A cramped dance club hazed with smoke/floorboards that creak under the weight of a few hundred strangers and their expectations: pregnant with promise/

the floor: slippery with the glistening insecurities of those few hundred strangers, chased out of minuscule pores and ducts by the liquid courage that permeates the air with echoes of uncertainty and the stench of regrets more coherent than the people they belong to/

the toxins coat the bottom of shoes and cling to nostril hairs and drip

drop

into the stray glasses that line the bar

(flecks upon my specs, i am the only one here with glasses on my face

but it is my eyes that stray.)

and I almost slip on my way to the bathroom—

caution: wet floor.

caution: swinging handicap stall door

caution: a flash of chest hair, a stifled gasp

caution: swinging handicap stall door

He zips her lips, he zips his fly

and I zip out of the bathroom and back to the table in the back and my abandoned cranberry sans-vodka/cranberry colored shirt that ruffles over my bosom and falls over my gut like the arm on my shoulder, attached to a friend with drops of toxin forming on his upper lip and dripping into the corners of his cracked lips—

only his arm kind of stumbles there, and the smile he flashes looks duller in the club-light than it does in the sunlight

but his eyes are just as kind— it’s the eyebrows I don’t trust.

and a few hours before, I wanted to punch him for being a pretentious tit, but here in the club, I laugh nervously and curl away as he curls in, but he ends up just hugging himself, and I do the same, my palms clutching my shoulders and the sweat he left behind, because it’s suddenly colder in this hundred degree club where the electricity must be powered by the body heat and heated bodies on the dance floor.

What is it about the night that invites greedy palms to slither across shoulders that are just as bare in the sunlight? Would you rather stroke the light brown hair with golden highlights in the sun, or raised goosebumps no one invited you to count, much less sprinkle like tiny splinters in your wake?

As I walk back to the inn, just a stone’s throw away from the club— I guess that’s how they party in the mountains— I feel the stench of prose embedded in my clothes, but I can see the stars spread out above me again, instead of flashes of light and colored smoke and sinister smiles slithering in and out of the blacklight. The moonlight on my shoulder reveals no hair, no bumps, just a bluish glow

and then I put on my cardigan, black like the light in the club, but not so revealing

because I’ve had enough contemplation of skin draped over bumps draped over hair draped over skin draped over bones and what sort of coloring book Light makes of my body to drunken passersby that are my friends when the Sun comes up but reduced to sweaty bodies when drenched in moon shine.

And then I see another friend, sprawled on an arm chair in the darkened lounge, so stale with the crusted scent of nicotine. And he is drunk, and he is dripping, and even though sweat and tears are the same color, I still see a clean streak of moisture cutting its way through the toxins glazed on his cheeks. So we talk

and we talk

we talk, and he touches my knee/i jerk my knee away

we go for a walk/he tells me about the girl of his dreams and her hiccup bare shoulder blades and her sniffle sob almond tinted skin slur slur the music of her voice and the stuMBLe power of her wOrds hiccup sob slur slur and then he leans into my face and I smell the liquid courage-gone-coward-gone-brokenhearted on his breath and turn away as he slings his sweaty arm over my shoulder for support as we stagger back to the inn because he’s had enough moon shine and I’ve had enough arms around my shoulders for one night. The barkeep of the inn watches quietly as our intertwined bodies hiccup through the corridor and over to his counter to retrieve the keys to our rooms, but the friend attached to the arm that is retreating from its perch on my shoulder is not finished talking yet

then he asks me if I believe in Love, and suddenly he is finished talking

and I tell him about always being a shoulder decorated with tears for another

and never the tears on someone else’s shoulders (the whites of the barkeeps eyesdart back and forth with interest as we lean on his counter, ignoring him)

and I tell him matter-of-factly that even though I’ve never been pretty enough for anyone in the daylight, at night I still dream of Love saving someone else’s world before paying a visit to mine, and how sometimes I can be impatient and get drunk on self-pity and sleep through Love’s knock at my door, but, I believe in broken windows and illuminated dust particles dancing in the sunlight. His eyebrows watch me as they climb up his forehead and I see my face reflected in his eyes that are wide with interest despite the heavy burden on his lids. I love this friend, but I do not Love this friend

which is why I panic when his hand inches across the counter and over mine as he leans so close to my face that I see the liquid-brokenhearted on his eyelashes—

and the whites of the barkeep’s eyes reflected in his hungry, assuming smile that does not waver as I break eye contact and curl away from my friend, extending my other hand for our keys. He winks at me, and sneers as I lead my drunken, brokenhearted friend up a flight of stairs and to his room down the hall from mine. He hugs me before he stumbles into his moonlit bed, but it is skin on my shoulders that I do not mind and sweat on my back that does not raise bumps.

