writing about my self-doubt.
That's probly where it started.
We are so much alike, this old man and I. He's sixty something and on anti-depressants. He was pretty successful in the conventional sense-- a doctor, made lots of money, had some decent kids-- What fucking hope have I got?

So, maybe that spiraled into how shitty my life has become as I step back into mom's house with the sodas and beers for pizza night.
First thing I see is my mother smiling (she's aging well) and my brother Ben (aging poorly) and on Ben's knee is my brand new nephew, Ethan Gabriel Blush.
And goddammit, god fucking dammit, I almost leaked tears right there. The first son. The legacy. It's a joke, but you know, its kind of not a joke. I wasn't sure right then why I was about to fucking cry ten seconds after walking through the door.
Ben is a stocky fellow, taller than me (not as tall as my brother Jon or my brother Tom) but stocky like I am. He played football in high school, and he's a Godly man. Teaches Bible at a christian school and is getting his master's degree in theology. He's grown a funny kind of goatee and I make a joke about it to keep myself from weeping like a little bitch at the sight of his child.
(I hate to say it, but Ethan is not really a beautiful baby. He's rotund and had a weird look on his face, like he was constipated and bored and unimpressed... I have a feeling I'm going to like him.)
Then he hands me the fucking baby.
There are the usual crowing from my mother and grandmother, "oooh looks good Chris, you're a natural!", but right then I knew what was tearing at my guts and misting up my eyes.
In the unaccountable way that I've known so many truths (intuition or divine revelation, some communication from the better part of my brain) I knew that I'd never have a son of my own. Holding that baby kind of proved it. Wasn't unpleasant, not like I hated the little guy. I lifted him up, flew him around, made faces at him, but I knew that this was not my future. I would never have what my brother has.
It's hard to explain, but there was no picture of me and my son doing this. My imagination is strong, it informs a great deal of my life, but it could not show me any possibilities for a family of my own. This sort of thing is great, I think I'd enjoy it and be good at it, but it's not meant for me.
I handed my brother his kid back and went outside to smoke. The tears never really materialized. Cigarette clamped in my lips I thought of all the things I haven't done and all the things I'd never do, and the urge to weep vanished.
I just sort of resigned myself to misery and lonesomeness, made a brief note in my trusty memo pad and went back inside.

My brother Jon had arrived with his girlfriend. He recently figured out that he will be going to hawaii for his graduate studies. I could not be more pleased. I admire my brother Jon. One of the smartest guys I know. Studies history. Knows some latin. And a super nice guy. But he also might be the only dude I know who hates himself more than I do. Forces me to put my own self-loathing away from time to time.
He always plays with the kids at these things.
Just after him my cousin Charlie arrived. I haven't seen Charlie since his wife was pregnant with their first kid. Must be two years ago or more. I can't remember what the occasion was. Charlie is also some kind of genius. He does work for the defense department that he can't talk about. I like to say that he's a scientist, like you see in the movies where you don't know exactly what they do, but they wear the coat and protective goggles and boil shit in beakers. I think he looks for traces of explosives or something to that effect.
At any rate, he has a gigantic two year old, a pretty wife still a touch plump from her second pregnancy, a good life. He's been a hard worker since he was a kid. Driven, Chuck was.
But...
He is also a turbogeek. D&D, Warhammer tabletop, video games, you name it, but most of all he is an avaricious reader of fantasy and science fiction. He reads fifty books a year at least.
We've had a connection, me and Charlie, since we were little. We've always liked the same shit. Cousinhood is a strange bit-- like you're family, but you know each other through holiday visits and such, such to say, not terribly well in most cases. But me and Charlie, we've always had a friendship that was sort of independent of us being family. Its like, we met because our parents are related, but we'd be friends if we met in line at the bank.

By the time Charlie shows up with his kids, Owen and Logan (Logan is a brand new human, but Owen is goddam huge; wtf are people feeding kids these days?) I've explained five times that I'm going to drive a taxi, I'm trying to decide where to go to graduate school, and I'm still writing. There are questions following all these that I won't go into. They're obvious and tiresome. Basically it amounts to a strange upward noise from the top of the throat, a noncommittal raising of eyebrows and widening of eyes, the 'oh, hey, you aren't just loafing around, you're actually doing the bare minimum! way to go!' kind of face.
Charlie, however, stops at 'still writing'.
"Oh, good. That's great. I just have kids."
I laugh, maybe a little too loud. "Kids are great! Look at this one, he's gigantic!"
"Yeah, he's huge," he tells me, and goes into, "I try to find time, but I have kids. Last thing I wrote was fan fiction for this tabletop game..." (I forgot the name of the game... it involves miniatures).
He asks me what kind of stuff I'm working on.
"Fantasy, you know, same kind of shit I've always done."
This isn't exactly true. I write all kinds of garbage that has nothing to do with swords or sorcery.
He goes on to talk about podcasts he subscribes to featuring famous fantasy authors, the magazines he reads, the books he goes through.
Charlie really wants to write fantasy books...

We eat pizza. My brother Ben has a long talk in the kitchen with me about the nature of love and the path of the redeemed. He's taking a class on love in his theology program. I've had some issues with this recently. He questions me (with an air of intellectual curiosity) about how I fell in love, what went wrong, and for a while I'm sitting on a kitchen counter with my brother I hardly ever see and wouldn't you know it, it's helping. Relationships and their complications aside, people and their issues aside, its good to know that there are people smarter than me who tacitly assume the truth and value of love.
It's real and it's good, and that's enough for tonight at least.
We're about to get into the 'agape' type of love, the selfless, everlasting, ever-suffering brand of love that God has for us, that we aspire to have for each other (in the royal sense), when he's called away to take pictures of the family.
I am included, much to my chagrin.
Anyone who's tried to take a picture of me knows that I find it hilarious to look away from the camera, as though something outside the frame has my attention, or staring heroically into the distance, or just looking generally distracted.
Not tonight.
I look right ahead and smile.
I might even mean it.

I excused myself from pizza night just after the picture. Hugged everyone, said my goodbyes, got my cousin's email. He really wants to read my stories and talk about books some more.
My self-loathing has been shooed back to its corner. I'm walking back to my car, picture smile still in place, thinking that after all, I'm doing what I was meant to do.
I'm writing shitty stories, probably never get published and sure as shit won't be famous, but I think of all the people I know who would love to do this, but can't for sake of career and family, or who simply can't find the time.
Maybe I haven't accomplished much, maybe I never will. But there is something to be said for doing what you love, whatever it pays. I don't put much value on material success.
I don't need to worry about producing any children. The Blush legacy is quite secure.
So, maybe I don't make much of a living, but what's living anyway? Even if life's pointless, this isn't the same as meaningless, and every day we must decide what meaning life has.
Just then, driving home, it was seeing things for their value rather than their cost.

There's more to this, little bonuses that are beyond my point here: my friend Don called me on the way home, needing advice to spruce up the D&D campaign he's been plotting. He's been working on it, writing out page after page, front and back, for weeks now, and as always he calls me for some tips and pointers plot-wise: in the course of five minutes, I lent him several devices to heighten the drama and the suspense. I am good at what I do, no denying that.

I begged for signs, for something to keep me going, some stopgap against giving up. I asked my creator for a scrap to sustain me, and I got it.
Why, here it is, not even lunchtime, and I've put down 3000 words.
All is not lost, not just yet...

-blush

Indulgence

2010-10-26T21:53:00.000-07:00

It was late and I was tired but I couldn't sleep, so I went for a drive.
It wasn't raining but there was a thick fog along the coast highway and up into the hills where I like to drive. Streetlights burned silent orange halos through the murk. Nothing that came through the radio pleased me so I shut it off. I had a lot on my mind but I couldn't voice any of it. I drove along this route mechanically, pure muscle memory, by habit alone. Been taking this same drive up the hill ever since I got my first car.
It's quiet up there where all the really nice houses are. These are the homes with the windows that light up with the setting sun like a second dawn breaking, bright as unmade promises. On a clear night you can see half the county from up there.
It's not exactly for comfort. More for clarity.
I parked by the side of the road at a secluded spot up about as high as it goes and got out of the car. Couldn't see anything through the fog floating through the night in fine drizzle. None of the city lights, no florescent squares in distant office buildings.
Just the goddam fog.
Then again, there's nothing out there that I haven't seen a hundred times.

It was only today that I got the minute of clarity I needed.
Strange to say, but I was driving around again, this time in circles around the island where I used to live. Yet another thing I've done for as long as I've been able to. This is purely for comfort. I'm feeling quite at the end of my rope despite a productive and worthwhile day. There is a lot to process just now, and many things to discuss, but I am utterly alone in the best and truest sense (surrounded by people who would gladly listen and offer good advice, who care and want to help, want me to be happy and all that, but still at a distance that precludes real involvement and therefore, actual investment in my happiness-- its not distrust exactly, but who can possibly understand or care without sharing the problem with me? In order to really get it, to really help, you must feel hurt when I am hurt, you must be confused by my confusion, you have to feel my pain and my joy as keenly as I do, and no one is close enough to me to do this.)
It's been a strange time. Going on months now of things I haven't fully grasped or understood.
There have been signs and wonders. Omens real and false. Voices from unseen sources. Psychic mediums, crazy love, bad endings and new beginnings, and it all wrapped up back in Orange fucking County, like a wretched one like me just can't fucking get away from it.
What in the hell does it all mean?
All of this, it is all the work and doings of a desperate man, all these things that have such meaning to me are madness. The things I have done for love and faith and honor, all these words that I've put myself on the line for, risked everything for, have no place in the real world-- they do not butter bread, they do not pay rent, and actions done for their sake change no one's mind or heart on anything.
By the same hand, I have raged and capered and smoked and seeped my sorry brain in drunkenness and abhorrent self-abuse, for things less noble and no more real-- other words: sadness, loss, pain, disappointment. Again, the actions and flailing of a desperate man.

Now here I was, driving about, drinking coffee at four in the afternoon like a damn heathen, smoking a pack and a half a day and falling into wordless growls of rage over the meaninglessness of it all. Realizing I was still a desperate man, I performed another desperate act-- perhaps less desperate than borderline alcoholic binges, throwing money away on psychic readings and wasting time trying to divine tarot cards and empty words.
I straight up just had a talk with God.

Understand me.
God may or may not have been in the car. God may or may not be everywhere. I like to think God is, but I am not so arrogant as to presume. Right now, at the computer drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, it seems like something a crazy person does. I mean, I'm alone in my car, talking loudly, soundly, truthfully every thought and all my doubts without nuance or even much of a break. I am questioning my God. It is every human being's right to do so.
I raged and railed at God for quite a while, and every question, every accusation, was met immediately with an answer from my own head.
Clarity.
It got right down to the heart of matters.
What the fuck was all this about? I thought you were giving me signs, I thought you were guiding me, I felt it damn you, I knew it, I had faith and I expected a reward.
Who the hell am I to presume to know the meaning of every sign? Did I set the planets in their course? Do I drive the winds, did I fill the seas?
Sure didn't, chief.
Well then goddammit why? What are you trying to do to me here? What is the goddam point?
The point is that I am driving around in circles around this island where I haven't lived for more than a decade, trying to find comfort from something that hasn't existed for a long damn time.
Point is, here you are, still, still. There is no comfort here. There is nothing for you here. What you have in this place is only what you bring with you.
And that's when I knew.

If there is a God, I will call him merciful.
If we are watched and ruled by a merciful God, then men must have hope.

It became clear what it was all about, what I was being driven to. Not by habit or rote or some old notion of where I belong and who I am.
It is time to leave again, but not for a jaunt. No more adventures. No more missions.
It's time to move on from this place. No more running away.
Time to run toward something, somewhere.
The Lord is trying to get me the fuck out of my homeland.
Question is, where am I supposed to go?

-blush

Word to Closure

2010-10-25T11:17:00.000-07:00

Last night it became clear that I had to put an end to it.
Had to know, absolutely, where everything stood.
So much of pain and confusion, wondering and doubt. Up nights, tormented by memories; up too early, troubled by foggy bits of bad dreams; never enough sleep and all kinds of time torn to shreds by longing and sadness and disappointment trading places in the mind like spokes of a turning wheel.
Had to make it stop.
Might have gone about it better, might not have pressed the issue with her. I could have dealt on my own, but a man must know the truth sometimes. When it really matters, you just have to hear it. Guesses and assumptions will not suffice.
So, I called her, and we called it.

It was the best thing to do. Not pleasant, but not as bad as the unknowing. Not that I heard anything I didn't know already, mind you.
But, like I said, one must know absolutely. If I can't have truth, I must have hope-- if I can't find the water, I will drink the sand.
That's not my phrase, but I like it, and it applies.
We talked for more than an hour. I said everything that I wanted to. She said everything I needed to hear.
I'll give you the digest:
I loved her more than she loved me. Indeed, she has no interest in love whatsoever.
I'm not going to sit here and lie to you and say that love is all that matters, but its pretty damned important. Clearly, me and this girl I love are on two different planets. Not a surprise.
Not the first time either, but it's never quite been like this.
When I count the times I've been in this situation-- loving someone who does not love me back-- I can always call it infatuation later. Yet, this morning, typing out my 500 word warmup here, after coffee and cigarettes and thinking it through and through, I know that this time it isn't so.
This was the real deal, least on my end. I think it could have been so much more, so much better than what it was, if only given time to grow into itself. A little courage, a little faith, just a bit more of a chance and it might have been the love of a lifetime.
Or, maybe not.
Maybe we weren't too compatible after all, for all that she was everything I've ever wanted.
Maybe just bad timing.
Maybe this or that or who the fuck cares.
Point is, it's done, and I can rest and think like a normal person again. (Well, lets be honest, never quite like a normal person, but back to my normal at least.)

Not to say that I'm just going to stow this and let it die. Every time I've done that, a little piece of myself died with it and I never quite got that bit of myself back.
I know better. She brought out something good and strong and ready in me. One day I will thank her for it, maybe a month or two down the line when its not so fresh, when we can get back to how we were before any of this went down. Before it became love.
It was the biggest, strongest, purest love I've ever felt, and I'm not just going to let it die.
I'm going to put it in its proper place, however.
This kind of love is not of the sort that one just gets over and forgets. It is not contingent on any sort of relationship in the strict social sense. It doesn't need a label or a name. It's the sort of love that comes from the truest and deepest part of you; it's a direct line to it, a love linked directly to the source of love, and now that I know its there, I feel sure I can find it again when the right person, the right time, the right place finds me.

Lovelorn is a good word to apply to me. Been so for many years, and no one is to blame.
I know something now that I did not before tho. I have learned myself capable of something that seemed impossible to me before. I suppose she might be to blame for that.
I really will have to thank her someday. Probly sooner rather than later. I can already feel the hurt of rejection and disappointment changing into something else.
She took what might have been the worst time of my life and made it into the best. There's some magic in that. I will give her credit for it. She won't believe it or understand it, but she should know anyway, right?

So, silly as it sounds, crazy as it seems, Blush can love again...

