Or an even more difficult question: what would that entail? What would it look like to live your life because you want to? Would it be egoism-- living life in order to make yourself happy, in order to ensure your own predispositions never become encumbered? Would it be selfishness? Sadly, I think that would exactly be the purest form of living. To look at the world as a playground, a sand box for you to mold into your own image, to play god if you will and simply just... exist to exist and to force your existence on the world.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
The Secret Confessions of a Lying No-Good
Or an even more difficult question: what would that entail? What would it look like to live your life because you want to? Would it be egoism-- living life in order to make yourself happy, in order to ensure your own predispositions never become encumbered? Would it be selfishness? Sadly, I think that would exactly be the purest form of living. To look at the world as a playground, a sand box for you to mold into your own image, to play god if you will and simply just... exist to exist and to force your existence on the world.
Monday, December 29, 2008
Flesh
Sunday, December 21, 2008
The End: The Beginning
Adam shrugged. He looked at the clock and a very great thing happened: it turned to closing-time.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Confessions
Confession? The thought should be funny to me. Whenever I confess, I end up showing certain sides of me, selective... deliberate. There is something false about that type of confession. Every time I confess or ramble on about what's going inside me, I feel like it is never enough... I want to show people what it feels like, I want them to taste it, I want them to possess me for a moment, standing in my shoes and seeing the world filtered through my lens.
Is that even possible?
I certainly try. I can't help it. But there are just some things I can't confess, and it feels very much like the world just keeps on turning, the opportunity for expressing those things vanishing into the distance.
I've talked much with a friend about what it means to be a writer. We jokingly agree that a writer is a soul that very much so complicates every relationship he or she has. Someone who is difficult to love not because they don't have it in their heart, or are incapable of it, but because there is constantly a struggle between telling stories that make people smile in the darkest of times... and telling the stories of those dark times that cast shadows on the ground. I want to tell both... but the thing about shadows is that you find yourself looking into them too deeply.
Is it a confession that I hate myself? Hell, you only have to talk to me for a short while and you can see it, oozing out my pores. Why do I do that to myself? I'm a walking contradiction... I love life and everyone who has made their way into mine, but if I could love myself as I love others... I could be capable of so much. Instead, I avoid reflective surfaces; instead I daydream about what it would be like to not wake up at all.
It is no accident, I think, that depression and drug addiction go so hand in hand. Depression is an addiction in itself. One day, you come to some dark conclusion, and a part of you wallows in it. It repeats itself; you hug it tight as if you are a child with a teddy bear. The flesh starts to bleed and you enjoy it. So you go about it again. You look in the mirror, and you spit. A part of you laughs and a part of you hurts, but the part that hurts is having as much fun as the part that laughs. Because there is a masochist tendency to the depressed. Hurting themselves, putting themselves in positions that they should never find themselves in, contemplating thoughts that no healthy person should think...
To say that I'm better would be a lie. I still walk that dark road from time to time and have the scars to prove it. But when I think of all the things that hurt me, they don't have the same affect they used to. Instead of thinking that some outside force has taken away everything I've wanted in life, I've finally refused to be stupid enough to think that any more. I'm to blame for the life I've built for myself, and whenever I feel a lack it is because I've been either too scared or too weak to grab whatever I need for myself.
I remember when I was around five years old or so, I'd stare blankly into nothingness and just... feel overwhelmed by it. I'd look into a shadow and feel so damn empty and pitiful and I remember just bursting into tears over it. In retrospect, that's a fucked up thing for a kid to be doing. Shouldn't I have been playing baseball or something?
Why am I confessing this? Because I have devoted myself to purging these emotions. Instead of just... giving in and trying to hurt myself as badly as I can just so I can feel like I've survived something, I, as of this moment, will admit: I want to actually make my friend's comment, that I've lived my life, truth.
It is a scary thought for me. It means, to a certain degree, silence... because in all honesty, what spews from my mouth when I talk to much is usually an attempt to connect, to admit of all the dark little streets inside me, in the hopes that someone will just turn to me and turn on a light. It is still a romantic idea-- someone willing to be my light.
But I gotta be my own damn light if I'm going to get any sort of positive attention anyway.
So... looking at my own predispositions... my first step is to learn how to be a storyteller that talks too much about the light... in the hopes that I can express life a lot more respectfully, not as dark alleyways in the rain, but more like New York City at night... neither light nor dark... I love this city for that... walk Times Square at night and you don't even realize it's night-time. But it is.
At least then I can feel like those I've lost over the years don't look down and shake their heads. At least then I can feel like I've earned my family being proud of me. At least then maybe I can start pausing for a second in front of reflective surfaces, and see myself.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Burn me away
Thursday, December 4, 2008
A Thought Between Friends
"Is there something wrong, Doctor?" I asked. Of course, there was the obvious. One thing about the medical profession is that, when one realizes that no medicine has been invented to cure the inevitable, no true "reverse entropy" pill, there is a frustrated scream that echoes throughout the heavens. No, doctors are not the most quiet of ghosts.
