5/24 - Sucker Punch
A man runs through the woods. He sprints as though he's running away from someone or something. His heart rate skyrockets, he perspires in copious amounts, and his breath is quick and staggered. He runs as fast as possible. He sprints past two younger boys walking along a trail nearby his imaginary trail of brush. He breaks twigs and snaps branches as he breaks through the woods. The boys chuckle to themselves.
He runs as long as his body allows him to - until it runs out of its last reserves and he can no longer sustain his quick pace. His legs quiver uncontrollably and he falls midstride and smashes his stomach on a stump that looks like a fist. He doubles over and writhes on the ground, not making a sound but grimacing in pain. He rolls over and looks back at where he had come from. He expected to see a path of broken sticks and crushed bushes, but there was no sign that he had ever been there.
He tried to get up to his feet, but failed. He clawed his fingers onto a nearby tree trunk and pulled himself up to his knees. After a few minutes, he made it back to his feet, less strong than when he started. He looked back through foggy eyes.
Nobody was running after him.
5/14 - Heaven
There was a great scientist from Korea, and he discovered that there is a Heaven. It is not a Heaven as Heaven is typically thought to be - an astronaut experienced an event that was thought to be horribly tragic at first - His helmet cracked when he was floating outside of a space shuttle - but he didn't die. Instead, he felt incredibly euphoric. The other astronauts couldn't believe how happy he appeared, sounded, and was - and then he popped. There's no air pressure out there, remember.
One of his fellow astronauts launched himself into space without a helmet, and he, too, became excruciatingly happy for a split second, happier than anyone else had ever been - and then he, too, exploded. Earth went nuts.
People all over wanted to go into space to experience this euphoria for even a short second, even if it meant death - life wasn't so great that it shouldn't be traded for a couple milliseconds of incredible bliss.
So this Korean scientist realized that he didn't want Earthlings exploding in space one by one. So he devised an intense gravity contraption that didn't allow any spacecrafts to make it into space - they would all be pulled back at a certain point in the atmosphere, so nobody could commit happy suicide.
People didn't much appreciate him saving their lives. He became a pariah, but he continued to use his gravity machine to keep people from making it to Heaven. People never appreciate having their feet kept on the ground.
5/13 - Foot in the Door
I'm at a restaurant, sitting on a bench, waiting to be seated. Some man yuks it up at the restaurant, making friends with everyone around him. The way he speaks to the people around him, it seems like he's just met them tonight. But there he is, like the best of their friends. He gets up to leave, and his cell phone rings. Loudly. He ignores it, just talks louder over the high beeping, making more noise than if he'd just answered the damn thing.
He's leaving, and he stops in front of the little girl, waiting with her mother on the bench across from me, with whom I have been avoiding eye contact the whole time, for no other reason than not wanting to make small talk with someone I'll never see again. Plus, I'm just paying too much attention to this man.
Anyways, he stops and reaches into the water cooler next to her. It advertises new, flavored, mineraled, enhanced, purified, tasty, hip water (it must be so hard to market something that anyone can catch with a bucket when it falls out of the sky). He pulls out a bottle and hands it to the girl, telling her that it's "on the house."
He sold that cooler to the restaurant earlier that day, he tells the mother.
So that's why he's so happy and sociable.
And then he makes small talk with the girl, who smiles sheepishly and tells him that she's writing for the school newspaper and that's why she has her homework in a restaurant. He tells her that he used to write for HIS school newspaper when he was little.
If she had told him that the books were a clever disguise and that she actually kills sheep all day, would he have told her that he used to kill sheep when he was little?
He leaves after a couple of minutes of sociable banter. I'm surprised the girl and her mother didn't leave the restaurant with their own cooler.
I don't think he even noticed I was there. Maybe he could tell I wasn't interested in the bullshit he advertised every second I saw him.
5/8 - Think About Africa, Act in a Hallway
Maybe one day, we'll stop doing studies on everything. Everyone will know that the world is going down quickly, that there is no hope, that there IS hope for people in adverse situations (or that there isn't), et cetera. We have trouble accepting the world without proof...we want to SEE the numbers that show us what we've done.
I'm tired of the numbers. I'm tired of people putting them on posters, music videos, magazine ads, and superimposing them on heartwrenching pictures to get people to do things. The humanist in me wishes that people would just do it on their own - but the realist knows that some people need to see the numbers on top of pictures.
Or some nonsense like that.
5/6 - O Come, O Come
There is a small country called Heilig. There, the weeks are no longer weeks. This land has ten day unnamed increments of time. Every tenth day, everyone in the country convenes in one place. They have their rituals, their chants, their group feasts consisting of meager foods, et cetera. These last for about two hours.
In these two hours, people get up to the front of the group and must speak in metaphors. The metaphors can either be fearful or hopeful, but in the end, they all end up having the same meaning: that everything will be okay. Everyone in the country knows how every meeting will go. They all say the same things at the same time, without provocation - everyone just gets the feeling at a certain time that they must chant. Like sheep they are, but happy sheep anyways.
Today it is my turn. I am just a visitor here, I am not much of a citizen here. I talk about how good everything will be, how there is hope - even if I don't believe it deep down, everyone absorbs it and murmurs assent as I go. My story comes full circle, with a cliff hanger that the audience fills in with a hopeful and happy ending. They all begin their chants.
I begin to say more...my lips open and I take in air, ready to speak again...but I decide against it. The crowd is into its routine, and I should not upset it.