-cbb

Locked

2010-10-24T10:59:00.000-07:00

It's been a while.
How are you?
I am wary of communicating with the tiny corner of metaphysical vastness today.
I have very little to say. There's an awful lot on my mind, but as much as we like to be honest here. I'd rather not discuss my doubts and issues just now.
I'm so very late in getting to my words today.
I put some effort in to making my little space here clearer and more livable. There is far, far less junk than there was previous. The floor is clear, some tables are clear, I have lots of shelf space, but still my mind is clouded.
Quite stagnant today, my brain. Well, that's not the word. Locked. My obsessive personality has interrupted my higher functions again.
Of course it has to do with a woman.
If the psychic medium I consulted a few weeks back is to be believed -- and there's a real choice there, whether to believe or not-- I am surrounded by various ancestral spirits. Not directly related to me, mind you, but a pair of fellows who apparently knew me in some past, more powerful incarnation. Seems only the really cool past lives count. All those times you came back as a peasant or a cow or a milkmaid just sort of come and go I guess. I mean, I don't know how it all works, Lord knows its not really my department. The divination of the soul's winding path through destiny is way, way beyond my pay scale.
Nevertheless, lets give the medium the benefit of the doubt, just for funzies.
I was told that in a previous incarnation, and it would seem there have been a great, great many, I was vizier to some powerful king or ruler of some sort. I was, I am told, some kind of magician, a knower of deep mysteries, versed in arts wizardly and profane.
I say profane because it would seem that some batch of my suffering in this life is connected to a nameless act of black sorcery I performed in that previous incarnation.
Good story, no?
Two men of my tribe in those times are apparently still watching over me. I got the sense they were largely indifferent but not unsympathetic. They are both large Nordic types, Vikings, warriors I'm told; one is blonde, one is gray. They were like brothers to me in this story.
No details, mind you, of what went down or how my past incarnation fucked me over or why.
But, the medium told me that these two advised --and their advice is, it would seem, seldom given-- that I not focus so much on women. I was and must become again a wise warrior and re-learn the magicks I had once used for good but perverted toward some evil end.
Might we assume then that this wizard I used to be did some heinous ritual for the sake of a woman?
Lots of different ways that could have gone down. Men have done a lot for love and more for lust. Usually the bad stuff revolves around lust. Desire is a motherfucker, gets right in there and makes decisions for you.
So maybe the viking ghosts have a point.
Either way, the key here is to let go, unlock my mind so it can work again.

I got locked on account of a phone call during what was supposed to be my morning coffee.
Oh yeah... coffee again. But, I only go for the half-caf now. Slowing it down. I've found the decaf just doesn't do the trick. Need just a little spike of the real stuff to make it count.
Anyway, this phone call brought up an important question:
What do I really want?

It's really sort of a generic kind of question. Guidance counselors and parents and friends who give a shit ask you this kind of thing from time to time. What do you want out of life?
My version is slightly more direct: What the fuck am I doin?
Seriously, what is the point of this? What am I shooting for?
Has anyone among my zero devoted readers noticed how full of questions my entries are?
Mostly questions.

So, what the fuck am I doin?
What is the idea here? What do I want, what do I need to get it?
Life is short, time is always running out, and at the end there will not have been enough, no matter what it was that I wanted to do.

-blush

So long, sweet song!

2010-10-06T16:40:00.000-07:00

I managed to get through three of the four great American deserts.
This breaks down, apparently, to the Great Basin, the Mojave, the Sonora, and the Chihuahua.
Went through the first three. Got my eye on that Chihuahua, but that's Texas, and we'll just have to see about that.
That's not really what I want to type about just now. I just had to start somewhere. I should be talking about what drove me into the desert, but its a longer story than just being driven anywhere. Its involved.
So, it started with the Great Basin...
This is pretty much all of Nevada, most of Utah, some of Colorado. I went to this desert for Burning Man, and what a Burning Man it was. I was in that stinking desert for a month, so long that I can barely remember how it started out. I can tell that I did not eat shit, I did not suffer heat stroke, nor serious dehydration, I managed to pull myself from the brink every time. I'm getting good at that. I can tell you that I did good work, I did God's work. I said prayers for myself and my crew, for my people at home and my people of the desert, and I say to you that my prayers were heard, for we were wise, strong, and joyous throughout.
What else can I tell you about it? There was some neat stuff to look at. There were connections made and friends met, and much dancing and yes some genuine happiness.
It was the last one that kind of fucked me up, and led to the messing around in the other two deserts. I fell in love. For reals. It sound stupid, and it kind of was. Falling in love at Burning Man is far too common and always a bad idea, and like a noob, I fell for it. I even disregarded my own advice, based on good intelligence and personal experience, and tried to make it work outside the desert. I followed a beguiling woman into the mountains for the second time in my life. I still say it was worth a shot, but if I'm being honest (and by God, let us be honest between each other if nothing else) it probably wasn't. Not that I'd trade the time-- it was beautiful and perfect whenever we were together. But we can't be together, and that's how it is.
Sure, I still love her. Like I've never loved anyone. I was never happier than I was when we were alone together. She is extraordinary in all the right ways, common in all the best; exciting, challenging, interesting-- I could go on and on, believe me, but it hardly matters.
I followed her into the mountains, was ready to stay, but she was not ready for me to do this.
My great fear is that I've ruined it forever, but fear is not part of our equations here. I followed my heart and it turns out he wasn't thinking it through. I did it anyway, knowing it was a bad idea, knowing the chance of success was low, but not afraid, never afraid of trying.
I was willing, and if there's a point, let it be this: Blush was ready, by God. Blush was not afraid.
I was willing to do anything to be with her.
Needless to say, the grand gesture failed. It always does.
I was politely told I should leave, so I did, and I did it politely.
Which takes us out of the Great Basin and out of that peculiar state of being that Burning Man leaves us in, where anything seems possible and there are no bad ideas. I'm sure I'll be back, but will it be the same?
Who knows.
At any rate, I broke south and put myself in the Sonora.
Mind you, there was one last stop in the mountains, on my escape route. I saw the Widow. She suggested that the nature of love is grand in itself. It is the grand gesture, to love unconditionally and completely; love, she told me, is not a prison, it sets you free.
I will endeavor to keep this in mind. Love is greater than circumstances, distance, and time. Let us hope.
So, I took that into a different desert. The Sonora is decidedly more pleasant than the Great Basin. Sonora might kill you, but unlike the Great Basin, it does not actively want you dead. There are frequent thunderstorms. I rode directly into the teeth of no less than five driving thunderstorms to get home.
The first was heading through New Mexico, on the road to Albuquerque. It dropped a solid two feet of hail onto the highway, slowed traffic to a crawl for miles, covered the desert with it for as far as I could see in all directions.
But, one just goes on...
I remember she called me that night, soon after I'd gotten through that mess. We spoke for a long time, mostly about her and her dissatisfaction with her career, her life. I didn't know what to say really, because I was dissatisfied with my situation as well, but at least I was moving, braving elements gone insane. Our conversation ended abruptly, as all our talks on the phone do. Onward, onward...
In Albuquerque, I found my old friend the Architect, told him all that had happened, about my new lack of direction. He suggested stagehand work, as he always does. He had, once again, a new project that I might be able to get involved in. More money than I've ever made in my life, I am sure. Months of steady work, twelve hour days, at a good rate. This will come up again later...
I left next morning feeling hopeful and turned West. Time to go home, but somewhere near Flagstaff, in the high part of northern Arizona, I decided to look into something that had been picking at my brain for a long time.
Sedona is a weird little resort town full of artists and psychics in a valley in those northern mountain deserts. I went there 15 years ago, and remembered it being a very special place.
Now, many times in my travels, feeling the lack of direction, the sense that I had no answers, I thought perhaps if the moment ever arose, if I was led by destiny so to speak, I would consult a psychic. I thought it would work in narrative fashion, that I would bump into one or see one open at a late hour on the side of the road in a strange town and have the sudden irresistible impulse to pull over and knock, and that I would be greeted expectantly, and this person would have some message ready to transmit from wherever it is that spiritual mediums get their information. It almost happened several times; outside of Memphis last year, again while on my way to the Burn this year, but now, I decided that it was a good time.
So, I went to Sedona to consult an oracle, to put it into the proper frame of reference. Pious men may consult oracles as they see fit to. One must not rely on them of course, but before any great endeavor, or at the end of one, or when many paths lie open and there are no clear signs which way to proceed, oracles might be consulted if one can afford it.
And, I had a pocketful of Burning Man money.
So...
I won't say what this woman said to me. I will say that I stayed in a motel in Sedona, I paid too much for the room and it was depressing there, and I searched for an hour to find a local bar open past ten o' clock, and it happened to be karaoke night. I sang, and it was not my best performance.
And, in the morning, after not nearly enough sleep, I talked to her again. Chatting over the interweb. I was feeling a bit sorry for myself, I must admit, and it got a little heavy. She confessed a certain amount of depression, she's prone to it, has trouble dealing with it, and I realized again that I was probably a bit better off than her after all. I let her know that, sad as we both were, we could probably help each other out with this. Why should we just make each other more depressed?
Right after that, I spoke to the oracle-- medium. I won't get into specifics, but it turned out to be far more interesting than I thought. Many suspicions were confirmed. Not sure I buy all the past life business, but I feel certain that some folk have higher senses, ways of detecting extra-dimensional presences or whatever you want to call them, perhaps even speak to dead people, and I was willing to take this woman's word for it. For the most part it was general advice that I didn't need, but for a great deal of it there was some legit weirdness going on.
Let me just say that I got the answers I came for.
Again, probably paid a bit too much, but I guess the days of getting a gypsy to read your cards for twenty bucks are over. Besides, what else is money for?
Oh, and I took some of her advice directly. I was told to climb a specific rock, and be silent there.
So, I did. Mile out and a mile up a huge painted pile of stone called Cathedral. A monument.
I understood up there where folk get the notion that these rocks were formed by spiritual forces rather than natural ones. But then, these might be identical.
All I know is that she was right about the climb, the silence. It was fruitful.
Plus, its always good to know that you're a little stronger, a little more fit than you think. One forgets in the light of disappointments great and small, and when one is at a loss for one's next step, just what one is capable of. I am surer and better for it.
Before I went up, I realized that I had no water. I searched for somewhere to fill up my canteen, and found a nice kid at one of the local resorts, who gave me fresh, cold stuff out of a water cooler that he refilled himself just to help me out. I gave him a piece of petrified wood from the painted desert.
Did I forget about that? I went to the petrified forest national monument. I would describe it this way: trees made out of fuckin rock. You gotta see it.
Plus, its not actually a forest. 225 million years ago, Arizona was the western coast of Pangaea, and where these broken crystal trees litter the ground was the floodplain of a great river system. Millions of years of trees from forests to the southeast were washed into silt. Coast shifts, silt dries, trees fossilize, erosion exposes them, and now you have crystal trees lying all over the place. You aren't supposed to take anything, but I took a little bit that was falling into a hole. It would have been lost if I didn't.
Go see if if you can.
Anyway, I tore out of the Verde Valley and hauled ass to Kingman, through more thunderstorms and increasing weariness and confusion. It took a great deal of concentration, a lot of appealing and forcing my better nature forward to keep awake and out of despair. Still working on that, but it is getting easier.
And, of course, right at the end there, it got the worst.
Fucking Needles...
Its about 60 miles from Kingman, old Needles, and its been forever since I drove through. Now, I always go through Vegas coming this way, but this time I thought, fuck it, gonna ride 40 til it fucking ends in Barstow.
I figured it was sixty miles from Needles to Barstow.
Nope. 140 of the worst, emptiest, sleepiest miles ever. Men have died doing this drive, and now I know why. Its like its cursed. You simply can't stay awake. Saps the strength, the will.
I stopped and ate after ten hours of fasting. Denny's, which I have come to rely on. I thought seriously of getting another motel room, but the idea of another night in a shitty motel room was too much. I'd rather sleep in the car.
I started getting text messages there, from the Architect, telling me that it was happening-- big job in Georgia, other side of the country. All I had to do is get there.
Can you imagine how I felt, in the face of the last and the worst 140 miles of the 40, and now here's the message telling me to turn right back around and take it all the way to where it ends on the other side?
Long, slow, dark thoughts, my friend. What to do, what to do. What do I really want? What the fucking hell am I doing in goddam Denny's in Needles? What the fuck happened to me?
I think right about then was when it all sort of hit me, all of it, the last two months. Busy months. Lot to say about it, more than I care to here, but you can imagine the rush of emotions.
But, it hit me like a river of lead. It just made me feel heavy. It was not confusing or disheartening or anything else. It was just heavy. I was tired.
Let me repeat. I felt tired. Profoundly exhausted.
It was time to go home.
Enough of this.
So, this is where the Mojave comes in.
Needles is the end of the transition zone... well, it ends before Needles really, but its the last reasonable stop in the transition zone, between Sonora and Mojave.
Mojave is not like the other two. There are many roads through Mojave and they are all bad. There is little water and little rest and it might kill you, but it doesn't look like it will. Sneaky, the old Mojave.
I did sleep, eventually, like a dead man, in Ludlow. After that, it was easy enough to get to Barstow, back onto the 15, and finally, some hours later, the beach.
Home at last, and what have I learned?
Hard to say.
Nothing I didn't already know, but its good to remind ourselves.
So long, old sweetness, old bitterness.
So long, sweet song!
Time for something new.
-blush

Apologetic

2010-08-10T13:20:00.000-07:00

I am so, so sorry.
I just didn't see it at the time, I did not understand. I was not paying attention. You gave me every chance, sent out every signal, said all the right things and put together the right moments and damn, I just didn't notice.
Too wrapped up in my own self-loathing to notice that you were done with yours. Too far gone in my own feelings of inadequacy. I just didn't feel good enough, strong enough, well enough.
I have a lot of excuses here. Reasons are in short supply. My vision was clouded, so in the end, I wasn't worthy, because I could not see you clearly.

It's not surprising (I almost said, 'in a way..' but that would be stupid, just wasted words).
The most important messages are often lost. Nobody misses unimportant messages. I'm not going to waste time with examples. I think that's perfectly clear on its own.

Is it wrong to say I kind of liked you better when you hated yourself?
Does it make any sense that I like myself better when I don't like what I see in the mirror?

The message is indeed vague, for all that we're given it so soon. I suppose the problem is that there's no one to deliver it to, no address on it. Is the missive I carry for me? For everyone? For no one? More wasted words, what stupid questions to ask.

Anyway, I'm sorry, and I'm sorry that its too late.

It is hard to get alone enough.

Still full of terror, still cringing, still whimpering, still confused and still wondering. Still afraid.
I almost want to go digging through something old to show you, just to be like 'see? it was not always thus' but what would be the point?
What would it prove or demonstrate? Grand gestures and fancy sayings never had much impact on you anyway. Is it proper to lay out the chatter like its important?
I just feel sometimes like its somewhere in there, a message lost in the static, like a SETI radio signal in the fuzz. Its all wrapped up in the nattering thoughts like there's a secret decoder ring somewhere to line up the few words that are actually important within the nonsense.
So, its almost worth it to keep trying.

Its like when you feel compelled to tell the story of a dream you had.
And I have awesome fuckin dreams. There's plot and character and twists and action and narrative and man, its so bitchin sometimes while I'm asleep.
But then I wake, and my time is again worthless on account of no one paying me for it.
I just really really don't want to look back on the span of my years and feel like it was wasted.
No one wants that, but few people are in real danger of this. I feel like I am. There is a real chance that its just too far gone, there will be no recovery. Insert metaphor (perhaps something along the lines of how they stop looking for hikers lost in the wilderness after a few days, even if the poor fucker is still surviving somehow... then I guess its just up to said hiker to find his own way out.)
Oh, and there's that trembling again. When will I learn.

I lost track.
I was talking to you about how sorry I am and how I wish things were different but of course they aren't and there's no way to change them. See, its the solipsism.
I was really desperate to get you into my world, like it was so interesting in here, when you were trying to get me into yours, but I had no interest in it. Least not enough interest.
We didn't manage to merge our universes. Always the separation between us, and I'm pretty sure that was mostly my fault. I told you everything but showed you nothing.
Sorry about that.
But, I don't think that my universe would fit inside yours, and you didn't want to bring yours into mine. You wanted it the other way around, and it just never worked, because I prize my solitude very highly, and I would have given it to you like a gift if you could have accepted it.
But, you didn't. After a while I didn't even know how to present it to you. Its like you just saw the wrapping paper and said 'no thank you'. Or I guess by then you kind of knew what was inside and you knew you didn't want any.