I laughed. "Dear Doctor, he came a bit after you. How did you come across the romantic?"
I directed him to more books on the subject that seemed to suddenly peak his curiosity. I looked as he wandered off toward the shelves, and felt a touch of guilt. The thought that, when confronted with darkness, the soul automatically is irevocably touched by it... as if festering in the presence of death and destruction... such was a judgment that I thought I was too intelligent to make.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Chorus: Broken Voices
Sunday, November 30, 2008
The First Checkout
With a sigh, I recommended the Auchinleck manuscript, though I warned him of the missing leaves. He seemed very grateful, but in the pursuit of completion, I also made mention of Andre Ernest Modeste Gretry's opera, Richard Coeur-de-Lion. I further dropped the name of Eleanor Anne Porden for her poem, Coeur de Lion. I hesitantly decided to perhaps allow him to find James Goldman on his own; I was uncertain how the man would react to the subject of King Richard as a homosexual.
I casually avoided his gaze. I knew the boy he spoke of. The child was referred to as "the ant that had slain the lion." It is said that, after being shot in the shoulder by the boy, King Richard had the boy captured. But the boy had told Richard that he was only acting in vengeance, for Richard had killed the boy's father and two brothers. In an act of mercy, Richard had set the boy free, even granting him a monetary gift before sending him on his way.
It is said that captain Mercadier had the boy skinned alive immediately after Richard's death.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Observations in NYC
Words sometimes flow. Thoughts always do, that's for sure, but the words for them... sometimes there are only images, and the words act as descriptors, but these descriptions take time. I look out my window, at the pitch-black sky, the concrete of New York City lit in pools of light from street lights and cars... there's a certain charm to it. I understand the tendency to think of dark figures jumping from building to building in the darkest grips of night when I look out at such sights. I can also understand why the notorious Dark Knight's home is a fictional version of this city. There's something about the brown buildings with jet-black fire-escapes that seems inviting somehow. I can understand vigilantism and I can also understand crime. Everything seems so easily accessible in this city, the windows, the women, the drugs... it is the city where everything flows through whether it can make it through the channels or whether it will get clogged up and drown.
Which is, in essence, how I feel most of the time in this cruel mistress of a city.
I've always been fascinated by monsters though, so the fact that this city casts its many shadows intrigues me. Not that it is exactly a frightening place to stay-- hardly. I came here after everything has calmed down, and violence has been something that has, luckily, eluded me. I've seen a handful of disturbances, and I'm not sure how, but some of my friends have encountered more than I have. I find it funny that this scrawny white boy, stumbling through various spots of Harlem at various levels of light, in various levels of sobriety, has never encountered so much as a paper-cut.
Not that I'm complaining.
I'm not sure what fascinates me so much about the darker aspects of everything. I think that's why I'm so attracted to this city, this Gotham City. It doesn't bristle with palm trees, it doesn't cast sun-spots in your eyes on any but the warmest summer days, but I like that. There's a sadness here, a sense of loneliness, a sense of desperation everywhere, that for some reason I find rather beautiful.
I picture a lonely figure walking down these streets, perhaps wearing a dark overcoat, a thin trail of smoke slipping between his lips as he sucks on a cigarette. Street kids play around him, though the hour is much later than they should be out, but you know how kids are, especially in this fearless city. However, as he takes each step, he could not be further from his surroundings. Lost in his own world, he walks into dark alleyways, oblivious to any dangerous creatures that may be lurking there, in the shadows. The air is brisk and cold; the concrete has finally started to freshen up in the winter breeze.
He marches down a steep set of stairs leading to a basement apartment. The paint on the steps is chipped and rusty. The street lamps cast an eerie glow on the side of the walls, his figure casting funny little shadows as he walks down.
And into the belly of the beast he enters.
I've felt that way many times, going down into the subway. There's something about it that is like entering willingly into the mouth of some great dragon, especially at night. In the daytime, people enter into the city's orifice in such a casual way that it is hard to feel any drama, but at night, there's a certain oddity about descending into the city itself. The streets are dimly lit, but you walk down and the light shines up at you. The dirt and cracked tiles are the first thing you notice, and the juxtaposition of the white walls and the dirty brown subway tunnels themselves. Every now and then a rat smiles up at you, hoping that you have a kernel of something to drop to its lucky little maw.
There are, hidden in broad daylight, shops that clutter the streets that would be at home in another universe, perhaps where Lovecraft's monsters walk the earth. It isn't that they are of services that obscure-- a psychic here, a dominatrix there-- but rather that they just... seem so obscure in and of themselves, like the deep red paint in Soho that marks either a psychic's abode or a dominatrix studio (I haven't really decided which it is). And as you walk the city streets and come across a shop or a studio you never noticed before, it is easy to think how something arcane and obscure could easily be hidden in this city. For all we know, there is a store inside this city that sells articles that may lead to the end of times. A part of me would not find the idea far-fetched.