Pull

I’ve stopped being afraid when the lights go out.

If something is there in the shadows, come and get me.

Come and get me, I’m waiting.

Bite me,

Kick me,

Choke me,

Curse me, but

I will live even if it eats my heart alive and

I will live until every last star dims

The idea that you will end? No.

Nothing is ending, only waxing and

Waning and

Faltering and

Beginning, but

Never ending.

Everything continues

Withering as it may be,

Still as it may be, it continues and

Emanates a light that penetrates even into the darkest cracks

Of the farthest reaches of this of your universe and

It cannot go out.

You are surrounded.

You are never alone and it is never too dark to see that.

But maybe that’s my nightmare.

I want to live. I take them up like the male and female paper dolls, and bang them together at the hips like chips of flint, as if to strike sparks from them. I say, ‘Do what you are going to do and I will tell about it.’”

I begin to open my mouth and immediately stop myself, knowing that everything I have to say will result in nothing but embarrassment.

In which, “you don’t understand” becomes, “you can’t understand”

In which the problem stops being, “No one will listen” and it becomes, instead, “I have nothing to say that anyone else will comprehend”

In which “special” becomes “lost”

In which “I’m learning” becomes “I can’t learn and I’ll never learn.”

In which self-expression is now screaming your lungs out with an iron hand clamped over your mouth.

Stepping stones, I am rock beneath your feet. I am but one metal rung beneath your worn sneakers as you climb higher and higher towards nothing at all.

–

I had to sell candy canes the other day. People had to write someone’s name on a slip of paper along with a little message; Most people wrote the generic “Merry Christmas!” or “Happy Holidays!”. There was one bulky boy that came up to buy a candy cane, though. It doesn’t take very much to detect that he has some kind of ‘social disorder’, he had a very childlike innocence and seemed oblivious to his too-short pants and his greasy hair. He bought a candy cane and stared at the slip of paper for a good five minutes, trying to come up with someone to send a candy cane to. Those five minutes tore me apart. An athletic, stocky boy walked past him and the two made a quick, uncomfortable eye contact. The jock that walked past him clearly wasn’t the type to want to associate himself with the awkward, chubby, unshaven person that stood before me. The jock just dismissed it and turned to greet his friends, but the boy that stood before me looked as though he had just been hit by some amazing wind of realization.  He looked at me, grinning ear to ear, and he said “I got someone!” and wrote down that jock’s name. I don’t think they’ve ever exchanged a sentence.

I don’t know when innocence became a concept to be crushed or looked down upon. I don’t know when a love of people became a “social disorder”. This boy wanted to be friends with everyone, he didn’t see anything wrong with defying any invisible barriers. Such innocence, such open-mindedness is now so rare to come across that when you find it, you stop in your tracks and stare with a mixture of awe, sorrow, and strange, overwhelming guilt. This boy is not going to go anywhere in high school. This boy is not going to go anywhere in the world, and he doesn’t realize just how bad things are and just how bad they’re going to get. Its like a baby opening its eyes to a new world for the first time. It only sees possibilities, not limitations. I want nothing more than to be clean, I want nothing more than to not see the walls that I am confined by.

I also came to the realization that I don’t deserve anything that I have. I throw people away, I use them to my disposal. This kid can’t think of anyone to send a candy cane to, I can list at least ten people. But I don’t want them. I grow irritated so easily, I get frustrated with people that don’t empathize with me when I, myself, can’t seem to empathize with them.

I feel guilty for being alive, I feel guilty for not wanting the things that I have. In all honesty, I want nothing more than to be in the middle of nowhere with absolutely nothing right now. Not only would that free me of my constant and completely consuming guilt but it would also free me of any “obligations” (as I see them). There are so many people in the world that would kill for the opportunities at my disposal, but I don’t want them and I can’t force myself to want them.

The only thing that is stopping me is myself but I am such a huge barrier to overcome.

I don’t want to exist, you need to understand, I don’t want to be here. I don’t want you looking at me, I don’t want your constant reminder of the fact that I am still here.