5/5 - Beyond Gibbard and Vonnegut
Here we are...the living don't remember us, and we aren't dead. On the lists, our names are invisible. We are neither. We can see everything. We can feel everything. I don't even know what we are. Vonnegut wrote about Tralfamadorians and the fourth dimension - time. Aliens that can see in four dimensions - they can see time like we can see a mountain range. There, the dead aren't dead. Everyone exists somewhere on that mountain range. So we must. On some peak way off in the distance. We're there, but our bodies are here.
So let's get walking. We have to get to ourselves way off in the distance. It's not so far. We'll be better off as wholes instead of halves, separated by time and the worldly metaphors. Once we are whole, we won't care if we're alive or dead. The world can't tell us anything. Not even Ben Gibbard will tell us what we are or where we are (see "I will follow you into the dark," "brand new colony," "we will become silhouettes," "soul meets body"). He may be amazing, but even he has no idea what it will be like.
Let's get walking.
4/14 - Stoplight
Last night, I was driving home around midnight. As it tends to happen (or at least, that's what it seems like to me), the green light turned yellow when I was too far away to keep going and pretend that I had enough time to make it through, so I had to wait. Since it was so late, there were only two cars waiting to pass through once their light turned green, and so they did. And I watched them drive off.
I turned back to the light, expecting it to be turning yellow for the perpendicular street, but it was still green, mine still red. I sat there, waiting alone in the dark. Nobody was coming from either direction, nobody else was waiting with me. It was me sitting there, being patient and exhausted. I considered going through the red light and turning left anyways, since nobody was around and it wouldn't have made any difference to anyone - it simply would have gotten me home a few precious seconds earlier.
But I waited. It's what I've always done - I'd rather wait.
Another car came driving towards the light on the left, and as he approached, the bastard light did exactly what it did to me - it turned yellow on him, and then burned to red, leaving the car smoldering, waiting for its turn to go. I passed through once I could, and I didn't bother looking back to see if he waited like I had.
4/12 - Rinse and Repeat
I imagined that one day, everything around me would be gone. My house may be burned down, everything may be stolen, my family may have disappeared, my friends may have left here - at any rate, everything I knew, everything I had, and everything that influenced me would be gone. And I would have to make it on my own. Then I would have to go out on my own and see how good I was.
Still waiting for that day - maybe it isn't coming. Every day, some of it goes away - it isn't an immediate disappearance. Everyday, something dies. It's called change, of course it happens - so everyday I see if I can handle it without whatever I lost the day before. So far, so good. Whether it leaves in small increments or huge blasts, I seem to still be on my feet. I guess that for everything that's lost, something else fills its place. Sometimes I don't even notice anything left. And I dunno if that's good or bad.
I think I'd rather know when things leave and are replaced - I mean, if someone dies, or if I run out of Nature Valley yogurt bars, I'd like to know, so I can buy more.
4/4 - The Blind Man's Army
In a crowded city street, a man slices his way through the mob. He is wearing a blindfold, and his ears are covered by headphones, blaring noise into his ears. In his right hand, he holds a long sword, and in his left, another long sword. He swings his hands wildly, and his swords slice into people and leave them lying on the sidewalk in agony. He doesn't notice. His arms continue to swing wildly, his swords continue to injure the people around him, and he smiles weakly, listening to his music and walking around without a care as to where he ends up. Some find his blissful ignorance inspirational - if only we all could be so blind to the bad things in the world.
4/2 - Death Wish
I drive to work one day, feeling completely lousy. I pass by a cliff, unconsciously drag my steering wheel towards it, and crash through the guardrail and fly in the air. I think about how I deserve to die - how nothing has worked, how everything bad is my fault. Somehow, the ground forms a slope for me to glide onto - I have been saved.
Every day, on my way to work, for a few weeks, I drive off of the same cliff. I don't even fight it - I know that I will inevitably drive off of it over and over again. My car veers off of the cliff and soars through the air. I damn myself the same way. Each and every time, the ground rises up and forms a very gradual slope underneath my falling car, eventually making it glide onto all four wheels so I can hit the brakes and continue to be alive. I don't fight it - eventually, I even grow to willingly expect it - at least it's some sort of routine.
After a few weeks of this, I am still driving off the same cliff, meeting the same salvation. One day, however, the ground does not rise up. I begin to panic as I see my car rush closer and closer to the ground. I let go of the wheel, pull my hair, clamp my eyes shut until tears pour them, and murmur about my eminent death - how it is all my fault.
The ground quickly rises up and saves me as it always has. It scolds me, and tells me to not be so weak. I should not give up on myself so easily. There is a fine line between selflessness and selfishness.
3/26 - Hush
One day, I take a nap, and wake up to an incredibly loud noise. Everyone in the world has started shouting...one person started shouting, and a person nearby shouted to be heard over the first, and then other people had to shout to be heard, and so on and so on. Every person on the earth was shouting, and all of the animals started shouting, too. The noise was incredible - I could feel it pressing in on my body and on the walls of my house.
The sound grew louder and louder, even though I didn't think it could. I clamp my lips closed, trying to keep myself from joining the crushing noise. It grows louder and louder, it creeps through the cracks in between my fingers covering my ears and penetrates into my skull. I feel my mouth open and my vocal cords intend to scream.
Nothing comes out.
The second my intended scream began, all of the sound stops. My scream pushed the sound over the barrier of loudness. There was no longer any sound. At first I thought that my eardrums had simply burst, but they had not. There was no longer any sound in the world.
