I may be to close to this moment to be allowed to write about it. The general badness of a day is not something that should be measured in the course of that day, rather it should be delayed a week or more to allow the sharp bits to sharpen and the muddled bits to become clear. But for the sake of getting some of that raw nerve purge energy on the page for future study I will succumb to the notion, no matter how inadvisable it may be.
The self-recriminating bit leads me to state that this is not the first time I have been here, it is not the only time I have felt overwhelmed an unsupported by the cosmos in general and by specific friends and associates in particular. There is an enormously annoying quality to finding yourself once again in a predicament that you have faced before. I take a tiny academic solace in the idea that we have a whole Greek tragic figure in Sisyphus to touch stone too and realize that people have been having this issue long before angst became a word.
The Greek's may very well have created the sentiment if not the term, but I'm going to be emotional and jaded and lazy and not verify this claim.
Which is one of those types of segues that leads me to say that I have often been lazy. I have not fought the best fight. I have not bothered to go down a road. I have given up a few minutes in because, honestly, what is the point? And I've put myself back at the bottom of that hill with the rock (Sisyphus, remember) on top of me or certainly about to plunk me on more than a dozen occasions.
I would like life to be as simple and straight forward as all that. It would be easy if I was simply flawed and spent a lot of time being a jerk about it (which is ultimately a true statement, but not all-inclusive). Life is more complex then that and outside factors can drive you right back into the rock-coming-at-you pit as easily as your own merits and efforts (or lack thereof).
I could cite my last week of efforts to find employment and escape the captivity of my small town, no life, living with the parents as I near the age of 30, and how those efforts were minuscule if not non-existent. I could vouch for the amount of writing I did, pages of characters and even manuscript pumped out, blog posts and project journal updates done and done, but those efforts are still less than half of what I'm capable of even in a weakened and discombobulated state.
I could turn it outward and discuss how my parents, fundamentalist Christians with a penchant for rote statements devoid of independent thought or autonomous argument, started my day with a combination of they why won't you just 'Give it All Over to Jesus' and 'Beware the Mark of the Beast' speeches. This, amongst a bevy of questions about why I am not employed six weeks after moving in and reminding me that in their opinion I should have quit going to college seven years ago and just started working a job that paid 'good money' so that I would be eternally happy and healthy the way they are.
Because you will rarely meet people as content and overwhelmingly pleased with their lives as my parents. Striking down all who will not obey Jesus in the way they do with cutting remarks and faux head shaking sorrow.
The way they accept anyone who is making cash as doing well and anyone without cash is obviously not right with God, who is known to test people with various things, but never seems to take peoples wealth or security in the process. All those without cash are woeful sinners, and will be smited as such until they repent and get a gods damned job.
I could say that it is in fact the juxtaposition of these to stances, the internal and external, that have lead me to feeling so thoroughly exhausted and angry and worthless today. There is a comfort in just throwing my hands up and yelling, "I am a failure, I deserve nothing but revulsion," but it isn't true and pretending it is solves nothing. I could blame the parents for being obstinate and uncaring, or if they do care their profound lack of ability to communicate it as anything but "grow up and start living right with Jesus."
Still, no single thing, no precise combination of things, and no act of bad timing or poor decision making on anyone's part takes away the problem. None of it sets the world back on its axis. I still have to fix all of this myself.
The one thing I wish I could demand, the one entitlement I long to have granted unto me, is if I manage to get it all together, fix all of the problems, solve all the issues; could I at least be congratulated on the effort at the end? Could I get a 'good job, we're proud of you'?
I know how these situations play out and I know I will just be given a rousing round of 'we told you so' some 'now that you are okay with Jesus it will all work out' and the brutal 'if only you had just grown up (or sucked it up) years ago then you wouldn't be going through this.'
Is it really too much to ask to be appreciated for my merits and success even a 1/10 as much as I'm yelled at and lauded for my flaws?
Doesn't everyone deserve a lot more adulation for victory and a lot less punishment for failure?
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Necessary Fractures
Perhaps it would be best to start sometime before the beginning and tell you a little about a particular friend of mine. He's a good friend, a bosom chum, an inseprable portion of myself. Suffice it to say that if I ever lost him I don't know what I would do. I'm speaking of my closest and most important friend, my second personality; Vincent.
I first met Vincent in third grade. I was on the verge of turning nine. It was late April and three unfriendly little boys were attacking me. Two of them held me down while a third one rubbed a variety of garbage in my face. Crying, more for a reason why then any sort of mercy, I blubbered and howled while a mixture of discarded orange rinds and dog shit was smashed into my mouth and across my forehead and into my eyes.
The recess bell rang and my tormentors abandoned me to whimper and twitch in the grass. I slowly struggled to my feet. I was dizzy, sore, bleeding and nauseous; but more than all of that was an overwhelming feeling of distance. I began to see myself from the outside like an establishing shot for a character in a movie. I walked past my classroom where I could see the teacher Mrs. Littlefield was calling my name. I walked past the playground and past the fence and unthinkable for a third grader, I left the school grounds and walked the 1.5 miles home.
My mother was surprised initially when I walked into the small shop in the garage
that housed her pet grooming business. Only vaguely paying attention to my presence, as she was working on a cocker spaniel, the bane of all groomers, she asked me if school was out early for the day for some reason. I blubbered something, half crazed, wild eyed and reeking of the remains of 20 minutes of walking home covered in shit and garbage. This caught her full attention and she began asking rapid detailed questions about what had happened to me. The details are sketchy from here but at some point I was taken back to school and refused to give the names of my tormentors, I take care of things in house.
With no names to go on the principal scolded me for leaving school and I was sent home for the remainder of the day. That night I had a certain recurring dream.
It began as such things usually do. I brushed my teeth, I flossed, and I put checkmarks on my dental hygiene calendar. I put on some pajamas. I got into the top bunk of the bunk beds which had ceased by that time to serve their original purpose as my younger brother now had his own room and the bottom bunk was only occasionally used to transform the beds into the cockpit of an exotic blanket-spaceship that always managed to crash after flying through an asteroid belt or meteor shower of some kind.
And then I fell asleep.
As I lay in the warm and comforting silence/darkness of sleep I began to see the red mist. I struggled against it. Turning my head and blinking rapidly, willing it to leave and finding my efforts fruitless. It grew thicker and thicker until the entirety of the darkness was covered in a waist height thick red carpet. And I was in a room, the light of the room was ambient, source unknown, but I knew where I was. I was lost amongst the bleak stone structures of the world I visited when I slept. Random edifices of a smooth, fractured, gray stone dotted a large room with a low, indefinite ceiling. Though I knew where I was everything was as different as it was the same. The world of my dream was ever changing but maintained a familiarity both terrible and satisfying.
I ran.
Not that there was anywhere to run, sometimes the walls were very close and only a 10x10 space existed to move around in, other times it was vast, with walls that could be seen but never reached and sounds that would echo in the way colossal cavernous batholiths turned on their side would sound. I would run, breath fogging or moving the dusty air, leaving what I feared was a visible trail behind. I would scurry, dodging around stone abutments and under overhangs trying to stop them from tracking me, stop them from finding me if only for a few extra seconds, because they always did find me and when they did they would take me to the door and beyond the door to the hallway and then to the chamber. And in the chamber lay the table. And a few seconds away from the table was worth any effort.