And I’m sorry. Oh god, am I so so sorry.

“No person is whole. No person is free. Over time, some have determined that the only way to live is to die.”

A friend of mine, Katie, died over a year ago. I remember for a few months after she died, I kept seeing her everywhere. In hallways at school, I’d think that the girl in front of me was actually Katie. And then I’d blink a few times and she wouldn’t be there anymore. And I get angry, I think, ‘How could I forget that she’s gone, how could I forget something like that?’

I’m not going to lie and say that we were incredibly close, we weren’t. But there’s something about her absence that I’m reminded of once in a while that just feels like a punch to the gut. I feel as though I don’t have a right to feel the pain of her death.

There’s a certain guilt that comes along with living once someone passes. You feel like wasted life. You say to yourself,”What if she had the life that I possess now? What would she be doing? Would she be laughing more, writing more, singing more, living more?”. You begin to convince yourself that you’re the one that should be six feet underground, not her. You think of all the people that she could’ve touched in her lifetime and all the people that you’re not touching in yours. You think about the air in the coffin and how it’ll stay there, buried, forever. You begin to wonder about decay. Does hair decay? Does cloth decay? Are her eyes gone? You regret not going to the wake now. You think about the last time you saw her and how you didn’t know that was the last time. And if you had known, what would you have done differently? You remember small things, details, she had a lock of hair that was a lighter shade of brown than the rest of her hair was. You remember the way that she walked, as though she was weighed down to the earth by weights on her wrists, but she had the energy of someone that was bound by nothing.

She was bound by nothing. I am bound by everything.

She was someone meant to live. She had a lot of life left in her. She should be let out, I should be stuffed in. I’m not making a difference, she could be making one.

And then you remember.

You remember that you’re six feet underground with her. My cells may be regenerating but my mind’s been decaying for years now and it’s only going to get worse. The only difference between her and I is that I have a choice to continue living while she didn’t. That’s an awful way to live. To live out of obligation, to live because you don’t want to be wasted life.

Her death has made a bigger impact on people than my life ever could. I don’t want to live like this, but I have to.

–

I wish I’d never met myself. Two passerby on a rainy street, bumping into each other and rushing to apologize. That’s a connection. That’s a connection that I’ve had with myself that never should have happened, the meeting of this person with this body never should have happened. I should be floating in space.

It’s a difficult thing to explain, it’s not something that I expect other people to really grasp. I am not myself. How I am cannot be contained in what I am. It’s physically evident in everyone, stretch marks are the splitting seams giving way to the pounding fists of what we really are. We want to be released.

To kill selected memories.

I can’t sugercoat it, I don’t write because I disappoint myself. It’s truly not anything else, I could blame it on laziness or stress but it’s just a fear of failure.

–

I lack empathy more than anything. Hearing people complain about their lives, to me, is like listening to nails on a chalkboard. The matter isn’t that I feel like my life is worse than theirs, it’s that I’m aware that it can be much worse. When people complain about their parents divorcing or their dog dying, there is not one bit of empathy that stirs in me. I cannot relate to other people at all, even if they’re just like me. Especially if they’re just like me, I have an irrational fear of being unoriginal.

There it is (here is the deepest secret nobody knows {here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide} and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart). I like being original. I like being the first, I like having ownership over something that is entirely mine. I enjoy having things. Is that so wrong? I like knowing that I possess something that won’t just shift from underneath me, as the ground often does. Having lived everywhere, having lost so many people, having thrown away so many more, I like stability. If in no one else, at least in myself.

I don’t like hearing about your dead dog because it distracts from my core belief, which is that I am the  penultimate center of the universe and my problems are of a greater significance than yours.

And clearly that’s just wrong.

Clearly my issues (MY lack of stability, the fact that I murdered animals when I was younger, MY 20 milligrams of prozac, MY abusive father, MY bipolar mother, MY socially disadvantaged brother, MY falling-apart house, MY fiftieth ‘FOR SALE’ sign, MY losses, MY gains, MY heartbreaks, MY priorities) take a very clear backseat to your dead dog.

