12.11.11

Excerpts from my journal

11.21.10:
Snow this morning, but not quite so cold as it has been. As I was walking, the mountains were half-covered in an elusive white mist framed perfectly by a grey sky - so powerful in their peaceful, dominating presence.
...
In short, I refused the Lord; I provoked Him - "Lord," I said, "maybe this isn't the right time for me; perhaps I can receive this blessing a little later?"
...
I tried for some time after to compensate by asking forgiveness, but the moment had passed, the door had closed with the opportunity behind it lost. I felt like I had betrayed a friend and left Him with a hurt and saddened heart.

12.5.10:
But there is a deep and subtle hope and indeed there has been during even the darkest hours of these past few days that has resided at the edges of my heart - a spiritual peace that has soothed, revealed, and reminded.

12.21.10:
The semester and its memories, both dear and terrible, seem so distant now. Perhaps this is the mark of entering new stages of life and my mind even begins to wonder if our passage from mortality would not bear the same transitory feelings.

1.23.11:
A joy and gratitude fill my heart this morning as I can hardly describe to you. I am sitting again in this small chapel in Ntinda during my first sacrament meeting back in Kampala. Can I but begin to tell you what immense happiness and sweet gratitude reside here? These beautiful saints and pioneers, how grateful I am for their examples of willingness and faith. How grateful I am to be here again.

1.29.11:
In the car of my dear friend Alfred on the road from Gulu back to Kampala.
...
There is an African tree which I have seen frequently on this drive whose bright red flowers are in almost full bloom. Other trees there are, like gigantic flat umbrellas, but my favorites are those massive round monuments standing in motherly superiority and teeming with life as though giant green beehives. The scenery extends outward from the road in simple, untouched magnificence. And people by the thousands; scarcely have we gone a quarter of a mile without passing a person walking, on bicycle, on motorcycle - in towns along the way or simply traveling to some unseen location.

2.20.11:
No church today as the Ugandan elections are taking place. Megan has been terribly sick the last few days and so it has been better that we have been encouraged to stay home; she has been able to rest and recover.

4.23.11:
It is my first Sunday back in Provo. It was cold this morning, but clear; it looks to be the beginning of a very beautiful day.

5.29.11:
I ask myself, when someone comes to you distraught, why do you not shed tears with them? Why do you keep yourself aloof from shared emotion? There are a few immediate responses in my mind; the first is: because it does not resolve anything - it doesn't accomplish anything to sit and cry with someone; to cry with them only makes the solution more elusive and unrealized. But this mentality highlights another immediate response - more of a feeling - which is of nervousness and fear. But what am I afraid of?
...
I think my mind thinks that empathy is a weakness; the potential, it posits, of a person is to overcome challenges and be consistently confident and at peace. Emotion, it says, is merely an obstacle to viewing these deeper assurances. For me, to be emotional with a person would actually be hurting them as it would not help them see the solution and, what is worse, would only be admitting to the fact that I do not already know the solution. I would be fatalistic and would actually make me a worse friend - why embrace someone lost in a dark cave? Does your embrace really help them find a way out?
...
But what do these opinions really come down to? Perhaps these logical thoughts are but a fearful escape. But what is it really that I am afraid of?
...
Someone's disapproval of my character is, I think, among my most prominent terrors. Even my spirituality, in many senses, can be so dangerously tied to my fear of the bias judgments of others; and not so much for them to think I am flawed or even arrogant, but for them to consider me weak in any way. For them to think I am what I passionately do not wish to be.

6.12.11:
To the addict, what hope is there of repentance?

7.17.11:
Perhaps the problems I have are a part of who I am; of course, this scares me to say because it implies that I cannot eventually purge myself of my issues. I'm afraid of not being rid of that part of myself because it is something that begets misery; and reflecting, I am all the more scared because of the variable nature of myself - I am afraid because I cannot have complete control.

8.7.11:
The pieces inside me do not cease their movements: although storms may rage at times, the weather never stops and this is, I think, an essential consideration. Perhaps emotions do not necessarily end; perhaps they are not, as I have been so apt to think, a virus to be waited upon as an exterior trial to be borne. The body never stops, while we live, breathing, beating, processing, moving, healing, regenerating, and so on. So too do we never stop synthesizing, thinking, analyzing, feeling, desiring, searching, wondering, and so on.
...
Emotions and thoughts: they are always moving and changing and developing.

9.11.11:
Ten years ago today, early in the morning, my mother was driving me to my friend's house to pick him up so that she could then take us both to seminary. When Nick got in the car, he mentioned something about the World Trade Centers. We switched on the radio and listened in horror as it was described to us what had happened, what was still happening.

9.18.11:
In a strange mood today; tired, but not necessarily apathetic or melancholy. Perhaps a little irritable as well, but also peaceful; there is also a little bit of nervousness and anticipation.
...
There is just not enough time: that is the feeling.

9.25.11:
So strange to think that God has the completeness of the human entity understood - that the entire range of the being is open to His vision. That its purpose and all its possibilities are known to Him and understood by Him - is there anything on Earth for which we could claim the same? Maybe carrots?
...
What comes first, lying or fear?

10.16.11:
This may sound extremely arrogant, but it has constituted a tender mercy for me that Noelle has often complimented me on things that I have tried to value about myself, but about which I have been constantly unsatisfied. I have been and am so grateful for her; this experience continues to be beautiful and a tender blessing.

11.13.11:
This journal comes to a close as does my time at BYU - something like 37 days.

11.20.11:
Less than 30 days now.

12.4.11:
As the newness of recent discoveries wears off, I fear that I have begun sinking back into old habits of fear, doubt, and judgment. I feel tired - the weight of melancholy thoughts bearing down upon me; questions steeped in ambiguity surface from deep within and surge and fade in a pacifying, almost apathetic desire for unknowns.
...
Sometimes I think my emotions are completely separate from myself and a disease that I have to deal with. Sometimes I think my emotions are myself and that what I feel defines who I am, for better or for worse. And sometimes I think that my emotions are a part of me, an important piece of my being that can provide me with information about myself, kind of like me talking to me; not something that defines me or my value, but something that moves within me as an important piece of who I am.

12.11.11:
The last page of this journal as I enjoy my last Sunday here in Provo. I think of my first Sunday here, the many, many Sundays I have spent: in the Riv, at the State Hospital, at the Branbury, at the Riv again, Carriage Cove, the Crestwood, and now DeVere. I think of Ethiopia and Uganda - the gorgeous Sundays I was blessed to have spent with some of the most faithful, beautiful people and friends I have ever met. My heart travels to all these Sundays and the years that have passed in between them - it makes me simultaneously grateful and terrified. The weight of those years, their teachings, their people, everything, bearing down upon me as though afraid to be ignored, afraid to be forgotten. And I am afraid to forget, and yet, so am I afraid also to remember, and attempt to process the profundity of emotions that surge within me, again and again like waves upon an empty beach.

12.4.11

I listen to the song Street Spirit (Fade Out) by Radiohead followed by Dissolved Girl by Massive Attack - a gin and tonic mixture that pulls to the surface of my thoughts the heavy elements of myself. "Immerse your soul in love," the one says. And then the other, "say, say my name; need a little love to ease the pain." The rending pleas of the first song melting slowly into the smooth trip-hop vibes of the second; hurting and then meditating; exhausting and then resting.

My body accepts the sounds and meanings with varied opinions. I find it strange how it seems like I am so many people at once.

My feet can barely hear the music - the right foot curls its toes under and then stretches them back again, the left lays silent with the chair leg wedged in between the second and third toe. They remind me that they are bare and cold, but they do not complain, they simply inform. After several minutes, I notice that my right foot has been softly kicking to the slow beat; seems like it could hear after all. As for the left, the chair leg is now wedged between my fourth and pinky toe and the foot is jittery - it gets like that when the silver bell from my privates starts ringing.

My privates, at regular intervals, are tapping on a silver bell to signal that a trip to the toilet is preferable. However, I will ignore the bell for another 30 minutes or so during which time the bell will slowly transform into a large campanile and my small intestines into a gigantic metal hammer, pounding in less frequent, but more violent intervals until I finally traverse the 10 ft. or so from where I sit to the bathroom. Due to the distraction, my privates are not very responsive to the music, though, ironically, my efforts to soothe their insistence largely involves rocking and swaying to the various beats. I wonder if my privates are fooled. Probably not. That's okay though, I have other techniques I can use if things get bad.