They would start looking for me soon. The precise time it took them to start was made obvious by the sounds of the first and possibly least horrific of the four things that stalked me in my dreams. I dubbed him the Imp, a short, stubby entity that smelled always of vomit and fish. His legs were uneven, the left longer than the right, and his arms were often twisted, though where the joints hinged wrong changed from night to night. He was green in color and danced about on his crooked legs to some horrific rhythm that pulsed through the room and around the rocks and rattled through me. His heart was firmly attached to the outside of his body and it lubbed and dubbed a thick dark material into his body that could be seen swimming in his eyes. He wore knickerbockers and a watch fob tucked into his waistcoat. His shirt was pristine white and his head was covered in only tatters of hair. He didn't talk, never spoke, only danced and hopped about smiling that horrible smile and pumping his octopus ink blood.
The Tall Man normally followed Imp, talking in an obtuse dead accent in rhymed couplets. He was easily seven feet tall but in my childhood he seemed closer to nine or ten. He wore a Victorian coat with long tails and had those sort of straight stove pipe trousers that made his knees seem so knobbly. He was missing his left eye, the socket just an empty housing and his remaining eye looked as if it had a crack through it from upper right to lower left. He had four arms that ended in barbed hooks and he walked in an incomprehensible slow lope. Every step he took seemed to take minutes to lift and shift and land but despite that I could never run from him fast enough.
I saw them coming through the red mist loping and hopping in tune to the distant, omnipresent, beat of the room. I peeked around the rock I was hiding behind and saw them. I froze in fear, wanting to run, wanting to stay hidden, wanting to not be here, wanting to find a way to wake up, and wanting a way for this to be the last time, to simply have them capture me and kill me and be done with it, to be away from the fear and torment and dread. The Imp must have seen me because he danced more frantically and did a little twirl on his stumpy left leg.
The Tall Man nodded. “Desperate do I seek the leaf/pain and death upon the waif.”
The Imp began running forward, head low and body writhing with the effort of dancing and coordinating his mismatched limbs. The Tall Man strode forward with his singular dedication one step at a time always just behind The Imp despite how slowly he took each step.
I jumped from my hiding place and ran, trying to stay low, hidden in the mist. “Streaking, bounding through the heather/the hare rattles into lather,” I heard distantly behind. As I ran I could feel the floor getting uneven, sloping downward. I stopped abruptly and ducked under an overhang of rock with a decent sidewall to it. I was protected from view from 5 directions from there. I sat and held my breath. My head must have hurt and for some reason my left hand was bleeding so I held it to my chest.
Too soon I heard them outside of my rock. “The prey I hoped to gather/I have lost to an other.” And with that they were gone.
I sat where I was, slowly breathing until I felt like I could move again. The pain in my left hand began to subside and I couldn't see the blood anymore. I rested my head on the rock and tried to sleep, sleep myself awake. As I closed my eyes I heard the clack clack of the fourth and most horrific of my tormentors. He who Had No Name, He who commanded the other three with gestures and glares and who was ever watchful, ever watchful of all things. He had no eyes in his head, rather, every one of his fingers ended in an ocular organ of some sort. Human eyes, cat eyes, lizard eyes, fish eyes. Eyes that were slit horizontally and vertically, eyes that twitched and twisted and saw. He walked about with one hand in the air in front of him wiggling his fingers as they gazed and probed. He wore a very smart pinstripe suit with no shirt and his shirtless chest was sunken and seemed to wriggle with things beneath the skin. He smelled of bad books, the stink that books that were bound in linseed or flax oil smell like. His feet (whether they were boots or actually the make of his feet) were redder than the mist and the heel and toes were separated by a slit that ran halfway up his calf. It was this that gave him the click as he walked.
The click click of his walk grew louder and closer. I knew that I could not hide from him and his horrible eyes so I ran from cover, back the way I had come, back towards where I appeared in the room. No sooner had I stepped out of then I saw He who Had No Name, and with him was the third of my tormentors, Stick. Wrapped in the remains of bandages and oilskins he was barely more than a mummified dog. But his legs were jointed wrong, his shoulder to his elbow/thigh to his knee were horizontal and then split straight down to his hands/feet. He moved like a water bug, drifting and sliding forward. He who Had No Name held onto Stick by a strand of cloth which he let go. And Stick moved forward at me, impossible fast, effortless, with a blank in his expressionless face. I took fewer than three steps when he pounced on me. I was knocked flat under the mist. The Imp and The Tall Man were right next to me giggling and smiling. They had known where I was.
They had always known.
He who Had No Name gathered me in his arms, his eyeball fingers clutching at my arms and staring into my face and wriggling as he walked across the room of mist.
Toward the door.
During the first year in which I had this dream this is where I would wake up, the point at which we reached the door. I would wake up, safe in my room and too cognizant of what I had just went through. I told my parents what I had seen and felt and they would tell me that “satan” was after me and that if I prayed everything would be fine. I spent a lot of time praying before bed, hands fixed before me securely on my knees before I went to sleep and still the dream would come.
The second year of the dream I would cross through the door. A simple wooden thing, no ornamentation, no symbols or made of human bone or anything, just a door like you might walk through any day in your own home. It was a door that could lead anywhere, but it always led to the hallway, and the hallway led to the chamber, and inside the chamber laid the table.
I was carried through the door and down the hallway, it was infinitely long and I never could see the end of it, all I felt was the pressure of being carried and all I could see and hear and smell was the presence of my tormentors. Some nights this portion of the dream would last for hours once it seemed nearly a day long. Tonight it lasted for what seemed like three. The second year the dream would end here, somewhere inside a vast tunnel where I was surrounded by visages of terror and nothing outside or inside of myself but terror. Terror of what would happen, dread of what was to come.
And the hallway led to the chamber, and inside the chamber laid the table.
The third year I began to reach the end of the tunnel, time would pass and I would be brought into the chamber. It was a large structure like an operation theatre hewn out of a black, sooty rock. Five rows of what could be seats were lined with torches set into the floor and in the center under a great glass skylight was a stone table that rose from the center of the room. Shaped roughly like a crucifix it featured four straps, one for the legs, one for each arm, and one for my head. The tormenters would strap me down, each taking a place around me. Stick at my feet, The Imp at my left, The Tall Man at my right, and He who Had No Name at my head. They would hold me down and place the brown leather straps through he loops and pull and I would wake up.
And on the table I was made to lay.
It was not until the fourth year of the dream that the strapping would not awaken me. No, in the fourth year they began to enact a ritual of some sort. The Tall Man would shove a hook into my neck and split me down to my groin. Several of He who Had No Name's fingers would detach, grow legs from the stalk and crawl inside my chest cavity like scorpions, finger/tails held high and crooked above their heads. They would emerge some amount of time later carrying my organs inside their finger/tails. The Imp would jump on my chest and dance and hop and bob lub-dubbing inky blackness into my chest and onto my face. Sometimes my organs were eaten other times they were merely shown to me and then discarded. He who Had No Name would speak to me in these times, telling me what was being done and how, but never why, not once. As they removed my eyes and tongue and teeth he would tell me how it was they were pulled out, would tell me how they had cut me or broken me.