He won’t remember any of this by morning.

But I remember all of it, the prose still embedded in my clothes

what is it about the moonlight that invites greedy palms to slither across the blades of my shoulders like midnight dew coating the blades of grass? what is it about the moonlight and liquid courage that makes me pretty enough in other eyes? I want Love in the daylight and under the moon

or I don’t want it at all.

I feel dirty with sweat that isn’t mine/liquid courage I did not consume/implications I don’t understand/violated by the gaze of white-washed eyes in a darkened lounge that sprinkled goosebumps like tiny splinters on my body in their wake

I asked for nothing.

I close my eyes and see the the hunger in the barkeep’s eyes before he winks and eats his sneer with a smirk, and

under the blanket of the suspended time of 3am and the stars it holds in the sky, atop a roof overlooking the mountains, with friends sleeping on the other side of the window

I suddenly feel disgusting.

I guess it’s because I’ve carried each one of them around at different times in my life over the last few years, that the stuff I’ve tucked inside of them can say more about me than I can say about myself because they’re more objective than the words I bleed into my notebooks.

Junior year of highschool I carried my notebooks in piles on my arm because I was too stupid to give up on the shoulder bag trend. what matters most is how well you walk through the fire was always at the top of the stack between classes and open in my lap during classes. Leafing through it now feels like opening a time capsule. I’ve got a handout from first quarter of my art class, a pass from my guidance counselor excusing me from my remedial math class to talk with me about colleges, a quote my english teacher gave me that says “In everything the ends well defined are the secret of durable success,” a hot topic receipt tucked in at “born to lose,” and a torn one in “revolt in the ranks,” a ticket stub to a Julia Nunes show, a barcode from the tag of a shirt i bought that I probably don’t wear anymore,  and a piece of college mail from one of the random persistent colleges that found my psat scores and my address.

I carried Slouching Toward Nirvana around in senior year of high school, but all I’ve got left in there is the packing slip with my scribbles on it, the business card from a Pratt admissions counselor that probably felt bad for me on Portfolio day, a memo I don’t remember the significance of, and a folded in half math assignment that I never did.

When I went to Lebanon this past summer, I took with me Come On In!. I’ve got plane ticket stubs, a question I wrote down but didn’t ask for a political figure I got to meet, a napkin from the restaurant with a view from the mountains, and the speech I wrote and read to a bunch of suits, on behalf of my friends and I.

The receipts, stubs, index cards napkins and letters are scattered throughout the rest of my bukowski books. The other half of my story is told through the poems I was bookmarking. It’s weird to flip through them and be brought back to the who, what, when, where or why of the reason I was intentionally marking the pages and unintentionally documenting the moments. For now it’s Bukowski, tomorrow will be Vonnegut, and after that will be someone else. I am pulling apart these books that keep me together. I’m shoving bits of paper into the binding and they’re shoving all their words into my head to keep me second-guessing everything. I don’t know why I don’t mind letting these books get battered around. Maybe it’s because they batter me around. Maybe it’s because I know that they’ll always last in the way I think about stuff.

My middle school English teachers made sure to beat the word “stuff” out of my rhetorical vocabulary, but as I’ve gotten older and seen how black and white thoughts aren’t

and how academic intelligence isn’t

and how concrete consciousness isn’t

and how simple life insists on not being

and how much harder it is to revise the life out of the emotion of an argument

and how it gets more difficult to stay on topic as I write

well, all I can see is “Stuff.” Everything is stuff. All the stuff tucked into the bindings of my books, all the stuff that marinates the meat of an argument and lives in the marrow of the bone. They try to tenderize and suck the Stuff out of us, but we only end up drowning in it as it flows out of us later.

I don’t know. Life gets harder and you find yourself surrounded by so much Stuff in all its forms that you can’t discern so easily. Just tuck it away for later and find meaning in it when you can’t find meaning in anything else.