I sound like a cunt and I know I do, I’ve only kept this blog because I’m trying to be honest with something. And for so long I haven’t written here because I’m afraid to disappoint people but now I realize that I’m not writing for other people. I need to be honest somewhere, I need to get things out and I’m doing it here. Whether or not people appreciate it, whether or not it’s poetic or interesting or heartbreaking enough for your entertainment, cannot be my concern anymore.

I have a proposition:

I am the penultimate center of the universe. I am the penultimate center of my universe, as I should be. You should be the center of yours. My problems are allowed to be significant and important to me if you’re going to say that yours are significant to you. Respect, I want the basic respect of being able to openly show that I don’t know what the fuck I am doing with my life without being called dramatic. I am a parfait. There is a lot of whipped cream and shit that people don’t want to listen to before you hit the fruit. You need to stick around for the fruit. If you don’t stick around for the fruit, then you have no right to tell me that I’m dramatic and that I overstate my problems because you haven’t seen the misery that I have possessed.

I’m bringing back the Golden Rule

Treat others how you want to be treated. You are a tapeworm.

“Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?”

World Peace is somewhat of an ignorant wish to have.

It’s as if people think that the world hasn’t already attempted world peace. We started with world peace, square one is world peace where nothing’s been established and no one’s claimed anything and therefore no one has to fight over ownership. The development of war from that point is clearly evidence that ‘World Peace’ cannot happen because it is human nature to claim dominance and fight to defend your ‘territory’.

If you put two miserably starving men in a room with a piece of bread, those two men are not going to sit down and discuss the equal sharing of the bread. They are going to fight. War is human.

–

The way that I know that I’m not a writer is because I’m truly not a reader. The Teen section at Barnes and Nobles literally makes me want to jam a knife through my ear and then twist. I’m not perceptive, in the slightest, to things that I cannot empathize entirely with. And I cannot empathize with the story of how Liane lost her virginity to a popular boy and their secret relationship, I do not care. And I understand that all people can relate to each other on at least some level but I have not developed the patience or tolerance to actively relate myself to all the protagonists in the Teen section, I just can’t do it. I pick up a book, I read the back, and I completely dismiss it. It doesn’t even occur to me at the time that an author might have been working on that book for 30 years and its publication was their dying wish, my complete entertainment is my only concern in a bookstore.

–

Reading Lord of the Flies in english class posed the question of whether or not human beings are entirely evil, entirely good, or have the capacity to be both.

My judgment human beings is based almost entirely around Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

If a human being’s basic needs aren’t met then their morals and their conscious effort to be good doesn’t even enter their mind, they’re just looking for survival. So, in that sense, humans are not inherently good, humans are inherently selfish.

So, ultimately, the question is whether or not self-preservation is considered evil. And I don’t have a personal answer to that question.

But then there’s the viewpoint that humans have the capacity to do both good and evil, which is entirely possible. My only hang up with this point is where is this ‘goodness’ coming from? Is it coming from legitimate care and compassion for another being or is it merely because a person wants to feel as though they’re doing the right thing (they gain personal satisfaction from feeling as though they’ve done right)? If a person is kind to another to ensure themselves of their goodness, then that’s just a complex way of displaying selfishness again. Which leads back to the question of whether or not selfishness and self-preservation are evil or just human.

That’s what his stare has been saying to me all this time: ‘At least I galloped – when did you?’

There’s nothing in the world that’s any less motivating than when one stops and thinks of the struggles yet to come.

Everyone thinks that they’ve overcome hardships so far, everyone thinks that they’ve managed to stay strong in the face of so much aversion for however many years they’ve been living. And while the aversion may lighten, it will never disappear. There will always be struggle and there will always be hard times. While I applaud the people that have the unfaltering ‘It gets better’ viewpoint, I can’t help but think ‘What if it doesn’t?’. There are so many unfortunate people in the world, so many people that are homeless and jobless, people that once lived normal lives. They were probably told at some point when they were younger that life only looked upwards, and then were understandably disappointed by the actual fruitlessness of the real world.

