I had planned to go to bed early, but I am still awake. I cannot stop thinking and I notice a moth convulsing around the light outside my window, hideous in its fragility. I am at home. I am plain and nothing has changed. I am not a college student, struggling to pay for everything, balancing 18 credit hours and a part-time job. I am not inescapably sleep-deprived, and I have not made a thousand small, stupid, costly mistakes. I do not have a roommate or a network of support sprinkled lightly over the country like flecks of toothpaste on a mirror.
This is when I harbor my thoughts worth thinking. This is when I sound like an artist, when I have enough time to sing in the shower, instead of eating M&M’s for dinner and forgetting to shave my legs. I am wearing a sombrero that is broader than my shoulders and it is morning. The sun sears my retinas ever few minutes when I turn my head at a certain angle and it shines thru the holes in my hat. It is jarring and I whip my head away from it. It rises inexorably. Suddenly I am the moth, drawn, drugged, towards the sun. We meet halfway…
I shine warmly and things grow. What I have become I held in fear and awe, and I can see from my new vantage point that the sun is sloppy, ejecting random spumes of stormy flame. I boil and froth. I am alive.
The fish and the whales, all with gaping mouths, motion the people, the animals, the hybrids, all, to gather in their bellies. My mother had taught me how not to go, how to resist the temptation. What was forgotten: the simple definition: temptation… what is it? Is it the pull to engage in what is not desirable in outcome, or the attraction to what is not desirable in principle? Or has it nothing to do with desire, only with theoretical disobedience of the habits we have been memorizing?
What is a trend? Is it enviable fleetingly, or is it a modified tradition? While conceivably it could be both, for these purposes it must be a form of tradition only, never as fresh. How complicated, how maddening it would be if temptation was focusing on what had once been correct. How could desire be fleeting?
An inclination to inquiry does not mean that I am a polemicist.
Therefore I went, dragged, but not against my will. I had no will at the time; I had not inherited any yet. I indistinctly recall being turned inward, perpetually recycling.
She paused, took the pen out of her ear, and put it in her mouth. It tasted like unwritten
How could something as complex as an emotion run away from you? Why keep track of anything but the theoretical?
It tasted like heart balloons, scuffed again and again against the things she writes on… paper, plastic, wood, skin. You can see the mutual appreciation when they write on each others’ skin; you and him, like it’s been for a while.
But rhetorical devices aside, I was drowning until yesterday.
There were three flowers, one was wilted, one was dried, and one was fresh. Oh yes, there was one more, and it was painted. There were four people there too: one was more special than all the others. She got first pick, and she picked the flower painted, lacquered, like her eyes. The others took the three remaining flowers and planted them in little knots in the trees, like they did when they were ten. The fresh one wilted, and then his flower and her flower were the same. The dried flower was for the gender-free person made out of water, who alone could have kept the fresh flower or at least revived the wilted one. When the curtains fell the audience stopped clapping. It was time to leave, and now only a few of us clapped to drown out the murmurs of nearby theatergoers who were naïve enough to speak, breaking the claps that still echoed in our ears. I asked my mother what was going on, and she shushed me, whispering frozen peas, eat them raw.
I save a lot of money to put on my desk. I might have had a hundred dollars by now, except that when people come by they take the ones, the fives, and the quarters. They drive up the price of beef by eating the grass from the pastures where the cows feed, complaining that they can’t afford this, five dollars, ten dollars, twenty. We are then offered an alternative food source by the directors, which is many, many numbers; all ambiguous, irrelevant percentages which we cannot afford but may have some special significance in their heads. Giddy with hunger, we drink each others’
blood is what makes us alive, but we cannot spare any. We are not a collective or anything. We cannot keep up in mass, and some of us always float to the top.
Yesterday I found out that there were giants, giants that pull the boat along by walking on the bottom of the sea. There heads stick up just a little. You would never guess that they were as tall as the people who live on the islands. And I smiled because they smelled like home… only I am not that tall.