So it is with the message. Because nothing is really separate, and a lot of being aware is just seeing connections; its neatly contained in the very smallest thing but its too big for the space you have. It might make you a little sad if you knew what the fuck it even was, if you could even read the goddam thing I'm sure it would be profound.
But, I didn't know it was for you. I thought it was for me, which is stupid, because why would I be entrusted to deliver something to myself?
So, I'm sorry.

Honestly, I didn't mean to.
I wish there was a next time that I could do better at.
-blush

Like a Diamond Bullet!!

2010-07-13T17:14:00.001-07:00

Can't concentrate.
I'd like to say there was a specific reason, but there isn't.
Just can't focus.
My brain refuses to stay on task.
Time ticks by, minutes become hours, hours bleed out the whole day, next I know I'm too tired to even attempt any concentration.
The inspiration center of my brain is weakened. Drained, perhaps.
One would hope that travel, the outdoors, exercise and making new friends would contribute to one's inspiration, but it hasn't.
I haven't even had good dreams.
I almost made up a dream to write about, just to put some crazy shit down here on the hypermind and have said something, anything, original for the day.
Instead, still stuck, stuck on the same scene.
I should just bite the bullet and let it rip, to hell with making sense or internal consistency. I can mash up the consistency later right?
Consistency, see, is a thing that takes time to establish. You can't hammer consistency in in an afternoon or even a week. I mean, by definition, it takes time.
Constant. Ongoing. Repetitive.
What else is bothering me?
There are consistent bothers.
My lips are tremendously dry. Like, super, uncomfortable dry. I slather balm on them constantly, but I'm almost certain it's making it worse somehow. How in the fuck is some lip balm going to make my lips dry?
That's some bullshit.
Let's see... what else...
Going to bed early and waking up late is getting old. I sleep very well these days. No dreams. Eight solid hours of blackness and peace. Hell of a thing. Somewhat new to me. Enjoying that, but damn, I miss the nighttime that belonged all to me and the few others. Somehow it feels so much lonelier and more pointless to have all this time wasted during the day. I feel like I'm wasting more life while the sun is up than I ever did from midnight to five a.m.
I was productive at night. Murderous. A demon. In the day, I'm a struggling artist who isn't even working on his masterpiece. I'm struggling with nonsense, wrestling with funzies. Funzies are not supposed to be struggles, goddammit. It's supposed to be natural and easy.
Nothing, if I'm being honest --and for God's sake, lets at least be honest with one another-- nothing is natural or easy for me right now. Just feeling out of place at all times.
Like, just today. Compulsively checking email and facebook like something interesting is going to fall out of the goddam sky that wasn't there two hours ago. Well, just a minute ago, something was. Something most unnatural and inclement to my ease.
Compulsive email check number six for today found a letter from my dead friend. For a moment, I was taken aback. I miss him pretty bad, and being a superstitious fellow, was given pause. But, it was only a mailer-daemon advertisement thingamajig-- an impostor, using my late friend's name to sell me some kind of pill or something.
Dirty pool, internet. Dirty pool. Bad form. Not a good look, interwebs, not a good look.
So, I tried to get back to work, but the 'work' is dry and feels bad, like I'm writing a shitty story, and have been for like, way too goddam long, and the only cure is to finish it, like taking the worst crap of your life; pinching it off is not going to help. You've got to see it through, however bitter and unpleasant the consequences.
I'd like to put an epic ending on it, this polished turd. It started off ok, but it drags, its 31 pages when it should be 20. It drags. It stutters. It halts and repeats itself. A lot. It will take a miracle of editing to make it readable, if I ever fucking finish it.
And finish it I must. Consistency. There is a timeline to follow. Step 4 cannot follow step 2. Step 3 has to be bolted in first.
Too much chatter in my mind for that at present, however. I had to jibberjabber to the vast, metaphysical overbrain of the internet for a time. I really need someone to talk to. I need someone to jabber at every day. Somehow, the internet is not a satisfying listening post. I get no result from this sounding. I might as well just be talking to myself.
No, I have to be able to lance someone's brain with my plotlines, see the look in their face, see if anything gets lit in their eyes. I mean, its hit or miss, but shit, you gotta take some test fires right? Can't just go shooting.
Thirty minutes of typing so far.
What have I accomplished?
Nothing.
Story of my life. I've been typing for years now, and there is little to show for it but the halting, offset admiration of my buddies. They like me anyway. It could be I'm doing all this for them at the end. Just get a smile or a charge out of one of them and my day is complete. Who is there to impress, really? How will I ever make a living like this? How will I ever enjoy a little bit of real life? It seems improbable to say the least.
Failure looms so heavy, always such a deep shadow.
Less outright failure than the lack of success. I don't even know where to begin, really.
It will not be good enough.
Too much time has passed.
The days when it really affected me are gone. It's too far from my soul now. It's more a nerdy fetish than anything else, a pose for cred. Little of it seems to really touch me anymore.
Christ, I am BORING MYSELF.
Like, I am bored with my stories already. And I wrote the motherfuckers.
Sure, everyone I show them too likes them well enough, but all those people like me. Give to someone that doesn't know me, then we'll see how it goes.

I know that you like me. I'm glad.
But you must understand that I am not that fond of myself. I know what I'm really like.
I'm a fucking joke, dude, trust me.
The only consolation is that everything is kind of a joke.
Thus: I am one with everything.
Self-loathing---->Enlightenment
I am the black box that turns X(self-loathing) into Y(enlightenment).

Back at the farm, when I was real little, we would do this thing, this weird little art project thing, called the Black Box.
You would construct with glue and old computer parts and bits of toys, whatever you could find really, a Black Box, with machinery inside.
I think the idea was to teach algebra, but for some of us, the Black Box was alchemy; lead to gold, one substance to another, numbers to letters, words to equations, anything to anything.
Mine, I think, made numbers into letters. I had a funny notion about equations and sentences being similar constructions. Blew my mind when I was a kid.
Somehow, my black box, which if I recall had a chunk of an old apple computer, some dried pasta, a tiny acorn, a stick, some blocks, some other stuff, I can't remember every piece but it was marvelously haphazard and ugly-- it wasn't even enclosed, just laid bare, all the guts of its mysterious machinery right out there to touch-- somehow, this device would turn proper equations into grammatically correct sentences. I was wild about the grammar.
Now that I think about it, I crafted a number of machines from junk at the farm.
I think one year for the big Halloweenie fair (ya, we did a whole carnival thing for halloween) I made a kid-sized robot. It didn't do anything, didn't host any games, but it was just three big boxes stacked up, with arms made from other boxes and antennae and I think some kind of radar dish made from tinfoil.
It was just for decoration I guess. I was never really with the program.
Another time, after someone had gutted one of the old computers, I took the old boards and stuff and literally duct-taped them onto a coffee can. I arranged marbles and some other doodads around these things, and once again found it necessary to put arms on the thing. This, I remember, had a name, slightly italian sounding and started with an R, and its purported purpose was to magically move the air trapped within marbles. There were dials on it, you see, and I fancied that it did, indeed, work for this purpose. This thing hung around for years at the farm.
Another little experiment was the dryer duct dragon. You know that collapsible silver tube that attaches to the back of your dryer?
Well, I took several lengths of this stuff, applied some snippers to get them just so, and put a head on top with fangs and googly eyes. It's body was long and collapsible, made entirely of the tubing.
Then, mad genius that I was, I 'painted' the thing blue. Mind you, I had no blue paint, but there was some plumbers glue with the most beautiful metallic blue sheen that I coated the entire thing with. Highly toxic. Incredibly wasteful. But, my parents worked a lot, so no one was paying any attention to me. I was alone in the garage making that dragon for hours. Duct tape, cardboard, googly eyes, that collapsible dryer duct stuff, and lots and lots and lots of highly toxic glue that gave it a special metallic blue sheen.

Could it be equally possible that I have always, even now, just been amusing myself?
I am still largely unsupervised.
If so, I ain't laughing that hard, tho I do appreciate the joke.
In fact, that shit gets funnier every goddam day.
52 minutes typing.
What have we learned?

-blush

Junebug

2010-06-13T21:18:00.000-07:00

It takes a great deal of effort to get around the incredible worry I have that my entire life is a huge waste of time.
One tries to be a little zen about these things. It is ok for life to be simple. Lack of structure is not necessarily a bad thing.
It's only in cataloging the events of the day, putting the actual expenditure of hours into perspective, that things begin to take on an unwholesome sheen.
Its the kind of thing where you could explain it in conversation, and the listener will nod and say, 'ya, i totally know what you're talking about' but really, they don't. They have a clear image of it, because you describe it well, but they do not sympathize or understand how its a kind of unsophisticated madness, a little slice of crazy when your days vanish into each other.
58,700 words so far. Half a book. That's what I have to show for my the last six months. Horrible amount of time wasted. What have I been doing... Even that crappy 'write a novel in a month' garbage has people pounding out 50,000 words in a month. I should have had 300k by now, but somehow, it just gets away from me every few weeks.
Tonite, i made some coffee, and while it was brewing, I put my cat in a krinkly bag full of catnip and watched her lose her mind.
There was a junebug in my house, a brown, stupid, worthless insect, bumping into walls, not even going toward the light, seeking nothing, accomplishing nothing, just buzzing into white walls until it dies.
Horrible.
Horrible clarity. Signs. Goddammit I am receiving communications. I have made a terrible mistake, and now its almost like its too late to turn back or fix it. I have to play out this foolishness now, and just eat the shit sandwhich when it comes out the oven.
The back half of this year is going to be rough.

New Day, Same Doubts

2010-06-11T07:50:00.000-07:00

This is never going to work.
This is a stupid idea.
I am wasting my time.
Humoring myself.
Bitterness, surety of failure, already casting blame about and the calamity hasn't even happened.
Who do I think I am.
What did I think was going to happen.
Everyone told me it would turn out like this.
How could I not have known.
Did I think I as special?
Why should I be set apart?
No one does it this way.
This is not how its done.
Those who've professed the most faith in you are turning their backs.
The world won't let you get away this easily.
You're wake up call is going to be severe.
It will crush you.
Break you.

Every goddam morning its like this. This is how I wake up. Crippling doubt to be overcome through activity, maybe cold coffee from the night before. Every day there is the new affronts, the same doubts.
Yesterday I got another talk about getting a job at the grocery store. My father mentions this twice or three times a week. It is a one way conversation. Now, suddenly, I need to get a job. Forget those two years I was trying to get a job, and he said I should just write. Now its important that I get any job. Its bizarre. Like I can't win with this guy.
So I was in the kitchen, just after having lunch with Don and sending him on to his interview with Blizzard. He did far better than I did. My interview, about a year ago now, maybe longer, was a total tank. Entirely bricked it. I was late, I had on someone else' nice clothes and I looked terrible, I hadn't shaved or gotten a haircut, but mostly, I was late. It was sort of over before I got there. I also froze up on some important questions in the interview, and said 'uhm' a lot.
I'm not good at interviews, but that's neither here nor there.
Point is. Don was off to get the job I was supposed to get a year ago, and my father chose this moment to bring up the goddam grocery store again.
Suddenly, it is very important to him that I be employed, even if its a terrible job.
Like, personally important. Like, guilt trip your son important.

A little background...
Lets not talk about my youth, because it was a bizarre, lonely nightmare.
Lets skip ahead to being a teenager.
The talk then was how important it was to do well in school. I had to get good grades, study hard. Well, I didn't study too hard, but I got good grades. Good grades were never a problem. I got kicked out of school, though, because I was just too different. No joke, that's what the principle told me, right after he told me not to come back. So, that's all the good all those A's got me in high school. Right after that, it was super important to get my GED. Done and done, dad, what now?
Jr. College. On it! Figure out what you're major is. OK! Done! Now get yourself a degree, its SO important Chris, its SO important!
Degree! You got it dad.
Once I had that degree... no more advice.
Just stopped. All the 'SO important' just went away. He didn't know what I should do any more than I did.
I tried to get some straight cubicle monkey-suit job, and guess what? Didn't work out. Who could have seen that coming. Two years I tried, and the whole time, his line was 'Why don't you just WRITE?' and he would say it like that, all that emphasis, and I would say, 'I don't know Dad, I guess I'm not ready to yet.'
Now I'm ready, but I guess its too late, because now, apparently, the most important thing is to go find a stockboy job at Ralph's or Mother's.
Yesterday I said to him, not for the first time, 'I'm trying to write a book, Dad. It's important to me.'
He replied, 'Yeah, that's nice, but you need to make money.'

When my father was in high school, he worked as a stockboy in a grocery store. There was a career day at his school, and there was a chart showing how much money you made over your lifetime at what career. Doctor was at the top, so he chose doctor.
Literally, this is how the man decided what he would spend his life doing. Career day chart.
Well, I never saw that chart I guess. Or maybe I just don't give a shit about money.
I'm not sure my father understands what I'm willing to sacrifice. There are levels of survival that he would never accept that I will.
I'm not sure he understands what I'm doing in here all day. I'm not quite sure I understand it either, sometimes I don't even know why I'm doing it or if I'm doing it right.
But I know that I don't want to say that I didn't try. There is the rest of my life to get a shitty job and buy shit I don't need or even want, to get bled by massive insurance companies, to have greedy landlords live off my rent payments based on property values based on NOTHING.
There is all the time in the world to eat the shit sandwich. The shit sandwich isn't going anywhere.
But I will be goddamned if I will go willingly.
Pride goeth before the fall, and pride's been gone a while.
Other people have made damn sure not to let me have too much pride.
I wish, though, that they'd leave me a little dignity...

man i feel like an asshole...

Note

2010-06-09T14:15:00.000-07:00

The other day I was in my kitchen and my father told me how he wanted to die.
I don't want to delve into the man's personal shit all over the internet, but he is my father, in a certain sense I own a little bit of that, given that so much of him is in fact myself, and likely vise versa.
At any rate, I was making oatmeal and my father was discussing the inheritance he had received when my grandfather passed away. I say passed away specifically here, because that's kind of how he went. It was not sudden. He was very old, and I think very done. He died the day after Thanksgiving last year. He'd seen everyone and was, presumably, in good spirits. He went quietly, in his sleep, but he was alone. No one was gathered near his deathbed, and I think this might inform what happened in my kitchen to some extent.
See, in the kitchen, while making the oatmeal, my father told me about how granddad passed away, and it was good that it happened like that. He was very, very old, ninety-six, and had little left to say or do.
I was sad that I wasn't at that Thanksgiving. I was away in Austin TX, thinking I was doing something important, beginning what I like to think of as the first step in truly accomplishing a life's work. Its a stupid thing to think or do or say, and especially to type onto the goddam internet, but a man can only fight his nature so far. I had in my mind the thought that I was on a mission. I knew that granddad was not long for the world, death was very close to me that summer, but where in one case I thought I had more time, I knew that granddad would pass away any day. I suppose that wasn't really in my thinking tho. I was only thinking that it was time to get started being a writer for reals, all kinds of bullshit having been wiped clean out my mind and soul and feeling ready for the task. What an asshole I am. What the fuck do I even know about it.
Still.
If you feel that life has a purpose, that you are on earth for a purpose, what is there but to get to it? The course of an entire life leads up to it, sacrifices are made, you choose one destiny over another at great cost, always at cost. Nobody gets everything they want, so you have to be pretty sure about what you want the most. So I chose, and missed Thanksgiving, and granddad passed on alone in his room, thinking that his favorite grandson was a bum who couldn't get a job and was afraid to write his first book.
Would that it were not so, but in my kitchen, my father said to me that he died well, and it might have been worse. Quiet, asleep, at peace. Not bad.
He then went on to explain how he would like to achieve this.
I guess he doesn't want to be so old and feeble that he can't take care of himself, even tho he knows I'd do it. He has told me before that when the time comes, he wants to go to a cabin in the wilderness --Alaska-- and just sit out on the porch one cold winter night and just fall asleep, and that is it.
In the kitchen he added some details. He would like to go alone, to the cabin, and drink a bottle of wine and take a bunch of valium and just fall asleep in the cold. Pretty much his exact words, with appropriate hand gestures indicating finality, a bit like a baseball umpire calling safe.
I laughed. "How about in a warm bed, surrounded by loved ones?"
"Oh but that so seldom happens, Chris. That almost never happens."
"Jesus, Dad. That's pretty fuckin' morbid."
Later on, he apologized for being so morbid. He apologizes to me from time to time for stuff that isn't a big deal. Stuff that happened years ago even. Sometimes, I have no idea what triggers it but sometimes he just outright apologizes for my entire childhood. It wasn't so bad, but he did miss all my birthdays, and if we're being honest (and by God let us at least be honest with each other) it probly did screw me up a little. I've felt that hurt, a kind of inborn loneliness that's now just a part of my personality, makes me want to be alone. That's not so bad tho. I'm lucky to have parents at all, even if they weren't around all that much when I really needed them. Fact is, I need them now, and they're around, so no harm no foul.
Anyway, he did apologize for flavoring my oatmeal with the somewhat bleak vision of his planned suicide. I thought about it a bit. Thing is, I have wanted to suicide many, many times. I thought of it extensively for the majority of my life. Now its just kind of a running gag. Whenever I'm feeling a bit down I just joke with myself that, well, nothing left to do about this shit but just fuckin' kill yerself blush.
But, the old man, I think he means it.
See, I want to die old, very very old, and we might be bleak, we blushes, but we have longevity. Gramma lived to be ninety-three. Fuck, if I play my cards right I could see a century pass before I do. I would like to die warm, under blankets, with someone I love dearly, perhaps love the most, holding my hand, and everyone who cares in there with me, watching it happen, so they can know that when I went I wasn't scared or sad or unready in any way. I do not want it to be sudden or unexpected, I want everyone and me to be ready for it. Might be a bit selfish, but there it is.