And people shouted even more.
3/25 - Guinea Pig
I awake one morning to discover that I have been taken from my home and placed into a cage. The walls of the cage are see through, and I don't know where they are until I smack into them. Other than that, life is fine in the cage. There is much less to worry about, and I live a fairly normal life.
Every day, the walls are compressed, but only by a fraction of an inch, so I never notice.
Even when I have only a ten by ten area to live in, I don't notice. I am happy, I am set.
Soon, the creatures experimenting on me learn that people can exist in a space smaller than the size of a pinhead. I remain happy and oblivious to the size of my home. In fact, I no longer notice anything. I am smaller than anyone could have ever believed something could become. And I live happier than anyone could have ever believed.
But no matter how much the monsters try to compress me into nothingness, they cannot. I simply keep getting smaller and smaller. It confounds them, but not me. I don't notice that anything's changed.
3/19 - Self-Inflicted War
Two nations got into a fight and declared war on each other. These two nations were on either side of a buffer nation. The buffer nation would survey over the big battle, which would take place on their land. This nation was peace-loving, and thought it atrocious that the two nations would settle their petty dispute on their land. So, the night before the battle, spies from the buffer nation removed all of the ammo from all of the soldiers' guns and replaced them with blanks.
All of the soldiers believed that the highest honor would be to die on the battlefield for their nation. So both sides marched onto the battlefield, bayonets on their rifles, with the buffer nation's leader watching over the battle. The battle began, and guns started firing. The whole field went up in smoke, and nothing could be seen. After a few minutes, guns stopped firing, and the smoke began to clear.
All that was left on the battlefield was bloodied corpses.
All of the soldiers had felt nothing in the intense gunfire, so they had all impaled themselves on their own bayonets so they could die a noble death.
3/17 - Repair
One night, my friends come over to my house, and one of them uses my bathroom. Upon leaving the bathroom, he remarks to another one of my friends that it looks as though my faucet is going to burst anytime soon. It is an old faucet, and the people who owned the house before complained of its problems as well, but it hasn't been problematic for me at all ever since I moved in.
The next morning, I wake up and find that my bathroom is under a thin layer of water. My faucet has sprung a leak, and has run water through the night, leaving everything soaking wet. So I clean everything up and I fix the faucet as best I can on the slim knowledge that I have of fixing bathroom parts, so it stops dripping.
The next morning, I wake up and the flooding is twice as bad - there is now an inch of water in my bathroom, and my tiles are starting to stain. I once again mop it up and temporarily fix the faucet.
This happens for days upon days. Some days it drips a slight amount, some days it doesn't leak at all, some days it lets out a flood of water onto my bathroom. Everytime I fix the faucet, I feel like it's begging me to buy a new faucet, because this one is broken and will never be fixed. And I quiet it's blubbering with reassurance and an old wrench - I will never want a new faucet. This one has cleaned up so much in the past, I couldn't imagine not having it.
A repairman comes in every couple of weeks and verifies that it isn't broken, and tells me all sorts of things I could do to make it work better. I don't know if there is a magic one or two that will fix the faucet forever, or if they are all part of an endless list of stopgaps, but I will use each and every one, as long as I still have it with me.
3/11 - See-through
It's a clever thing, this sphere surrounding me. It keeps me in - I see the weather is beautiful outside, everything's melting, giving life to everything that was dead just a few days ago. It's really cool to see. But only to see. I'm not allowed to feel it anymore.
Now there's the bubble around me. It makes me analyze, it makes me overthink, it makes me criticize. None of it matters, it's all busywork. I wish it kept me down to earth, because then I'd experience everything. But I'm missing out. And it sucks.
It's not like I can prick a hole and everything will disappear..or maybe it is. Hell if I know. This is Hell if I know. Sometime I'll get to stop proving myself. Someday.
3/7 - Flatline
One day, I put on some track shorts and some sneakers. I went out the front door, and I started running. I don't know why, I just ran. I ran as fast as I used to back when I was in third grade, when I ran around the block in under four minutes, and when I ran the mile in 6 minutes 6 seconds sophomore year. I just ran.
I ended up at a humongous mountain. I didn't even look up, I just ran up it. My mind processed thousands of metaphors and other nonsense that needn't have applied to my jog. I ran up and up the mountain for hours.
Hours turned into days.
Many days went by, and I kept running on the sheer hope that something could would happen at the top.
I reached the top, and saw no ray of light, no sudden epiphany. I didn't even stop to catch my breath. Before me was the longest plateau on earth. The sun was setting far far away...so far I away I couldn't even make out what it was setting behind. I just kept running.
After running uphill for so long on nothing but hope and effort, I ended up finding none of it. I just became resigned to another run, one that had no apparent end. But I never stopped to catch my breath. Still running on hope, and I will even when it turns into fumes and I run empty.
3/4 - To-Do List
There was a man. He was a terrible procrastinator. His mother always taught him to make to-do lists. So he made to-do lists and never did what need to be done. After moving out of his mother's house, he moved into his own house. And he began making lists and never doing anything on them.
Before long, his entire desk was buried in to-do lists. After a few days, he lost the entire room under a sea of papers. Then the room next to it. After two or three weeks, his entire one story house was filled with papers. He couldn't even open the door to get into the house.
So he moved into the house next door.
After a month, this house was filled with to-do lists, too.
So he moved next door.
That house had papers spilling out the windows and doors after three weeks.
And so it went until his entire street had houses filled with to-do lists.
And then the streets on either side of his street.