My hands hear the music and are occasionally given to tapping, but they are mostly involved in typing, scratching my scalp, supporting my head when it bows to the side to think, and waiting. Other less frequent occupations include scraping at the small scabs on my face, pulling out loose eyebrow hairs, rubbing my eyes, texting, dislodging earwax, and cracking my knuckles; picking and rubbing my nose is also a favorite, but my nose seems pretty clean at the moment.

32 minutes later and the bells have stopped ringing, the alleviating comfort of their echoes fading into a peacefully empty rest.

My nose itches. My nose always itches. And what is more, my nose and I hate each other. Well, I guess that's unfair to say: I'm not completely sure as to my nose's feelings toward me. I posit one of three scenarios:

1. My nose does, in fact, hate me. Like Satan himself, the little devil lives to annoy me and buffet me with its itching, hurting, flowing, snotting, sniffling, aching, sneezing reminders that it, like a malignant tumor, has attached itself to my face in order that, one day, it might destroy me. It cackles and giggles in disgusting evil as it sucks dust and pollen into its ample caverns, purposefully looking for excuses to produce exorbitant amounts of snot such that any normal activity becomes a red-nosed, red-eyed, red-tempered venture into hay-fever hell. Even as I type, I can feel the demon cantering through the my nasal causeways, wielding a cheese grater the size of a thimble and scraping it against the interiors of my sinuses. "Curse you!" I say as I sniff, rub, and type some more.

2. My nose has severe mental challenges. This is the more benign ascription of my nose's pitiful attempts to actually be a nose. Perhaps it just doesn't know quite how to do it: wet and weepy it tries it hardest to smell and breathe, but for some reason just doesn't make the connection that its constant flow of secretions just doesn't help. It's like a toddler making a magical potion using all the things he or she can find in mommy and daddy's medicine cabinet - the sentiment is pure, but the methods and result disgusting, terrifying, and infuriating. To be honest though, I tend to lean towards this explanation only when I am seriously considering blowing off my nose with the nearest handgun.

3. My nose is a melodramatic manic depressant. Like a teenager alcoholic, my nose weeps with a deep sense of loneliness and confusion as it throws up again and again into the nearest toilet. Though sometimes cheerful, my nose has only to think about the crunching of fall leaves or fresh cut grass in order to fall back into and wallow through the mire of mucus and allergenic sobs of an addiction-inspired depression. It can't help itself and yet wishes it could, and it doesn't know why. The poor soul is doomed to a life of noncommittal solitude as it drinks glass after glass of Benadrylic cocktails only to vomit their contents in violent retribution once the non-drowsy buzz has worn off. This explanation can provide some pity and even empathy, but you must understand that patience soon wears thin when you're the one being puked on.

The music is over now and I must leave: a different kind of bell is ringing. More of a gong, actually.

11.13.11

What if we could fly?
Would angels call upon us
and beg us for ease?

11.12.11

A cold wind still blows
From southeast chills and grey clouds
Scarves are not enough

11.10.11

Graves cry with women
But soon knowledge calls them back
To lives beyond earth

11.3.11

Benjamin said that we are nothing.

In a mathematical sense, that is a limit that seems to approach the truth - even if we consider this planet alone with its billions, a single human being takes up a pitifully miniscule, insignificant amount of space; although when you're standing next to someone at a urinal, it honestly doesn't feel that way.

How many people could we fit on earth if we all gave each other the space we wanted? I think about how skewed that distribution might be, or how it is changing. It seems like we want more and more space, or at least plenty of glass screens between me and he. We like our glass screens, they protect us from inlaws.

In the sense of worthiness, do we deserve anything? Benjamin said no; Benjamin said we are nothing. And yet I deserve all the time - my mother tells me so - a cookie or a "swift kick in the pants." I do hope she means the backside of my pants. Do we ever really deserve cookies? I think it is my clandestine hope in life to one day merit a snickerdoodle.

I remember one day sitting on the bus going to a volleyball game. We were sitting on the chairs with our legs open, facing the ail and throwing oranges across the ail in an effort to hit each other's genitals.

I remember one day sitting in a room of my house with some friends. We were sitting across the room from each other with our legs open. We were throwing a plastic eightball across the room in an effort to hit each other's genitals. I hope you better understand now my preference as to the kicking of my pants.

In the sense of metaphysics, can we prove Ben wrong? What proof is there that matter exists? I mean, does anything really exist? Descartes seemed to think so, and he provided a proof. Ironic that Descartes tried to discount nothingness by proving the existence of God (which constituted a brilliant attempt in my opinion) and that Benjamin substantiated his argument of nothingness by comparing us to God. Can they both be right? Probably.

I remember one day having the stomach flu and feeling like an insomniac with knives in his hands was trying to sleep on a steel rotating bed inside my abdomen. I guess pain doesn't really prove anything though. Dammit.

In the sense of worth, I think I passionately disagree with Ben. But of course this begs the question: do I view myself as of the same worth as God?

I once arm wrestled my father and exerted myself to such a degree that my nose started bleeding. We both laughed hysterically as my mother - also laughing - ran into the kitchen to get me some tissue paper. Sometimes I pray that way, sometimes I convince myself that I'm too tired though, sometimes I am too tired.

Who measures worth? Who measures nothingness? I hope its not me, or people like me. Ben went with = 0; Descartes went with > 0. Maybe it's somewhere in between, maybe ≥ 0. But that just puts us back at mathematics.

In the sense of desire, I really don't know what to do. I desire things all the time including sleeping in, sleeping through church meetings, taking a nap instead of studying the scriptures, dozing off during General Conference talks, sawing logs during the movie they show in the temple, deeply meditating during my girlfriend's favorite part of a motivational speech, conversing with Morpheus during a particularly long prayer, etc. I think I desire other things besides sleep, but most of those things cost money.

One night I was supposed to go to a meteor shower with my friend Tara. When she came to my house to pick me up, my mother could not find me - I had fallen asleep on the floor of my room. Sometimes my faith is like that, probably most of the time. Could that be why I'm nothing?

10.31.11

Halloween on Alta Dr. meant you had to hit at least three houses - Roger's, Janette's, and Jo's. The holiday was a big event for our neighborhood and for the surrounding neighborhoods, my brothers and friends and I filling pillow cases to the brim with a better catch every year - the blue and red and silver fish flopping and jostling their paper fins as they struggled for breath - ultimately giving up their chocolate and nougat ghosts to greedy costumed fishermen.

Roger's house was stage-right, dark and dismal. As you approached along the driveway, you could just barely see a table on the porch. Closer and there was a bowl of candy on the table. A simple setup, novel, but there was, of course, a sickening twist.

 ***

Roger's daughter was an acquaintance of mine at school and the victim of one of the first terrible injustices I can remember. We were graduating Junior High School together, an exciting time. I remember one day walking to the bus and watching a couple kissing passionately, on another day I observed a boy throw up, on another I heard whispers of "that one redhead" being raped, and there were always dirty stories of dirty videos, lingo, slang, new vocabularies that had to be learned quickly on penalty of ostracization, on another day there was my first girlfriend giggling with nameless cohorts, on another a fear of wetting my pants, on another a fear of someone noticing the awkward angle of my pants due to the quintessentially pre-teen concentrations of blood that frustrated me to no end in the nature of their volatile, seemingly random occurrences; "random" in the current context being synonymous with embarrassment and thus, death - all these memories floating in the estuary of pubescent emotion and imagination where nervous feet still prepare to board the bus. It is like some migratory settlement, some open market of the newest signals, symbols of confidence being exhibited by frantic-eyed performers, their audiences simultaneously dazed in awful rapture and secretly plotting their individual means of perfect mimicry. That was the world of the bus.

At the end of eighth grade I asked Roger's daughter to sign my yearbook. As she was doing so, a tall, muscular boy named Brandon approached us. He insulted her, she defended, and he insulted her again before leaving us, my yearbook still in her hand. She finished writing her sweet congratulations and best wishes; she handed me back the yearbook and walked away weeping.

***

Roger's porch was lit by a solitary black light, casting unearthly shadows of perfect terror. And there, in the middle of the table, on a silver platter, was Roger's head, pale and bloody. "Take one please; only one piece of candy," the head would say in a hallow voice, as though its vocal chords were no match for the undead decay creeping up slowly from the empty veins at the neck. Roger was always just seconds from the guillotine, freshly lulling open his tired eyes to observe the world as if for the last time; each child the son or daughter of some French revolutionary, screaming as a parent chuckled, delighted at the memory of Her Majesty The Blade.

Stage-left was Jo's house. No twists here, only the most finely crafted jack-o-lanterns I have ever seen.