Later on that day I had dinner with my Mom. I explained to her that I have a deathly fear of a heart attack. I do not want to die of sudden cardiac arrest. Or like, a fuckin' stroke. I tend to put these two into the same category, even tho a nurse explained to me this weekend that they are, in fact, not the same, and different things must be done to survive and prevent them.
My mother, she has a bit of a bleakness in her too. She explained to me that heart disease runs in the family. She described a mysterious heart condition, in fact, that afflicted my grandfather on her side. He died of sudden cardiac arrest when I was very young. My brother Ben was there. Old Charlie at some El Pollo Loco, was walking to the garage, said "I feel funny..." and then just passed out.
My grandmother, on my mother's side, who happened to be visiting (thus the occasion for the dinner) confirmed this. She said there was no further sign than inexplicable shoulder pains he'd complained of for weeks before.
My mother said not to worry, because it won't hurt, son, you'll just pass out and that'll be it.
Then she laughed.
Bleak, just a little bleak, my parents. Sometimes I forget that my father has seen many, many people die, way more than most people ever do, and I suppose my mother heard about it for a long time. She was also a nurse at one point, apparently, before going to law school. Probly saw people die.
We had lamb for dinner, btw. It was pretty good.

Now, I thought about this and thought. I still remain afraid of having a deadly heart attack. Dying before my time is frightening. I have so much to do...
But, if a man wants to die a certain way, he should. I think when the time comes, I will help my father die this way. I don't think I want him to be alone on the porch, though. I won't die with him, but I won't let him be alone when he goes. That doesn't seem right. In fact, I know it isn't right.

The world is very old, and probly unimpressed with our bravado at this point. Courage and honor don't have much meaning these days. They are rarities in the world. If a man should have the courage to face death alone, I should honor that by making sure that he doesn't.
We should all be so lucky to choose.

Way Past Morning

2010-03-23T14:43:00.000-07:00

My day is just beginning, and its quarter to three in the afternoon.
I've already done some things. I read forty pages on the toilet (multitasking) and I started breakfast, coffee is brewing, I cleaned my room here a little, and I'm about to vacuum. (Funny verb that, to vacuum. Of course I mean to say that i intend to clean the dust and lint and dirt from my floor with a vacuum cleaner, a Dirt Devil, but to 'vacuum' something seems an odd thing to do; vacuum I think is technically an a um, shit, i cant remember what it is, not an adverb, perhaps an adjective, but more of a noun describing a particular state... fucking grammar) But before I vacuum my carpet, which I felt compelled to do because I've had a lingering headache for days on end now, I decided to start myself on some simple morning pages, tho of course its not anywhere near morning. It is way fuckin past morning, but its better to do things wrong than not do them at all.
My inner critic has been very loud lately, and I remember from workshops and classes that pages every day without thinking or worrying about what they will amount to or even whether you are making a point can help.
The mystery is why i would want to display this in the overbrain, leave the rambling, unfiltered words for even a modest posterity. I suppose because the overbrain has infinite space, and it satisfies my little vanities to have my words exist in perpetuity somewhere, event the vacuous (back to fuckin vacuum) pointless ones. Better to satisfy vanity this way than in some fashion that might actually cause an affect somewhere, like getting me into a fight or hurting someones feelings or ruining someone's day. Or night.
See, I'm all alone in the cell here and sometimes, I forget. Sometimes its just such a thrill to be out of the house that the proper way to act eludes me. And I always forget that nobody wants to drink all night and get maudlin no more, no one wants to have heavy discussions under a hot ocean of drunkenness, and nobody but nobody wants to know everything youre thinking and everything that troubles you in whatever divergent order you choose to narrate them in.
Except me apparently.
I been on a world of warcraft binge the past two days. My friends from Carolina who I see but once a year were on one server, I was on another, and they needed a tank. So, they said to me, they says, hey, we're in this raiding guild, and we're kicking ass and its awesome you should come join us, and I say, what do you need, I got any kind of character you could want, and turns out they need a tank. Which happens to be my second best character.
So, I transfer my draenei warrior and turn him into an undead, and I start gearing up, and this guild, they are stoked to have a new tank, because the previous tanks are lacking. I know how to do this properly, and it is new and exciting for them. They help me gear up, and fast, and they take me into raids and lo, they win, and lo, Blush is now the main tank. Not even geared yet, but they are determined to gear me, resources are pooled, time is devoted, support is lent, and I lend it back, gearing the holy paladin who only had dps gear, and lo, Blush is in vent, only to give instruction and mumble little asides like "Shield Wall" or "Last Stand" or "Get that shit off the healer please" or "fear that guy" and the guild leader, a pally tank who's sick of tanking and wants me to do it, is this fellow Dale, and last night he ends up talking to me for like two hours on ventrilo.
I'm not much of a ventrilo talker, and I got real life friends that I talk to, but for some people, all they have is like, their families and their work and maybe two or three guys they hang out with irl, and this fellow Dale is like that. Since I'm a listener, and he's a talker, he starts telling me like his whole life story, and dammit its kind of fascinating, or at least as fascinating as a dude from Iowa can get. Actually, I guess its not really that interesting, but I dunno, life in Iowa sound strange, its not a big state but its real empty, and there isn't much to do there but, in his words, "Drink, fuck, and fight". Having been through Iowa, I am not surprised. There is much of our wonderful country that is like this. Nothing around for miles. Nothing to do. And big, strong, cornfed fucks with simple, troublesome, black and white views of right and wrong. With little to hold onto besides one's principles, it is easy to imagine resorting to violence to uphold them.
I think the crusades were a bit like this.
Anyhow, this dude, he has been in all kind of fights. He has fought seven men by himself, he's broken a man's neck with his bare hands, he's been stabbed several times, and is, it would seem, a crazy motherfucker.
I am not a violent man, and I do not condone violence. But, what I do like is personal mythologies. If he exaggerated a bit, I don't care. I've been all over this country and if I've learned anything its a healthy suspension of skepticism. Crazy shit is happening all over, and crazy motherfuckers are among us.
And one of the things I love about Humanity is how we all create these myths by which we live. Our memories and stories and histories are really what make us what we are, and our memories and stories and histories are not static, stone-carven things, they are living parts of us, they grow and change and evolve as we do. These little bits of heroism and villainy and grandeur and wretchedness within all of us, of which we are comprised, they are beautiful and unique to an individual. Makes the whole goddam world magic.
Now, I must vacuum.
-cbb

Sunshine

2010-02-15T14:50:00.000-08:00

Getting hot around here.
Score one for walking it off. Sadness simply doesn't have the energy to continue for too long. You really have to will it onward, or feed it regularly with drugs and alcohol, to truly nurture a deep and abiding sadness. Open your eyes, walk around for a while, listen to some music, rage for a while, let yourself feel it, and it passes, like everything does.
That's a little sad in itself though.
Anyway.
The Blush blog has always been a solipsistic, pointless sort of endeavor, in which I arrange a mighty lens to view sand. That's a metaphor.
The sand, you see, is the heaped up moments of life. A simple, uneventful life. But, the lens, as I said, is mighty indeed. Upon each one grain are formations of sparkling salts and bits of disintegrated bones shells and stones. Each grain is unique, an individual mote many hundreds --thousands?-- of years in the making.
It happens without any effort at all, but one can hardly say that its simple to make a grain of sand.
See there. Metaphor. The language of experience. The language of nature. The language that deciphers myth.

This woman has been texting me all day.
It's my fault. I started it.
Someone mentioned recently that it would be nice to go to medieval times again. Not the time period, the dinner show. I never get tired of that joke.
Medieval times is one of my favorite things. You get drunk, eat things with your hand, drink soup from pewter bowls, there is pageantry and magic and swordfighting, even romance and intrigue, and sometimes the show changes a little bit. It's always an occasion, a happening, and kind of a big deal. One does not go singly to medieval times. It requires an entourage. You must arrive in force, and you must let go of any idea that you are watching dinner theater. You must scream and yell and boo and hiss and cheer as though it were the time period, and not the dinner show.
However, a problem arises, the same problem that arises whenever anyone wants to do anything these days. I'm the one single guy out of literally everybody I know. Any kind of group activity will be a number of couples and me. This is awkward. For everyone.
So, I thought of this woman.
I see this woman a few times a year, and she's always acting like she wants to go out with me. She talks like she's just waiting for me to make a move, once in a great while we make out, and then she bails. This woman says things to me: "Blush, when are you gonna get it together. Blush, what are you waiting for. Blush, what's the holdup."
And yet, and yet...
It is impossible to connect with this woman as a human being. We meet up at Burning Man or at parties or whatever kind of rare, random occasion it is, and for a minute there I let myself think that maybe she's serious, that perhaps this woman is actually interested and that it will come to something, will matter at some point, and then I try to call her, try to make something happen.
And she never picks up the phone.
She will reply to a text within seconds, and text all fuckin day long, but to speak to one another like regular humans is a no-go. Its incredibly frustrating. What should be a two minute phone conversation becomes three hours of texts. Ever spend that much time texting, literally having a talk with yoru goddam thumbs?
I feel like an asshole texting.
Why even have a goddam phone if you won't talk on it?
I can only assume that I'm just being screwed with.
Nevertheless, I need someone to go to Medieval Times with... the dinner show, not the time period. She's not far, she's got free time, and she doesn't hate me, if one can believe text messages. So, I had thought to invite her to Medieval Times. I mean, seeing someone's conduct at Medieval Times can tell you an awful lot about their character. Plus its super fun. What kinda goddam communist doesn't like swordfights and dinner theater with dancing horses and magicians?
And the pageantry, did I mention the pageantry?? How often does one see pageantry in this day and age? Almost fucking never. But always at Medieval Times.
I don't even know if I'm spelling it right, and I don't care, I'm all excited just typing about it!
But, I can't get this woman to call me. And its pointless calling her.
Whole goddam thing is pointless really.
Regardless of time wasted, it's been said that a man is only as good as his best efforts.
If it must be a challenge to connect with this woman as a human being, then so be it. I suppose I will just have to try.
Not today tho.
Today, there is much to do, and it is already afternoon.
Back to work.
Page 3, chapter two, here we go...
-blush

Easy to Forget

2010-02-13T12:56:00.000-08:00

I need to get something off my chest.
There's bitterness and anguish weighing on me like stones around my neck.
I have been shown yet again that I'm simply not good enough. Whatever I have to offer-- insufficient. There's been so much of this in my life that I'm just not sure how much more of it I can take. The bizarre paradox of being told how wonderful you are, but only your lack of worth is demonstrated. I suppose words are easy to say, its really easy to tell someone anything, but to bear out your assertions honestly is another matter.
I suppose I have it coming. I don't come through on things all the time. I flake. Habitually.
Habitual flake.
But not when it counts. I can say that much. When it matters, I'm there.
Most of the time.
I had been feeling so strong, so confident of late, I even accomplished something, but now just a few people let me know, without saying it, through actions, that I'm inadequate, and its gone, any sense of fulfillment or satisfaction, any belief in myself, up and gone like smoke.
I'm once again at a loss. Crippling depression and insomnia. Loneliness starts to bother me again. Confused, demotivated, deflated, angry even, but mostly just sad and afraid that it's all for nothing, that its all amounting to nothing, that I really don't have anything to offer. What's killing me I guess is that it does actually look that way. That's how it bears out. I give nothing of value, I create nothing of worth, all my best is unimportant, unnecessary, all my efforts failures, all my toil senseless. Fuck.
And here I thought I was finally on the right track. It wasn't perfect, it wasn't grand, it wasn't impressive or lucrative, but it was something, it was worth it if only to me, it had meaning.
Now it just doesn't seem that way. While it seems a little pathetic to actively seek validation from your fellow creatures, it seems far less so when you get a little active invalidation. Have a handful of people who know you and like you demonstrate that, even to those close to you, you have little worth, and suddenly a little validation is crucial.
Fucked up part is that if you ask for it, of course you're going to get it, but it won't be true. It will just be words. Nothing anyone says or does is going to legitimize my existence. It's really been a huge waste of time. And that's not just words. Realistically, in purely material, rational, functional terms, I have wasted my life.
Long road to nowhere.
Had I anything of worth, if I were of any value, would not there be some sort of demand thereof?
Would not someone want what I've got? If my labors or struggles or strengths were in any way purposeful, they would be sought, but they are not.
No one is interested.
Nobody cares.
Go sleep, or die, or something, anything, whatever you want really.
No one cares what you do. You can call it whatever you want as well. Once again, no one will give a shit.
You're free, if you want to call it that.
How's that workin out for you blush, all that awesome freedom?