Or for when you finally decide to clean your room.

and after I continuously inhaled toxic oil paint fumes, glue, clouds of charcoal dust and so on, I finally got to bed around 3:00 am.

It was there that I had a dream about the future. I was watching it like a movie, so I didn’t play a role in this dream. Noam Chomsky was depressed, destitute, heavily bearded and ignored. nobody knew his name. He was a walking Jekyll/Hyde of cynicism and mopery, because the future kind of sucks, intellectually speaking. The way the world will be run in the future is worse than that last sentence before this one that I tried to get away with.

So anyway, these kids keep walking by him and whispering “Ha-ha! Look, it’s Nom Chompsky! Ha-ha, om nom nom chompsky! My moms said he totes balls crayola!” And every time a kid does this, Chomsky pictures another one of his books bursting into flames in a furnace in a dusty underground office somewhere as a lethargic intern named Barry eats a two day-old mayonaise on rye sandwich in the next room.

Because how could anyone not know his name? He’s Noam Freaking Chomsky, the philosopher, the linguist, the activist! I mean, he used to be on this old website called Wikipedia so people writing stupid blog posts about him could look up his official occupational titles and sound intellectual enough to be familiar with his work! But not anymore, because in the future, censorship is as common as cheap reality TV shows are to the present. And like the TV shows, it is just as embarrassing. Because, see… they don’t just put you on a prohibited list, or hide your work, or threaten your life, or egg your house, or make you the conservative party pinata or even brown-bag your head and erase you from existing— no. They humiliate you. They make you a laughing stock. They make a propaganda infused children’s TV show and fictionalize and bastardize everything you stood for. They find comedy that isn’t there in the way you articulate things, and they project their own delusion and denial onto your philosophies.

“Ha-ha! Nom Chompsky, our kids will make that a thing, and no one will know what it means.”

“Ha-ha! Importance the of and language literacy!”

“Ha-ha! Israeli-Palestinian conflict! How precious. What even is a Palestine? Ha-Ha!”

The end of the dream zooms into Noam Chomsky as he has fallen to his knees, his hands thrown up in despair, his crazed eyes searching the sky for the cosmic reassurance he probably doesn’t believe in, and his anguished cries pierce the sky as he isn’t sure if he’s trying to convince the world or himself when he says

“IT’S NOAM

FUCKING

CHOMSKY.”

So basically, the art studio needs ventilation.

There’s something seductive about the blank page. It’s more than just the crisp wink it gives me as my pen hovers over the page, hesitating to make the first mark. It’s this beauty of the naked page. It is exposed and vulnerable, it has no one else but me. There’s this intimacy that comes with the comfort of knowing that I am facing it the same way. Exposed, vulnerable, and down to no one but these pages bound together to keep my thoughts spiraled together before they spiral out of my control.

It’s the kind of thing that makes me fall in love with a blank page over and over again. I catch myself doing this every time I pick up yet another notebook that I’ll probably discard to the side when I’m no longer in need of its therapy or consul, or out of guilt for my infidelity when I actually have my usual notebook on my person. I’m kind of what one would call a Notebook Whore, I suppose.

Okay, no suppositions. I am a Notebook Whore.

I pace in the stationary aisle, calling to my mind pictures of my battered, but loyal notebook that allows me to scratch up its insides everyday. It sits at home, waiting for me and my cup of coffee well into the night. But there’s this idea has infiltrated my mind, see, and I don’t have my loyal pal by my side. The Muse seduces me into picking up these new notebooks one by one. I leaf through their pages, making sure their margins aren’t too big and their lines are ruled just so. I run my hand over the covers until I find one or two or seven notebooks that please me. Then I favor a couple of them, I hold them in a way that hints this to them but not the others, but I make sure to check all their prices— the pretentious starving artist must always think economically, of course.

I return the most expensive notebooks back to their respective shelves, but it does hurt. I wish they could know that. 

And then I am down to four. I contemplate buying all of them and before I can argue with the excited Muse whose ego has inflated with the thought of all that blank paper devoted to it, I am halfway down aisle before I feel the change in my breast pocket give me a cautionary clink. I slow down and impulsively return the underdog I wanted to root for, but instinctively know wasn’t going to make it.