After a year of living alone, half of the town in which he lived was inhabited by his to-do lists. The mayor called him in one of the few weeks in which he knew he'd be in a house before it was filled. He told him to stop ruining his town with his procrastination. It was selfish and the only way the problem would be solved would be if he started doing what his lists said. He agreed, and went to the house next door to start.
The first paper he picked up, he angrily crumpled up and tossed over his shoulder. The same with the next, and the next, and the next. After doing this for a few minutes, he crumpled into a heap in his pile and started crying. He thought about all the time he'd wasted filling up houses with his "to-do lists."
He had scribbled, "Stop procrastinating" on every line of every paper.
2/27 - An ant screaming underneath a boot
So there's this boy. He's in high school. He waits at the busstop for his bus one morning, and all of a sudden, decides that he hates school and hates the way things are going - something's convinced him that he knows everything and he knows what's best. He drops his bag, runs towards a tree, and climbs up it. Nobody notices.
Hours later, he still sits high up in the tree. A police officer has been informed of his truancy, and he drives towards the boy's house. On the way, he passes the busstop and notices him up in the tree. He pulls over and tells him to come down right away. The boy refuses. "You're not in charge of anything that matters," he shouts, and similar concepts that could potentially be deep but aren't. They only infuriate the officer. He remains standing at the tree, telling the boy to come down. As if the policeman would climb up and eat him alive, the boy clings to the tree and grips the trunk firmly.
Hours pass. The boy remains in the tree, the policeman remains below. Now, more people have arrived. Several people have come to gawk at the event and left once they realized that the policeman wasn't going to shoot anybody. One of the officer's buddies sits in the car, bored out of his mind. "Why would your presence matter?" hollers the boy.
Eventually, the sun sets. Everyone has left...the officer has been left with a flashlight. He shines the flashlight at the boy. "In the grand scheme of things," taunts the boy, "you really don't matter. None of this matters. What I've learned in school is nothing. I'm fine up here."
The officer has stopped yelling orders and asking the boy to come down. Now he sits patiently with the flashlight shining up at the boy. The boy spouts philosophical nonsense for hours as though some of it would penetrate the officer, but none of it does.
A local newspaper catches word of this boy and attempts to make him a spectacle. It fails, because the boy means nothing to anybody. Nobody wants to hear about this boy except for the police officer. The boy shows the officer his reasoning, but none of it makes sense to the officer.
After a few days, the officer leaves. He's grown tired of the nonsense, and he joins the rest of the people who have stopped caring about the boy. Once the officer leaves sight, the boy takes a nap.
When he wakes up, he realizes how little satisfaction he feels. He looks around helplessly for anybody, but nobody is in sight. The area is silent except for the wind. As though the ground will eat him alive if he gets near it, the boy starts scrambling up the tree.
He looks up to where he plans to climb. He suddenly sees some stirring branches a few feet above himself, and sees a much older man. His hair is long and tangled, his clothes are dirty and wrinkled but intact. He looks down with big sad eyes that look as though they will swallow anyone alive. He sees the boy looking up at him. He chuckles to himself and mutters softly, "Yeah, I used to think I knew it all, too."
2/26 - The Monster
Why don't you see the spiral you create? Everyone's fine, and then you arrive and suck everybody into you.
A monster grown too big for its own self...you've swallowed them whole. But I freed myself. I can't slay you, but I can keep myself out of you. I can keep myself aware of you.
Which is all I can do for now. Until you swallow yourself whole. I'll bide time. It'll be worth the wait. It'll be worth the wait to see the catastrophic explosion, the people's reaction. When they see that you're gone and they're better...all the wasted years. Wasted in your spiral. They'll throw out all that they have, forget everything they've learned. They'll be better off.
You're a monster and you don't even know. I don't even care if you realize your wrongs and repent...you won't repent. You'll stick with your choices because that's what you do. You'd never retreat. You'll die as you lived. You'll die as you lived. Can't wait.
2/24 - Trick
Today I recorded two songs with my friend George. I did all the tracks, all in one take except for the guitar solo in one song, which took some experimenting. But I'm really proud of it.
After such a long time...I have a ton of work, but only lousy recordings. Now it's looking good. I can get a good album, I can get people to hear something I'm really proud of.
It feels good to finally move. It's like driving uphill forever, then finally reaching the top. It's level for a while, and eventually, things get easier. Things work out. I start off on something amazing. At least I hope so...maybe there's another hill after this. I can't see that far ahead. And that's okay. I don't want to, anyways.
This mountain. The peak is probably miles away, and I'll never reach it. What do I care? Keep driving and pushing. It moves as fast as I do. Like some cruel experiment...the rat in the treadmill chasing the cheese. Keep driving and pushing.
2/22 - Nice to meet you
Here, I will attempt to discard my cynicism. This will be my outlet. As close as I can get to one by typing babble onto the internet.
I've had a few of these before. A livejournal that ended up meaning nothing, a few old websites that were seen by all of four or five people, some other stuff. This is another one, another one. None of the past ones have worked for very long, and neither will this one. Eventually I will stop caring, and I will accept the fact that nobody reads this, and that yet another one of my creative outlets has fallen victim to being meaningless.
And the cycle goes and goes and goes.
"Upper Lower Class" means absolutely nothing. It seemed fitting for what will be here.
"A Funny Accent" implies that you will not understand what I am saying. I got the idea when my girlfriend, Amanda, mentioned a coworker from Jamaica. She had trouble understanding his accent.