It might not get better, it might just get a lot worse.

I think that the unattainable key to finding happiness lies somewhere in the knowing that not everything will work out perfectly. Happiness can just mean being content with oneself and understanding that although things could get worse; in that moment, they are not. Perhaps the understanding that the people around you, the people that you care about, are also ‘happy’ could result in more personal happiness.

I think the key word here is ‘unattainable’.

I have a great difficulty with living for the moment. I have great difficulty in deriving personal satisfaction from the achievements of others, I just get jealous. I understand that I’m young and I understand that I limit myself but I can’t stop.

I am my own worst enemy and I am the only person that I can turn to for help.

I have tried making connections, don’t think that all this pessimism is something that I automatically came to. I do have reasons. All relationships that  I attempt to establish with people either end up being catastrophic or just dissolve entirely by no doing of my own. The complete and utter failure of maintaining a healthy friendship or relationship at all is what has led me to my viewpoint and I believe I’m justified. I enter every new conversation expecting it to fail miserably and I don’t do this deliberately, it just happens.

And I’m not looking forward to another 60 years of life if this is all there is. I don’t have a fear of failing, I have a knowledge and acceptance of failing

There are no angels in America

“I love everyone”.

No you don’t.

You love everyone that’s part of a minority. What about the group of people that’s opposed to the minority? We have all this support for gay rights, we have all these people on board for love no matter what gender. And that’s fantastic. It’s great that people are getting equal oppurtunities to openly love whoever they want to. But if people are opposed to gay marriage for reasons of their own, be it religion or a bad encounter, then they’re perfectly entitled to have their own opinion and they are no less of a person just because of that. If they’re not knowingly harming anyone, then homophobes and racists and sexists should be allowed to hold their own opinions without being bullied by everyone else. It’s come to the point where it seems like homophobic people are now the minority and homophobic people are now getting picked on by society. We’ve substituted hate with more hate and that just leads us nowhere. And I can’t stand the people that preach tolerance and acceptance for all, but then don’t tolerate and accept those who can’t tolerate and accept for whatever reasons they have. I hate these double-standards that we have. Killing is wrong UNLESS we kill a terrorist, then it’s fantastic.

–

I’m not suicidal, I’m just not particularly inclined to living. If a giant pick-up truck was hurtling towards me at a breakneck speed, I would not move an inch. However, I would not step into the path of said giant pick-up truck. I walk around hoping for some kind of horrific tragedy to occur that would liberate me from my social obligations. If my family died tomorrow, then I wouldn’t be expected to attend school for the next month. If I were brutally raped, then I’d have a reason to just stop talking and I could get packed up and sent to a cozy little institution and be spoon-fed variously colored pills for the rest of my life. I wouldn’t have to try anymore, I’m just looking for excuses to be lazy. And I can’t explain this to anyone without them overreacting. I just want to be lazy, death seems like a nice long sleep. But if I tell someone that I’d enjoy being hit my a truck, then they automatically assume that I’m either A) Making light of suicide or B) seriously suicidal, neither of which I actually am. I’m just tired.

–

Someone told me last month to “Keep writing!”. I have never once received a less encouraging remark in my entire existence. It’s because of the manner in which she said it, it was like I was the little retarded kid that get picked on and bullied in school but then one day everyone realizes that the little retarded kid actually has a talent. It was just mildly disgusting. And I don’t want to ‘keep writing’ if I’m going to get talked to as though it’s the only thing that makes me worthwhile. Because it’s not. I’m a bullshit writer.

I wrote a play a little while ago about a man trying to catch a train and his wife who wanted him to stay. And while it held a personal significance to me, there is no way in hell that it intellectually appealed to anyone else. It was a bad play. It was stupid. It was irrelevant to anyone but me and anyone claiming to actually appreciate the play is another one of those people that looks at me like one of those stupid kids that has one defining ‘talent’. I feel condescended upon.