***

Jo was one of my dearest childhood friends and, to the best of my knowledge, is still one of the best artists of all time, ever. I was friends too with Chris and Kevin, but this latter friendship was much more about looking up sexual words in the dictionary, trying to figure out what a condom was, and getting caught repeatedly looking at Playboy magazines whilst (to the grave, no pun intended) swearing that they were only the latest issues of Sports Illustrated.

But Jo's friendship was much more meaningful, we would draw or paint together in her garage and talk. She loved Greenday and mohawks, she showed me once a model of a M*A*S*H helicopter she had made, she showed me her art, we often rollerbladed together.

At one point Jo owned a pair of large toads. One day we were in the garage observing the toads - one was sitting on top of the other. "I think they're mating," I said. That was my only awkward moment with Jo.

One summer Jo came back from school to visit. She had a purple mohawk and piercings. She came over to our house and told our family about her new adventures, we laughed at her stories (somehow a bumblebee had once gotten caught in her mohawk) and were excited for Jo, we loved her, I loved her.

***

Each pumpkin on the walkway leading up to Jo's front door was a brilliant work of art. There were symbols or scenes, witches, beasts, dragons, everything - a museum made mausoleum, the artwork displayed in creeping beauty to visitors with images of Roger's severed head still fresh in their minds. At the door there was usually only a simple bowl; that's just how Jo's family was, a bit reclusive, a bit mysterious. I would never enter the kitchen or living room of that house until years later, when Jo and her family had long since stopped curating the eery walkway.

Across the street was Janette's house, the piéce de résistance. Even before you approached the house, even before you approached the cul-de-sac, you knew about Janette, the witch, her wailing cackle piercing the night at regular intervals, carrying on for miles. At Janette's there was no candy, there was something else: witch's brew. Her evil screeches billowing from her like the clouds from her gigantic black cauldron. The witch herself was disgusting, sitting, one would imagine, on a chair made from the bones of eaten children. As she poured you a drink, you wondered what frightening ingredients had been added, what subtle poisons might be found within. Long, green fingers handed you the styrofoam cup from which you drank your doom; Hawaiian Punch, devious.

Janette died of cancer a few years ago. Every Halloween I remember her, hear her witch's laugh resounding in my head, taste the brew. It tastes like childhood, it tastes like cool autumn nights when I didn't wish my mattress was an ice block before falling asleep. It tastes like something instantly lovable and instantly respected. That was Janette to me, stubborn, but friendly - powerful in personality and sweet in understanding. Dedicated to community and neighborhood and family, a mover, and the finest screamer I have ever heard. No witch I have met comes close. Halloween isn't the same without Janette, but at the same time, Halloween couldn't be what it is to me without her.

10.19.11

I remember it as a perfect day in California, only a few skim-milky clouds spreading thin across a pale sky. I like to think that an airplane or two crossed that weightless sky as they often did. My mother and I were in the backyard of our house. I remember the backyard only slightly - there was a small table and chairs, the table may have even had a large umbrella to shade it from Valencia's heavy July's and August's. That was the same house that resided across the street for a taller house that had, at the tip of its roof, a small concrete cap that always looked like snow to me. Ironic too as I do not remember it ever snowing there, though it did once - we have pictures.

That was the same house from which we moved when I was still relatively young. I remember sitting in the passenger seat of our car as my mother drove us away, down Gaucho Ct. one last time. As we reached the corner of Gaucho and Magdalena, she began to weep. As I reflect now, I can only imagine what she felt - perhaps that strange quasi-grief that so often accompanies us when we move on to a new stage of life, a feeling of gentle peace and loss that simmers late into the evening, pushing our minds into reverie as we go from Magdalena to Del Monte to Estaban, down John Russell to Alta Dr., where the years of this new stage will sweep by in brilliance.

But all that is to come; for now, my mother and I are still in the backyard on Gaucho Ct. A tall wooden fence surrounds the backyard, a dark, dry wood that is frequented with knotted holes just big enough to peek through. One time I remember observing a gigantic grasshopper crawl across the fence on the left side of the patio - it was about as big as my whole head, maybe my entire body, it inevitably gets bigger every time I am brave enough to recall the memory. Suddenly the grasshopper haphazardly jumped off the fence and attacked me; I am still terrified of grasshoppers.

My dear mother will not budge, she has a plate of macaroni and cheese in front of her and is wielding a fork with one solitary, cheesy noodle impaled upon it. I do not want to eat the noodle; my mind cries against it in childish drama. I simultaneously crave the attention of my mother, fear the social implications of walking away, and am adamantly determined never to admit that menacing noodle into my tiny mouth. I do not want to eat the noodle! Why do I have to eat it!? Its gross; I don't like it; I don't want it!

Surprisingly, I'm not sure entirely why I don't want it. I mean, it might not taste amazing, but what am I so afraid of? And I afraid it will kill me? Not really. Hurt me? No. Cause emotional duress? Leave a bad taste in my mouth? Induce violent convulsions? No, maybe a little, but not really, and no. Are any of my friends there to make fun of me? No. Wow, I'm really running out of possibilities...

Somehow the situation embarrasses me; somehow I have decided that I do not want to eat the noodle (perhaps due to its purely undesirable unknown-ness) and that now eating it would have some adverse effect on my control of the scenario. My mother doesn't understand: she thinks that eating the noodle will help me overcome some trivial fear of the unknown. Little does she know how badly she is upsetting the complete social comfort of my life that I worked so desperately hard to achieve; an environment where I simply do not do what I don't want to do - what is she trying to pull!? I do not want to eat the noodle!

My mother understood perfectly. Years of mature confidence and patience now paid off as she brandished that cursed silverware with its painfully unrelenting noodle. She waited, resolute in winning this mental battle, in staking her claim and completely derailing the institutional cohesion of my wonderfully parasitic utopia. But I was fixed there too with something far more dangerous than patience, confidence, and determination: love.

To this day, I hate macaroni and cheese. To this day I shudder at its gooey consistency and the squishy sounds of cheese and noodle and bowl. To this day I hesitate to accept such apparently undesirable dishes into my mouth and stomach; into my being. And to this day I remember somewhere deep within me the lesson of that one lonesome noodle. And though I may weep and kick and hurt that such a noodle be presented me, ultimately I must take it and eat it, just like I did on that early-summer's day. And once the noodle hits my mouth and I begin to chew I inevitably remember that mac and cheese doesn't taste so bad or that, even if it does, the reasons that fix me there seem to always infuse the pain of chews and swallows with something from my mother's tender, deep desire.

10.17.11

It is a warm Saturday morning in Ntinda; the kind that remind you that here, along the equator, the afternoons come quickly and drench the city with a dense, palpable heat. The sun, elsewhere so fickle, beams down in a strange consistence, as though the world is finally able to rest in a routine balance. The sun; the sun that "[God] maketh [to] rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust" (Matthew 5:45, KJV).

It is a short walk to where we are going. First we take a small asphalt path to Bukoto road where, directly across from us, there is a gigantic Evangelical church: Victory Christ Church. On Friday and Saturday and Sunday nights, large crowds fill the hall and sing until early hours of the morning. I wonder now how they feel as they sing, how they feel after. Do they smile as they think back on their evenings? Do heavy heads nod in blissful relaxation?

We turn right and walk along Bukoto. On the left (across the street) there is a slight hill which drops down sharply to end in a small gutter before meeting the road. On the right there are a few gated houses which are lined with bushes and low trees. Trucks often park along the grassy sidewalk, their gigantic hulls finally resting from whatever long journey ended with their march into the city, no doubt being slightly annoyed as they did so by the many small streets that would hardly admit them. Eventually we cross to the left side and start walking up the small hill along a dirt path. To our right is Buddies - a small, yet immensely popular bar and dance club. Strait ahead, just behind Buddies, there is a beautiful building within a gated complex; it is to this building that we are headed.

The building is locked, so we wait out front for Christine to come with the key. As we wait, a large open-backed truck backs up to Buddies and the workers there start loading it with crates. I hardly notice at first, we are still a bit tired as we stand here in the early morning - the heavy mists of dreams still squeezing our eyes tight and pushing yawns from deep behind our cheeks and jaws. Eventually I notice though; I notice the tall towers of crates waiting to enter the truck, I notice the men walking back and forth, in and out of the club as more crates and more crates and more crates now populate the small dirt path. In the aftermath of some swirling massacre, these men work to clear away the decay.

The crates are full of empty beer bottles, empty laughs, empty hours of escape. Some still half-full of liquid, they slosh and spill as they were thrown into the truck - bleeding carcases flailing their rag-doll limbs as they are stacked in a putrid bliss. More crates, the bottles clinking together in posthumous screams, their open eyes staring up at heaven, empty, blank, the glassy film of death eternally contemplating in rapt unawareness, as though the eyes, before their glazed atrophy, were forever fixed on one delightfully elusive thought; a fixation now so completely unaffected by any movement of flesh that one could almost believe that in resting peace, in some cloudy afterlife, that empty soul just might find it.