I can't remember much about the record that might help you, sir. It just has the name on the front and too many nondescript pictures inside. Some people say you can't change your mannerisms on the inside, and that you ought to treat people like the people you would have them be. Some people say to drop everything and dance. It was splendid. The priest even thought she was the Queen of England. Of course, everybody made complete fools of themselves. My only audible advisor tells me to silently obey. Fall back into yourself and cover your eyes. Stop wasting paper calligraphing "i waste beaucoup de papier" one hundred thousand times. Oh, and above and below all, be yourself, if you can squeeze that into your schedule.
BEING? Being.
[It looks like a sound effect, so I typed it twice, hoping you’d think the word looked weird the
second time.]
I don't understand when everybody got so smart about everybody else. Perhaps people are predictable, but who would know that for sure, within the confines of our peripheral vision? How accurate is science? How accurate are our minds? Do these writers of social and psychological theory really believe they have hit on something phenomenal, something true, something no one else has thought of? Or are they just trying to get by in careers that dabble in maybe, and brains that run amok with potential eventualities?
[If you are an astute reader, you probably noticed that some of the questions I just phrased were pointed towards certain answers. It could be (I refuse to state anything in certain terms, for fear of self-contradiction!) that society has inclined me to attempt to persuade you haphazardly, unwittingly, even as I rebel against attempts to persuade. People have to think they have pretty damn near the right answer to write anything of merit about it, without watering it down with qualifications and acknowledgement of generalizations to the extent that the reader loses interest entirely, or misses the point. Perhaps this is what is wrong with my writing. This has been an unforeseen tangent.]
I read what’s what in the papers, in books, in textbooks. I listen in lectures as well as casual conversations. I am a sponge, I soak everything up. It runs from brilliant to murky, from colorful to gray, in the process of amalgamation. I can’t seem to pop out another Sarah for every opinion I’ve ever held, so the best I can do is make a stew and hope it doesn’t taste too bad.
People are like arrows! No they aren’t. How can you justify that statement? People tend in certain directions, and potentially could be followed, depending on their clarity and placement on the planet. So how does that make them like arrows? I don’t know, I lost my train of thought. Maybe it doesn’t.
STOP IT! I don’t want your doubt that begs for assent. I don’t want to hear that you have the answers, either. Too many people think that already. Don’t worry about watering it down though. You don’t even have to say it, if you know that your perspective is probably not the only valid one, and certainly not the only one, then it will be enough. You in yourself are enough, aren’t you? You are not the only person on the planet, and you are not the answer to everything. I want to hear your ideas. I want to incorporate you into me, whether I like you or not. I want to expand as your words expand within me. We will stretch out endlessly, hoping to touch the edges of the earth before we break.
Have you ever felt moved to the point where your skin prickled and your eyes clouded? You feel the desperate need to sit or lie down, and the whirring in your ears drowns out any interruption of your epiphany? You know that this is what you want, that this is a part of you, and that you have seen truth? Then the next day, you go on with your life. Disillusionment. You realize that truth may be here or there, but you are no more sure than last week, or last month, or ten years ago. Has that ever happened to you? It makes me wonder if I am making progress, or if I remain suspended, like in gel. It is as if there may or may not be some grand puzzle that we are expected to put together, and it may or may not consist of some vast and unimaginable number of pieces. Now if that wouldn’t take a lifetime to put together, given you probably don’t know what the darn thing is supposed to be a picture of, consider that you only really get a piece every now and again, on odd occasions, just as the last piece has started to collect dust in the open back pocket of those jeans you used to wear, when they fit, when they were in style. Now the puzzle has the potential of being insurmountable, unless you are crazy and decide you can just hot glue random pieces together at right angles and call it artwork, complete! Though perhaps it is those people who feel a sense of accomplishment, despite the potential that the accomplishment has no validity whatsoever; and it is an accomplishment that the rest of us cannot feel. And then irrationality becomes a decision. Would you rather be happy, or right? Would you rather be an Egyptian slave for the duration of your life, or would you rather be the idiot on the side who sings incoherently until the foreman knocks him senseless and dumps his body in the pit of mortar?
[DISCLAIMER: I have to apologize; sometimes strange things come out when I write. I do not censor. I think my ideas may be conveyed, but I could probably do it more subtly, or less subtly and more pleasantly.]