Pflugerville

2009-11-23T11:37:00.000-08:00

Well, a month after being douchebag in a coffee shop down the street from Harvard, I have attained Pflugerville, Texas, and here I sit in the garage at the Taj Mahal of bachelor pads, trying to warm myself up for the real task by allowing my thoughts release into written words.
I almost want to call it silly, but its not the silliest thing I've ever done, this thing I'm trying to do. Any one of my six trips to the desert is sillier, and takes longer than what I have planned here.
Rather unlike the last time I communicated to the Overbrain, this time I do in fact have a great deal of outline to work from. I'm actually in pretty good shape to get a book written in three weeks.
Still, as this day wears on as the three previous ones did, I have to wonder if this remains a realistic goal. Yet, I must also consider the realistic goals I had that went nowhere. Like, getting a square job with health and dental, paying off mounting debts, telling the people who need to know exactly how I feel about them, and getting into shape.
I met with the absolute lower limit of success in all these, and it might be worth postulating that in point of fact it was not simply that I was incapable of even limited goals, but rather that these were the wrong benchmarks by which to measure myself. Perhaps "reasonable" is not the best criterion for my personal goals. Maybe I need to just accept that I am an unreasonable man in an unreasonable position, and the only natural, proper course will be an unreasonable one.
Lets review...
Square job got exactly as far as one interview, a few phone calls, and limited work as a process server. This was clearly a kind of dead end. Let us not forget that for so many years it was the sole ambition of my life to NOT be that guy, working in a cubicle so that I could buy shit I didn't need to impress girls who didn't care. It was just that after college, with nothing to do, and no good plan, and no real ambitions of my own, this started seeming like a good plan; most everyone I know is on that plan and they are mostly happy. Happier than I am at any rate, but then I must also note that happiness was not my first priority. My version of happiness is unique to me, as far as I can tell, and has little to do with stuff or money. It might be that spoiled upper-middle class sensibility, that money ain't a thing and somehow it will be taken care of, the righteous indifference to practical matters that at times can accompany coming from a good family. It might also be last kid syndrome, the youngest feeling somehow entitled to free living.
It might also be that its just not that important to me. In a literal sense, I just need a roof over my head and food and a little booze and smokes. Travel expenses aside, I have a pretty meager lifestyle. And lord knows I'm not traveling first class here. Its been a lot of tuna cans and saltines and peanut butter.
So, I'm not cut out for an office job, for the path of least resistance. I mean, not everyone can be, or the whole world would be in cubicles, and nothing would be built, grown, painted or written. I must serve society through some other means, and I only have the one talent, and its been going to waste for too damn long.
Everyone who needs to know how I feel about them knows already. If I didn't express myself strongly or clearly enough, I'm content to call it cowardice and live with the sting of regret. I doubt the right words or the perfect timing would have changed anything anyway. The feelings that really matter, the truest ones, are impossible to fake or express properly with words anyway. Life is almost always in the process of achieving balance, and feelings are no different.
Things are precisely as they should be, in the proper perspective. I might have ended up a bit lonely, but I am hardly the only one, and ultimately I think I kind of like it this way. I need a proper amount of loneliness to make any sense. I am no good to anyone if I'm too content or happy or comfortable.
Besides, loneliness drove me far afield, to places I've never been and shit I would never have seen, and to a certain clarity about what is really necessary.
As for getting into shape, well... thats another matter. I shall have to approach that problem again, when I reach the proper venue. I put on a considerable amount of winter chub up in the northeast, and now I'm not in the wintery places anymore, I can force myself to eat a damn salad once in a while and lay off the cookies and shit.
Of course, here in Texas, the food is rich indeed. Last night I ate not one but two fried fruit pies, the second one with a scoop of ice cream. I literally stuffed myself on deep fried fucking pie. Normally I don't even like pie, but hey, big surprise, fry it in a pool of liquid fat and it becomes delicious.
Thats good tho. It will give me something to focus on, if even for a little while, other than this silly book, that I'll have to pull a miracle out of my ass to finish in the time frame I've provided myself.
I comfort myself with the thought that kerouac is widely respected, and his book wasnt all that bad, even if it wasn't structured for shit (and im big on structure) and was really just some fucko on benzedrine driving back and forth across the country with his beatnik loser friends.
I don't have benzedrine or horny poet friends.
I have dunkin donuts coffee, a Mr Coffee machine, a rice cooker, a fuckton of canned tuna, a fresh pack of cigarettes, a big fat pile of outlines, characters, inspiration, and a really good idea for a book. What I lack is lots of time and a little more discipline.
Easily remedied. Time is an illusion, and discipline is easy to enforce when you are comfortable.
Wish me luck.
-blush

Ceaseless Contention with Danger

2009-10-22T06:05:00.000-07:00

For many years now I have wanted to avoid certain... stereotypes.
Take, for instance, the struggling, wannabe writer. This is the ridiculous douche at the cute cafe with the laptop, typing away out there for God and everybody to see, with his endless cup of coffee and his hat and his shirt, his feigned look of concentration, dazed yet shifty eyes scanning to see if anyone is watching him 'get creative'.
I never, ever wanted to be this guy, but fuck me to death, here I am in a goddam coffee shop, with my goddam tiny computer, typing away and dicking around on facebook with my one cup of coffee and my stupid hat and my shirt. I'm a little hungover, I have no place to stay in Boston anymore, and I have jack shit to do today. This might be exactly how douchebag writer guy gets where he's at, though usually they look smarter, brighter, and younger than I do.
I mean, douchebag isn't the right word for me at this time, what I look like is a dirtbag. Haven't shaved in months, hairs all greasy and long, cargo pockets full of shit. Fuck it, I'm all kinds of bag right now- dirt, douche, scum, and lets go ahead and put failurebag and dickbag on there too.
I am many bags full of unpleasant things that got stuffed into a human costume and sent into the world to look idiotic at coffee shops and make people feel better about themselves.
Batteries running low and no plan, no outlines to work from at present.
Not to say that I cannot salvage this bullshit morning into a decent day.
I'm just saying that at present, I feel like an asshole, and I kind of look like one too. The lady who gives me coffee is nice though, and I still have cigarettes.
I got drunk with people who are much, much younger than me last night. Nothing like hanging out with a much younger crowd to really make you feel like a scumbag. I have absolutely no business getting fuckered with twenty year old girls anymore, just absolutely none, but there I am pretending to be interesting and hoping they'll be interested, drinking at a moderate pace and likely being kind of sedentary and boring compared to your average college kid, but still just as crowing and loutish when you get a few beers and a few shots into my brain and pretty girls in front of my eyes.
I have to admit though, the really smart ones who like books still get me, at any age. Can't help that. The one I was talking to was very smart indeed, and painfully pretty, and very sweet, and I forgot while I was in her company that she's almost a decade younger than me and I have no legitimate business even getting drunk with a girl her age. In fact, I'm pretty fuckin sure that shit's illegal.
But, what are you gonna do. I'm a sucker for pretty stoner girls that talk about literature.
Drunk as I was, I would have paid that chick's rent last night if she'd asked me to... jesus i hope i didn't pay that chick's rent last night... as it was though, she was beautiful and interesting enough to give me pause, to reconsider the plan; how could I stay in this town a little longer, for the remote chance to see her again?
Such fancies, of course, are for men more vigorous and youthful than myself, men without destinies and paths to pursue, men who do not fear winter or failure or rejection.
Crippled by fear and self-hate I can only plan the next phase of escape from anything that might possibly matter or make a real human being out of me.
That having been said, I'll be sticking around this town a little longer than I thought. No one here knows me, so there's no real reason not to be fucko writer dude here. Who's gonna say anything about it? With the ratio of fuckos here, with these like fifty fucking universities in one town?
Nobody, that's who.
Nobody but me, and we've already established that I can't be trusted with opinions or votes.
-blush

Many Dangers on the Road

2009-10-21T14:12:00.000-07:00

Once, in the desert, I saw a woman with shiny blue eyes on a slattern little stage, holding a bottle of whiskey in her hand, and I heard her sing with a clear voice but no rhythm: "On the road to Mecca many dangers" she repeated, smiling big as the world, like she was dreaming everything in front of her. I have thought of this moment often since then.
There are times in life when a person becomes something more than a man or a woman or even the wonderful or terrible thing they are doing. In isolated, priceless, untouchable moments some kind of alchemy happens behind the eyes of the observer, and what in the same moment is a drunk girl singing out of time in a ramshackle tavern is also a silk-tonged, star-eyed prophet.
There are many dangers on the road to Mecca, and more to bear in Mecca itself.

I don't want to belabor the metaphor though. It tires easily, and never quite recovers.
I've not communicated through the overbrain in a while; I've been traveling.
Since there's no telling how long my powers of thought will hold out just now, I should start with what is happening now, in order that we might understand each other, formulate together the current context of our communion.

As I type this I am alone in a friend's house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is about two thirty in the afternoon and I haven't done much with my day. This is the first time I've been alone in a while, and it is sort of difficult to know what to do with myself. Honestly, I'm not sure what my plan was in coming here, but I have been in New Jersey since the beginning of the month, and it was very much time to go. When you rely on hospitality as much as I do (charity really, lets call it what it is) you learn when its run out.
I had spent most of my two weeks in Jersey writing notes in little memo books I bought in bulk at Staples. I went through two pens and lots and lots of coffee, mostly sipped silently at a local diner. New Jersey, by the way, is famous for its diners; some are better than others.
I should mention that I started drinking coffee regularly again on the first leg of this seemingly unending road trip, the one with Mary O'Mahoney. That was a fun bit, out to Texas by way of Phoenix, AZ, then up through Tennessee to Chicago, where we parted ways, she to her great wilderness expedition, and I to Fredericksburg VA, where I lingered for eight days before heading home for approximately thirty-six hours before setting off for Burning Man, which took two weeks, and which led, through various questionable decisions, acts of faith, misadventures and bad ideas to Boston, where I now finally get back to my missive to the overbrain.
There are two more people to see before I leave the East by way of the South. Another week or more, but I'm already anxious to be gone again. Winter is approaching, and I aim to be away before the snow falls.

I don't want to be too long winded, and I'd wanted to give a fuller account of my activities, explain myself to you, but as usual, I find it difficult to explain, but easy to explore in my rambling way.
That might be the best way of accounting for this round of poor decisions and irresponsible behavior. I'm doing a bit of exploring, in a rambling kind of way. Mainly its been seeing people I don't see much and taking various time I find to consolidate some notes for a story I'd like to tell. I'm hesitating with that; it is serious business, and I want to take it seriously, and taking things seriously always locks me up. In fact, there's been less consolidating and more piling up. But, I suppose its only fair to say that the better prepared I am, the easier it will be, the less anxious I will be, the less my endless failures will seem to me like a promise of future failure.
Ah, failure, like an old friend...
More later, I think. Just now I want to chain smoke and drink coffee and collect my listless thoughts.

-blush, returned

Nerves

2009-08-03T11:59:00.000-07:00

I think it is time to talk about fear again.
I believe last time I brought it up, the centrality of fear in the emotional experience was the main subject. Of course, that was months ago, and who knows what I was thinking at the time. The mind is a mysterious thing, a black box duct-taped to a skateboard, set on a slow roll down a dark passage. Its always difficult to tell how the mind transforms what goes into it into what comes out of it. Sweet mysteries.
I am, today, without the fear. I am accustomed to fear, to a degree comfortable with how it must be balanced against hope, but today it seems there is no need. I have, inexplicably, tapped a hidden resource of inner peace.
My concern is almost constantly that I am an irredeemable failure, that all the chances are past, all the time I had was wasted, all the potential squandered, all the joy fleeted off. No new prospects, no growth, no further development, nothing to hang on to or look forward to, only a continual backslide into a life I wasn't meant for, and even if I wanted it its just too late now. It ends with me as a homeless person, not quite with the dignity of a bum, a real wine swilling, rail riding bum, but just a guy who can't keep himself afloat, who doesn't even know where to begin trying. It would be taking any shelter, any help or pity and being glad of it, each one taking a little piece of me because nothing and no one, not even charity or the bum, is truly free.
Not today though.
For whatever reason, today there is no fear in me. I see it, as a kind of object in my mind, which is to say not an object at all, a nothing that I can do with as I please, a little fantasy or imagination blob that is only as real as I tell myself it is. In a remote way it even feels the same, but it is not the same. Its not fear. Only a signifier of fear.
Perhaps I cannot explain after all.
I'm not entirely sure I need to.
-blush

Trite

2009-07-21T15:51:00.000-07:00

It is almost four in the afternoon, in the middle of summer, and it is hot.
The precise temperature is not as important as the physical discomfort.
I am sweating, this glass of water I'm drinking is warm, and the fan is blowing hot air in my face. The open window is admitting more heat, more sunshine. Closing it is out of the question. It is stifling enough in my room as it is.
I have no idea what to do with myself. My plan for this day is already accomplished. There is nothing else to do.
The heat is making me sluggish, making it difficult to think.
For weeks, I have been waiting to hear about a job. It would be comfortable. A steady paycheck, a dark cubicle full of conditioned air, alive with the breath of very many computers spilling their ions. I can imagine the cold, electrified, arcade smell of the place even now. I can sense the subtle loosening of boredom --at the edge of anticipation-- as the end of the workday approaches. I anticipate these things with equal measures of gladness and dread.
I am completely broke. All I have is my time; but I'm not even sure how to spend that, the one currency I have in abundance.
I do have sweat, though; and I have what functions as my mind.
Assets, but no tangible wealth.
I am patient. I can wait. There is waiting, though, and then there is waiting for loss, waiting in nameless dread, waiting for the painful blow, waiting for the bad news and waiting to know exactly how you're going to take it.
Waiting to know, when knowing is remembering without seeing.
Man it's hot.
Forgetting must be seeing and not remembering then. What exactly have I forgotten, that I don't know, that I am waiting to know?
I think I've made a terrible error somewhere.
I read a poem that nobody liked to a girl, on a day hot like this one is. She didn't hear half of it, and wondered what I meant by it, and then thought she knew what I meant in writing it.
That's why I'm not a poet I guess.

Do not drink the duck water

2009-06-09T15:20:00.000-07:00

Ordinarily, I wouldn't bother anyone again after just having left a rather long, rambling, and boring discussion topic only yesterday. Today, however, I saw something that bears mention.
I was at the pool today, doing some laps, and I noticed a funny smell in the water. This was not a complete surprise, as yesterday I had seen ducks in the pool, leaving duck... leavings. Feathers and duck poop and most likely hints of the bay. It was this 'hint of the bay' that I smelled in the water today. I chalked it up to duckpoop evenly distributed in the chlorinated water.
Key word, Chlorinated. Chlorine is a substance that makes water safe from germs. I was not worried about duck diseases. The funny smell, however, was less than satisfactory. One wants the pool to smell like antiseptic chemicals-- like civlization, like progress. It should be a smell like a dentist's office or a hotel laundry room; not exactly these smells mind you, only of a similar register. But I digress.
I took my swim, did my laps, and was relaxing in the jacuzzi when from the blazing disc of the sun, like japanese zero fighters, the ducks returned.
They soared into the pool in perfect unison, and began immediate splashing and frolicking.
I like these ducks. They are cute, acting like they own the pool and everything else. It is a mallard and his mate. Up until today, I only assumed it was his mate; now, to my horror, I know for certain that they are an item.
You see, as I lay in the sun after my soak in the hot tub, I casually observed the birds diving in graceful underwater arcs, apparently for the fun of it, slapping up the water with their wingtips, and preening.
And then, I noticed a strange behavior. They began to sort of circle about one another, bobbing their heads in this curious way, one then the other, like a query-response kind of deal. It was a short head bob, just the tip of their beaks dipping into the water, a precise, exact movement that was precise and exactly equal in both of them.
And then, the mallard sprang with a flap onto the other bird, pushing her underwater, nipping at her neck (ducks like it raw, apparently) and scrabbling with his big ass duck feet for position. He was sort of --try to follow me here-- angling his duck ass around and underneath her duck ass, with much splashing and ado, like he was really doing something, working it duckystyle, killing that duck pussy-- oh, excuse me, killing that cloaca (its an anus AND a vagina!!).
I'm not going to say that I've never seen ducks fucking before. I have. But, its not exactly something I've gotten used to either. I mean, how does one get used to the copulation of waterfowl. Don't answer, its rhetorical. There's no getting used to it. It seems so violent, so sudden, and it is so brief. In fact, the action is sometimes called a 'cloacal kiss'.
How romantic.
So, this three seconds of duck passion ends, and the female immediately defecates, like a huge crap, right in the pool there, and preens herself, doing little dips and dives.
The thing is, I had JUST been in that pool.
Mind you, there's a lot of water in there, but now, despite myself, there goes through my head the equation of duck-semen (and other duck leavings) to water.
What level of duck-semen am I comfortable with in my pool water?
Cloacal mucous? There's bound to be some.
What level of cloacal mucous am I comfortable with in my pool water?
My pool is a giant duck toilet.
It is duckwater.
It is ruined.
Ducks have nasty duck-sex and then take giant shits in there. No wonder they act like they own the place.
There is no real point to this, except that nature always wins.
-blush