The Final Cut. It’s kind of like the last three contestants on that cheesy Karaoke show you’ll never admit you used to watch— you can’t choose who will move on to the final round and you insist it over and over to anyone who will listen, but really… you know who will survive. Admit it.

And so I do, in the form of returning the third wheel back to it’s spoke upon the shelf. I grimace and give one last glance behind me as I walk away. Like a bandaid.

Despite my dramatization above, the last two is always the hardest. I have to glance around to be sure that no one walks by me while I am in this emotional state. I want It to understand. I didn’t mean for all this teasing, this built up excitement for the potential, for the promise of friendship and emotional catharsis and all that we would create. We had been through so much already… no. I can’t do this. It is unjust. Unfair. Redundant. Yet… in the other hand, I hold College Ruled. I need that kind of order

that boundary in my line so I can feel the heat of the challenge to break it. Wide Ruled can’t give me that. It allows too much comfort; there is no challenge. There is the frustration of being babied. Wide Ruled lines are like training wheels, made to slow me down when all I want to do is keep up with my thoughts (or let’s be real, at least be able to see the dust they kick up as they sprint ahead of me.)

So with a heavy heart, the last notebook to hit the shelf is usually the first one I court. I leave the scene quietly. Nothing can be said. There is too much pain. Well, that and, I like to think that I still have some grip on normal social behavior, and talking to/forming relationships with inanimate objects— while we all know we do it— is not something you wanted to be walked in on by a stranger.

Especially if the stranger happens to be attractive. Which is exactly what happens as I turn around and spot him smirking at me. I realize he has observed this entire torrid affair. There is awkward silence, because why wouldn’t there be? I smile sheepishly and make my getaway in haste. At times, talking to notebooks can be easier than talking to people.

I really need to buy less notebooks.

What if God wasn’t God? What if God was just this giant Hug that waited for you after your life ended and you were finished putting up with everything you had to put up with(, and some things that you didn’t have to put up with)? What if he worked through people that hugged back extra tight, so he allowed them to call themselves Prophets because his one goal was to get everyone up to what the Prophets liked to call Heaven? When really it was just a giant Hug for you to

finally

just fall asleep in

The only way in would be to believe in Something.

So he allowed the prophets to do what they did because the easiest way to get people believing in anything is to get a bunch of people to believe in Something. Mass-faith. (Mass-murder?)

But, as long as you still believed in Something, be it

music

art

the power of humanity

the power of freedom from the prophets, freedom to live outside of their word, even

you were in.

Why can’t it be like that? There are people that are more alive outside of the church than they ever will be when they are within it.

There’s a hug that’s supposed to be so unconditional, but the Prophets messed up

and no one wants it anymore, so they turn to their neighbor for that embrace, a person they’ll know more than they’ll ever know that omnipotent Hug in the sky

and that makes me wonder: Did the prophets really mess up by turning people away from God, and toward each other?

I don’t know what I’m trying to say. I don’t feel like thinking about Science or Philosophy or my indignant peers that assert the teachings of both concepts, instead of listening to anyone that dares to converse with their spirituality—

that stubborn ball of light inside of me that refuses to die before it gets some answers that can’t be found out of the mouths of old bearded men, or textbooks. It flickers in the face of logic, but in the dead of night in that brief moment between the second my thoughts fade out and the second sleep takes me, it shines brighter than I let it during the day, until it makes the shadows of my thoughts leap and dance in my dreams or nightmares

and I wake up more confused than I was before I fell asleep.

I know there’s something in the sky, but I’m through with the ancient paperbound conditions of men that played God thousands of years ago infringing on my view of the paint streaked clouds at sunset and the shine of the long-deceased stars that overlap them.

I want to see the sky the way I used to. The way I look at my discarded paint palette after a day of getting lost inside of a painting. I don’t want to know where this color ends and where that one begins or what spectrum it falls under and how I can make that color again. 

I want to get lost in the sky and be okay with it. I want to get lost in the sky without wondering whether it really is mine to get lost in. 

I want to get lost in the sky without the certainty of textbooks and cynical old men weighing me down so that I can’t get a better view.

I want to believe in the sky. Why can’t I believe in the sky? The sky that gives me room to explore, instead of the world beneath it filled with humans that run around trying to traffic the skies.