A man runs through the woods. He sprints as though he's running away from someone or something. His heart rate skyrockets, he perspires in copious amounts, and his breath is quick and staggered. He runs as fast as possible. He sprints past two younger boys walking along a trail nearby his imaginary trail of brush. He breaks twigs and snaps branches as he breaks through the woods. The boys chuckle to themselves.
He runs as long as his body allows him to - until it runs out of its last reserves and he can no longer sustain his quick pace. His legs quiver uncontrollably and he falls midstride and smashes his stomach on a stump that looks like a fist. He doubles over and writhes on the ground, not making a sound but grimacing in pain. He rolls over and looks back at where he had come from. He expected to see a path of broken sticks and crushed bushes, but there was no sign that he had ever been there.
He tried to get up to his feet, but failed. He clawed his fingers onto a nearby tree trunk and pulled himself up to his knees. After a few minutes, he made it back to his feet, less strong than when he started. He looked back through foggy eyes.
Nobody was running after him.
5/14 - Heaven
There was a great scientist from Korea, and he discovered that there is a Heaven. It is not a Heaven as Heaven is typically thought to be - an astronaut experienced an event that was thought to be horribly tragic at first - His helmet cracked when he was floating outside of a space shuttle - but he didn't die. Instead, he felt incredibly euphoric. The other astronauts couldn't believe how happy he appeared, sounded, and was - and then he popped. There's no air pressure out there, remember.
One of his fellow astronauts launched himself into space without a helmet, and he, too, became excruciatingly happy for a split second, happier than anyone else had ever been - and then he, too, exploded. Earth went nuts.
People all over wanted to go into space to experience this euphoria for even a short second, even if it meant death - life wasn't so great that it shouldn't be traded for a couple milliseconds of incredible bliss.
So this Korean scientist realized that he didn't want Earthlings exploding in space one by one. So he devised an intense gravity contraption that didn't allow any spacecrafts to make it into space - they would all be pulled back at a certain point in the atmosphere, so nobody could commit happy suicide.
People didn't much appreciate him saving their lives. He became a pariah, but he continued to use his gravity machine to keep people from making it to Heaven. People never appreciate having their feet kept on the ground.
5/13 - Foot in the Door
I'm at a restaurant, sitting on a bench, waiting to be seated. Some man yuks it up at the restaurant, making friends with everyone around him. The way he speaks to the people around him, it seems like he's just met them tonight. But there he is, like the best of their friends. He gets up to leave, and his cell phone rings. Loudly. He ignores it, just talks louder over the high beeping, making more noise than if he'd just answered the damn thing.
He's leaving, and he stops in front of the little girl, waiting with her mother on the bench across from me, with whom I have been avoiding eye contact the whole time, for no other reason than not wanting to make small talk with someone I'll never see again. Plus, I'm just paying too much attention to this man.
Anyways, he stops and reaches into the water cooler next to her. It advertises new, flavored, mineraled, enhanced, purified, tasty, hip water (it must be so hard to market something that anyone can catch with a bucket when it falls out of the sky). He pulls out a bottle and hands it to the girl, telling her that it's "on the house."
He sold that cooler to the restaurant earlier that day, he tells the mother.
So that's why he's so happy and sociable.
And then he makes small talk with the girl, who smiles sheepishly and tells him that she's writing for the school newspaper and that's why she has her homework in a restaurant. He tells her that he used to write for HIS school newspaper when he was little.
If she had told him that the books were a clever disguise and that she actually kills sheep all day, would he have told her that he used to kill sheep when he was little?
He leaves after a couple of minutes of sociable banter. I'm surprised the girl and her mother didn't leave the restaurant with their own cooler.
I don't think he even noticed I was there. Maybe he could tell I wasn't interested in the bullshit he advertised every second I saw him.
5/8 - Think About Africa, Act in a Hallway
Maybe one day, we'll stop doing studies on everything. Everyone will know that the world is going down quickly, that there is no hope, that there IS hope for people in adverse situations (or that there isn't), et cetera. We have trouble accepting the world without proof...we want to SEE the numbers that show us what we've done.
I'm tired of the numbers. I'm tired of people putting them on posters, music videos, magazine ads, and superimposing them on heartwrenching pictures to get people to do things. The humanist in me wishes that people would just do it on their own - but the realist knows that some people need to see the numbers on top of pictures.
"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
Or some nonsense like that.
5/6 - O Come, O Come
There is a small country called Heilig. There, the weeks are no longer weeks. This land has ten day unnamed increments of time. Every tenth day, everyone in the country convenes in one place. They have their rituals, their chants, their group feasts consisting of meager foods, et cetera. These last for about two hours.
In these two hours, people get up to the front of the group and must speak in metaphors. The metaphors can either be fearful or hopeful, but in the end, they all end up having the same meaning: that everything will be okay. Everyone in the country knows how every meeting will go. They all say the same things at the same time, without provocation - everyone just gets the feeling at a certain time that they must chant. Like sheep they are, but happy sheep anyways.
Today it is my turn. I am just a visitor here, I am not much of a citizen here. I talk about how good everything will be, how there is hope - even if I don't believe it deep down, everyone absorbs it and murmurs assent as I go. My story comes full circle, with a cliff hanger that the audience fills in with a hopeful and happy ending. They all begin their chants.
I begin to say more...my lips open and I take in air, ready to speak again...but I decide against it. The crowd is into its routine, and I should not upset it.