The Blind man sees his Darkness

2009-06-08T15:15:00.000-07:00

I almost never finished the story I was kind of telling last time.
But now its been almost 20 days and I'm not sure I remember what my point was.
I was going to talk about the various gas station attendants I have known.
The most recent one likes me the best. His name is JC and he has been to jail before. He likes me because I am polite and respectful and call him Sir. The night that my story was going to relate, it was close to midnight, and I needed smokes.
The whole day had been pretty shitty from the word go, and I was feeling pretty bad as I recall, but also this odd detachment, a huge distance between myself and what was happening around me.
When I pulled up to the gas station, there was a cop car, and JC was out front talking to them about something.
This is not altogether unusual at this gas station.
Nevertheless, I waited, politely, eating a sandwich I had gotten from the store.
It was one of those gigantic sandwiches, cut into three parts that each could stand alone, easily, as an individual sandwich, but containing nothing but turkey, lettuce and bread.
So, I munched away slowly at this huge third of a sandwich, standing outside my car, just waiting for JC to be finished with the cops, and I noticed that they started looking at me.
This is probly because I was staring at them.
Turns out, I have a staring problem.
Sometimes, I stare at people.
So, the cops start looking at me and obviously talking about me to JC, who notices me, and beckons me into the store.
Here I became nervous. I was not high, not specifically anyway, but I was out of it, and I am not the sort of person who can hide his emotional/intellectual/spiritual state very well. Clearly, I must have looked a little out of it, because one of the cops approached me in that friendly but soon to be not so friendly way, they way they approach stoners, and asked me how I was doing.
Its a bit like sneaking up on a duck or like a rabbit or something. You don't want to frighten it before you can get your hands on it. This was the approach that puts the frog in the cold water and slowly brings it to boil.
I told him I was fine, but more importantly, JC told him I was fine, and not only that but a very respectful person, and that I had only been avoiding the cops because I did not want to interrupt JC's conversation with them.
And this was entirely true.
Like I said, not the first time I'd seen JC talking to the cops at this particular gas station.
The result thereof was somewhat heartening.
JC, nearly a total stranger, thought I was a good, respectful person. Like, one step above total stranger is how well I know this guy, and he sees some worth in me.
That was a bit of a boost.
And now, whenever the cops are there, they do not approach me in that way. They wave or say hello like anybody else doing their job and seeing someone they recognize.
None of this is terribly important andprobably a really boring story to boot. I just thought I would offer some kind of conclusion, given that the last post ends with me going for a walk, and then nothing for like three weeks.

But thats how it goes around here sometimes.

By the way, fuck springtime.
Fuckin hate springtime.
Fucks with my allergies and my cat is never home.

I went to the bookstore the other day and bought far too many books. Among them, I finally broke down and got the Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
I'm 50 pages in and its pretty heady.
So far, we have discussed the trouble with idendifying the evolutionary origins of consciousness, as well as the things that consciousness is not, and now we are talking about what it must therefore be.
I'm in the middle of a section about metaphor.
He makes a point that is not foreign to me and has always been a great source of inspiration and wonder, and that is simply just how gnarly and powerful metaphor is.
Its the essential base of language, not only in the functionary sense but in the artistic sense. Words, phrases, symbols, images, even grammatical constructions are all metaphors in the wide sense. I should have a larger point to make here, but I don't really.
It is, tho, entirely feasible that experience itself, in the sense that we are conscious of whats going on around us, is something of a huge metaphor for some other process going on thats completely beyond our understanding. Like, your own life is really just a metaphorical expression of a larger relationship of consciousness to the universe at large, of the congress between spirit and matter. Metaphors are all about relating things, and human experience is essentially the same process, relating to the world, to each other, to the shit that happens to you and even the shit that doesn't, things you imagine or remember or just wish or dream of, allllll of this stuff falls into relation within the human mind, mostly in the part we call consciousness.
Man. Just wait til I get to the end of the book. I bet I'll be bored by then and not even care about what consciousness is for anymore.
I am fond of the idea, and have espoused it through fiction elsewhere, that consciousness does not arise from matter or evolution or natural processes as such, but rather that all these things come from consciousness.
In the book, Julian Jaynes mentions that at literally the exact same time as Darwin, this whole other smart english dude came up with the theory of natural selection or evolution or wtf ever they call it, but that he is not remembered or credited thereof because he saw a limitation on what evolution was capable. He identified three points in evolution that required some kind of outside force, some sort of metaphysical or at least unknown catalyst, to progress beyond.
The first was pretty obvious- The origin of life. Inert matter does not just come to life, everyone knows that, though some people just take it for granted.
The second was less so- the origin of consciousness. Equally mysterious, but hardly the sort of lightning crack that would require the finger of god to spark.
The third kind of mystifies me, as someone who knows a bit about history- the origin of civilized society. Is there such a thing? what exactly does civilized mean anyway? I don't think you need God at all to have society as we know it. In fact, I think 'civilized society' is largely godless and is just about the only thing we human beings can take complete credit for, for good or bad.
Now, this dude, he went to seances and spirit mediums and other tomfoolery to try and find the metaphysical force that sparked these three jumping off points for him, and because of this, he and his contributions are completely ignored by science.
This happens a lot actually.
So, he was smart enough to come up with the theory of evolution, but when he notes a problem with it, scientists tell him hes wrong. We like you're theory, but what the fuck do you know about it?
Anyway, this guy, I wont even bother to find his name right now, because it doesn't matter, he's purposefully removed from the record of science for his outlandish belief that evolution was an incomplete theory of the origin of life. what a retard.
Similarly, evolution as a model does not have the power to explain the birth of consciousness, or the inner actions of the human mind.
While I am not quite prepared to make specific predictions about where the theory of evolution will open up to admit forces beyond what a handful of broken bone shards can tell us, I will say that I would assume that like the unified field theory, it will involve higher dimensions.
Consider the basic actions of life; purposeless, dumb, pointless, sourceless? Chemical? Mechanical? Euclidian? Newtonian? Relativistic? Positronic? Quantum mechanical? What model describes its function?
Every single model falls away, expands into something new, but in biology and evolution this never happens. The model changes by halting degrees, the smallest admissions that it is too small, too narrow, too confined to explain the complexities of life. Biologists should learn something from physicists.
But, lets get back to the real point here. Consciousness beyond the simple actions it performs for human beings. Existence as a metaphor, life as an expression of some incredible principle, and what level of conciousness could possibly concieve of a principle or ideal that necessitates its expression as everything that lives, breathes, thinks and suffers in the wide, old earth?
Maybe we snap into a hyper-dimensional consciousness the same way that newton, einstein, maxwell, and the standard models all snap into the metrics and tensors and what have you that describe higher dimensional space?
Each consciousness individually might only be an expression of a vast infinitude of consciousness that occupies for existence in the royal what our indiviual consciousnesses do for individuals.
I mean, maybe.
Its not any crazier than anything else I dont think, to think, that perhaps the action of all matter in the universe is akin to subconcious action, which is like the vast bulk of all the actions of the mind, where the conscious action in the universe, introspection and daydreaming and the intense kind of focus one has in the most memorable and meaningful of times, maybe that, collectively, makes up the thoughts and dreams and meaningful memories of that infinitude.
Maybe.
It kind of looks absurd on paper.

-blush

The most boring dream I've ever had

2009-05-22T14:45:00.000-07:00

At the risk of seeming like a diary entry, I have to explain some bizarre personal feelings I experienced yesterday.
First, let me just say that I've been playing Left4Dead and everyone was right, this game is fuckin superkickass. One of my favorite things about first person shooters is the sense that the odds are stacked incredibly high against you. Like, you are one dude, and you have to basically destroy whole armies of monsters, not just to survive but to win.
Few games relay this sense of impossible odds like this fucking zombiefest. There are literally an infinite number of them. Not a great variety, you understand, which is something of a disappointment, but enough that you come to hate some more than others.
Actually, I hate all of them.
The last first person shooter that I really enjoyed was Quake... like, all the Quakes, they were all good, but my particular favorite was Quake 2, because of the monsters and the nature of your mission in the single player game. You were one space marine out of a great many, and guess what? They are all dead except you. Yes, somehow, you are the only guy, and you must single handedly complete the mission an army was sent to accomplish. Between you and victory is an army of bloodthirsty cyborgs, and when I say cyborgs, I mean that the majority of them were gigantic walking tanks with like, a human face pinned onto it somewhere, bristling with rocket launchers and grenade launchers and chainguns and yes, lasercannons (pewpewkaboom!). More often than not, it was you against a squad or platoon of these bastards, a few little ones, like two big ones, two fast ones, and then a gigantic one, all screaming in their crazy alien language and shooting grenades at you. Clearing a gang of cyborgs like that really makes you feel good inside.
But, to contrast, this zombie game... Its just zombies, and there is no winning as such, you just get to live. Its a little anticlimactic. There is no victory to be had, you just get the fuck out before a million zombies show up. There are no mission objectives. They do not have guns, or leaders, or anything like that, theres just a huge mess of bodies to mow down, and then you get to move on. I'm not saying it isn't fun, I'm just saying its mostly harrowing as opposed to feeling like you've conquered anything.
Still, I like it, even with suprise magic zombies coming out of nowhere and choking me because I can clear a room with shotgun faster than the three jerkoffs following me with machineguns. Oh, I forgot about them. This entire game is based on the idea that you are one of four survivors, and you are trying to escape the zombies, so everywhere you go, you have these three fools following you around. Sometimes they say funny stuff and its cute, sometimes they save your ass from evil strangling magic zombies, and then sometimes they set off car alarms and take the long way around and get owned by hordes of zombies. Theres just no telling. I think its supposed to be part of the fun, but most of the time I just want them to keep up with me and not walk in front of the barrel of my shotgun while theres fifty zombies coming at me. I get killed a lot because im far ahead of them, having gone on a rampage, and some magic zombie, more deadly than the average meatsack, comes out of nowhere, unseen, and just annihilates me. Its kind of annoying, and I guess the cure is the multiplayer, where your buddies are actual humans, but I see that going badly too.
And besides that, nobody who was into this game last week seems to want to play it right now, so I'm sort of on my own. Story of my motherfuckin life.

Anyhow, yesterday I woke up in a terrible mood. Maybe terrible isnt the right word. I felt a kind of sadness, but it came from this bizarre sense of detachment, like I hadn't really woken up, I was still dreaming the most boring dream ever. I had to go to Fry's, and it was completely surreal walking around in there. I mean, on its best day, Fry's Electronics is like a small forgotten byway on the road to purgatory; everyone there hates you, everyone there seems as confused as you are if not moreso, you dont know where anything is, and they never seem to have just what you need-- at any rate, I had to find a keyboard, because my wireless one was mysteriously unresponsive. Somtimes breaking in a new computer is like breaking a horse, they fight you to the last, and then carry on with some form of minor rebellion or another until you begin to give it some positive reinforcement, and then it loves you forever.
I was hating life and hating Fry's and feeling this peculiar sense that nothing was real, or maybe that I was false in a solid realm. Its very hard to describe. I couldn't bring myself to turn my air conditioning on in my car, I just sat there sweating, driving robotically, staring ahead like I didn't see anything. When I was walking in, I found myself walking just behind some tibetan monks, or some kind of monk, in bright orange robes like they wear. What in the world, I still must wonder, were buddhist monks getting at fry's electronics?
(On the side, allow me to explain that this is not the first time i have spied berobed buddhist monks in places they seemingly do not belong, if a buddhist can be said to not belong anywhere. First time was at Del Taco #3, in Barstow, along the 15 on the way to vegas; this is the best del taco you have ever been to, its like gourmet del taco, they pile on the meat and cheese and the tomatoes are fresh and somehow everything tastes better, but, was alone on my way to vegas, i believe, im not sure what trip it was, but it was one of the long ones, like i wasn't coming home for a long ass time, and i was eating del taco for possibly the last time for a long time and right next to me were these three tibetan buddhist monks, looking at their burritos in placid confusion, while their guide or interpreter dude was trying to explain something to them. The next time was at magic mountain of all places, while i was waiting for other people to get off one of the roller coasters. i rather dislike roller coasters so i assume that i wasnt in line to get on one, but there they were, walking through magic mountain, smiling like it was the craziest thing their old eyes had ever seen; i like to think it just pleased them to see people having a good time, to see a place built solely for amusement, but of course it isn't, its there to make cash off your amusement, which to me and my thinking makes it much, much less amusing-- but i digress)
What the monks were getting, however, was not my concern. I was there to figure out what I was getting. A corded usb keyboard. The wireless, clearly, was horseshit to this new comp, so I was going to give it what it needed so it would give me what I needed-- sweet zombie killing action. I found the keyboard isle, and began laboriously deciding what sort of keyboard I wanted.
I think it might have gone quicker, but my decision making was impaired by the strange feeling I had. Fry's was like a ghost world around me, these keyboards fragments of imagination. What the fuck was I looking at. What the fuck is this place.
The first thought was cheap, then I thought comfort, then I thought, wait, Im primarily going to be gaming with this machine, and I lit upon one of those super gamer keypad things.
The WOLF KING, it was called, and it was your basic wsad setup in its own little circle with like a bunch of other buttons you supposedly need around it. The gamer within me was aroused-- how much more ass, thought I, will I kick with that kind of hardware. It was thirty dollars tho, and I would still need a normal keyboard, and there was still in my mind the thought that spending hours with my wrists tweaked on that thing required some kind of comfort, memory foam or some such fuckall thing. But, ultimately, what convinced me to make the decision I did was the thought of bringing home fifty dollars worth of keyboard and WOLF KING and having to look at the WOLF KING there by my keyboard. It occurred to me that to buy the WOLF KING along with a normal keyboard that essentially did the exact same shit was not simply buying a funny little gaming controller: it was, in fact, making a statement about what kind of person I am, what my priorities are. To have a WOLF KING on my desk would be something that is not of my own nature in my most personal of computer spaces. Indeed, the WOLF KING, cool as it is, is something that will only make me feel worse about myself in the long run.
I fled the fry's with a sigh. I happened to know that micro center was having a sale on the exact shit I was looking for. So off I went, back down the 405, up the 55, 20minutes out of my way, for some reason refusing air conditioning or radio comfort, to save five dollars on a cheap keyboard.
Because apparently, that is the kind of person I am. I am no WOLF KING, I am a CHEAP BASTARD who enjoys suffering.
Yet, was I suffering?
It didn't feel like it. Intellectually I understood the lack of comfort, but physically, mentally, I felt aloof, like none of it mattered, nothing was real. Such a strange feeling. Such a weird freedom. What is suffering really but the sum difference between what you've got and what you want, or what you think you should have, or what you think you need?
There is an end to this story, if you aren't bored to distraction already, but I will have to get to it later. It's sunny, and I gotta get out there. Also, I need to get dinner started.
I'll be back in a few hours, not that you're like, hanging out waiting for it...