More crates, more bottles, stacking, hefting, stacking, sliding, the hands of these gravediggers wet and soiled. No gloves, no masks, they laugh in foreign tongues as they breathe the fumes of forgotten lives. I don't know how to feel; I feel sad, angry, a twitch of melodrama in the monotony and unfeeling nature of the task being witnessed. I wonder where the souls had traveled to after leaving the open bottles, where they had finally laid down to rest. I wonder what brought them here. I wonder how many more crates they will pull out of the minotaur's cave.

And then Christine is there, opening the gate that we might enter the compound and begin to clean the building. I grab a broom and start with the largest room upstairs, the room where our Sunday services are held, the room where men in white shirts pray and bless our bread and water, where sincere voices sing a cappella, where children wonder why everyone is suddenly so quiet and why their mothers weep.

I think of the men outside, sweeping away as I am sweeping. Sweeping away the same dust and ashes, but from so different a faith. I suddenly feel a slight defensiveness as I reach for some rational claim, for some logically gated compound within myself. It is frustrating that I do not find it, I find only simple, longing waves of sadness. Where do the souls go before their ghosts are swept up by our brooms?

10.10.11

 
The theatre was a large circular building at the north end of campus. On the outside it was layered with dull pink and beige rock; on the inside it was layered with Athens and Ireland; the streets of fair Vienna, the dismal tombs of Danish kingdoms. Like any theatre house, in this one there were those that dared believe, dared become, dared die upon those foreign scapes, crying out in terror to a sea of watchful ghosts who observed this mortal strife in true attitude of ghastly phantasms - viewing, hurting, pleading, laughing, wondering, lamenting, but never helping, their hands tied in painful diaphaneity and words inaudible to the poor characters strutting or crawling round in disastrous humanity.

But ironically, both can feel both - the ghosts and the players - perhaps so like life in which we strut and crawl almost oblivious to the myriads of hands and hearts and voices of those invisible; dead to us as we die in solemn loneliness, but alive in us as though each generation amplifies the next. This is the audience of the stage: the emotional might of the collective channeled through the individual - him given a powerful responsibility, the giant chest of his theatre laying open, bleeding its unbridled passions upon him, begging him, daring him to express them with what before were only words. And grabbing hold he does so, pulling on the reigns of some colossus beast as though it were the sea, commanding it, tugging with what talent he have at hopes and interests and imaginations, screaming the incantations of some long-dead sorcerer as he feels a force he cannot see, as he dreams a face that cannot be. Is this as the angels are to us?

I see my friend Jamie as she walks into New England, walks into Sarah; Mike into James. With her hands Sarah weaves her story for us, inquirers looking through a part-time veil. Sarah cannot speak and passionately resists the efforts of James to train her to do so. Without word, she is perfect - her expressions are beautiful, her emotion conveyed in silent brilliance, like a candle flame, flickering soundless meanings to which we ghosts can still relate. James translates for her, but only the words. They were the children of us lesser gods, we watching from the stars and clouds that then surrounded our New England. They prayed to us and we listened. And we prayed for them, in turn, to greater gods.

Outside the play house there is a small parking lot where, one day, a group of us are waiting. It is a Saturday, I believe - just practice today. The sun is still low and the air is dry and cool, but not cold. What soon becomes extraordinary is the wind - that day the wind blew powerfully from somewhere southeast, coming through our groups in strong, exhaling breathes. Most of us stayed in our cars or huddled near the theatre doors, but Mike went and sat on the small white fence in front of the lot, his arms high, the leather of his jacket snapping like a thick flag as it blew freely behind him - Michael was our archangel. I left my car and stood to watch him for a moment. Then I closed my eyes and slightly lifted my own arms, leaning into the sweeping pressure of Michael's beating wings.

10.9.11

I am afraid of being angry with God, though I often am. Afraid that my anger will require some harsh, predicated punishment that He, impersonally, will be obligated to deliver. Last night I realized that some unknown someone had taken advantage of me, had taken something that I desperately needed - something that I had worked hard to secure for myself - and would not be returning it. I, of course, went immediately to God in order to direct my fury as He is obviously the one in control of things that I desperately need - this implying that I am in control of everything else - this implying that I should only really recognize Him in the extremes, in the tails of my logical, bell-curve existence - this implying that only injustice or extra-justice should be attributed to God - this implying that God is more mysterious than science has previous proven - this implying that He is not trustworthy as to matters of certainty - this implying that there is an incomprehensible system of divine justice which, as it cannot be predicted, can only be feared - this implying that God, be He personal or impersonal, only allocates mercy to those righteous souls who would never, as a consequence of their saintly nature, be angry with Him - this implying that I should never feel anger in any circumstance due to its high consequences, namely damnation - this implying that my current anger with God would disqualify me from other things that I desperately need - this generating an intense emotional conflict in which I was furious that my Father should deny me my allowance and simultaneously terrified that my reaction would deny me further allowances (these allowances, by the way, already causing enough terror in the clearly unmerited nature of their irregularly), not to mention my worries of divine inflation and pay cuts due to past overdrafts.

Of course, none of this was able to recant the fact that I was, at that time, angry; the emotion (most illogically) being produced without written consent. It was preposterous - why would God, knowing that I would become angry and that being angry would force Him to punish me, put me in such a situation in the first place? He was testing you, you may say, to see if you would actually get angry. Well, that may be true; kinda makes me feel like a lab rat though. But maybe I am, maybe we all are; makes we wonder what kind of drug God is trying to get through the FDA - maybe He's trying to cure humanity.

And as a corollary, it can be a fascinating exercise trying to be angry with God, like a child making fretful splashes in the midst of a giant, calming sea. I was there last night - trying to grab hold of some minor injustice and fuel it with increasingly irrational outbursts, crouching stubbornly over the dying flame trying to hide it from the sweet, soothing rain. Frantic, I was frustrated by my empty attempts at genuine frustration, each passing minute solidifying the superfluous temporality of what I wanted so badly to hate. How many years have I spent so occupied - holding onto a feeling of which the source is long forgotten, or long exaggerated, or long disassociated somehow with the pain I have thought justified in carrying? How long have I sought dark corners where I thought I could escape the cleansing influence of time, only to find out that such corners only exist in my mind; in the solitary caves of self-willed, self-fueled deception? Where is my allowance?

Sometimes I wonder so intensely as to how God looks at me. Is that what this fear comes down to? Do the unknowns of my relationship with Him leave room for doubt? Of course they do.

Sometimes my prayers feel more sincere when they are illogical; honest; human.

In the movie Howl's Moving Castle, the main character is a young woman who is cursed to look like a very old woman by a witch. Sophie subsequently meets a wizard - Howl - and tries to help him deal with his own demons (pun intended, guess you'll have to see the movie to get it). Sophie falls in love with Howl, and though she doesn't realize it, each time she expresses her love for him, she turns young again; she becomes herself again. I think Hayao Miyazaki may just be a genius.

What do I fear that makes me so angry with God? The unknown, perhaps? Pain, unpleasantness, rejection? All possibilities along the horizon and ones that, ironically, our fear cannot partial out of our lives, although heaven knows we spend lifetimes trying to convince ourselves it can. I think sometimes I look at salvation like an electricity bill: I can't afford to get angry.

10.5.11

I see a living room with small red checkered couches.
I see a narrow mountain road opening up to a small circular driveway; I see the house there looking back down the mountain toward a lake and evergreen landscape.
I see a busy causeway with large shops on either side.
I see the end of a small dirt road, endless fields beyond.
I see a busy train station; and another busy train station, steam rising from tracks and yawning mouths.
I see a hamburger stand at yet another train station; they also have churri-pans.
I see the Thames.
I see a leaf-littered path covered by overhanging trees; a bench.
I see a wide sidewalk with grass and trees on both sides; people walking, playing games, picnicking, laughing.
I see a gigantic golden statue looking across the street at a concert hall; large red buses occasionally blocking his view.
I see a large house serving as a chapel; I see friends there washing and cleaning on a Saturday.
I see a small house and a woman with a large pot of potatoes.
I see a lake and a perfect day, both slowly receding into a warm evening.
I see a little boy swimming with empty milk jugs tied to his waist.
I see a group of children in a dark room; I see their tired, confused faces; I see them chewing on sugar cane.
I see a giant river as I drive along the road at its bank.
I see an audience obscured by several stage lights.
I see two scantily-clad girls giggling at me from a display window.
I see an empty city on a chill morning.
I see empty slopes and endless snow.
I see snow in Central Park.
I see a child smile at me and run away.
I see...