I would wake up somewhere in there, not ever at a specific point or a particular organ removal – just somewhere along the way. I began reading every night in the fourth year. About half the time I would dream I was in the book and would not find myself in the room of mist. I began reading late into the night, sometimes four or five in the morning, usually in my closet where my parents would not see the light and know I was still up. Even now I can barely sleep without music to occupy portions of my mind.
And on the table I was laid open and pulled apart.
But tonight things were ever so slightly different in the dream. Tonight as they carried me into the chamber and strapped me to the table something changed. Tonight as I struggled to fight against my horrific tormentors, desperate to free myself from the bonds of the esoteric operating table, something happened. The skylight that looked out upon a non-Euclidean cyclopean landscape burst open and a man that looked like an older version of myself came crashing in. He wore a large floppy black hat and a combination of black wool and leather clothing. He was strapped with: two pistols, .45s; a shotgun, double barreled, sawed off; a rapier; two tonfas; a nodachi; a knife; two hand axes; and a leather satchel. He talked in a deep, even, monotone the simple word “Enough.”
He who Had No Name screamed/hissed a sound that shook the room. Stick scuttled forward and was split in twain by a massive stroke of the nodachi. The Imp was blasted from my chest by multiple rounds of the pistols. The Tall Man fared better against the newcomer. Striking with his abundance of limbs he momentarily held off his destruction. But the newcomer was faster and stronger, ripping each hook from its socket with deft twists of the rapier and finally running The Tall Man through. This only left He who Had No Name. He hissed and spat and howled into the depths of the chamber. The newcomer strode forward with a singular purpose and hacked off both of He who Had No Name's hands. The fingers fell, transmuting to little scurrying scorpions as they hit the floor. Again the nodachi split the tormentor in two and hundreds of eyeballs scurried to the floor.
The newcomer sliced the straps and picked me up from the table. I lay limply in his arms as he walked out to the hallway and woke up. Since that time I have not had the dream, though I have met other characters such as the tormentors, and I have seen more than one eyeball-scorpion.
After that I have been in and won nearly 200 fist fights, jumped 7 feet vertically on two separate occasions saved five peoples lives and kicked the hell out of three muggers.
I would later learn that the man who saved me in my dream that night calls himself Vincent and claims to be an angel bound to the earth since 600 A.D. for reasons he isn't talking about. I'm not overtly superstitious and though I may spend a lot of time researching, reading about, and writing stories about angels I am too cynical to suppose that his tale may be true.
But I do know this, I was once given to a horrific repetitive nightmare that all of my advanced intellect cannot place where or how I would have come up with so many of the details of and it did stop one night when a strange man broke in and saved me. Since then I have preformed amazing feats of strength and skill and can fence and sword fight like few others. I may not be possessed or occupied by an earth bound angel, but I certainly do have a second voice that says so.
I first met Vincent in third grade. I was on the verge of turning nine. It was late April and three unfriendly little boys were attacking me. Two of them held me down while a third one rubbed a variety of garbage in my face. Crying, more for a reason why then any sort of mercy, I blubbered and howled while a mixture of discarded orange rinds and dog shit was smashed into my mouth and across my forehead and into my eyes.
The recess bell rang and my tormentors abandoned me to whimper and twitch in the grass. I slowly struggled to my feet. I was dizzy, sore, bleeding and nauseous; but more than all of that was an overwhelming feeling of distance. I began to see myself from the outside like an establishing shot for a character in a movie. I walked past my classroom where I could see the teacher Mrs. Littlefield was calling my name. I walked past the playground and past the fence and unthinkable for a third grader, I left the school grounds and walked the 1.5 miles home.
My mother was surprised initially when I walked into the small shop in the garage
that housed her pet grooming business. Only vaguely paying attention to my presence, as she was working on a cocker spaniel, the bane of all groomers, she asked me if school was out early for the day for some reason. I blubbered something, half crazed, wild eyed and reeking of the remains of 20 minutes of walking home covered in shit and garbage. This caught her full attention and she began asking rapid detailed questions about what had happened to me. The details are sketchy from here but at some point I was taken back to school and refused to give the names of my tormentors, I take care of things in house.
With no names to go on the principal scolded me for leaving school and I was sent home for the remainder of the day. That night I had a certain recurring dream.
It began as such things usually do. I brushed my teeth, I flossed, and I put checkmarks on my dental hygiene calendar. I put on some pajamas. I got into the top bunk of the bunk beds which had ceased by that time to serve their original purpose as my younger brother now had his own room and the bottom bunk was only occasionally used to transform the beds into the cockpit of an exotic blanket-spaceship that always managed to crash after flying through an asteroid belt or meteor shower of some kind.
And then I fell asleep.
As I lay in the warm and comforting silence/darkness of sleep I began to see the red mist. I struggled against it. Turning my head and blinking rapidly, willing it to leave and finding my efforts fruitless. It grew thicker and thicker until the entirety of the darkness was covered in a waist height thick red carpet. And I was in a room, the light of the room was ambient, source unknown, but I knew where I was. I was lost amongst the bleak stone structures of the world I visited when I slept. Random edifices of a smooth, fractured, gray stone dotted a large room with a low, indefinite ceiling. Though I knew where I was everything was as different as it was the same. The world of my dream was ever changing but maintained a familiarity both terrible and satisfying.
I ran.
Not that there was anywhere to run, sometimes the walls were very close and only a 10x10 space existed to move around in, other times it was vast, with walls that could be seen but never reached and sounds that would echo in the way colossal cavernous batholiths turned on their side would sound. I would run, breath fogging or moving the dusty air, leaving what I feared was a visible trail behind. I would scurry, dodging around stone abutments and under overhangs trying to stop them from tracking me, stop them from finding me if only for a few extra seconds, because they always did find me and when they did they would take me to the door and beyond the door to the hallway and then to the chamber. And in the chamber lay the table. And a few seconds away from the table was worth any effort.
They would start looking for me soon. The precise time it took them to start was made obvious by the sounds of the first and possibly least horrific of the four things that stalked me in my dreams. I dubbed him the Imp, a short, stubby entity that smelled always of vomit and fish. His legs were uneven, the left longer than the right, and his arms were often twisted, though where the joints hinged wrong changed from night to night. He was green in color and danced about on his crooked legs to some horrific rhythm that pulsed through the room and around the rocks and rattled through me. His heart was firmly attached to the outside of his body and it lubbed and dubbed a thick dark material into his body that could be seen swimming in his eyes. He wore knickerbockers and a watch fob tucked into his waistcoat. His shirt was pristine white and his head was covered in only tatters of hair. He didn't talk, never spoke, only danced and hopped about smiling that horrible smile and pumping his octopus ink blood.
The Tall Man normally followed Imp, talking in an obtuse dead accent in rhymed couplets. He was easily seven feet tall but in my childhood he seemed closer to nine or ten. He wore a Victorian coat with long tails and had those sort of straight stove pipe trousers that made his knees seem so knobbly. He was missing his left eye, the socket just an empty housing and his remaining eye looked as if it had a crack through it from upper right to lower left. He had four arms that ended in barbed hooks and he walked in an incomprehensible slow lope. Every step he took seemed to take minutes to lift and shift and land but despite that I could never run from him fast enough.