I will believe in the sky that encourages me to explore what I’ve unexplored, instead of being bogged down by the affairs of men that chase me into my safety net where I get tangled up in the things I’m sick of indulging my thoughts with.

I’m sick of writing about myself.

I’m sick of the view from down here. I want to believe in the sky.

Have you ever woken up from a nap that you shouldn’t have taken in the first place

but for every other reason, needed to have

and found that the world was a different place than it was before you fell asleep?

It’s like something happened way down inside of you while you were sleeping that was interrupted when you woke up and you’re still unconsciously seeing the rest of the world through the waning, hazy kaleidoscope veil that blurs the realities of the waking world into illusions, but sharpens everything beneath them.

But then you yawn really big and your ears pop— or you just

blink

and everything is back in focus. All is normal. You are awake.

Whatever we uncover in our grogginess is attributed to the grogginess being a flaw in perception, and never as reality.

What if the only truth we can find is in disorientation?

I stew for hours in silent anger by myself as I try to go about my day, but eventually the night beckons my thoughts and I out for a walk and I get drunk with emotion

so then I try to sober up by watching five episodes of The New Girl and hugging to Celine Diawful with a couple of my best friends under the Christmas lights strung on our wall

but it doesn’t totally sober me up and before I can stop myself, I start writing mediocre poetry in a furious haze so I can close my eyes until morning when I will wake up

hung over from my anger, but conscious enough to remember what I wrote and feel the regret trying, but failing, to break down the anger in the pit of my stomach—the pit that my forced indifference tried to completely hollow out weeks ago.

anger, regret, and stomach-bile bubble together

but there isn’t enough room for everyone, so they rise to my throat to spew out of me

and here I am again.

i guess when you’ve been writing the same journal entries

with varying feelings, but the same scenarios

in the same type of notebooks

about the same person

for most of your young adult life

you should probably stop criticizing nicholas sparks

he chases tired cliches until they are dead upon his page

you’re chasing a muse that got sick of living on your page but not in your heart

the muse is not your friend, do not think otherwise

the muse never did

the muse had it easy

and packed light

made a quick get away, and left the door open.

its shit lays scattered— its marks on your walls, pacing scuffs on your floors, wilted flower petals swept into your corners, sweet echoes long dead

a drowned butterfly floats at the top of the pot of tea for two on the table that has gone as cold as the coals in the furnace that never got a chance to be embers

it’s awfully cold,

but you have a match hidden under your tongue

“fuck you” is too acidic to swallow

strike against the lump of tar in your throat

fill the room with your anger, its flames licking every mark off of the wall,

scuff off the floor,

there are embers in the furnace

there are embers falling around you

dance in the embers, kick up the ashes, and open the door so they follow he who left them behind for you in the first place

no need to say good bye, no one can hear you.

fill the empty space with catharsis

wash your hands

and begin again.

I’m surprisingly chipper on a day that I haven’t seen the sun.

Rain is falling on the world outside my window and Pickles, our squirrel neighbor is running up and down the fire escape on her perpetual mission. I don’t know what it is that she does all day, but I think she might be up to something. She never dwells for long. I feel as though she may also be on to something, there.

My coffee is watered down, but I don’t really mind. My body aches like it always does, but I can stay awake today. I can bob my head and swing my feet off my bed to the sound of the rain pattering on the house and the subtle melodies of Brand New and Anthony Green’s music, instead of falling asleep to it like I’ve been prone to do every Thursday for the past month that it has rained.

Police sirens are going off for extended periods at a time because hey, we live in the city during a desperate time. Isn’t everyone always saying how desperate these times are

all the time?

They say it like it’s this new thing. Desperation is the norm. So maybe instead of always pointing that out, we could just stop and note when things are going well. It would make those brief periods of wellness mean more. It would make them familiar to us. They would be easier to spot in a room so crowded with people looking at their shoes because they’re so suffocated by the stench of desperation that they can’t bring themselves to look up from their feet to see if there’s anyone in the room with a face not pinched by the stench, but spread in a smile that reeks of fresh air.

There go the sirens again. They’re fighting to be heard over the rain, I think. They seem to be winning this sound-off, but I think I’m just going to turn up this music and crank out some more psychology homework under the lamplight that bathes my wrinkled up bed in what feels like sunlight making the greens, teals and pink pattern of my sheets pop in my peripherals as I work, the same way the watered down coffee attempted to make the colors in my veins come to life to get me moving.