–

If I were being mugged in alleyway, I’d have to scream quite loudly before someone would notice. Anyone would.

–

I’ve realized as of late that when I actually do get someone to listen to me, I come off as being quite arrogant and overly-assured in my intelligence. I’m not. I’m an idiot because my way of thinking doesn’t make sense to anyone else. I don’t know what I’m saying. I just say things and hope they make sense and people always choose to take me seriously at the wrong times. Like, the two seconds that I can actually get a person to listen to me are the two seconds when I’m spewing my anarchy bullshit. And my anarchy bullshit (as explained in the last post) takes a lot longer than two seconds to fully explain, but they’re only listening for those two seconds.

“If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, the possibility of life is destroyed. “

The idea of running away, just packing your basic necessities and fleeing is so inviting but I know I could never do it. It’s not even that I feel obligated to stay here, among people that I know and care for; I can give that up in a second for pure freedom. It’s the complications that come along with running away, the police that would get involved, the properties that I wouldn’t be able to set foot on because someone owns them, the…the golf course I can’t sleep on because it’s public property, I just couldn’t live without breaking one of our confining laws. When did humans declare ownership over something that they’re blessed to inhabit? No one owns land, people think they own land. Truthfully, nothing’s yours. Your house isn’t yours, your car isn’t yours, your food isn’t yours, you’ve just declared your ownership over it and the fact that people believe that the house is yours and the food is yours is just pure trust. The food belongs to us, as a whole, the house belongs to us, as a whole, this earth belongs to us, as a whole, and the fact that we draw lines and borders and state things as individually ours is just wrong.

No one man should be able to claim power and total dominance over something that he himself has not produced, no one has that right. The lives that people live are shaped solely off of coincidence. If Barack Obama had been born in another country then he wouldn’t be president and he wouldn’t have the power or influence over people that he has today. He is as equally a human being as I am, yet he still controls 3.79 million square miles more than I do because of what? What right does he have to rule 3.79 million square miles of land, to place borders and laws and restrictions on 3.79 million square miles of land?

If I want to take off, I should be able to. I should be able to cross country borders on my own accord without having to worry about being hounded by police. If we hadn’t drawn these lines, if we hadn’t burrowed our stick into a mound of earth and called it ours, then all these problems could be avoided. If we hadn’t pinned a badge on man after man after man and told these men to rule 3.79 million square miles of land then most of our problems could be avoided. And this isn’t just applied to America, this is globally, we are ruining what it means to be human and we are degrading ourselves by putting our security in the hands of a bunch of ‘government officials’ who just happened to be born at the right place and time.

However, now we’ve made things complicated; now we’ve developed taxes and health care run by the government. The fact is that people don’t know how to survive without these things. If we just abolished the governments of every country tomorrow, then there would be no funding for public schools or libraries.

But here’s the thing and I know that it’s crazy and impossible and irrational; why do we need to be educated in anything more than what it takes to just live off the land? Why do we need to instill these facts into children’s minds, why can’t we let them explore and learn what the world is for them and learn how to survive on their own?

I want to live in harmony with nature for the well-being of mankind, imagine how much bigger the world could seem if you weren’t told at the age of 5 that the world is round and that you live in New York City in America and your president is George Bush. Think of the excitement that would come from seeing the ocean for the first time and actually thinking that it was endless and boundless; imagine the prospect of something being endless and boundless on earth. Imagine looking up at the sky and not knowing that the orb hanging above you is called the moon and not being told that you can never touch the stars.