I saw them coming through the red mist loping and hopping in tune to the distant, omnipresent, beat of the room. I peeked around the rock I was hiding behind and saw them. I froze in fear, wanting to run, wanting to stay hidden, wanting to not be here, wanting to find a way to wake up, and wanting a way for this to be the last time, to simply have them capture me and kill me and be done with it, to be away from the fear and torment and dread. The Imp must have seen me because he danced more frantically and did a little twirl on his stumpy left leg.
The Tall Man nodded. “Desperate do I seek the leaf/pain and death upon the waif.”
The Imp began running forward, head low and body writhing with the effort of dancing and coordinating his mismatched limbs. The Tall Man strode forward with his singular dedication one step at a time always just behind The Imp despite how slowly he took each step.
I jumped from my hiding place and ran, trying to stay low, hidden in the mist. “Streaking, bounding through the heather/the hare rattles into lather,” I heard distantly behind. As I ran I could feel the floor getting uneven, sloping downward. I stopped abruptly and ducked under an overhang of rock with a decent sidewall to it. I was protected from view from 5 directions from there. I sat and held my breath. My head must have hurt and for some reason my left hand was bleeding so I held it to my chest.
Too soon I heard them outside of my rock. “The prey I hoped to gather/I have lost to an other.” And with that they were gone.
I sat where I was, slowly breathing until I felt like I could move again. The pain in my left hand began to subside and I couldn't see the blood anymore. I rested my head on the rock and tried to sleep, sleep myself awake. As I closed my eyes I heard the clack clack of the fourth and most horrific of my tormentors. He who Had No Name, He who commanded the other three with gestures and glares and who was ever watchful, ever watchful of all things. He had no eyes in his head, rather, every one of his fingers ended in an ocular organ of some sort. Human eyes, cat eyes, lizard eyes, fish eyes. Eyes that were slit horizontally and vertically, eyes that twitched and twisted and saw. He walked about with one hand in the air in front of him wiggling his fingers as they gazed and probed. He wore a very smart pinstripe suit with no shirt and his shirtless chest was sunken and seemed to wriggle with things beneath the skin. He smelled of bad books, the stink that books that were bound in linseed or flax oil smell like. His feet (whether they were boots or actually the make of his feet) were redder than the mist and the heel and toes were separated by a slit that ran halfway up his calf. It was this that gave him the click as he walked.
The click click of his walk grew louder and closer. I knew that I could not hide from him and his horrible eyes so I ran from cover, back the way I had come, back towards where I appeared in the room. No sooner had I stepped out of then I saw He who Had No Name, and with him was the third of my tormentors, Stick. Wrapped in the remains of bandages and oilskins he was barely more than a mummified dog. But his legs were jointed wrong, his shoulder to his elbow/thigh to his knee were horizontal and then split straight down to his hands/feet. He moved like a water bug, drifting and sliding forward. He who Had No Name held onto Stick by a strand of cloth which he let go. And Stick moved forward at me, impossible fast, effortless, with a blank in his expressionless face. I took fewer than three steps when he pounced on me. I was knocked flat under the mist. The Imp and The Tall Man were right next to me giggling and smiling. They had known where I was.
They had always known.
He who Had No Name gathered me in his arms, his eyeball fingers clutching at my arms and staring into my face and wriggling as he walked across the room of mist.
Toward the door.
During the first year in which I had this dream this is where I would wake up, the point at which we reached the door. I would wake up, safe in my room and too cognizant of what I had just went through. I told my parents what I had seen and felt and they would tell me that “satan” was after me and that if I prayed everything would be fine. I spent a lot of time praying before bed, hands fixed before me securely on my knees before I went to sleep and still the dream would come.
The second year of the dream I would cross through the door. A simple wooden thing, no ornamentation, no symbols or made of human bone or anything, just a door like you might walk through any day in your own home. It was a door that could lead anywhere, but it always led to the hallway, and the hallway led to the chamber, and inside the chamber laid the table.
I was carried through the door and down the hallway, it was infinitely long and I never could see the end of it, all I felt was the pressure of being carried and all I could see and hear and smell was the presence of my tormentors. Some nights this portion of the dream would last for hours once it seemed nearly a day long. Tonight it lasted for what seemed like three. The second year the dream would end here, somewhere inside a vast tunnel where I was surrounded by visages of terror and nothing outside or inside of myself but terror. Terror of what would happen, dread of what was to come.
And the hallway led to the chamber, and inside the chamber laid the table.
The third year I began to reach the end of the tunnel, time would pass and I would be brought into the chamber. It was a large structure like an operation theatre hewn out of a black, sooty rock. Five rows of what could be seats were lined with torches set into the floor and in the center under a great glass skylight was a stone table that rose from the center of the room. Shaped roughly like a crucifix it featured four straps, one for the legs, one for each arm, and one for my head. The tormenters would strap me down, each taking a place around me. Stick at my feet, The Imp at my left, The Tall Man at my right, and He who Had No Name at my head. They would hold me down and place the brown leather straps through he loops and pull and I would wake up.
And on the table I was made to lay.
It was not until the fourth year of the dream that the strapping would not awaken me. No, in the fourth year they began to enact a ritual of some sort. The Tall Man would shove a hook into my neck and split me down to my groin. Several of He who Had No Name's fingers would detach, grow legs from the stalk and crawl inside my chest cavity like scorpions, finger/tails held high and crooked above their heads. They would emerge some amount of time later carrying my organs inside their finger/tails. The Imp would jump on my chest and dance and hop and bob lub-dubbing inky blackness into my chest and onto my face. Sometimes my organs were eaten other times they were merely shown to me and then discarded. He who Had No Name would speak to me in these times, telling me what was being done and how, but never why, not once. As they removed my eyes and tongue and teeth he would tell me how it was they were pulled out, would tell me how they had cut me or broken me.
I would wake up somewhere in there, not ever at a specific point or a particular organ removal – just somewhere along the way. I began reading every night in the fourth year. About half the time I would dream I was in the book and would not find myself in the room of mist. I began reading late into the night, sometimes four or five in the morning, usually in my closet where my parents would not see the light and know I was still up. Even now I can barely sleep without music to occupy portions of my mind.
And on the table I was laid open and pulled apart.
But tonight things were ever so slightly different in the dream. Tonight as they carried me into the chamber and strapped me to the table something changed. Tonight as I struggled to fight against my horrific tormentors, desperate to free myself from the bonds of the esoteric operating table, something happened. The skylight that looked out upon a non-Euclidean cyclopean landscape burst open and a man that looked like an older version of myself came crashing in. He wore a large floppy black hat and a combination of black wool and leather clothing. He was strapped with: two pistols, .45s; a shotgun, double barreled, sawed off; a rapier; two tonfas; a nodachi; a knife; two hand axes; and a leather satchel. He talked in a deep, even, monotone the simple word “Enough.”
He who Had No Name screamed/hissed a sound that shook the room. Stick scuttled forward and was split in twain by a massive stroke of the nodachi. The Imp was blasted from my chest by multiple rounds of the pistols. The Tall Man fared better against the newcomer. Striking with his abundance of limbs he momentarily held off his destruction. But the newcomer was faster and stronger, ripping each hook from its socket with deft twists of the rapier and finally running The Tall Man through. This only left He who Had No Name. He hissed and spat and howled into the depths of the chamber. The newcomer strode forward with a singular purpose and hacked off both of He who Had No Name's hands. The fingers fell, transmuting to little scurrying scorpions as they hit the floor. Again the nodachi split the tormentor in two and hundreds of eyeballs scurried to the floor.