I think maybe, I don’t need the coffee today. I’ve got fresh air in my veins instead.

Do you ever get sick of yourself?

Not in a depressing, melancholic, “boo-hoo-my-life-sucks why does no one GET ME? WHY AM I NEVER ENOUGH?” kind of way, but in the way that

that is all that your Insides are screaming. That is the gist of what all of your Insides are screaming in unified cacophony because they’re sick of being pulled to the surface that they can’t stand being reminded of because it makes them recede back into Yourself. But they nervously let you pull them to the surface and the introversion you’ve gotten them used to rumbles in the pit of your stomach, hungry for that satisfied feeling of the colors of your Insides flourishing in all of the comfort that comes from the familiarity you cleave to your chest to regulate your heart beat away from pounding like a drum that calls attention to you and your flaming cheeks filled with the blood of excitement pumped from the heart that doesn’t want to be yours anymore because your digustingly introverted tendencies deprive it of beating in sync with anyone else’s.

So your Insides are in protest. They don’t get it. They don’t get why you’re never good enough. They don’t get why their efforts of backing you up go ignored, unnoticed, unappreciated and unreciprocated. They don’t get why the words you replace the blood in your veins with don’t spill into your respiratory system and out of your mouth every once in awhile, because they’re sick of hearing them all the time. “Share them with someone else!” they say—

They yell. Among other things, in the cacophony. 

I swallow the words they’re sick of hearing and they wallow in the sea of self pity that crashes at the end of my throat. They yell and spit and splash, hoping to push a tear out of my eye

because how else are they going to get anything out of me?

But I do not cry.

I am sick of them. I am sick of their voices. I am sick of myself. I am sick of everything that is going on in my head. I am sick of being my own handicap but blaming everyone else for it. I’m trying to swim up that waterfall of words I keep swallowing, but I keep crashing down at the bottom and Inside the cacophony of my Insides until I’m drowning and I can’t find my way out

and every time I reach out for a hand from the outside, the cacophony turns into a murmur of excited curiosity

until my hands get slippery with the words I’ve tried to arrange in a combination I thought would help me hold on a bit longer, but have actually sabotaged me, pushing me back down into the cacophony.

It’s enough to want me to never share my words again.

Until I realize that I should stop reaching for a hand, and start hanging on to my words and letting them take me where I want to go, because they’re flowing on a current of their own. I just have to jump in and swim.

But for now I’m stuck at the bottom of my throat, the words I keep swallowing, crashing over me and all of my Insides pulling me under with them until I can see nothing but the sludge of self-pity polluting my insides and fogging everything up so that I can’t make my way to the surface and to the raft that will guide me to the words that will take me far away from all of this

I just want to be far away from all of this noise inside of me. I just want to be far away from myself

because I’m pissing myself off.

what else is new?

I’m always supposed to be doing homework

I’m always supposed to be thinking about the things my syllabi tells me to think about and

don’t get me wrong. I enjoy doing that. I recognize and relish in the value of grabbing at the information floating around in the nebula that is human consciousness. But sometimes,

sometimes I can’t concentrate on it.

It really bothers me what human beings allow to bother them. Like this, right now. I’m bothered that people get bothered. I’m falling into it, and somewhere up there or even over my shoulder on a parallel plane and out of my sight, Something is laughing at me. Something is laughing at all of us. But right now, Human egocentrism and my flaming cheeks inspired by the social mortification I’ve just thrown myself into and staggered humiliatingly out of won’t settle for anything but the pre-operational notion that it’s only laughing at me.

But really, that Something is laughing at all of us.

I’ve been thinking about it, lately. Human nature and Human Consciousness are two separate things. And then there’s that Something that we all look for

that meaning, for everything in the Universe to ever mean anything, ever. That

Something.

It’s right under our noses, yet we stretch our consciousnesses to the heavens, to the stars, to the things we can’t see and things we only feel and effects with no clear causes, and sometimes, we get distracted. Well, we get distracted a lot, because when you think about it, the pursuit to Figuring it All Out is more important than actually Figuring It Out. We discover so much more. We expand our Consciousness.