-blush

Ruth, Ruth, Betty and Agnes go to the pool

2009-05-20T11:55:00.000-07:00

I haven't much time. I have to get to Fry's and buy a power supply for this computer I got, that's almost working but, of course, has cost me more to get in working order than I anticipated.
I have learned several things this week, and its only half over.
First, fat guys can do yoga. Not very well, or fast, or in public, but it can be done.
Second, Kale is not a bad vegetable, if you can get past the look of it; it should be filling in your flower garden, but lo, there it sits on your plate, tryin to act all healthy and shit, but frankly, I deeply question the nutritional value of leaves. More on this at a later time.
Third, computer hardware is designed poorly. It is made to be somewhat arcane and inaccessible to your average idiot just trying to figure out how to put a computer together. Information is always missing, things are always incompatible, and if you think about it even on a surface level the bulk of the computer industry is based on this idea that only a select few can fix your computer or even tell you how it works.
I reject this assumption.
I think that a great many IT 'experts' are in fact just nerds who played some video games, maybe upgraded a few parts, and then got a job to get out of their parents basement; perhaps some friend said, "Hey, that guy knows computers, lets hire him to do our computers!" and mostly what they do is throw shit away, find the last good configuration, or straight up format and reinstall. This is neither here nor there, on to my fourth great discovery.
Four, every Wednesday, apparently, some kind of crazy water exercise class is taught in the pool here at the trailer park.
It begins around 10:30am... old ladies in bulky, old school swimsuits, like 1940's swimsuits, begin to filter towards the pool, drifting in with slow, laboring steps, but smiling. It is a sunny day after all, and they are on their way to the pool. I was nearby when the first two met.
"Hello Ruth!" said the one, drawing it out.
"Hi Ruth!" said the other, and cackled.
I couldn't believe it. Two old ladies, and can you imagine, not one, but BOTH are named Ruth. I had been walking by to the drinking fountain near the pool and I saw a third, carrying a towel, a cap, goggles, and cookies. She was wearing some kind of robe-ish shawl. She was very bubbly and greeted me, and greeted her friends, and her name was Betty I believe. I'm going to call her that anyway, because its an old lady name, and since I'd seen two old ladies and both had old lady names, indeed the SAME old lady name, I don't think its unreasonable to assume that the third will have an old lady name too.
So, soon, the whole pool area is like, crowded with old ladies. Its like geese gathering for migration. They are eating cookies and splashing about and chattering; Agnes, Alma, Bertille, Betty, Blanche, Edith, Florence, Gladys, Harriet, Ida, Janet, Mabel, Martha, Matilda, Maude, Mildred, Muriel, Pearl, Ruth, Viola, and of course the other Ruth (alphabetical order), all just havin a ball.
Then, up walks this other lady, with a big like pool bag, like the people used to have at summer camp, full of floaties and whatnot, and shes got this like, huge boom box on one of those little tiny hand-trucks.
This other lady, she is not quite so old, and she has one of those visors thats a sweat band with a gibbous moon sort of shape of colored plastic, making her face look green, and shes in a one piece bathing suit and shorts and sneakers with bunched up socks, like if you didn't know better you'd say legwarmers.
She walks up, and just like you would imagine, she opens with a hearty call of, "OKAY LADIES!"
And so it begins...
She cranks up her boom box, and get this shit, its fucking big band music with a rockin techno beat, and she walks along in front of the pool, moving her legs and arms on land in patterns to be mimicked underwater by the ladies.
The fantastic part of this is that the ladies do not stop chattering. They think this is great. They continue to socialize even while they work out, churning up the pool to trance-driven glen miller tunes.

My workouts are a lonely affair, driven by fear of death and self-loathing. I speak to no one, and everytime someone walks in while I'm working out, or if I walk in while they are working out, we do not talk or socialize and I will be goddammed if anyones ever brought me cookies in the weightroom. In the rare instance that I see another human being in there, we seldom share the space for long.

So, for a minute, as I was sweating away on a bike that goes nowhere, listening to the same mix of music for the thousandth hour, I thought how lovely it would be to be in the pool with the old ladies.
I could just show up on Wednesday mornings, slip my fat ass into the pool, and pretend like I belonged there.
I'm sure they would notice though.
Not that I would be unwelcome, I'm sure, but it would be awkward for all of us, and no one would be able to say why exactly, and I would be forced back into the lonely weightroom, with double the shame hanging and jiggling on me.

I was going to make a point at the end, but I don't have one.
Old ladies at the pool... think about it.

-blush

There is, apparently, only so much to be done.

2009-05-15T17:13:00.000-07:00

I am exhausted today.
I have an interesting story to tell, which is the only reason I would bother the good people of the Overbrain with more typing, but allow me, no; no, indulge me, if you will, a little idle chatter beforehand.
I wish that I could say that I was like, the strong silent type, a man of few words, the John Wayne/Ernest Hemingway kind of guy who's every word carries freight, but if we're being honest with one another --and let us always be honest with one another-- I enjoy smalltalk.
You know whats awesome about smalltalk?
First, its an actual word: smalltalk. Its not 'small talk' or 'small-talk', its smalltalk. I love words like that... I'll think of more in a moment, I don't want to stress myself out about it right this second and lose my train of thought trying to think of more words that are two words combined into one word, where they could be a phrase or a hyphenated phrase or a hyphenated compound... theres a word for words like that... wtf is it...
Anyway... oh shit!
ANYWAY is one of those words! its not any way, or any-way, its anyway! That might be pushing it and pressing the issue, but you see how rad it is.
Bullshit! theres another one; bull-shit; bull shit... come to think of it, those might be three individual things... Bullshit, of course is the common term for blatherskite or nonsense (this one doesnt count beause NON is not a word, it is a prefix); bull-shit might very well be the best way of expressing the verb but with the modification of bull-like attributes, like, if you took a shit the way a bull might, you might call this a bull-shit, but you couldn't in good standing call it bullshit; and of course, bull shit is the physical stuff, the excrement of a bull.
Words are fun.
What the fuck was i talking about...
Oh right, im super tired today. Everything is sore.
See, yesterday, I went on a speedy hike to tune of four or five miles or so and this connects to the story that I have to tell, that even with this second anticipatory remark, will now likely be a letdown. (Now, Letdown, theres a perfect example; let down, let-down, and letdown must mean three different things, think about it.) It was all good, but today I am sore and do not feel like doing anything strenuous. So, here I am, talking to the meta-brain.
Now, this story I wanted to relate. I have mentioned a few of my wilderness adventures in the past, tremendous and awesome encounters with wildlife. I don't know if I mentioned my last trip in the tiny plastic canoe, but aside from a whole flock of pelicans under the bridge and a gigantic gray heron-king(King of birds!KAKAW!) I saw gigantic sea lions lounging fat and happy on unused sailboats (three of them! KAKAW!), and something bumped the bottom of my boat one time.
But, yesterday, I was out on that hike, tryin to make the circuit in quicktime. Its not lieka wilderness hike, you see, its along the streets, but the route is chosen to avoid waiting at any signals, only crossing streets where the little glowing man or the glowing red robot hand can be ignored, the idea being not to lose a minute and make the distance is as clean a time as possible.
At any rate, I was going down Jamboree, and I would explain exactly where this is, but if you havent seen it its hard to picture; I will try anyway.
So, you're comin down the street right, and its on your left as you're comin up a big hill, just between some tennis courts and a fancy housing tract is this stretch of unused land leading right out to the bay, down this like gulch or gully; it can't really be built on unless you like, totally fill it in, and of course the bluffs and such sort of meet around this area.
So heres this like, hundred yards of nature between tennis courts and a housing tract, with a busy ass street just to your right. I mean, the nature comes right up the sidewalk.
And I see this bunny, hauling balls out of the scrub across some grass and into some bushes. This is not unusual, it being springtime, and bunnies being the most pervasive vermin in the area. That's how nice a place we live in-- we have an infestation of adorable bunnies.
Anyhow, a few steps on, I see what I think is like a really, really fuckin big housecat come out of some bushes, around the same place where the rabbit came running from.
It was brownish and black striped, and I noticed it had a bob tail with a splash of white, and it looked right at me -- some predatory sense must have indicated it was being watched-- and I see it has really big ears with really big tufts up off the top of them. It was trotting right in my direction for a moment, then turned into the mangal of untended growth by the fencing of the housing tract, which is a pretty wide stretch, to keep the sound of the busy street away.
When this thing turned, no less than sixty feet from me, I noticed that it was pretty damn huge, and for sure no housecat.
And thats when i realized that it could only be a bobcat, in its summer coat, probably a juvenile, chasing rabbits by the road.
There are indeed bobcats around the back bay, but lord knows Ive never seen one, nor have I met anyone that has ever seen one around the back bay.
But I will be goddammed if I did not see a motherfuckin bobcat from the sidewalk of Jamboree road.
Totally made my day.
The peak of my wildlife adventures so far.

Thats really all I had. When I saw the thing, I immediately tried to think of someone who might give a shit, but I realized that no one I knew would care enough to be interrupted from their day to hear about how I saw a really neato animal on my walk.
Oh, dear, is that my lonely showing?
Let me just flip this closed...

-blush(KAKAW!~)

Let us speak freely with one another...

2009-05-06T09:10:00.001-07:00

In spirit of openness, of fairness, I will be saying some dirty words soon, and will be discussing highly personal hygiene issues.
Today, I awoke with hives.
Hives on my arms, my chest, and my knees, oddly enough. Thankfully, the delicate regions are hive free, and my back seems to be hive free. Hives are, as you know, an allergic reaction, typically to abrasive substances and fine stuff, like dander or powdered cleaning agents.
My hives arise chiefly from shame and guilt.
I have psychosomatic hives.
Whenever I've done a thing that I sort of wish I hadn't, my brain connects to my endocrine system and produces hives as a visible reminder never to do that sort of shenanigan again.
Example: Mr. Garcia's bachelor party, when I fell in love with that stripper and blew $300 on lap dances and drinks. Had hives for a week.
Example: The time I went down on that chimorro girl in the minivan. Hives for three days. Not to mention 'skank-lip' but thats a whole other story.
Example: Night before last, when I got drunk and fingerbanged some other dude's girlfriend. Wake up today with hives.
Now...
The thing is that I hadn't intended to do this thing at all. Furthermore, the act itself is somewhat harmless, which is to say one cannot get diseases from fingerfucking; this is nothing that middle school kids aren't doing around the world, at this very moment, with little to no negative consequences.
However, there is a reason I have shame and guilt hives. You see, I am a man who long, long ago made a pledge that I was never going to be this guy, the guy who gets drunk with YOUR girlfriend and fingerfucks her on a dirty futon. This because long, long ago, I had a girlfriend who was extensively fucked by various appendages, doubtless on various types of furniture, and such was my feeling of devestation upon each new revelation of her faithlessness that I would never, ever be this guy.
And yet, here we are. I wish I could say it was the first time, but in all likelihood it is not. I am not a hard person to lie to, and I drink a lot; I might have caused all manner of havoc without meaning to.
This present case, tho, is not without its mitigating circumstances. Certain parties (who shall remain nameless) who represent forces of chaos and carnality were influential upon both of us, and I was feeling an odd kind of pressure, not exactly unpleasant or unwelcome, to do this thing that has now given me mind-induced hives.
You will say, immediately, "Blush, you scalawag, don't you dare blame the forces of darkness for this, you knew damn well what you were doing!"
To which I will kindly respond: I do not blame the forces of darkness, but they were most certainly present and active in this situation. I blame only myself.
And let me also say, again, that the drink was involved.
Now, you will say, "Blush, you rapscallion, don't you dare blame the drink, you drink all the time and don't go about unnatural, immoral acts!"
To which I will patiently reply: I do not blame the drink. I am an adult and not an unseasoned drinker, and should be expected to contain my base urges and instincutal perversions with dignity, to uphold righteousness in the face of tempation, to conduct myself in a gentlemanly manner. But, I am hardly the drunk that I was, and do not go about drinking to excess so frequently these days that I am quick enough to recognize when my judgement is impaired, not critically or dangerously, but just skewed enough to make a bad idea look like a good one, to make a morally ambiguous position into one in which morality has no place.
You see, my considerations of right and wrong in this matter were brief, and I was too happy to want to examine my condition or the choices before me carefully. I decided to follow bliss, the simple and easy and cheap, temporary happiness that was available to me in the moment, and leave the wondering and the judgement for later.
And now, its later...
And I've got goddam hives.
Better than genital warts or herpes I guess. Not that she would have them. She was a good clean woman, from a far distant, forthright land where she does simple, life affirming activities, far and farther from the deviancy that I, for one night, represented. She has a good man, who makes good money, is good looking, and has a rich and good soul to match I'm sure. Her interest in me was clearly some kind of aberration born of distance and intoxication, and with a little luck, he will never know of my inappropriate contact with her, and I will never have to have a conversation with him about it. It sound strange and rather unlike me, but I hope to never make friends with this dude, because this will require that I be honest and disclose to him that I pressed his lady's naughty buttons.
Man, I just feel terrible.
Not to mention the hives...
Those are easy enough to get rid of. Take benadryl for a few days. Merely an allergic reaction.
To shame! and guilt!

This just brings up all manner of ancillary questions concerning the kind of guy I really am. Flawed, certainly, but god, there is just so, so, so very much wrong that it seems impossible to begin righting anything.
One must ask oneself what kind of dude he wants to be, and if he's anywhere close to being that guy. For myself, I have great doubts. Mind, one can't do the right thing ALL the time, as virtue dies if not fed by vice, but you really should pick your battles. Like, instead of getting nasty with some other dude's girlfriend, perhaps you could shoplift, or wish ill on someone, or kill a creature that is harmless to you. I dunno.
The end of this story, tho, is that I'm taking this one to the bank, along with all the other shameful stories of my ill-cultivated decision making skills, to be kept as insurance against doing something like this in the future.
Like, if a morally dicey situation comes up, I can just quietly whisper in my mind.
Don't give yourself hives dude...
Just remember the fuckin hives...

-blush

Frustration

2009-04-28T15:37:00.000-07:00

I'll try starting with a title this time.
I have been sick. Its very frustrating. I drink lots of fluids, I take vitamins, and I've been taking it entirely easy, but it just lingers on and on. Today I woke up thinking 'Fuck yeah! this is it! back to business!'
There will be no business, however. My mucus is still discolored, the occasional hacking cough still troubles me, and it totally hurts to swallow (there goes my day job... I guess night job would be a better joke... ya, I'll go with night job... there goes my night job doesn't really sound right tho, does it? Still, the inability to swallow ruining my job is still kind of a good joke... I'll leave it in. I mean, they can't all be winners, but you don't get anything for not trying... sometimes you don't but then sometimes its like, with no effort at all, things just come together... is that worth another joke? probly not, i mean, a second joke within the parentheses would be like, diving into bracket country, and that leads to double parentheses land, and before you get out of double parentheses land, you're grammar is already just out the window...).
What sucks is that there's stuff to do, but this illness completely demotivates me. Its like all I can feel are my sinuses crammed with disease. So Ive been in for three days now, and I don't think I can take much more. My sleep has been completely fucked, absolutely random. My room here is a complete shambles, its goddam squalor, like i was living in a shed, and every time i clean shit just moves around, nothing is got rid of.
The people on the radio are talking about what its like to be a musician going deaf. So this musician, he goes to the doctor, and he gets augmented with devices, and guess what? He still sucks. Now he goes on radio shows, sings his horrible music, and talks about how easy it is to go deaf. Whatever you say deafy. By the way, I can totally tell that you can't really hear yourself, because if you could, you would stop singing, because guess what? Deaf people shouldn't fuckin sing. Not tryin to be a dick about it, but I wanted to play an instrument my whole life, so i tried to teach myself the ukulele and you know what? I can't, because I'm fuckin tone deaf, and I can't tell what the fuck I'm doing with the goddam strings, so when I play the ukulele, i sound goddam horrible, and thats why i don't play it, for the exact reason that deaf people, even if they just have song inside of them wanting to get out, sadly and inexorably can't sing.
You know what else is bugging me?
Warcraft. Fuck that game.
I started playing Half Life 2 instead, and guess what? It's frustrating as hell. Every fuckin level i have to load my game like a hundred times, because if you fuck up even a tiny bit, you're toast. The difficulty of the game is scaled according to, get this, the accuracy of your weapons. In a game where all you do is shoot shit in first person perspective, part of the deal is that if I have shitty aim, it should be my fault-- you can't fairly hand me a fucking gun that doesnt goddam shoot straight when the only way to solve my problems in this goddam game is to shoot things. Its the most frustrating fucking thing. If i run up to within five feet of you, and shoot you in the goddam face, you should, by all rights, take a bullet to the face. But, this game, in order to appear more difficult, decides that you can, in fact, miss from ten yards with a bullet going the speed of sound. figure that shit out. So, in this game where you have all this futuristic shit, and all these cool weapons, guess what I'm using 90% of the time to kill fools?
A fucking 9mm baretta, a shotgun, and hand grenades, because these are the only things that do what they are supposed to, the only weapons that actually work they way my brain thinks they are going to, ie, I point at shit, pull the trigger, and my bullets or pellets or grenade goes at the place im targeting. All the pulse rifles, laser guns, rockets, crossbows (wtf is a goddam crossbow doing in this game anyway) are all not just innaccurate, but WILDLY innacurate, like clownshoes innacurate. Don't even get me started on the shitty vehicles either-- benny hill music should be playing while youre trying to drive these things.
Its torture, but at least its got a goddam plot, and its not bad either.
Not like World of Warcraft. Fuck that game.
While im on the subject, you know what else is frustrating?
Thinking that you have more to say, so you start writing down a sentence, realize its retarded, start over, realize that the whole idea was stupid, so you try to think of something else, but then you realize that you ain't got nothing else, and before you're quite finished, guess what? You're done.
-blush