The newcomer sliced the straps and picked me up from the table. I lay limply in his arms as he walked out to the hallway and woke up. Since that time I have not had the dream, though I have met other characters such as the tormentors, and I have seen more than one eyeball-scorpion.
After that I have been in and won nearly 200 fist fights, jumped 7 feet vertically on two separate occasions saved five peoples lives and kicked the hell out of three muggers.
I would later learn that the man who saved me in my dream that night calls himself Vincent and claims to be an angel bound to the earth since 600 A.D. for reasons he isn't talking about. I'm not overtly superstitious and though I may spend a lot of time researching, reading about, and writing stories about angels I am too cynical to suppose that his tale may be true.
But I do know this, I was once given to a horrific repetitive nightmare that all of my advanced intellect cannot place where or how I would have come up with so many of the details of and it did stop one night when a strange man broke in and saved me. Since then I have preformed amazing feats of strength and skill and can fence and sword fight like few others. I may not be possessed or occupied by an earth bound angel, but I certainly do have a second voice that says so.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Essay on Essaying
Writing is often listed as the pursuit of truth by those people who like to deal a hefty trade in truth. They are, however, probably wrong. Truth is an un-malleable substance at it core, a substance that must exist in only a very few forms for it to work whatsoever. Writing shares none of these characteristics. Writing is an art; it requires knowledge about the steps and styles, the forms and choices, in essence, the craft. Writing is a craft, a craft that has a number of highly precise tools and a fine assortment of hammers at its disposal. Learning to write well requires years of practice and a practical dedication to doing things the way they should be done over the way you want to do them.
Writing is rarely about what you say; it is all in the delivery.
Day 1
Opening the Book
When I first entered the Non-Fiction class at Southern Utah University I was coming back from one of those breaks where everything that I did amounted to the sum total of nothing. The most stirring accomplishment of my Christmas break was playing Legend of the Five Rings for 33 consecutive hours. Excitement. Entering the classroom I was staggered by the group of souls within. Nearly thirty students were occupying a room apparently built for ten. I clutched my closed-session add slip in a white-knuckled hand. I glared about the room, looking for holes in the people. Some of them, I hoped, would not be here by the next class. I took a seat upon a table and waited for the opening spiel. The class instructor Melissa Frateriggo is a younger woman with an ethnicity that is hard to place. She had brown hair that hung just below her jaw line and wide set features that left a smoothness to her face. She carried herself well but wasn’t precisely outgoing in any particular sense.
She explained the rules and regulations of the class including the attendance policy, which was understandably strict considering that most of the class was dedicated to discussion of outside and inside works. I felt like her eyes were boring a hole in my chest when she announced the “no late work clause.” I have always attempted to be a good student in life, and until the past three years I have been. Perhaps the shift had something to do with my getting tossed out of a university abroad and forced to seek shelter within a less than prestigious institution of higher learning. Or maybe it was because I had shifted something in my own personal paradigm. Regardless of the reason, I was committed to working whenever it felt like the thing to do and flinging far fetched excuses the remainder of the time.
Of course I had a sort of thing for her too. Most of the students did. Maybe it was because she was new and young. Maybe it was because she was pleasant and witty. Maybe it was because she was a writer, and I’m always a sucker for an artist.
Class ended, I skulked out, intent to make my decision to join the class on a later date. Melissa figured that I should probably seek another class herself, as she sent me an e-mail the following day explaining that it would probably benefit me to have a class that required less attendance and perfunctory dedication to the subject matter. I balked at the e-mail and decided to prove her wrong about me, that I really was a dedicated individual locked in the midst of a hellish life that I had not chosen for myself but was forced to deal with anyway.
That or maybe that thing I had for her was larger than academically acceptable.
Day 10
Emotion
Exercise # 3 was due. I had put together a piece based upon a five-year weekly recurring nightmare. I was trying to show something of what created the entity that I inhabit to the other students. The purpose of the assignment was to show emotion in writing. The most important emotion out there, to me, is fear. Love has problems in being an emotion that controls you, hate is too linear to be useful, desire is a strong emotion, but is ultimately an emotion born of something else. Fear is where I stake my claim for the first impetus for human activity. Other members of the group read their pieces; I cannot remember the names of the students, regrettably. One person wrote a rather silly piece about their truncated Mormon relationship with a guy. In case you have never lived in Utah, I’ll explain. The typical relationship in Utah features a couple that meets somewhere in the first three years of college, decide that now is the time to get married, and regardless of how much either person means to the other they are engaged in three weeks and married in six months. They make terrible writers as their life experience is so convoluted towards one set of events, which I refer to as “the pattern”, that you cannot read more than one of them without starting to repeat yourself in a sort of organic two-step.
Keith Ben Stein was the next to read. Keith is a great guy, full of wit and a strange self effacing quality that tends to buoy the people around him by putting himself down. I often feel uncomfortable talking to him about anything more than a surface matter because I don’t want him to tell me how great I am. In fact I might appreciate a large number of people telling me something about how great I am not. Then again, maybe I’m just saying that.
I read my piece and watched the faces of my audience. A look formed in their eyes that I have seen before. A sense that whatever world it is that I have come from is not on their list of vacation spots, and sometimes, they are sorry they even flipped through the brochure.
Day 13
Essay #1
At the time I had been struggling to write a single coherent paragraph for five days. I don’t get writers block, I disassociate. I lose it. One half of me disagrees with the other half of me and I spend hours to weeks spinning in a circle waiting for an outside influence to shove me one way or another. Writing on deadline, my passion, my dream, becomes a dark torment, a nightmare constructed of too much stress about a test, a sick pleasure like cutting up your mothers couch just so that you will get in trouble. I told Melissa that I had nearly finished the assignment and would get it to her by 5:00 in the evening. I sat down at 4:30 and cobbled together three journal articles into an essay. The essay had no point save a brutal reflection of me talking to me about me, but I figured I had to get something in, and knowing the human algorithm it would probably be heralded as a gripping and fine piece.
There are days when the lying becomes to big for you and you feel that you must tell the truth to one single person, the whole truth, as you see it, whether they understand or not. I got my piece in at 5:00 as promised and returned to home. It was a Monday, and if I am not mistaken I played Devil May Cry for the PS2 until 1:00 in the morning. I did not feel good, but I pressed on.
Somewhere in my not too distant future, or my recent past, the keys to success were waiting for me to do something with the mess that I see as my life.
Day 15
Unnatural Defense
They were talking about my piece. The thing that I had cobbled together. The thing that reflected opinions I had two entire years ago. Opinions that I had given only a cursory glance to in the ten minutes it took for me to slap it together. I sat back with a little grin on my face. Inside I was laughing; outside I could barely contain myself. They took the whole piece seriously. They thought that what I had written was interesting, and deep, and useful. I knew that it was nothing. It was me ranting to me. It wasn’t valuable it was stupid. It was something that I should never have done. I should have taken a zero rather than subject my fellow students, and writers, to this false art. This horrible project that amounted to nothing more than a guy taking crap and displaying it in a way that people who where too in touch with the art world and nowhere near reality could proclaim its brilliance. Proclaim because it was placed in front of them and they didn’t understand it but thought that since it was there they needed to.