I know I have not said anything groundbreaking. I know I do not even need to acknowledge this, because you know it as well, even if you happen to be moved, which I doubt because I myself was not particularly moved to write this until ten seconds ago, to be honest. But perhaps it is worth consideration. It is exposure. It is part of your essence now, seconds of your life that you will never retrieve. It is.
Absolute silliness.
I've simplified language. Actually, all we need is words for two basic human emotions, and cuss words. The rest can be filled in by a series of grunts or suggestive gestures, as well as retreating into the fetal position when necessary. so here goes some stray genius.
Blemple = happiness
Snookstory = deviousness
Buckerding = cuss word #1, mild, for occasions like: oh i just cut my finger off or my girlfriend left me for Arnold Pimplebutt LeSmooth
Rampleguard = cuss word # 2 for more serious emotions involving high levels of snookstory and such, used in instances such as: i just realized i will never reach nirvana, dinosaurs are dead, cobb salad has been permanaently discontinued at restauranunts nationwide, i was demoted on the food chain from ladybug, and outrages of the like
happiness is simple to understand, and therefore should be simple to communicate, with this happy little disyllabic noun, blemple.
We need “deviousness,” however, more than we may realize. It may be used in the event of almost any negative occasion, or unhappy emotion. Take anger, for example. When you are angry you want to pull a chair out from beneath someone, which is pretty devious…
…or you may want to sneeze in their food! pathogens are also devious…
…sadness. cutting off your own balls may be construed as deviousness towards the self. and no, i am not promoting self mutilation, it just happens to have cropped up twice in the past five minutes. i mean, hours…
And, um, not that this language needs any further promotionals, but all of these words are onomatopoeias. that was an unintentional statement of the obviously obvious. have a good
Good.
IN CONCLUSION: yes, language is easy to simplify. This took me roughly twenty seconds, minus typing-time. So why don’t we have fewer words? My answer for that would be, words are enthralling. Words are juicy. And communication is imperfect as it is… the plethora of words we have attempts to allow us to select that one word that means something very near to what we wish to convey. You may be thinking, I Know. The reason I wrote this at all is just to give you a little something more to think about next time you feel like saying GODDAMMITFUCKSHIT, or something of that nature. “Buckerding” is two fewer syllables.
i have an idea about how to improve the state of the world. this actually may solve the dual problem of poverty and hunger, as well as eliminating religion and economics, therefore restoring peace and prosperity to the entire globe. have you ever noticed how "peace" and "peach" are very similar words, and "peachy" means just plain swell? [ignore the fact that this word is often used sarcastically for a moment] ...this is the psychology behind my proposal
i propose that, next time you say you love someone, describe it in no uncertain terms. tell them exactly how you love them [eliminate dishonesty] by describing your love for them in tandem with your love of inanimate objects, utilizing the simile, which has been scientifically proven to improve one's understanding of Brahms in relationship to the toxicity levels of a storm drain. for example, you may tell someone you love them like a salty banana, which is saying something if you hate bananas, or you can tell them you love them like you love the effect of the amalgamation of grapefruits and steroids on guitar playing. the more scientific, the more rational and believable your love is going to seem. even if you don't love them, with this method (recently, aptly named "love hurts") you can tell them you love them, and, by telling them exactly what you love them like to whatever degree you do not love them [i love you like sandals when it rains, i love you like pepper in my eye, i love you like i love inhaling silt, i love you like i love falling down a storm drain], you are able to profess your love for your enemies without reintroducing dishonesty into your vocabulary. jesus would be proud.
Journal entry for the second seven hours and fifty minutes on Friday when July turns 16 in the ear with a ‘y’ number 2007
I have eaten the socks on the table... the ones that were bright red. One of them had a big monkey, and the other had five small red sharks that you couldn't see because the ground in the back was also red. I have also eaten my dinner, all except for the food that is 10 green boulders which are also called what your body tells you to do after you have drunk a glass of water. I left them on my plate in the shape of a horse called Pegasus that I saw in the ceiling.