5/5 - Beyond Gibbard and Vonnegut
Here we are...the living don't remember us, and we aren't dead. On the lists, our names are invisible. We are neither. We can see everything. We can feel everything. I don't even know what we are. Vonnegut wrote about Tralfamadorians and the fourth dimension - time. Aliens that can see in four dimensions - they can see time like we can see a mountain range. There, the dead aren't dead. Everyone exists somewhere on that mountain range. So we must. On some peak way off in the distance. We're there, but our bodies are here.
So let's get walking. We have to get to ourselves way off in the distance. It's not so far. We'll be better off as wholes instead of halves, separated by time and the worldly metaphors. Once we are whole, we won't care if we're alive or dead. The world can't tell us anything. Not even Ben Gibbard will tell us what we are or where we are (see "I will follow you into the dark," "brand new colony," "we will become silhouettes," "soul meets body"). He may be amazing, but even he has no idea what it will be like.
Let's get walking.
4/14 - Stoplight
Last night, I was driving home around midnight. As it tends to happen (or at least, that's what it seems like to me), the green light turned yellow when I was too far away to keep going and pretend that I had enough time to make it through, so I had to wait. Since it was so late, there were only two cars waiting to pass through once their light turned green, and so they did. And I watched them drive off.
I turned back to the light, expecting it to be turning yellow for the perpendicular street, but it was still green, mine still red. I sat there, waiting alone in the dark. Nobody was coming from either direction, nobody else was waiting with me. It was me sitting there, being patient and exhausted. I considered going through the red light and turning left anyways, since nobody was around and it wouldn't have made any difference to anyone - it simply would have gotten me home a few precious seconds earlier.
But I waited. It's what I've always done - I'd rather wait.
Another car came driving towards the light on the left, and as he approached, the bastard light did exactly what it did to me - it turned yellow on him, and then burned to red, leaving the car smoldering, waiting for its turn to go. I passed through once I could, and I didn't bother looking back to see if he waited like I had.
4/12 - Rinse and Repeat
I imagined that one day, everything around me would be gone. My house may be burned down, everything may be stolen, my family may have disappeared, my friends may have left here - at any rate, everything I knew, everything I had, and everything that influenced me would be gone. And I would have to make it on my own. Then I would have to go out on my own and see how good I was.
Still waiting for that day - maybe it isn't coming. Every day, some of it goes away - it isn't an immediate disappearance. Everyday, something dies. It's called change, of course it happens - so everyday I see if I can handle it without whatever I lost the day before. So far, so good. Whether it leaves in small increments or huge blasts, I seem to still be on my feet. I guess that for everything that's lost, something else fills its place. Sometimes I don't even notice anything left. And I dunno if that's good or bad.
I think I'd rather know when things leave and are replaced - I mean, if someone dies, or if I run out of Nature Valley yogurt bars, I'd like to know, so I can buy more.
4/4 - The Blind Man's Army
In a crowded city street, a man slices his way through the mob. He is wearing a blindfold, and his ears are covered by headphones, blaring noise into his ears. In his right hand, he holds a long sword, and in his left, another long sword. He swings his hands wildly, and his swords slice into people and leave them lying on the sidewalk in agony. He doesn't notice. His arms continue to swing wildly, his swords continue to injure the people around him, and he smiles weakly, listening to his music and walking around without a care as to where he ends up. Some find his blissful ignorance inspirational - if only we all could be so blind to the bad things in the world.
4/2 - Death Wish
I drive to work one day, feeling completely lousy. I pass by a cliff, unconsciously drag my steering wheel towards it, and crash through the guardrail and fly in the air. I think about how I deserve to die - how nothing has worked, how everything bad is my fault. Somehow, the ground forms a slope for me to glide onto - I have been saved.
Every day, on my way to work, for a few weeks, I drive off of the same cliff. I don't even fight it - I know that I will inevitably drive off of it over and over again. My car veers off of the cliff and soars through the air. I damn myself the same way. Each and every time, the ground rises up and forms a very gradual slope underneath my falling car, eventually making it glide onto all four wheels so I can hit the brakes and continue to be alive. I don't fight it - eventually, I even grow to willingly expect it - at least it's some sort of routine.
After a few weeks of this, I am still driving off the same cliff, meeting the same salvation. One day, however, the ground does not rise up. I begin to panic as I see my car rush closer and closer to the ground. I let go of the wheel, pull my hair, clamp my eyes shut until tears pour them, and murmur about my eminent death - how it is all my fault.
The ground quickly rises up and saves me as it always has. It scolds me, and tells me to not be so weak. I should not give up on myself so easily. There is a fine line between selflessness and selfishness.
3/26 - Hush
One day, I take a nap, and wake up to an incredibly loud noise. Everyone in the world has started shouting...one person started shouting, and a person nearby shouted to be heard over the first, and then other people had to shout to be heard, and so on and so on. Every person on the earth was shouting, and all of the animals started shouting, too. The noise was incredible - I could feel it pressing in on my body and on the walls of my house.
The sound grew louder and louder, even though I didn't think it could. I clamp my lips closed, trying to keep myself from joining the crushing noise. It grows louder and louder, it creeps through the cracks in between my fingers covering my ears and penetrates into my skull. I feel my mouth open and my vocal cords intend to scream.
Nothing comes out.
The second my intended scream began, all of the sound stops. My scream pushed the sound over the barrier of loudness. There was no longer any sound. At first I thought that my eardrums had simply burst, but they had not. There was no longer any sound in the world.
And people shouted even more.