I felt cheap. I felt used, even though I was using. Then I started to feel something else entirely. They liked what I had written. They liked this incredibly personal item; this record of my thoughts in the grips of a depression that spanned four months. Four months that found me joining the Air Force briefly, being tossed out for mental instability. Four months, one of which was spent with Wendy. Whom I had loved. Who I still love, who I was not joking too when I proposed to her; even if she thinks so. They were seeing something in my words. Something that I had placed there. Something that I had put between the lines because it was what I was doing. The emotion of life.
Not one simple emotion, the whole complex spectrum was there. I just hadn’t seen it.
Day 16
Aftermath of Technique
Saturday. I sat about the game store in town and listened with half an ear at children that thought I was god. They approached me with a sacred reverence and begged for my attention with offerings of food and drink and cash. I allowed them to continue on, benevolence flowing from my feet to wash away their sins.
I have always reeked of conceit. And with good reason. They tell me that I am greater than they. I know that I am worth what I am worth. But they see something different. They see something in me that I can only guess at. So I begin to want to become whatever it is that they see. I can live the life that others think that I should, because it is important that promises be kept, even when you are not the one that made the promise.
Justifications for my behavior circle through my mind. Ways that I can convince others of my true purpose, of my true self. Nothing presents itself. The packaging is all wrong. My style, my sense of self out-weighs my words. If I broke down in the middle of the quad screaming people would merely assume that I am doing a Rodney bit. They’re all Rodney bits.
I am worshiped like a cult figure by people I have never met. They may not always like me, in fact I am hated as often as not, but never for me. Nobody sees me, they see the visage that I have created, the visage that has me trapped within.
So I sit down and ask myself what writing is supposed to do for me, and I get this idea of a way of presenting myself. A way that will be about me, that will cut down the visage.
Day 21
Beginning Again
Essay #2 is due in one hour. I’m something like 400 words away from making the six page minimum. I want to list other things but find if hard to go back and change what I’ve already laid down. It would be wrong to delete the words, to make them disappear from the record of existence. They only live by being read. They only breathe if I say that they do.
I ask myself questions, sometimes direct, other times not. Will the readers see something here that I did not place here? Will they laud my skills above their actual existence or will they miss the most important part.
What begins as a dialogue about writing ends as a dialogue about being writing. The words that are printed are and are not me at the same time. I give them life and they walk out to find lives of their own. They carry within each of them a meaning that is singular and part of the whole.
Writing is rarely about what you say; it is all in the delivery.
Day 1
Opening the Book
When I first entered the Non-Fiction class at Southern Utah University I was coming back from one of those breaks where everything that I did amounted to the sum total of nothing. The most stirring accomplishment of my Christmas break was playing Legend of the Five Rings for 33 consecutive hours. Excitement. Entering the classroom I was staggered by the group of souls within. Nearly thirty students were occupying a room apparently built for ten. I clutched my closed-session add slip in a white-knuckled hand. I glared about the room, looking for holes in the people. Some of them, I hoped, would not be here by the next class. I took a seat upon a table and waited for the opening spiel. The class instructor Melissa Frateriggo is a younger woman with an ethnicity that is hard to place. She had brown hair that hung just below her jaw line and wide set features that left a smoothness to her face. She carried herself well but wasn’t precisely outgoing in any particular sense.
She explained the rules and regulations of the class including the attendance policy, which was understandably strict considering that most of the class was dedicated to discussion of outside and inside works. I felt like her eyes were boring a hole in my chest when she announced the “no late work clause.” I have always attempted to be a good student in life, and until the past three years I have been. Perhaps the shift had something to do with my getting tossed out of a university abroad and forced to seek shelter within a less than prestigious institution of higher learning. Or maybe it was because I had shifted something in my own personal paradigm. Regardless of the reason, I was committed to working whenever it felt like the thing to do and flinging far fetched excuses the remainder of the time.
Of course I had a sort of thing for her too. Most of the students did. Maybe it was because she was new and young. Maybe it was because she was pleasant and witty. Maybe it was because she was a writer, and I’m always a sucker for an artist.
Class ended, I skulked out, intent to make my decision to join the class on a later date. Melissa figured that I should probably seek another class herself, as she sent me an e-mail the following day explaining that it would probably benefit me to have a class that required less attendance and perfunctory dedication to the subject matter. I balked at the e-mail and decided to prove her wrong about me, that I really was a dedicated individual locked in the midst of a hellish life that I had not chosen for myself but was forced to deal with anyway.
That or maybe that thing I had for her was larger than academically acceptable.
Day 10
Emotion
Exercise # 3 was due. I had put together a piece based upon a five-year weekly recurring nightmare. I was trying to show something of what created the entity that I inhabit to the other students. The purpose of the assignment was to show emotion in writing. The most important emotion out there, to me, is fear. Love has problems in being an emotion that controls you, hate is too linear to be useful, desire is a strong emotion, but is ultimately an emotion born of something else. Fear is where I stake my claim for the first impetus for human activity. Other members of the group read their pieces; I cannot remember the names of the students, regrettably. One person wrote a rather silly piece about their truncated Mormon relationship with a guy. In case you have never lived in Utah, I’ll explain. The typical relationship in Utah features a couple that meets somewhere in the first three years of college, decide that now is the time to get married, and regardless of how much either person means to the other they are engaged in three weeks and married in six months. They make terrible writers as their life experience is so convoluted towards one set of events, which I refer to as “the pattern”, that you cannot read more than one of them without starting to repeat yourself in a sort of organic two-step.
Keith Ben Stein was the next to read. Keith is a great guy, full of wit and a strange self effacing quality that tends to buoy the people around him by putting himself down. I often feel uncomfortable talking to him about anything more than a surface matter because I don’t want him to tell me how great I am. In fact I might appreciate a large number of people telling me something about how great I am not. Then again, maybe I’m just saying that.
I read my piece and watched the faces of my audience. A look formed in their eyes that I have seen before. A sense that whatever world it is that I have come from is not on their list of vacation spots, and sometimes, they are sorry they even flipped through the brochure.
Day 13
Essay #1
At the time I had been struggling to write a single coherent paragraph for five days. I don’t get writers block, I disassociate. I lose it. One half of me disagrees with the other half of me and I spend hours to weeks spinning in a circle waiting for an outside influence to shove me one way or another. Writing on deadline, my passion, my dream, becomes a dark torment, a nightmare constructed of too much stress about a test, a sick pleasure like cutting up your mothers couch just so that you will get in trouble. I told Melissa that I had nearly finished the assignment and would get it to her by 5:00 in the evening. I sat down at 4:30 and cobbled together three journal articles into an essay. The essay had no point save a brutal reflection of me talking to me about me, but I figured I had to get something in, and knowing the human algorithm it would probably be heralded as a gripping and fine piece.
There are days when the lying becomes to big for you and you feel that you must tell the truth to one single person, the whole truth, as you see it, whether they understand or not. I got my piece in at 5:00 as promised and returned to home. It was a Monday, and if I am not mistaken I played Devil May Cry for the PS2 until 1:00 in the morning. I did not feel good, but I pressed on.
Somewhere in my not too distant future, or my recent past, the keys to success were waiting for me to do something with the mess that I see as my life.