I have also evidently eaten pepper oil olive cheese, though I cannot remember doing so. Somebody said that it was on my dinner, but since I didn’t see anything on my dinner I can only assume that they meant to say that it was in my dinner, like closed in with a key and door. Either that or it was invisible like my pudding after I was done with it.
Le Marshmallow Awakening
I am eating a memory of cheesecake, pickled shoes, and cherry pie when suddenly I choke so I wake up and try to swallow it but find that I am underwater, so I look up and you scream: They Must Be A Thousand Feet Deep! But not dead because your consciousness is awake and depleted from your apparent lack of juniper berries. We then decide over a cup of tea that the only way to avoid drowning right then and there is to run as fast as we can so we do and we run and run until we fall off the edge of the universe and are enveloped in purple ink clouds and, since there is nothing else to do at this point, we dance as someone pumps yellow fluids into our ears, green fluids into our eyes, and red fluids into our knees. Then I decided that you were mad at me because you slammed the door in my face earlier that day. When I stop dancing the music stops too and then we start falling, limbs flailing, trying to start dancing again and I Thought They Were Your Friends, I say in the silky dusken midnight sunshine that burns my eyes... Don't Just Stand There Screaming, you say. Someone else comes over to help me because I am crazed and I can't see their face so I feel their eyes and nose and mouth with my fingers and suddenly they take a big bite out of one of my fingers so I scream even more. Then you are there saying to me that You Should Have Died Long Before We Met But Since You Didn't I'll Take You To A Hospital. Then I hear the humongous clock hit half past (the loudest hour) and blood trickles out of my ears and I am deaf. When I wake up again I am at home in bed with your happy face pasted onto my shirt.
i really wish i'd have made an effort to be friends with K. She's someone i really am impressed by. though i've also been a little jealous of her at times, which really doesn't happen to me because i think i'm the shit. so i suppose i couldn't really approach her because i thought so highly of her. it's really easier to make friends with people you're not impressed with. then, once you're friends with them, you can find out what is impressive about them, because everyone has something really special about them that cannot be bottled... or replaced. everyone is worthwhile. it's really fucking hard to see it in some people. but i guess then they probably don't think they're that worthwhile, and so they can't really exude the confidence necessary for the respect they need to qualify their existence. it's like my thing with boys... in all areas (except for things like music and art, not to mention sports, where i think boys can be really unnecessarily competitive and annoying*) i basically think men are more exemplary human beings. Perhaps this is because (as we discuss in developmental psych) men have been socialized to move their butts when they want something, and women have been socialized to wait for it. of course, my previously negative view of women could also have come from the fact that more womanly characteristics are usually frowned upon. weakness, foolishness, water-works... thy name is woman.
either way though, it wasn't until i cut my hair really short at the end of my sophomore year of high-school that i realized i have a good face. until then i had thought i was the epitome of ugly, and that my brain was my only real asset. lucky, lucky me. that was not sarcasm. i was really (unknowingly) fortunate that things turned out the way they did. it would have been a true shame if i had not cultivated my brain like some girls who realized they were pretty much sooner. another crying shame for women... beauty has somehow become a downfall. Maybe it has to do with vanity. what does society have against us?
of course, it's not easy for men. women can be manly and get by, but a womanly man? you've got to have your mind wide open to accept an emotional, caring, loving man. even as i intellectually understand and accept the softhearted males of our generation, i don't know that i'm fully capable of accepting a womanly man as a (sexual) male... i have thus far only been able to appreciate effeminate men as friends.
case in point - my "man" haircut that i kept thru high school (and have on half of my head even now) was, as i mentioned earlier, the only way i truly came to appreciate and accept my face for being a face-like thing. i whined when people walked into the ladies' room and left quickly after seeing me, only to re-enter moments later (after they read the sign on the door). of course, it wasn't terrible to think myself a convincing man. when i came to college and started getting attention from other men, i realized i was a woman and became incredibly vain. i am still recovering from that.