Blah, blah, blah...I see the Grim.

10.3.11

 
Shame
I did not know my maternal grandfather very well; at least, I have very few memories of him. I remember that he loved shortbread and small tins of cookies could often be found around the house. I remember that he would sit in a chair by a large window on the second story of the house and that I would often sit behind it. I remember the almost forbidden nature of an office downstairs that had all his things in it. But mostly I just remember watching television (All That!), lying on the polar-bear-skin rug, playing with the small organ/ piano next to the fireplace, sleeping in a room full of droopy-eyed dolls, the large wooden Buddha on the staircase, the wooden chairs with dragons carved into the armrests, a giant clock, a giant window, an indoor pool that I tried not to splash too much in, the red-rocked landscape around the house, playing arcade games in town.

It was my brother, although much younger than I was, who actually seemed to have a stronger bond with our grandfather. As I was the attention stealer, my brother seemed to settle more into a genuine, peaceful state of being. Perhaps I don't remember grandpa as well because of how concerned I've always been with myself - even those memories I do have of him are based on my own interactions. I cry out now for more observation, but find none; perhaps my brother better remembers, his sincere innocence holding truer to the wholeness of the man. I hope so, even as a pang of jealousy and self-rebuke gazes back and wishes for a more personal curiosity.

***

One day I was playing with a friend in my backyard. There was a red basket of old toys in the yard and, as we were playing, I kept hearing a strange noise emanating from the basket. It was sort of a plastic grinding noise, the kind that cheap wind-up toys make when they are walking or driving across the table, or doing a back flip, or chomping their giant teeth on some invisible, superfluous enemy.

We continued playing, but the noise insisted - the gentle plea of something long-neglected. Or perhaps not, perhaps just the simple expression of something so long in playing with that it reveled in this new dutiful rendition of its noise, which seemed to grow ever louder.

In the excitement of play, I suddenly turned my attention to the basket. The sound had not so much annoyed me, but as my companion's attention had also been turned to the noise, I was obviously obligated to incorporate it into my performance. Given too much leeway, the noise could have completely divided his attention, which I could not allow.

I approached the basket, making some exaggerated comment about the noise; he laughed, my scene was progressing excellently. I searched through the basket to find the source; the basket was full of guns and cars and miscellaneous pieces of past adventures. The last thing I expected to find was...a toy train? It was small, comparable to any given Hot Wheel also found at times in the basket. It seemed a bit older though, something quite distinctive from its flashy contemporaries. Green, it was a small green steam engine that, invigorated by some invisible Duracell, had been chugging along some distant reverie; pulling its faithful wheels through an abandoned desert, the crisp, dry smell of cactus and tumbleweed trapped in the boiling estuary of sun and rock, thus forcing the aroma to blossom slowly and permeate its barren eternity. The train asked nothing but to ramble on in its dream, in its nonchalant, joyful canter.

But I had my audience in perfect, rapt attention. I searched the toy for the "off" switch and found it, but then quickly realized that simply turning it off would have very little artistic value. What could I do to make the scene more dramatic, more powerful?

I turned the train off, but then back on, dropping it back into the basket, its tiny wheels still grinding. My audience was intrigued, I delivered a perfect mask of overbearing frustration, he laughed, I drank in his curiosity and childish delight, it fueled me, intoxicating me sufficiently to abandon simple reason. I dove back into the basket and pulled out the enraging perpetrator, the tool of my addiction, the damned soul. The passion in my eyes and mind burned in the chaos of a child's condemnation. I held the engine before the world, wishing nothing more than to bring it to a terrible end, to seal the act of this momentous play with a momentary hatred bent to crucify.

With its wheels still whirling gently, I turned and hurled the train. It flew ever so gracefully and then, in romantic brilliance, exploded against the stone wall of my backyard. The noise had stopped forever.

Later that day, my friend long since having left the theatre, I sat inside. My brother was outside playing alone when he happened upon the remnants of my sacrifice. He picked up the pieces and began to weep; deep, powerful, heartfelt sobs - not of the scraped-knee brand, or of the leave-the-toy-store-without-the-game type - this was much more. It was the terrifying onset of grief, the realization of a pure ideal suddenly being ripped from the world in horrid, undeserving malice. At his tiny fingertips lay the pieces of a dear friend, a link to a meaningful past that now had been smashed and violated - the pureness of the bond being mocked in the selfish assurance of its end.

So innocent were his sobs, so genuine; the approach of despair to a child: not jealous, not vengeful, not angry, only intensely sorrowful, not knowing what to try to understand, only feeling the extreme unfairness of the moment, the incomprehensible hurt of an unblemished loss.

My mother went outside to comfort him, told him it was okay, asked him what had happened.

"This was my train from grandpa; this was grandpa's train he gave me."

9.28.11

"Rows of houses all bearing down on me
I can feel their blue hands touching me" (Yorke 1993)

I am often melancholy; tragically longing in the mid-morning. Do you get irritated easily?

I remember standing with my bicycle on an unkempt lawn. My friend was there also; we were talking to a man. We had stood on this same spot with our bicycles about a week before and spoken to him and his mother. We had tried to convince them to let us teach them something religious. Come back, they had said. Now we were back.

The man was going blind, they had also informed us. He was taking it very hard, everyday receding more into an unknown world, walking down a fading road alone. His mother was pleasant, but concerned in the stubborn, business way that some mother's are. She knew all the facts and figures; a resourceful woman, but not a scrounger. Her's was a hard-met hope, built and sustained on passion fused with logic, on the defending of her son. There was at least the hope that his condition was treatable.

Their house was close to a main road that headed out to a large bus station and then out to the highway. There was a gourmet sweets shop on that road; we stopped there several times. The road out to the bus station was long and beautiful, but we rarely noticed the beauty - we were most often rushing to the station in a long since futile effort to catch the right bus. My bike seemed to be perpetually stuck in the highest gear, although our bikes didn't even have gears. That must sound like some awful metaphor, but its not - for some reason my bike was simply adamant about missing the bus. Perhaps its previous owner had not been so care-taking as I, though I can hardly claim that I took better care of the vehicle, mostly because of my frustration with its stubborn spite of cooperation. I felt like my legs were going to implode every time we got to that bus station.

I often have the audacity to call this kind of mood "pensive." I guess it is somewhat pensive, but more like a plea for the weight of heavy thoughts.

This time the man was alone - his mother had gone out to run some errands. In the interim since our last visit, he and his mother had visited the hospital and found out that his blindness was not reversible. As he spoke about it, he began to weep. Had God taken even this from him; his sight? What hope could he have in God? He seemed to plead with us for the answer. I don't remember what we told him, but I don't think it was the answer.

So long have I waited, Lord
so long I have tried
so long whipped and hated, Lord
that my hope has burned and died

In ashes let me see thee, Lord
so tired, let me rest
not as I would see me, Lord
but as I need be blessed

I picture my brother playing with his band in a dark room. There is no stage, only a space between the many tables and the wall. There is a moose's head hanging on the wall, or maybe it was more like some type of caribou or elk; I don't really know (it took me a good minute to figure out how to spell "caribou"; spell-check suggestions were "carbonate", "caboose", and "scarab"). There are only two small lamps on either side of the wall, and a neon Coor's Light sign. The band begins amidst a subtle hubbub.

My brother starts to sing and is gradually transformed. Each word that he transmits to the microphone pulls him deeper into some mysterious plane of painful meditation. There is all range of voice; all range of feeling. Within this world he alone transcends the bounds of mortal limitations - social, cultural, ethical, intellectual. Alone he drifts in some immortal current, beyond even the notes of his own music. At times the sound is a gentle haunting of ghostly contemplations, at others the mournful scream of some overpowering memory, once experienced and now laid before the audience, our souls surrounding it and collectively weeping as it is slowly, triumphantly lowered into its grave. Such is the emotional power of his travels that by the end of the performance he is on his knees. Breathing heavily, he resurfaces amidst rapt applause.

"I can't believe we have fans that can deal emotionally with that song. That's why I'm convinced that they don't know what it's about. It's why we play it towards the end of our sets. It drains me, and it shakes me, and hurts like hell every time I play it, looking out at thousands of people cheering and smiling, oblivious to the tragedy of its meaning, like when you're going to have your dog put down and it's wagging its tail on the way there. That's what they all look like, and it breaks my heart. I wish that song hadn't picked us as its catalysts, and so I don't claim it. It asks too much. I didn't write that song" (Yorke).