Day 15
Unnatural Defense
They were talking about my piece. The thing that I had cobbled together. The thing that reflected opinions I had two entire years ago. Opinions that I had given only a cursory glance to in the ten minutes it took for me to slap it together. I sat back with a little grin on my face. Inside I was laughing; outside I could barely contain myself. They took the whole piece seriously. They thought that what I had written was interesting, and deep, and useful. I knew that it was nothing. It was me ranting to me. It wasn’t valuable it was stupid. It was something that I should never have done. I should have taken a zero rather than subject my fellow students, and writers, to this false art. This horrible project that amounted to nothing more than a guy taking crap and displaying it in a way that people who where too in touch with the art world and nowhere near reality could proclaim its brilliance. Proclaim because it was placed in front of them and they didn’t understand it but thought that since it was there they needed to.
I felt cheap. I felt used, even though I was using. Then I started to feel something else entirely. They liked what I had written. They liked this incredibly personal item; this record of my thoughts in the grips of a depression that spanned four months. Four months that found me joining the Air Force briefly, being tossed out for mental instability. Four months, one of which was spent with Wendy. Whom I had loved. Who I still love, who I was not joking too when I proposed to her; even if she thinks so. They were seeing something in my words. Something that I had placed there. Something that I had put between the lines because it was what I was doing. The emotion of life.
Not one simple emotion, the whole complex spectrum was there. I just hadn’t seen it.
Day 16
Aftermath of Technique
Saturday. I sat about the game store in town and listened with half an ear at children that thought I was god. They approached me with a sacred reverence and begged for my attention with offerings of food and drink and cash. I allowed them to continue on, benevolence flowing from my feet to wash away their sins.
I have always reeked of conceit. And with good reason. They tell me that I am greater than they. I know that I am worth what I am worth. But they see something different. They see something in me that I can only guess at. So I begin to want to become whatever it is that they see. I can live the life that others think that I should, because it is important that promises be kept, even when you are not the one that made the promise.
Justifications for my behavior circle through my mind. Ways that I can convince others of my true purpose, of my true self. Nothing presents itself. The packaging is all wrong. My style, my sense of self out-weighs my words. If I broke down in the middle of the quad screaming people would merely assume that I am doing a Rodney bit. They’re all Rodney bits.
I am worshiped like a cult figure by people I have never met. They may not always like me, in fact I am hated as often as not, but never for me. Nobody sees me, they see the visage that I have created, the visage that has me trapped within.
So I sit down and ask myself what writing is supposed to do for me, and I get this idea of a way of presenting myself. A way that will be about me, that will cut down the visage.
Day 21
Beginning Again
Essay #2 is due in one hour. I’m something like 400 words away from making the six page minimum. I want to list other things but find if hard to go back and change what I’ve already laid down. It would be wrong to delete the words, to make them disappear from the record of existence. They only live by being read. They only breathe if I say that they do.
I ask myself questions, sometimes direct, other times not. Will the readers see something here that I did not place here? Will they laud my skills above their actual existence or will they miss the most important part.
What begins as a dialogue about writing ends as a dialogue about being writing. The words that are printed are and are not me at the same time. I give them life and they walk out to find lives of their own. They carry within each of them a meaning that is singular and part of the whole.
Monday, January 19, 2009
Childhood Horror: One of Many
Back in the early 80's when I was in 1st grade we had a little story time segment. The children would gather around the teacher, sitting on a little stool with her back to the crowd pressed up in a corner.
A decent strategic move for keeping an eye on some 20 rowdy mouth-breathers with a penchant for clumsy mischief.
There, a story of some twenty pages would be read to the earnest faces. Milk and cookies were not served, kindergarten being a fading memory in the minds of the little tykes. But the idea of story time and the special niche it filled before recess was an important one to me.
This time became even more sought after when after a few weeks the teacher announced that students could sign up for a section of a day and read stories they brought from home.
The ritual was meant to encourage reading in us wee ones. But it started me thinking down a sinister road.
A naturally shy and painfully introverted youth with a scowl setting in at age 5 that would later in life cause me to wear glasses for a astigmatism that formed in my left eye, I waited to sign up and determine what kind of material the other students were bringing with them.
It was amazing how many different tiny books that Golden Books was publishing when I was a child. I must have heard The Pokey Little Puppy poorly sounded out by 15 out of 20 children before I decided to bring material of my own.
Now, reading long tomes about sailing and sailors, desperate and thick material that a child can barely lift let alone read, to a group of people that struggled through The Pokey Little Puppy made me reconsider Moby Dick.
Not a joke, I was reading it at the time as well as David Copperfield, but in the case of the latter I was reading it because I thought it was about the magician. I may have been a genius of a six-year-old but some things you learn much later in life.
Incidentally I had a much finer respect for the magician for many years, seeing how crummy his early life was and all...
As a compromise I brought in my very own copy of The Pokey Little Puppy. But rather than read what was there I made myself little sheets and taped them into the book and created a short story about a talking plane that had a problem with crashing into buildings.
George of the Jungle was my favorite cartoon at the time, but in retrospect it has become sinister to even consider planes and buildings, even though apparently a creative 1st grader could come up with it as a plan.
It didn't take the teacher more than a few pages to sweep in and take my little home-made book away. Though I had captured the attention of the student and was reading only what I had written on my poorly crayon-illustrated pages, the point of the exercise was to read, not make things up.
Laughed at and ridiculed for being told off by the teacher it would be some three years before I sat down to write anything again. But the lessons of youth are always remembered.
Know your audience, and avoid getting caught doing anything the authorities will not understand.
A decent strategic move for keeping an eye on some 20 rowdy mouth-breathers with a penchant for clumsy mischief.
There, a story of some twenty pages would be read to the earnest faces. Milk and cookies were not served, kindergarten being a fading memory in the minds of the little tykes. But the idea of story time and the special niche it filled before recess was an important one to me.
This time became even more sought after when after a few weeks the teacher announced that students could sign up for a section of a day and read stories they brought from home.
The ritual was meant to encourage reading in us wee ones. But it started me thinking down a sinister road.
A naturally shy and painfully introverted youth with a scowl setting in at age 5 that would later in life cause me to wear glasses for a astigmatism that formed in my left eye, I waited to sign up and determine what kind of material the other students were bringing with them.
It was amazing how many different tiny books that Golden Books was publishing when I was a child. I must have heard The Pokey Little Puppy poorly sounded out by 15 out of 20 children before I decided to bring material of my own.
Now, reading long tomes about sailing and sailors, desperate and thick material that a child can barely lift let alone read, to a group of people that struggled through The Pokey Little Puppy made me reconsider Moby Dick.
Not a joke, I was reading it at the time as well as David Copperfield, but in the case of the latter I was reading it because I thought it was about the magician. I may have been a genius of a six-year-old but some things you learn much later in life.
Incidentally I had a much finer respect for the magician for many years, seeing how crummy his early life was and all...
As a compromise I brought in my very own copy of The Pokey Little Puppy. But rather than read what was there I made myself little sheets and taped them into the book and created a short story about a talking plane that had a problem with crashing into buildings.
George of the Jungle was my favorite cartoon at the time, but in retrospect it has become sinister to even consider planes and buildings, even though apparently a creative 1st grader could come up with it as a plan.
It didn't take the teacher more than a few pages to sweep in and take my little home-made book away. Though I had captured the attention of the student and was reading only what I had written on my poorly crayon-illustrated pages, the point of the exercise was to read, not make things up.