i think one of the major flaws of our western society is that we find ourselves so significant. no, i don't mean to contradict myself -- i think people are significant in a very microscopic way. we are significant to each other, but humans as a whole have limited significance, even to the globe. (don’t talk about the cosmos, you’ll sound self-absorbed.) ever since we essentially became a pestilence to this planet, we have gleaned a false sense of security from the fact that our only real enemy is ourselves... which cannot possibly enter into our babied brains as a problem. how could we be our own enemy? that doesn't even make sense! PSHAW! even as we are on the path to wiping ourselves out. mother earth will survive our shit. heck, a bunch of other species will survive, too. but how tough are humans, one-on-one, without technology at our side, against tigers? alligators? bears? CARS? BULLDOZERS? global warming?
so hmm. we've got to use our brains. no really?!!!? shyyyt, i never thought of that!
it's got to be significant enough that we are significant to ourselves, right? well it seems like that would be difficult to judge from so close-up... i mean we's right in the right in the right here now ya know.
why would we perpetuate if we weren't significant? when the human race dies out, Shakespeare will die out too. so will Mel Brooks. so will Tolkien. so will Salinger. so will the Red Hot Chili Peppers. assuming we do die out.
and if all those great great great people (oops i forgot Socrates and Galileo and Stevie Wonder and Marilyn Monroe and Henry Fonda and Jane Goodall and my anatomy teacher!!!) then our stuff will also, unfortunately, be lost. i mean, if you leave a great book behind, it's like you're still alive right? but dogs can't read, last i checked. and they've got tougher alimentary canals than we do. also they don't require a fucking sterile blood stream.
so really nothing you do matters. it is not significant. and i think we realize that on some level, or else it wouldn't be so hard to find someone who gave a damn that you were having a hard time putzing around. it's funny that rich people seem the most blind to this phenomenon... maybe having people wait on you (figuratively if not literally) makes you think that you are somehow above the human condition (is that mortality, or am i misusing that phrase?)
now, assuming humans up and live forever (REALLY not likely, guys, i'm sorry. assuming the universe began and all, what if it just expanded and all that empty vacuum space decided to collapse back in on itself? we can fly away from our little blue home all we want, but if the universe decides to collapse back in on itself, we ain't got NOTHING! No big fucking cosmic pliers to fix it. then again, i don't really know anything about astrophysics... at all.) but anyway, assuming humans live forever, it's still only the fucking geniuses who didn't have any time to enjoy their lives because they were too busy being brilliant who get to really stick around... i mean even the people who stay big for fifty years or so fade eventually. and if they manage to make libraries big enough for all the starving authors' books of today to cram themselves into little crannies and nooks and niches and corners... who the hell will care? who will continue to read that which is only in vogue and has no lasting substance/substantial value to speak of? and who are we?
if you're lucky enough not to be a genius, my professional opinion (i'm no genius, so i have personal experience to cite!) is to go ahead and enjoy your life. be selfish if that's what suits you, or have morals. you know, so that other people can be selfish and greedy and take everything from you. but that's fun (source: personal experience, past ten years) in a way, because 1) you get to laugh at them and 2) you get to take pride in the beauty of your meaninglessness, for there is nothing sadder or more brilliant (in my personally subjective opinion) than a vain effort. i mean by that, of course, an effort in vain, not an attempt at vanity, which i would never. ever. suggest. nope!
so starving artists, take comfort. we may not amount to anything in the grand scheme of things, but you (and possibly me, though i'm a science major) US, we truly are artistic in our ways. and be kind! or don't be artsy. because you're just silly if you are trying to appear to suffer and you're not actually giving anything to the world. giving hurts, and no good really comes of it (unless you believe in god. who could actually exist, for all i know) but it is beautiful. and how you gonna be an artist if you don't live the life!!!!! comeON.
don't test my gangsta i'll bite you
*I’m a circular thinker so my parenthetical statements are, by nature, too long. But I wanted to add that if you think about it really hard, competitiveness in an area such as art doesn’t make much sense. If you are attempting to compete, you are attempting to compare yourself with someone else. And if you’re capable of making comparisons, then you are probably less likely to succeed because your stuff is too much like that other guy’s stuff that you’re comparing it to. Of course, I’m no artist so I have no idea, really.