9.26.11

"Tho' I've belted you and flayed you,
By the livin' Gawd that made you,
You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!" (Kipling 1892).

Religion sometimes confuses and worries me, mostly because I enjoy it when people think I know things. And it's not that you can't know things in religion, but it seems that so often the lines between belief, assumption, logic, knowledge, and truth become incredibly blurred. That being said, I naturally grew up as a spiritual prodigy.

I went one summer to a week-long church camp called EFY (Especially for Youth). I remember one night we were gathered as a small group sitting outside and listening to our councilor give a short lesson. At the end of the lesson, he invited us to separate (there were only about ten of us) and each find a secluded location where we could (ideally) truly and honestly pray. I found my spot and laid down on the grass, looking up at the moon. Suddenly, I began to weep. Powerful, emotional sobs - waves of some kind of fire, some kind of eruption of deep anticipation that washed over me again and again. Was it God? Was it only me? I stared up at the moon as if it were the hand of God. After a time my tears stopped and the intensity was replaced by a feeling of rest: a sort-of aching peace. As I think about it now, I think about Elijah, who witnessed wind and earthquake and fire - what emotions of terror must have accompanied him, I can only imagine. Or maybe it wasn't terror, maybe it was astonishment and awe, an outburst, a crescendo of incomprehensible beauty that may sometimes attend us as we witness the unequivocal power of the natural; perhaps even of the divine. Perhaps he felt the wind and the earthquake and saw the fire as if they too were the hand of God; waves of passion washing over him as they did me.

But I feel empty now as I remember Elijah's story; I feel somewhat confused, like my emotions should have proved something, like remembering them - and even experiencing them again in the slightest degree as I do so - should have produced something more than the quiet, tired uncertainty that now pervades. But perhaps that is why the author of 1 Kings was so careful to note that the Lord was not in the wind, or in the earthquake, or in the fire. But why? What is this voice that comes after?

A few years after EFY, I went with a large group of local church youth to a weekend campout activity. During one of the last nights we were put in a surprisingly similar situation (though this time by our local church leaders) and thus I again found myself in a secluded spot with the intent of communing with the Divine. But this time I was ready, I knew what I wanted and I was fully prepared to ask for it. This time I did not weep; I was not washed; I was not fooled by wind or earthquake or fire. I was only refused.

One day in my high-school English class our teacher began to criticize the US government. The things he said here controversial - something about Osama Bin Laden (whoever that is) and the Taliban (whatever that is) being freedom fighters when they were fighting Russia , but now being branded as terrorists. I didn't really know what he was talking about, but I definitely observed how his controversy gave him some sort of rapt attentive power. I immediately adopted his beliefs and, the next day, was thrown out of my Math class for refusing to stand during the Pledge of Allegiance. My Math teacher spoke to me afterwards as did my mother when she picked me up from school. They each reprimanded me, but then masterfully used the situation to respectfully present their opinions. They even encouraged me to discover my own.

Did I listen? Of course not; the damage had already been done. When I had been waiting outside my Math class after being kicked out, I had been approached by two girls, one of which I knew. They asked me why I wasn’t in class and I explained. They looked at me like a god.

You know, the boy who cried wolf eventually got eaten by the wolf. I'm not entirely sure what that means, but it is rather frightening to me that, in my mind, this brutal end seems so incredibly justified.

9.23.11

The womb
The average temperature of the female womb is 98 degrees Fahrenheit, which degree scale was named after the Dutch and German and Polish physicist (and engineer) Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit who in 1686 apparently caused his mother to go into labor somewhere in Danzig, Poland before communicating his express opinion that he possess tri-nationality, thus causing his mother to quickly traverse the German countryside - including both the Elbe and Rhine rivers - so that he could actually be born somewhere (I would imagine) in Kerkrade, Germany/ Netherlands which city existed at the time as a part of, of all things, the Spanish Empire from which he apparently emigrated to begin experimenting with alcohol, glass blowing, and mercury which led him to eventually propose the philosophy of a temperature scale in 1724, just 12 years before his death in 1736 for which a certain Swedish astronomer, Anders Celsius, was desperately waiting perhaps due in part to some slight insecurities and jealousy caused by what must have been for him a very lonely, mono-national state of being and also in order that, perhaps as a strictly secondary reason, he might - only 2 years before his own death in 1744 - propose a completely new scale at which water boils at 0 degrees and which he must have thought to be vastly superior to Fahrenheit's, but with which an Irishman - one William Thomson - would disagree (though perhaps not because of reasons of nationality) and so propose yet another scale in 1848 which was an attempt to reconcile his qualms with absolute zero (which I'm sure he's settled by now with his absolute death in 1907) and, in a startling turn of events, was actually named after him by other scientists instead of being so named in front of a mirror, though I'm sure he had plenty of mirrors as he was said to be a Baron in which case I probably should have addressed him as "Lord William" at first, this being the proper title at the time in Ireland for people with a lot of potatoes, such as engineers, and for people named William as was the case (though I think without the potatoes) with William John Macquorn Rankine of Scotland who didn't even wait for his Irish counterpart to kick off before proposing the Rankine scale in 1859 which no one really uses, which I think a just consequence for William's obvious attempt to overshadow another William and fellow engineer for the reason of potatoes, but I also think poor William got little attention because there were many other important things going on in 1859 of which one was the birth of William Fredrick Rigby, Jr., who left Mrs. Mary Clark's 98-degree (Fahrenheit; 36.67-degree Celsius; 309.82-degree Kelvin; and 557.67-degree Rankine) womb to be aptly named after his father, William Fredrick Rigby, Sr. who had renounced his own mother's womb 26 years before as the first child of his father, William (this fifth William adding substantial evidence to the Rankine's apparent William complex for which I'm sure he received frequent, albeit posthumous, criticisms from William "Lord" Kelvin who actually outlived him by 35 years, probably because of his potatoes) Atkin Howarth who abandoned his respective womb (the word "womb" actually being of unknown origins) in 1816, a mere 46 years before the birth of little Jr. William's brother, George, whose son's daughter's son (not named William) married a lovely woman (whose paternal grandfather, believe it or not, is named William) whose womb I vacated on the 25th of April in 1986, exactly 300 years after the birth of Mr. Fahrenheit, with whom I share a name and by whose scale I experienced a temperature drop of about 30 degrees on the night in question, which has justifiably caused me to remain screaming for the last 25 years.

9.21.11

Loss
In my junior year of high school, I was enrolled in an art class at the south end of campus. I sat across from two girls, one of which I was attracted to, one of which I was not; but I had to make jokes for both so as not to lose face. The result was that the girl I was not attracted to became attracted to me. The other girl I couldn't say. She (the girl I was not attracted to) wanted us to take a picture together near the end of the semester - I was sitting down at the art table and she was bent down from behind me, her arms wrapped around my neck and her head to the left of mine (to the right in the picture). She gave me a copy of the picture which I still have somewhere. The other girl must have taken the picture, but I don't remember; I don't even remember what she (the girl I was attracted to) looked like. I remember the picture though, vividly - the lighting of the room such that it turned out terribly blurred. I remember the feeling of her arms around my neck, her face close to mine; why do I remember her?

For a few days in art class we were assigned to attempt a self-portrait. It was to be my next masterpiece as all high school art projects are when you are sitting across from a girl you are attracted to. We began simply enough: the basic shape of the head, the symmetry of the face, adding the ears at the same level as the eyes (which I had no idea was the case even though I had been looking at faces for upwards of sixteen years, including the face of the girl I was attracted to. The girl I was not attracted to had smooth, brown skin and long, dark, strong Latin hair; she was just a tad shorter than I was).

Next we added the nose, mouth, and hairline. I took great care to add my characteristic Widow's Peak and scraggly sideburns. A Widow's Peak is said to be an omen of early widowhood.

"And ye Jentyl wymen whome this lewde vice doth blynde Lased on the backe: your peakes set a loft" (Barclay 1509).

After the basic hairline, we went back to the eyes. Here great care was taken, mirrors getting closer and closer to faces across the room, silence in the contemplative poetry of self and self. The brushing and nervous scratching of pencils, the condemning judgement of the No. 2 eraser.

After many minutes of work, I put pencil and mirror down to view the portrait in its entirety. I looked at the proportions and hairline (which, again, pleased me immensely) and then meandered down the face to the eyes of my creation. I was suddenly transfixed. Deep within those sullen, two-dimensional orbs I saw something strange and terrible; something that looked back at me in the sudden realization of life. It was the mirror that looked back, it was me; beyond the windows of lead and tree I had crossed the bloody, arcane river braved by Frankenstein. I was startled and entranced, and then it was gone; the monster fled before me and I was left alone, never to see his living visage again upon the page.