Laughed at and ridiculed for being told off by the teacher it would be some three years before I sat down to write anything again. But the lessons of youth are always remembered.
Know your audience, and avoid getting caught doing anything the authorities will not understand.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Pscyhologic Blankets I Have Known
Throughout the course of my dramatically problematic life I have encountered an abundance of interesting things that soothe me when times seem the most dire or in the aftermath of yet another life destroying event.
Sometimes I found solace in books, tomes of great wisdom from people long dead that experienced their own shares of real and imagined trouble. Sometimes from music, people who cry out with lyrics and voices that stab at the throat of my issues or wrap me in their sullen tones and lull me to a place inside where its safe to be numb.
Repetition of imagery and smells are the next most powerful drugs that have sustained me. Vanilla, the scent of fog used in a high school play in 1994, still fills me with fond memories of times when I wore a compilation of black clothes and did my damndest not be seen during scene changes.
The individual components of a psychological blanket don't seem to hold up under close logical scrutiny. The threads part, separate, unwind and blow to the wind as they are observed. But solace is not a product of logic. It is not held to the whims of the thinking mind, it holds up in the primitive portion of the emotions and soul.
There, in the center of any given person, is a little factory that takes in stimulus data and converts it into simple components of like and dislike. And once something has been marked it rarely changes.
There is no great conclusion to be drawn from this process, no single defining event that takes a sight or sound and produces comfort. It is a gestalt of a lifetime of tiny iterations that creates an effect that ultimately has no bearing whatsoever on what insect is flapping what where.
But in the end everyone has a happy place, and the doors to that place are labeled so that no one else can enter in quite the same way.
Sometimes I found solace in books, tomes of great wisdom from people long dead that experienced their own shares of real and imagined trouble. Sometimes from music, people who cry out with lyrics and voices that stab at the throat of my issues or wrap me in their sullen tones and lull me to a place inside where its safe to be numb.
Repetition of imagery and smells are the next most powerful drugs that have sustained me. Vanilla, the scent of fog used in a high school play in 1994, still fills me with fond memories of times when I wore a compilation of black clothes and did my damndest not be seen during scene changes.
The individual components of a psychological blanket don't seem to hold up under close logical scrutiny. The threads part, separate, unwind and blow to the wind as they are observed. But solace is not a product of logic. It is not held to the whims of the thinking mind, it holds up in the primitive portion of the emotions and soul.
There, in the center of any given person, is a little factory that takes in stimulus data and converts it into simple components of like and dislike. And once something has been marked it rarely changes.
There is no great conclusion to be drawn from this process, no single defining event that takes a sight or sound and produces comfort. It is a gestalt of a lifetime of tiny iterations that creates an effect that ultimately has no bearing whatsoever on what insect is flapping what where.
But in the end everyone has a happy place, and the doors to that place are labeled so that no one else can enter in quite the same way.
Friday, January 16, 2009
Lessons Everyone Knows That I'm Learning Late
There is a fundamentally wise saying, Work Will Set You Free, that contains an interlaced wisdom that is sadly overshadowed by its inauspicious location above the entrance to Auschwitz.
It isn't just that working provides a level of freedom and stability, it's also a matter of distancing one from their problems. As long as you have something in front of you that needs to be typed, or a hole to be dug, or a call to make - what have you - then there is a mental/emotional distance from your life that is achieved.
I have found from a life of avoiding jobs and employment that given enough space in your head you will find ways to attack yourself for things that cannot be as much of an issue as you can make them.
There is something reassuring and calming about having the mental space to think about a problem or situation. There is a firm and life-assuring quality to closure. There is something fundamentally wrong with taking a mental sledgehammer to the insides of your mind and remodelling your perceptions of events ad naseum.
So, here I am, coming to the end of a week spent frantically applying to every job that requires no experience, is located within a 400 mile radius, doesn't involve driving (because I just cannot do that), and doesn't require me to know anything except how to read, write, and speak.
As you might imagine, its going slowly, and there is an eerie whistling wind sound and visions of tumbleweeds in my non-existent bank account.
So for all of you out there that already work, I salute you. And for those of you who live comfortably without needing to work, I suggest that you find something to do with your time before the time, to be quaint, finds something to do with you.
Time apparently is a fan of poorly conceived melodrama and reality television.
It isn't just that working provides a level of freedom and stability, it's also a matter of distancing one from their problems. As long as you have something in front of you that needs to be typed, or a hole to be dug, or a call to make - what have you - then there is a mental/emotional distance from your life that is achieved.
I have found from a life of avoiding jobs and employment that given enough space in your head you will find ways to attack yourself for things that cannot be as much of an issue as you can make them.
There is something reassuring and calming about having the mental space to think about a problem or situation. There is a firm and life-assuring quality to closure. There is something fundamentally wrong with taking a mental sledgehammer to the insides of your mind and remodelling your perceptions of events ad naseum.
So, here I am, coming to the end of a week spent frantically applying to every job that requires no experience, is located within a 400 mile radius, doesn't involve driving (because I just cannot do that), and doesn't require me to know anything except how to read, write, and speak.
As you might imagine, its going slowly, and there is an eerie whistling wind sound and visions of tumbleweeds in my non-existent bank account.
So for all of you out there that already work, I salute you. And for those of you who live comfortably without needing to work, I suggest that you find something to do with your time before the time, to be quaint, finds something to do with you.
Time apparently is a fan of poorly conceived melodrama and reality television.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Starting Roughly from Somewhere in the Middle
Starting out on such an auspicious project, such as this, its difficult to live up to the grandeur of the title and still dodge the label of pretentiousness. The following stories and events are almost certainly embellished, coming as they do from the mind of a person who is not sure that anything that has ever happened to him has actually happened in the way he remembers, but they are laid out plainly for the reader to make their own judgements.
It is my hope that this collection of tidbits from a life lived clumsily and with an increasingly skewed perspective of its own purpose will assist all who read it in dodging the ominous pitfalls in their own lives. It may be asking too much of the writer to carry through on these hopes but that falls in line with the very substance and fibre of the stories themselves.
At times the stories will be humorous, at times horrific, but rest assured that all conclusions were reached poorly and all morals and lessons are inconclusive at best.
You have been cautioned, dear reader, you have been told that what you are about to face is real, fake, frightening, a pack of lies, the convoluted thoughts and machinations of a self deluded prick. But they are told to you honestly and without reservation by someone who feels it cannot have been that bad, and it cannot have been for nothing.
Thank you, and enjoy.
Or don't. That's entirely up to you.
It is my hope that this collection of tidbits from a life lived clumsily and with an increasingly skewed perspective of its own purpose will assist all who read it in dodging the ominous pitfalls in their own lives. It may be asking too much of the writer to carry through on these hopes but that falls in line with the very substance and fibre of the stories themselves.
At times the stories will be humorous, at times horrific, but rest assured that all conclusions were reached poorly and all morals and lessons are inconclusive at best.
You have been cautioned, dear reader, you have been told that what you are about to face is real, fake, frightening, a pack of lies, the convoluted thoughts and machinations of a self deluded prick. But they are told to you honestly and without reservation by someone who feels it cannot have been that bad, and it cannot have been for nothing.
Thank you, and enjoy.
Or don't. That's entirely up to you.
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