As a species we are overthinking and overdeveloping ourselves to failure, we are boxing ourselves in tighter and tighter into this concept of owning things and limiting and defining. We are chained to our lack of creativity by the iron shackles of our own knowledge. And when we look out at the ocean, we’re beginning to feel bigger and bigger instead of smaller.

someone must have taken you while I was stuck asleep

You make me want to puke

Or scream. Ill. Ill is what you make me. Physically sick. You wear the same damn clothes every day. And that belt, that colorful fucking belt, I hate it. And your shoes, the bright red ones, are so obnoxious. I hate your laugh, your overly-obnoxious booming laugh that makes everyone turn and stare. I hate the way you talk and your goofy tone all the time, every word out of your mouth is part of another cheap one-liner. And that pretentious ‘deep’ crap you watch and listen to all the time, your obscure hipster music.I can’t stand how you look down at me with those huge fucking owl eyes.

Exclusivity, that too. I hate your exclusivity and how only a few people are deemed ‘worthy’ or you to talk to. Worthy of you to give a damn about, worthy of you to care for. The way you look at me makes me want to die. I can feel the fist of your judgement clenching and twisting down on my guts, thinking that I am not worthy. Thinking that I am ordinary, that I can’t possible ever live up to the caliber at which you think. That I can’t ‘keep up’.

I hate every ambition that you have. I hate that you can aspire and dream and possible be whatever you want to be. I hate your potential, I hate your creativity, I hate that you can be amazing while I can’t be. I hate every step that you take away from me and towards your dreams. Every step is another scream from me saying “WHAT ABOUT ME? I AM RIGHT HERE, WHAT ABOUT ME?” and it grows louder and louder with each second.

the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint

I do draw. I draw faces, faces of people that don’t exist. And it’s easy for me, it’s routine and simple. But I don’t want to draw faces anymore. I’ve been told that I’m creative, but I only know how to draw one thing. Any attempt that I’ve had to branch out and experiment with, say, painting landscapes or flowers or sketching objects has always ended up looking trite and lame.

Things have grown considerably more difficult. Waking was easy for a short period of time, but I can sense the days growing shorter and the creeping unease that accompanies it. There was a period where everything was light and buoyant and I didn’t see how I could possibly revert back to how I was a few months ago, but now I see it.

There’s just this perennial dissatisfaction that I have with myself. No one else seems to detect it, but I do. Whenever I feel like I’ve accomplished something or that I’ve been outstanding or special for once, my accomplishment is quickly overshadowed by the transparent and temporary achievements of others. I can do something well, but if no one recognizes it then it might as well be as though I hadn’t done it at all. I don’t understand why I continually try to find something in which I excel because such a field simply does not exist. No, everyone is not special at something. I realize that.

I can’t ever do anything just to make myself feel satisfied, I don’t know what that entails. I have no idea what pleasing myself means, pleasing myself requires recognition which I never get. And whenever I do get recognition, it’s always stained with the idea that others have done whatever task that I did better. I’m not worthy, I don’t deserve whatever I’ve won.

I might be able to be fantastic. I might have the potential to change the lives and the viewpoints of hundreds of people. I could be something. But if you don’t feed a flame, then it just fizzles out and dies.

More and more I feel as though people smile at me because they feel obligated to. When someone’s leering down at me, I half-expect to turn around and see a man offering them some kind of grand prize for doing the ‘right thing’. For making the untalented outcast feel for a few seconds as though she is accepted in this sick parade of flaunting useless ability. This pity-acceptance does not make me feel loved or special or included. It makes me even more aware as to how out of place I am.

I know that there are genuine people somewhere, and I need to work my ass off to get there. But I’m so unmotivated. What will I do once I find a community of people who are like me and who understand me? Blend in there? I don’t want to blend in. I don’t blend in. I cannot dissolve into some liberal arts sea of tolerance, I am more than that. And that’s not meant to sound as egotistical as it does, my ego is non-existent because I realize that my expectations for an ideal nurturing environment can never be met. ie the garden in which I can blossom into a beautiful rose of intelligence is buried underneath fifty feet of solid concrete and I realize and accept that.

None of this makes sense

I don’t understand why I write, it doesn’t make sense.

The concepts that I try to attack don’t exist in anyone else’s minds but mine. They can’t be understood by anyone else and so, to anyone casually stumbling upon this, I sound like a blithering idiot.