"I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world" (Shelley 1831).

The girl I was not attracted to had produced a pitifully disproportionate portrait - her head was much too sphere-like and much too small. I said I liked it though; her's is the only other portrait I remember.

9.19.11

 
I guess the main purpose of this blog is to be honest; an attempt to be authentic and admit a range of both light and dark thought and emotion.

What is it about honesty that we perceive to be so liberating? Honesty can be terrifying, it can be incredibly unwelcome, it can be socially unacceptable; such a strange concept, even purely irrational in some cases.

What if you don't know whether you will be understood? Perhaps this is what constitutes authenticity - the ability to be honest despite your audience. Talk about terrifying: if honesty itself is challenging, authenticity seems like a naked stage-fright nightmare. Even as memories now arise and beg to be recorded, my mind fights back, "why would you ever reveal that?" I'm not entirely sure. Curious the phrase "in spite of yourself."

A friend of my mother's once caught me looking at a nude picture of Britney Spears.

Do I even dare tell you about this? My mind screams the contrary, it tells me that you will change the way you think about me and that that is a bad thing, the worst thing. It tells me that you will not understand, it begs me to avoid it. Or, if I can't avoid it, to at least explain it in such a way so as to show that I am not the same person as that twelve-year-old boy. "See!" it wants to say, "that was something bad, but now I've changed and am going to heaven. Judge me the way that I want you to!" Please don't, actually.

At the time, my room had a large window facing the patio and front yard of our house. My computer screen directly faced this window such that anyone approaching the front door could clearly see what I didn't want them to, unless the window was covered. This was the job of a large quilt my mother had fitted to the window to act as my pubescent stage curtain; different shades of diamond and trapezoidal pink that always seemed to me strongly Native American.

It was in the evening and I had grown bolder and bolder in my curiosity for the last couple of days. I remember thinking Britney Spears had the face of a goddess - some type of beauty that I couldn't really understand, and one that had some mysterious effect on me. As I think about it now, I am reminded of Marilyn Monroe: "goodbye Norma Jean, though I never knew you at all."

Why am I telling you this? You may be asking that question. I kind of hope you're asking that question and that the answer gives me an excuse to rethink what I'm doing. "Rethink" in this case meaning complete abandonment.

My face was close to the screen, close to Britney; close, I wanted to be close. I wanted; longed; she seemed so real, but frustratingly far away. There was a wall, some kind of wall; I willed myself to believe that it wasn't there, that all I had to do was get closer...break through the wall. The perfect curves of her body screamed to me in a language I did not understand, but wanted to; oh, how I wanted to speak that language, for her to know that I spoke it; for her to speak to me; to...

The doorbell rang.

"Delete that paragraph"

"What?"

"Delete the paragraph now."

"Shut up; you don't think this is hard enough?"

"Those emotions are inappropriate; admitting that you have ever felt that way is unforgivable. What are you, an animal? Some sick pervert? You are disgusting; why would you ever want to remember being so sub-human? If you don't delete that paragraph, you're no better than a sick dirty novelist."

"What's it to you? Maybe I am just a dirty novelist."

"People won't like you; they will judge you; it will hurt."

"What will hurt?"

"Being flawed. Being rejected."

"Maybe I am flawed."

"Well why the hell admit it to other people?"

I'm not entirely sure.

My hand shook almost uncontrollably as I clicked to close the browser window. I turned around to find that I had not drawn the quilt. I sprinted over to see who was at the door, my mother and Denise looked back at me, Denise was smiling in a giggling sort of way, my mom looked confused.

I had until after school the next day to think up what I thought to be a convincing lie. "It was in an email," I frantically told my mother, "my friend sent me an email and I didn't know what was in it; I didn't know that there would be a naked woman when I opened it!" I wept, terrified. I was scrambling to be believable, wanting with my entire soul for her to believe the lie, for me to believe it myself. Maybe it was just an email, right? Anything to avoid embarrassment. Sexual attraction was just something that happened to other people, right? That makes sense, I mean, it was those "other people" that had sent me the email.

"Other people" in this case meaning me.

What are we supposed to do with the emails we send ourselves? Trash? "Mark as spam"? Reply? Archive? "Mark as read"? "Add label"?

"Well, that depends on the nature of the email."

"Why?"

"Because some emails contain bad things."

"So, how about I just create a label called 'Bad things: Never feel again'?"

"Yes! Then you could set up your account so that bad emails were automatically archived! Then you'd never have to even see them in your inbox!"

"Sounds fantastic; a perfectly rational solution."

"Precisely! Wow! So, why haven't you tried this yet?"

I have.

I don't remember anything my mother said; I wish I did. Sometimes I kind of wish she had just cuffed me in the back of the head and told me to stop being a liar; to just be honest. Maybe she did. Would I have listened?

"They crawled out of the woodwork
And they whispered into your brain
They set you on the treadmill
And they made you change your name"

9.16.11

Sight
The train from Spegazzini is cold in the morning air. We are headed towards Tristán Suárez and then on to Ezeiza; the blue metal seats unforgiving and unsympathetic to desperate pleas of warmth - my body heat just seems to bounce off them. Its like trying to warm up an ice rink with a hockey puck. The seats are relatively empty so far; we'll fill up as we get close to the city though.

El tren bumps and lurches along, always content, the old horse; harmless, but still powerful. Oblivious to its passengers, whether few or many; they have painted her and sold her, but still she canters on, her placid eyes are dull, but luminescent in the early mist.

Around me there are routines, automatic gazes wait for 11am at least, some for noon, some forever. I am reminded now of the Hotel California: some dance to remember and some dance to forget. But I realize now as I am reminded now that these two settings and their inhabitants have absolutely nothing in common: "forever" doesn't even rhyme with "remember". Maybe the people at the hotel are waiting for something, maybe they're trying to escape. Either way, the people on the train are trying to sleep. Nada que ver.

Maybe a couple dances the tango at the hotel?

Many are holding bags or boxes to take beyond Ezeiza, into the city, into shops and ques and homes (hopefully). The hope has since faded though; meshed into the confidence of time. A man walks through the compartments selling sweets and shouting an instantly familiar phrase: "quatro por un peso!" I wonder now if he is still there, walking back and forth along those distant corridors, shouting in his tired way.

What I wouldn't give now for quatro de sus alfajores. And por only un peso? He's probably raised his prices a bit since then though, un peso no te llevás como antes. At least, that's what I imagine he would say; I also imagine him rubbing his right index finger under his nose, across his mustache as he says it, in a forlorn look of business. But maybe then he would make a dirty joke, at least something with some character - something to show that he's still alive, that some element of humanity still simmers inside him, breaking occasionally through the cement mask of peso; through a lifetime on the train.

I look to my left and see one last line of houses along a dirt road. And past that, something beautiful - a place of solitude. It is, to me, a symbol of culture, of casual brotherhood, of pureness, of passion. It is like a dream, a memory, a piece of poetry that bridges generations. It is the essence of struggle, of enjoyment and of life; it is la cancha.

Here I sit and gaze upon it, wishing I could somehow take it with me. I watch until the trees obscure it, holding it in my mind for just a few more moments. Then I turn back to the train, my head against the window, and try to settle a little deeper into my jacket. I close my eyes and wait for Tristán Suárez.

9.15.11

Crossroads
A combination of tales swirls in my mind; a current of dark observations and considerations.

"They said, please, please make love with Helen, we require an assertion of value, we are frightened. I said that they shouldn’t be frightened (although I am often frightened) and that there was value everywhere" (Barthelme 1981).

"To what extent do we allow ourselves to become imprisoned by docilely accepting the roles others assign us or, indeed, choose to remain prisoners because being passive and dependent frees us from the need to act and be responsible for our actions? The prison of fear constructed in the delusion of the paranoid is no less confining or less real than the cell that shy persons erect to limit their own freedom in anxious anticipation of being ridiculed and rejected by their guards - often guards of their own creation" (Zimbardo 1973).

"'Listen lady,' he said in a high voice, 'if I had of been there [to see Jesus' miracles] I would of known [they were true] and I wouldn't be like I am now.' His voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother's head cleared for an instant. She saw the man's face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, 'Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!' She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them" (O'Connor 1953).

History sometimes seems to pull at secret parts of your mind, revealing those hidden synapses that connect you to generations uncounted. Possibility can seem like such a heavy burden.

Children, are we not all children? Scared, sad, hopeful, unsure - cycles of feeling seem to both bind our hearts or bind our hearts together. Are we doomed to repeat history or are we supposed to?