3/25 - Guinea Pig
I awake one morning to discover that I have been taken from my home and placed into a cage. The walls of the cage are see through, and I don't know where they are until I smack into them. Other than that, life is fine in the cage. There is much less to worry about, and I live a fairly normal life.
Every day, the walls are compressed, but only by a fraction of an inch, so I never notice.
Even when I have only a ten by ten area to live in, I don't notice. I am happy, I am set.
Soon, the creatures experimenting on me learn that people can exist in a space smaller than the size of a pinhead. I remain happy and oblivious to the size of my home. In fact, I no longer notice anything. I am smaller than anyone could have ever believed something could become. And I live happier than anyone could have ever believed.
But no matter how much the monsters try to compress me into nothingness, they cannot. I simply keep getting smaller and smaller. It confounds them, but not me. I don't notice that anything's changed.
3/19 - Self-Inflicted War
Two nations got into a fight and declared war on each other. These two nations were on either side of a buffer nation. The buffer nation would survey over the big battle, which would take place on their land. This nation was peace-loving, and thought it atrocious that the two nations would settle their petty dispute on their land. So, the night before the battle, spies from the buffer nation removed all of the ammo from all of the soldiers' guns and replaced them with blanks.
All of the soldiers believed that the highest honor would be to die on the battlefield for their nation. So both sides marched onto the battlefield, bayonets on their rifles, with the buffer nation's leader watching over the battle. The battle began, and guns started firing. The whole field went up in smoke, and nothing could be seen. After a few minutes, guns stopped firing, and the smoke began to clear.
All that was left on the battlefield was bloodied corpses.
All of the soldiers had felt nothing in the intense gunfire, so they had all impaled themselves on their own bayonets so they could die a noble death.
3/17 - Repair
One night, my friends come over to my house, and one of them uses my bathroom. Upon leaving the bathroom, he remarks to another one of my friends that it looks as though my faucet is going to burst anytime soon. It is an old faucet, and the people who owned the house before complained of its problems as well, but it hasn't been problematic for me at all ever since I moved in.
The next morning, I wake up and find that my bathroom is under a thin layer of water. My faucet has sprung a leak, and has run water through the night, leaving everything soaking wet. So I clean everything up and I fix the faucet as best I can on the slim knowledge that I have of fixing bathroom parts, so it stops dripping.
The next morning, I wake up and the flooding is twice as bad - there is now an inch of water in my bathroom, and my tiles are starting to stain. I once again mop it up and temporarily fix the faucet.
This happens for days upon days. Some days it drips a slight amount, some days it doesn't leak at all, some days it lets out a flood of water onto my bathroom. Everytime I fix the faucet, I feel like it's begging me to buy a new faucet, because this one is broken and will never be fixed. And I quiet it's blubbering with reassurance and an old wrench - I will never want a new faucet. This one has cleaned up so much in the past, I couldn't imagine not having it.
A repairman comes in every couple of weeks and verifies that it isn't broken, and tells me all sorts of things I could do to make it work better. I don't know if there is a magic one or two that will fix the faucet forever, or if they are all part of an endless list of stopgaps, but I will use each and every one, as long as I still have it with me.
3/11 - See-through
It's a clever thing, this sphere surrounding me. It keeps me in - I see the weather is beautiful outside, everything's melting, giving life to everything that was dead just a few days ago. It's really cool to see. But only to see. I'm not allowed to feel it anymore.
Now there's the bubble around me. It makes me analyze, it makes me overthink, it makes me criticize. None of it matters, it's all busywork. I wish it kept me down to earth, because then I'd experience everything. But I'm missing out. And it sucks.
It's not like I can prick a hole and everything will disappear..or maybe it is. Hell if I know. This is Hell if I know. Sometime I'll get to stop proving myself. Someday.
3/7 - Flatline
One day, I put on some track shorts and some sneakers. I went out the front door, and I started running. I don't know why, I just ran. I ran as fast as I used to back when I was in third grade, when I ran around the block in under four minutes, and when I ran the mile in 6 minutes 6 seconds sophomore year. I just ran.
I ended up at a humongous mountain. I didn't even look up, I just ran up it. My mind processed thousands of metaphors and other nonsense that needn't have applied to my jog. I ran up and up the mountain for hours.
Hours turned into days.
Many days went by, and I kept running on the sheer hope that something could would happen at the top.
I reached the top, and saw no ray of light, no sudden epiphany. I didn't even stop to catch my breath. Before me was the longest plateau on earth. The sun was setting far far away...so far I away I couldn't even make out what it was setting behind. I just kept running.
After running uphill for so long on nothing but hope and effort, I ended up finding none of it. I just became resigned to another run, one that had no apparent end. But I never stopped to catch my breath. Still running on hope, and I will even when it turns into fumes and I run empty.
3/4 - To-Do List
There was a man. He was a terrible procrastinator. His mother always taught him to make to-do lists. So he made to-do lists and never did what need to be done. After moving out of his mother's house, he moved into his own house. And he began making lists and never doing anything on them.
Before long, his entire desk was buried in to-do lists. After a few days, he lost the entire room under a sea of papers. Then the room next to it. After two or three weeks, his entire one story house was filled with papers. He couldn't even open the door to get into the house.
So he moved into the house next door.
After a month, this house was filled with to-do lists, too.
So he moved next door.
That house had papers spilling out the windows and doors after three weeks.
And so it went until his entire street had houses filled with to-do lists.
And then the streets on either side of his street.