2009-04-21T11:02:00.000-07:00

I simply don't know what to say.
I started off talking about the weather, but put a stop to that immediately.
I was going to talk about this movie that I saw, and I really liked, but that seemed kind of stupid too.
I almost told about my trip up north, but, despite the fun I had, it was really the kind of fun you had to be there to share in. A wordy account of the fun wouldn't really be fun in itself.
I thought I'd discuss loneliness and how it isn't so bad, but that seemed a little preachy and silly. Who does not understand loneliness? People have pets and friends; loneliness is covered. There are of course more profound levels of loneliness, like being alone in a crowd or no one 'getting' you, but really its the same want of company.
So, I thought I would make myself some decaf, get the brain active, but I'm out of instant and I cannot find my coffee maker, and now that I think about it, I haven't seen the coffee maker in a very, very long time. I'm kind of wondering what I did with it, but I'm drawing a complete blank. I only remember that once, I had a coffee machine, and now I do not. There are no steps in between.
Then I thought I might discuss that, but I kind of just did.
I would discuss how boring and uninteresting my life is today, or how nothing seems to be working, but I think I just did that too. Besides, the only thing worse than a boring person is a boring person that wants to talk to you at length about how boring their life is.
To that end, I'm gonna go ahead and let this rest for the time being.
blush out

There is Much to Fear

2009-03-20T03:37:00.000-07:00

We must discuss fear.
It is impossible of course.
Fear is the oldest and easiest emotion. In a way, it is at the root of everything we understand about ourselves, all our reactions to things, all our interpretation of stimuli.
Fear, or freedom from it, is the basis of all human feeling.
Happiness could just be the absence of fear, definition by negation as it were. Joy does not stand alone. Even sadness is just fear's pale, listless shadow, following behind it, confirming its solidity.
Fear is poison for the heart, a cage for the soul, the trap, the key, the truth.
To understand fear is to understand what it means to be alive.
So, let us try together to understand fear.

I myself am afraid quite a bit. At most times it doesn't go beyond a simple nervous energy, a tension. Yet, there exist conditions that arouse real and genuine fear.
The dark.
I'm a terrible nyctophobe.
I think that is the right word. I cannot stand to be in the dark. Even with someone near me, next to me, holding me, the dark seems alive around me, something more than an absence of light. It's like an endless opaque thing, it produces pressure, has its own airy weight. My sensitivity to the dark leads to the notice of many subtle shades of light. This truly only makes the dark that hides and waits in every place that light is too weak to reach all that more terrible. I feel intention in the dark, like it wants something. I feel attention in it, like its watching me. You may accuse me of exaggerating for dramatic effect, but I'm sure someone has noticed me tensing up, freezing up, wide awake in the dark like I'm waiting for something.
The terror is that I don't know what it is, there is nothing solid for me to watch for, point to, confirm or confront. Maybe its nothingness that gets me.
That terrifies me too.
Nothingness.
How awful it is to want more than there is.
The dark is the very definition of nothingness. Its on an order with silence; I can take silence, I even love silence, but I imagine I'm not alone in the perception of a kind of silence that has in it the same sense I get from the dark, this weight it has, the imposition silence makes at times.
I find it hard to describe.
I can't sleep well in the dark. Which is crazy. Most people can't sleep with a light on, I kind of need it.
I suppose that's really childish. The adult thing to do is just be an insomniac, but only in the sense that one sleeps primarily in daylight. Probably safer that way.
But safe from what?
What is it that's trying to get me? What am I so afraid of exactly?
Nothing I guess. Just nothing.

I like to believe that everyone is afraid of the dark, but that does not bear out in reality. Some people don't seem to mind.
I can recall in the vague way that memory works -which is to say, always changing, memories being as alive as we are, different as our moods and our personalities change- being unafraid in the dark; voices in the dark, lying in a bed and speaking in a kind of freedom that only darkness can give. Same as it is sometimes necessary for complete silence for the mind to be free to think.

Some connection exists between darkness and chaos. No need to get all into it, the mind can work this out fairly simply.
Chaos is a species of freedom, or rather there is a kind of freedom that is born from chaos. What does this make order then, assurance, harmony?
It is perhaps that order, peace, and harmony only exist on the flipside of chaos, conflict, and discord. We only need order because chaos exists, and we must experience chaos to seek order.
Maybe fear of the dark works on a similar principle.
Fear the dark to honor the light? Something a little less prosaic perhaps?
Fucked if I know.
I work from the fear, because life has taught me that I am frail and small and at the mercy of great forces against which there is no avail, and in this helplessness is indestructible faith, the milksop courage of the pacifist. The inability to grasp the infinite brings eternity into focus, makes it clear and real in every experience and every passing moment.
So, we return: What is fear?

-cbb

Dracula

2009-03-19T02:59:00.001-07:00

So, it's around 3am and I just finished Dracula.
Awesome book.
I have to say, however, that it has that weird, Victorian kind of gothic melodrama that makes so many of those books impossible to translate into movies.
For one thing, you may not be aware that the entire book is told through diary entries and newspaper clippings. Lets be honest with each other, when there was nothing to do but read books or watch plays, when entertainment was literally standing around in a parlor or whatever and listening politely to someone play the piano, this sort of cumbersome device is just fine. But if you have anything at all to do with your day other than read, it makes the novel heavy on the brain.
You can't really do an action packed diary entry. Just doesn't work.
However, the book is still rad. For started, Dracula is way, way more sinister than he is in any of the movies. Like, for reals, he's a monster, the old fashioned kind that you aren't supposed to feel sympathy for, who doesn't have some emo tragedy in his past driving him to evil.
He's evil because he does evil shit, because he traffics with the devil and sorcery and he studied at the Scholomance. He was bad way before he was dead, and when he died he just got worse.
So, also in gothic, melodramatic victorian fashion, the book is aptly named. It's about Dracula really, and maintaining the right distance from this central figure is what really makes him fascinating.
I should also mention Professor Van Helsing.
They made a horrible, horrible action movie, that is technically unwatchable, called "Van Helsing", and this dude in the book has nothing in common with it.
Professor Van Helsing, for one thing, is dutch. And he talks, in the book, in his memoranda, in all his dialogue, with a thin but noticeably distorted dutch accent. He refers to objects, ideas, and incidents as 'him' like its another person, which at first is really annoying but once you figure out wtf is going on its totally rad.
He's this like, old dutch dude who specializes in brain diseases, right, but for whatever bizarre reason, he knows all about vampires. Go figure. He's supremely good, prays all the time, and motivates these weepy english dudes (and one american dude who talks like an english dude) to do good things, and not be retarded when they go to fight the vampire.
But, theres like, no fighting. They chase a lot. Theres a lot of talk about what to do. Theres a lot of figuring out what properties the Count owns exactly, and detecting just how he chartered a ship or a coach or whatever.
Its actually pretty boring...
You can tell that Stoker was more of a playwright than a novelist. Lots of dialogue where there could be action. This device of the diary entries. The gratuitous use of that weird thing they used to do where they say 'oh!' in the middle of a sentence, and sometimes repeat the exact word that comes before 'oh!', and also the overuse of the exact combination 'poor, dear, sweet', or any combination thereof: 'oh! you poor, sweet, dear man!'; 'oh! my dear, poor, sweet Mina!', and suchlike for 320 pages.

Anyway.
I put Dracula to bed, and it was a long time coming.

Blush paddles a tiny plastic boat around the bay.

2009-03-18T23:44:00.000-07:00

Today I saw the raddest bird.
I was in a kayak, which is an ancient native American word meaning "tiny canoe", and I was paddling around the bay, and on one sandy little island were all these birds.
Some of them, I'm sure, were tiny little sandpipers. This is an itty bitty friendly bird, like a sparrow built for wading in the sandy mud and picking bugs out of same mud with long beaks.
Before I go any further, I don't know shit about birds.
That having been said, there was another kind of bird that was, much like the sandpiper, long legged and long beaked, but huge, like six to nine of the little ones could have fit inside the big one. I can only imagine what the little beach birds think of these birds that are just like them but tremendously huge (comparatively).
I wondered this, as I paddled, and when I'd come around the other side of the sandy island, there was a gigantic, stork legged egret sorta bird, like a heron or something, blue-gray and all stately and towering over all the other birds. He was enormous, had that sort of accidental grace that big, storky birds get when they move slow, neck all curled up, and then stretching up to look at something, or just seem taller I suppose.
I mean, there is simply no telling about the emotional state of birds, but he (she?) looked pretty pleased with himself.
Then he took off and flew like five feet in front of me, to the far shore, where he scared some seagulls.
Totally rad bird.

Being a kayak brought up some feelings that I realized are vaguely connected with my previous (first) post, concerning sea creatures.
Turns out I have an irrational fear of sea monsters.
The bay is too shallow, too polluted to support anything large enough to be a threat to me, yet in my brain is some kind of vestigial, primitive nugget that insists on the possibility that some behemoth fish can -silent, unseen- rise to the surface and with cavernous maw or slithering tentacle snatch me from sunlight and further life.
This fear led me to run aground once or twice in the effort to stay near the shore. When I did find myself in open water, I paddled like a crazy person.
It is of course impossible to 'run' as such in a small plastic canoe, but that did not prevent me from trying.
It was a silly undertaking to begin with, roving around with no destination in a one man boat. An even sillier way to die, in a small plastic boat.
Nevertheless, I made the attempt, and found it to my liking after a time, in spite of the occasional primeval dread. A little nervous tension makes recreation into an adventure.

Later, I went and had dinner at the Alta, which is still my favorite coffee shop, even tho I drink decaf now. I still like the taste of coffee as it goes with a cigarette.
My friend Mary met me there, and we talked about college. That's what she does now. She's in college.
Anyway, being of morbid cast, she inevitably brought up people she knows experiencing some form of tragedy.
The world, she tells me, seems to be moving into a "death phase".
We somehow went from old movies we liked to the "death phase" of the world. Still, food for thought.
"Death Phase" is followed by... nothing. There is no phase after "Death Phase".
Not to be nitpicky about it, but that doesn't really make it a 'phase' now does it. That is where phases stop, the "Death Phase" (Ima capitalize it from now on) is just the end of phases. Phase implies that it changes at some point, there will be some further passage of time.
Not so, the "Death Phase".
You get to the "Death Phase", you're done.
We'll discuss this further another time. This whole line of thinking is just unproductive at the moment.

I'm wondering if other people really need to read this garbage. Who would want to?
People with boring jobs and interweb access.
Shut-ins.
Mental patients.
Blush's legion of ~11 admirers.
Who knows. I'm sure it's not important.
wtf ever.

-cbb

Nothing to say.

2009-03-16T21:53:00.000-07:00

So, at the behest of certain parties, I have started a "blog", which is something that apparently is fairly common these days.
I'm told that not a lot of particular thought is meant to go into this process, and in point of fact most "blogs" are actually merely cobbled together from other sources, or amount to a kind of daily diary. My personal journals have always been failures, uninteresting even to me; if you bore YOURSELF with your diary, you probly shouldn't have one.
I don't have any like, poetic thoughts or particularly important musings. My first few attempts at this I couldn't get my mind over the thought of cuttlefish and octopi (cephalopods in general) being too smart than sea creatures have a right to be, but thats pretty much where that line of reasoning peters out.
Of course, one might bring up the intentions of these creatures, for surely a thing that is mostly brain matter has more on its mind than eating, right?
But such an idea as the intentions of sea creatures is highly philosophical and has no place on the interweb, the illegitimate storehouse of humanity's meta-brain.
Meta-brain being, of course, a highly technical, scientific term for the network of thinking machines that link together, suck in every bit of information that human beings give them, and store it in a kind of pseudo-life, much akin to Dracula or the Lawnmower Man.
Needless to say, once the bowl was cashed and the weed started wearing off, I found the issue of the intellect of the cephalopod to be somewhat inappropriate. I'm not even sure that I'm spelling "cephalopod" correctly.
I could, of course, ask the internet. In fact, I will.
I go to consult the machine...

*minutes later*

Turns out I spelled it right, but if wikipedia is to be believed, the cephalopod issue is more problematic than I at first assumed. I was wrong to dismiss it so summarily.
As it turns out, there are also Nautiluses, the Nautilus being a shelled cephalopod, and squid, who apparently are far more angry than one might think.
Squid are simply murderous. They attack anything. The biggest ones fight whales.
Fuckin whales man.
Wrap your brain around that shit. Its angry enough to swing at a goddam whale.
What's it gonna do to you?
Octopi are also aggressive, and get this, they can do math, open bottles and cans, and operate simple machines. They can squeeze into tiny spaces, and an awful large portion of their body mass is also their brain.
Cuttlefish can mimic other sea creatures, changing shape and color, and, surprise surprise, they are highly aggressive and will fuck with anything that comes near them. Like most cephalopods, they communicate emotions and possibly other information (such as plans? why not) through secret color codes too fast and complicated for people to ever figure out.
Now, follow me here.
People talk to dolphins. We can vaguely hear sadness or joy in the songs of whales. These are mammals and so far as like, the animal world goes, mammals are on our side. You can look into their eyes and kind of tell whats going on in there.
But octopi? Never.
They are "talking" to each other, and only to each other. We will never understand wtf is going on in cephalopod universe. You might easily say: but Blush, we don't know whats going on in a lot of other universes, like squirrels and birds and snakes.
Well birds and snakes we can discuss another time, but I will say this, that squirrel universe, however mysterious to us, is by no means as sophisticated as cephalopod universe. Squirrels are dumb. They wear their hearts on their sleeves. They like nuts, nesting, food, trees, shit that we as people can plainly interpret and understand.
But the squid has its own agenda.
They eat whales man! There isn't anything larger in the ocean, and what does the giant squid do?
Attacks it, no question.
I'm not going to say that I'm worried just yet. They are safely in the ocean, and we humans and most of the mammals are enjoying the good life up here on dry land (which is where its at).
But cephalopods are definitely food for thought.

Now you see that this was entirely pointless, and I apologize for wasting your time.
I just couldn't think of anything else.
Man, what a horrible feeling. I think this makes me a slightly worse person, to add more information to an already bloated, overfed meta-brain.
Nevertheless, I do hope that this brief interjection has satisfied certain parties as to my participation in the "blogging" activity.
Blush has re-emerged onto the Interweb, and the ramifications will be largely ignored.
Have a good evening.

-cbb