It seems at certain crossroads that life can so easily seem real and surreal simultaneously; its incredibility can haunt, its terror can give hope. Crossroads remind me of Mr. Robert Johnson; crossroads remind of me the blues. Seems strangely ironic: do you know the tale of Robert Johnson?

Last night I was washed over by a strange feeling; I felt like my soul could somehow clearly observe the reality of the moment because it had been ripped out of the moment. It was a sad sweetness, like a man in the midst of the sea, grateful for its bounty and terrified by its depth. The feeling somewhat permeates today, considering unknowns like the possibility of affection - the flutter of the heart both excited and anxious, afraid to lose control, afraid to have it.

"Standin at the crossroad
tried to flag a ride
Standin at the crossroad
I tried to flag a ride
Didn't nobody seem to know me babe
everybody pass me by"

9.14.11

Certainty
Sometimes it seems like the certainty of life is not like the certainty of death; you'd think God would give us more guarantees than one. Of course, He probably did, but who are we to remember?

You may counter with the point of revelation and I may agree with you; but I feel like explaining revelation is like explaining whats inside a black box that you cannot see and that belongs to someone else. Its like those people that make their own cars; sometimes you get to ride in it - blindfolded - but perhaps the only thing you really know about it is the incredible roar of the engine and the rush you feel when you're taken somewhere new. I guess the trick is to always have your thumb out; thumbs get tired though.

Ironic how it feels sometimes like the need for certainty only aggravates the fear of certainty. How certain are we supposed to be about things?

"Um, I think I'd like to wait on that," she said. I had just tried to kiss her, botched it, and asked her if I could have another go. I told her some load of crap about how that was okay - about how I didn't want her to get the wrong impression or anything. Ironic...

"Someone else took your place," she said. I had just explained to her that although I had not thought that I had been interested at first, as I got to know her I started to notice a feeling of...joy. And not joy in the sense of excitement, more like a peaceful joy, a kind of summer-evening contentment.

"I feel like I should wait for you," she said over the phone. I had just arrived home from school and was preparing to leave the country for two years. We had been talking for a while, mostly about the whole two-year thing. It seemed like it was pretty hard for her to let go; why wasn't it for me?

She's married now; their new child is beautiful.

"Why do I have to experience all of this? Is it, what, so I can write better?" she asked, somewhat rhetorically. I had just parked the car and was trying to think of the best cure for her ailment. I knew it then, but have since forgotten; funny how medicine seems to work better on the relatively young. Maybe my body is just building up immunities.

9.12.11

Brave
Hero-bashing seems popular these days; advocating for the non-existence of the dreams us children have dancing in our heads. Hawkeye says that, "Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, [a hero is] somebody who's tired enough and cold enough and hungry enough not to give a damn. I don't give a damn."

Once I was mountain-biking with some friends in a competition. At one point, we took a shortcut through some very difficult switchbacks. It was an intense climb, but I kept pushing harder. I pulled easily ahead of the others; at the top I let our a roar.

Later on, we took a wrong turn that put us about a mile off course. As we were walking back to where we had turned, my legs kept shaking and cramping; we had been out of water for a while. I was exhausted; angry. I wanted to have an excuse to quit. Finally, I threw down my bike and exclaimed that I was finished. "No you're not," a friend said. I picked up my bike and kept walking; ashamed.

There was a man in my mind both times. I hated him for being right and ignored him because he was. Why should I listen when its not what I want? Heresy.

Once during a class a boy in the back was asking a lot of questions; he was having particular trouble understanding that day. Another boy sitting just behind me was quietly laughing and whispering to the girl next to him. I felt this was unfair; it made me angry, but at the same time it felt slightly different from anger, almost...like a sadness. At one point I turned around and rebuked him. He was furious, I was...conflicted. He told me to "get off my high horse." Thinking about it still makes me angry and sad at the same time.

Its a long way to fall when you get bucked off your high horse.

One time I came to a four-way stop and got there just after the car to my left. He hesitated which annoyed me, so I cut in front of him. What do I care if he's too stupid to make a decision? As I passed him, he honked. I looked at him, flipped him off, and sped away. At the next stoplight, he got out of his car and approached me, furious. I had nothing to say; my mind searched frantically for justifications, excuses, lies.

Afterwards, I pulled into a nearby parking lot and wept.

Last night my roommate - who is studying to be a paramedic - needed to practice putting in an IV. I was annoyed that I would be put in such a position. As he stuck the syringe into my hand, pulled out the needle, and began to wipe up my blood, I noticed his hands were shaking. As I think about it now, I wonder: who was the one being brave?

9.9.11

 
I find myself afraid to look within and seek to define. Am I afraid I will be wrong? Yes. But what else am I afraid of? Perhaps I avoid the kitchen as much as possible because I still have not washed the dishes. I eat in my room these days.

Work
The hours I have spent in this office.

The song says: "I went to a whore; she said my life's a bore. So quit my whining cause its bringing her down. Sometimes I give myself the creeps." This part of this song always reminds me of the Catcher in the Rye, which is a book I didn't like because nothing happens.

Sometimes in life, nothing happens. And suddenly you find yourself not wanting anything to happen.

"Sometimes my mind plays tricks on me."

Friends
So many of my friends have come and gone.

I remember attending a party and, as part of a sort-of game, kissing a girl I didn't know. As I think of the kiss, I think of the feeling; though I do not think of the feeling then - which I think was mostly one of uncertainty - I think of what I want to feel now. The longing of a kiss; trying to remake the memory in my mind, add onto it, prolonging the scene and repeat it to try and grasp at something. And soon the kiss means more to me; she means more to me - or at least the idea of her means more, even though she, as I now hold her in my mind, does not exist; has no name; has no purpose except as the subject of my emotion; as the means for my mental expression.

A friend once approached me troubled; I told her it would all work out. I cried when she left.

It did end up working out though.

Religion
I see a chapel; two stories; beautiful brick. Its roof is rounded to give it a barn-like aspect; it has a large, round window at its front which looks out from the second story. I have never been inside the building.

The chapel is surrounded by low concrete walls that separate it from the buildings and houses adjacent. The walls are covered with graffiti, mostly indecipherable. But one phrase stands out: "Maradona es Dios y Messi es el Salvador." It is rather comical, but I wonder about the intention of the writer; what child is this?

Anger
I met with a leader of my local church - my bishop - and he asked me about my language. I told him it was improving. He told me that profanity was the attempt of a weak mind to express itself strongly. I just agreed with everything he said after that and it worked - I was out of his office in less than ten minutes.

I think I was actually was improving until yesterday; but my bishop will never know about yesterday.

Dreams
Two excerpts from a dream journal I used to keep:

"Night of 4/24/2008 - I remember teaching a little boy that 'bad words are for those who are afraid of life'. I remember seeing the boy later, as he was leaving, and reviewing that phrase with him."

"Night of 8/31/2008 - My dream was very movie like. I remember at the beginning of the movie there were two lovers. They were not human; more fish-like, and I remember that they somehow formed two children. I was one of those children and the other was my sister. We started to grow up, but then one night a fish came to where my sister and I were sleeping and took her. Somehow we got her back, but she was badly injured. My parents stayed with her while I went to find someone who could help her.

I think the first people I met were two women in a town next to where our house was. I remember that our house was very humble, but we lived next to a town with a lot of affluence; there were large buildings and even a cathedral. So I went to the town and found two women, but they were high on drugs and couldn't help. They recommended that I go find another doctor. I can't  remember the name they said, but I remember that they said that it would be difficult for me to convince this certain doctor to care for my sister. I went to find her anyway because such was my worry for my sister that I didn't care what it would take to heal her.

I remember finding the doctor to whom I had been referred and that, like I had been told, she was very reluctant to come with me. I remember talking to her for some time and trying to convince her. Finally, she agreed to come with me, but only after I went into some detail about the pain and suffering my sister was going through.

I remember we then flew back to where my house was. When the doctor I was with saw all the riches with which we were surrounded, she got very excited. I remember that one of the streets between two of the houses was actually made of diamonds. We landed and she began to look at the incredible riches all around us. My house was right around the corner and she finally came after my calling her several times.

When we got there I asked how my sister was and my parents responded that she was actually recovering. I remember her walking around; she still looked hurt and bruised, but she had obviously recovered. I remember thinking about how sure I had been during my search that only a doctor could save my sister. Then something very interesting happened. I remember my father asked the doctor if she wanted to keep and raise my sister. The woman was so touched that she began to cry and we all cried for joy with her. She said yes and that was the end."