After a year of living alone, half of the town in which he lived was inhabited by his to-do lists. The mayor called him in one of the few weeks in which he knew he'd be in a house before it was filled. He told him to stop ruining his town with his procrastination. It was selfish and the only way the problem would be solved would be if he started doing what his lists said. He agreed, and went to the house next door to start.
The first paper he picked up, he angrily crumpled up and tossed over his shoulder. The same with the next, and the next, and the next. After doing this for a few minutes, he crumpled into a heap in his pile and started crying. He thought about all the time he'd wasted filling up houses with his "to-do lists."
He had scribbled, "Stop procrastinating" on every line of every paper.
2/27 - An ant screaming underneath a boot
So there's this boy. He's in high school. He waits at the busstop for his bus one morning, and all of a sudden, decides that he hates school and hates the way things are going - something's convinced him that he knows everything and he knows what's best. He drops his bag, runs towards a tree, and climbs up it. Nobody notices.
Hours later, he still sits high up in the tree. A police officer has been informed of his truancy, and he drives towards the boy's house. On the way, he passes the busstop and notices him up in the tree. He pulls over and tells him to come down right away. The boy refuses. "You're not in charge of anything that matters," he shouts, and similar concepts that could potentially be deep but aren't. They only infuriate the officer. He remains standing at the tree, telling the boy to come down. As if the policeman would climb up and eat him alive, the boy clings to the tree and grips the trunk firmly.
Hours pass. The boy remains in the tree, the policeman remains below. Now, more people have arrived. Several people have come to gawk at the event and left once they realized that the policeman wasn't going to shoot anybody. One of the officer's buddies sits in the car, bored out of his mind. "Why would your presence matter?" hollers the boy.
Eventually, the sun sets. Everyone has left...the officer has been left with a flashlight. He shines the flashlight at the boy. "In the grand scheme of things," taunts the boy, "you really don't matter. None of this matters. What I've learned in school is nothing. I'm fine up here."
The officer has stopped yelling orders and asking the boy to come down. Now he sits patiently with the flashlight shining up at the boy. The boy spouts philosophical nonsense for hours as though some of it would penetrate the officer, but none of it does.
A local newspaper catches word of this boy and attempts to make him a spectacle. It fails, because the boy means nothing to anybody. Nobody wants to hear about this boy except for the police officer. The boy shows the officer his reasoning, but none of it makes sense to the officer.
After a few days, the officer leaves. He's grown tired of the nonsense, and he joins the rest of the people who have stopped caring about the boy. Once the officer leaves sight, the boy takes a nap.
When he wakes up, he realizes how little satisfaction he feels. He looks around helplessly for anybody, but nobody is in sight. The area is silent except for the wind. As though the ground will eat him alive if he gets near it, the boy starts scrambling up the tree.
He looks up to where he plans to climb. He suddenly sees some stirring branches a few feet above himself, and sees a much older man. His hair is long and tangled, his clothes are dirty and wrinkled but intact. He looks down with big sad eyes that look as though they will swallow anyone alive. He sees the boy looking up at him. He chuckles to himself and mutters softly, "Yeah, I used to think I knew it all, too."
2/26 - The Monster
Why don't you see the spiral you create? Everyone's fine, and then you arrive and suck everybody into you.
A monster grown too big for its own self...you've swallowed them whole. But I freed myself. I can't slay you, but I can keep myself out of you. I can keep myself aware of you.
Which is all I can do for now. Until you swallow yourself whole. I'll bide time. It'll be worth the wait. It'll be worth the wait to see the catastrophic explosion, the people's reaction. When they see that you're gone and they're better...all the wasted years. Wasted in your spiral. They'll throw out all that they have, forget everything they've learned. They'll be better off.
You're a monster and you don't even know. I don't even care if you realize your wrongs and repent...you won't repent. You'll stick with your choices because that's what you do. You'd never retreat. You'll die as you lived. You'll die as you lived. Can't wait.
2/24 - Trick
Today I recorded two songs with my friend George. I did all the tracks, all in one take except for the guitar solo in one song, which took some experimenting. But I'm really proud of it.
After such a long time...I have a ton of work, but only lousy recordings. Now it's looking good. I can get a good album, I can get people to hear something I'm really proud of.
It feels good to finally move. It's like driving uphill forever, then finally reaching the top. It's level for a while, and eventually, things get easier. Things work out. I start off on something amazing. At least I hope so...maybe there's another hill after this. I can't see that far ahead. And that's okay. I don't want to, anyways.
This mountain. The peak is probably miles away, and I'll never reach it. What do I care? Keep driving and pushing. It moves as fast as I do. Like some cruel experiment...the rat in the treadmill chasing the cheese. Keep driving and pushing.
2/22 - Nice to meet you
Here, I will attempt to discard my cynicism. This will be my outlet. As close as I can get to one by typing babble onto the internet.
I've had a few of these before. A livejournal that ended up meaning nothing, a few old websites that were seen by all of four or five people, some other stuff. This is another one, another one. None of the past ones have worked for very long, and neither will this one. Eventually I will stop caring, and I will accept the fact that nobody reads this, and that yet another one of my creative outlets has fallen victim to being meaningless.
And the cycle goes and goes and goes.
"Upper Lower Class" means absolutely nothing. It seemed fitting for what will be here.
"A Funny Accent" implies that you will not understand what I am saying. I got the idea when my girlfriend, Amanda, mentioned a coworker from Jamaica. She had trouble understanding his accent.
bravenet.com