You’d think that instead of evading our Consciousness, the Something would pull something to trip us up lest we become stronger than it. Unless, the Something wants to be swallowed up and put to rest, because it’s weak and tired and lonely and has ALMOST given up because of all

that

waiting.

But not quite, because it didn’t get that mystique for nothing.

But not at all, because it’s having a good time watching us try— having a good time watching us cry.

It’s having a good time watching the perpetual power struggle between Human Consciousness and Human Nature. Who will win?

I just had it. I just. Had it. I went up to order a sandwich, and I’ve lost it somewhere along the way back to this table I’m sitting at where I can see the quad emptying out for the weekend, like the last dregs of that realization I just had. I guess sometimes Physiology likes to pinch-hit. For the sake of this spiel, I’m throwing it out of the game because there’s almost nothing more infuriating than having a thought that grabs you and shakes you, waking you up to something, only to have Someone(thing) run by and violently steal the ball.

Foul play.

Though, I suppose I got lucky only getting a grumbling stomach, when the Something usually doles out a lot worse the closer you get to pulling its curtain back to see who the wizard really is.

Like, what if every death that wasn’t at the hands of the atrocities of human nature, actually came from that omnipotent Something? What if our life force is our consciousness and the relationship between it and the entirety of Human Consciousness? What if when someone died, there was just something in them that couldn’t keep trekking through the consciousness? Something in them that said “I don’t know.”

“I give up.”

“Stop.”

“Enough.”

Or, the curious, excited buzz just died down

and they followed shortly after

where they were greeted by Something, and it told them what who how when where why ever everything that it is

and the eerie silence they had upon the death of the buzz became a satisfied silence of satisfied satisfaction, and they saw why no one could ever know Something. And then their energy was released back into the Nebula of Human Consciousness.

Though, it’s not fair to take into account all the brilliant minds that died suddenly and before it could possibly be their time, only to chalk it up to their internal buzz of curiosity for Something, just dying down.

Maybe they were the closest to figuring Something out.

Maybe Something panics and can’t have that, so we can’t have them.

Did they get the same treatment upon Death? Or were they immediately disposed of, lest their energy be contaminated with too much knowledge? Their Consciousness too superior to their Nature?

“…energy can neither be created nor be destroyed: it can be transformed from one form to another or transferred from one place to another.”

They can’t be disposed of, which is why there are always going to be untimely, unjust, unknown causes of death in this world.

Just like there is always going to be the Something that can’t be known but its balance will be felt.

Is the Something actually just a messenger? 

Is the Something actually Nothing?

Is the Something a destination disguised as a catcher in the rye

to throw us back into the Consciousness to keep the cycle going—

To tell us that finding it is not as important as all the somethings we find on our journey to unveil that Something

because finding that Something and throwing it into the Consciousness will break it

we will all know

we will think there is nothing else to know

our buzz will be quelled

our life-force will run down

Human Nature will win out and we will all,

we will all be Nothing.

Maybe I’m overestimating Human Consciousness and cosmic activity and the Something is still laughing at me over my shoulder, feeling victorious for sending that mere rumble to my stomach that threw me so far off track. But at least it’s not laughing at me for something as silly as letting social interactions with the opposite sex take my mind off of grabbing from the nebula.

And at least I’m still here.

I’m listening to this music that reminds me of you and this is a letter for you even though you’ll never read it

you’re driving me crazy.

i have a headache and it’s put me in a frenzy

i want to create to create to create to create to create to create to create

something

ripping out random pieces of cardboard

tacking them to the wall and then

taking them down

endless tubes of paint

i can’t find the colors i want

endless empty pages spiraled together invite me to spiral out of control

like i still have any

i can’t form a coherent stream of words that will bring me to you

and i can’t perform the song in my heart in a voice that will bring you to me

just the voice in my head into the words on this page

i still can’t find a canvas big enough

pencil sharp enough

a pen dark enough

cup of coffee endless enough

to satisfy the throbbing in my head that pounds at the back of my eyes

like a metaphor that wants to get out but just can’t figure the combination for the satisfying click of liberation that unlocks the door and sets it free

i can’t remember a time when i wasn’t even a little tired

i can’t remember a time when my eyes didn’t burn even a little bit

i can’t remember a time when the dark circles under my eyes weren’t highlighted by the crust of eyeliner on my lids and the gooey sediment of the same material that rests in the corner of my tear ducts like a piece of spinach in your teeth that becomes the one being spoken to

but never does anyone tell it that it shouldn’t be there

never does anyone tell you that you have a little something

right

there

never does anyone address the dark sediment

never does anyone address the dark with sentiment

there’s something on the inside that wants to get out and i want to let it out but i can’t let it out until i let someone in and i can’t let someone in until they want to come in and no one will want to come in unless i

somehow

can sing these words in a pretty voice with strings under under my fingers and my hair pinned up and my guard let down a flowing dress embracing my hips some rouge on my lips rhymes flirting with my tongue a wrinkle in my nose and my bright eyes close as i hit that note

the only note you’d ever read because it’s being thrown in your face

like a brick fallen from the cosmos that you think has you seeing stars

when really you’ve just walked into a wall

You’d never go looking for this letter

filled with notes upon notes pulled from the strings of my heart that play the song i can’t let out of my head

I hope you keep seeing stars.

eatsleepdraw:

Eatsleepdraw Boston sketch meet-up happening now.

Due to weather, we have moved to the Pru center food court. Hit us up on twitter if you want to join us. @eatsleepdraw

This was fun.

I love living in the city and being a part of things like this.

I can’t contain my contribution to 500 characters in an Ask Box, so onto my blog it goes.

I’ve been reading that people think that Helga’s story-lines seemed to always center around her infatuation with Arnold. I disagree with that, because personally, I think that Hey Arnold! covered deeper issues in Helga’s life than her unrequited love for Arnold.

Helga came from a neglectful and verbally abusive household. In “Helga on The Couch,” it was made clear that the reason she latched onto the idea of Arnold so early is because his character embodied all of the qualities that she yearned for but could never find at home. He noticed her. He was nice to her. He liked her bow because it was pink like her pants.

Helga’s sister Olga was a Type-A overachiever that was rarely home, so when the part-time bum/full time beeper emporium king Bob Pataki and his perpetually dazed and alcoholic wife Merriam weren’t wrapped up in their own banal day to day existences, they were devoting their attention to one of the few constants (Olga) in their life that made them feel like they were doing a good job, and that they were justified with the way they went about raising their family. The Pataki parental unit had their own issues.

So Helga grew up in the shadow of her “perfect” sister Olga. Vying for any type of attention from her parents proved fruitless a lot of the time, so she turned to her books. Helga’s vocabulary and literary allusions proved that to me. Coolest nine year old ever. From these books, she was inspired to write. She over-romanticized a lot because of living vicariously through her books to escape the unpleasant life at home. I feel like maybe the reason Helga is so emphatic about Arnold is because he’s the object of all the affection she’s been too hardened to release. He’s also someone real that sees through that hardness. Even if Helga doesn’t really let him in, the fact that he’s willing to come in upon invitation is assurance enough for her that the world is a little bit like all that positivity that Arnold spews— even if she can’t wrap her cynicism around his way of thinking sometimes.

The reason that Helga was so “mean” to Arnold was because of her pent up frustration toward her parents who, as mean as she could be to them, still didn’t pay her much attention. Then there were the peers at school who took the way she presented herself for face value and didn’t bother to get to know her further. The way Arnold was still nice to her after the way she treated him was an affirmation for Helga; who still cares for you even when you’re a bitch? Someone who loves you. Even if she knew it unconsciously, it was still there. It kept her dependency on having Arnold in her life there. She felt like someone finally cared for her.

The show was always exploring Helga’s personal life beyond Arnold, but the reason that it seemed so centered around Arnold is because he is her anchor. He represents the qualities in herself that weren’t nurtured by a warm environment, so they lie deep inside of her because any time she has shown them, she has been rejected or ignored. It’s apparent in a lot of situations that he inspires her to want to show them. It’s easy to want to view the way Helga is portrayed vs. the way Arnold is portrayed, through the feminist lens and say that her infatuation with him is typical to what we expect the female character’s story to centered around, but

I don’t think it’s about that.

Because Helga isn’t infatuated with Arnold, so much as she is with the idea of everything he represents.

The Helga/Arnold story is a look into the hope and inspiration you can find in people when the ones closest to you have let you down and how even the smallest of kind gestures can change a person’s world.

That can be a dangerously cliche message to convey, but I think Hey Arnold! executed it brilliantly.