insomnia rant. flagrant errors

No, sleep is not working. I am stirred awake by the massive presence of my mistakes; all of that drunk and neglected time spent wallowing in negative places, below the horizon line of my future. My eyes are open even when closed. Images burn on the insides of my eyelids like kaleidoscopes of missing friends and colors of conversations that could certainly have turned out better. At least less indifferent to each others existence next time. There will not be a next time. This is it. This is the only true moment and then it passes like everything else.

How can I sleep when I feel so sick and privileged. Breathing through a seemingly fine respiratory system as others gasp for air in between rushes of choked up blood. Surely there has got to be some purpose for this immense bothersome weight.

I feel the stars and the indifferent universe outside of my childhood bedroom window. I am horrified by my actions in their soft light. I'm horrified by all actions I've ever done, all those awkward advances and failed attempts at timing, and, indeed, am horrified even greater by all future fumbled actions. Letting great ideas slip through those yawning sidewalk cracks is a worse crime to the creative soul than to be a vegetable; sitting on the couch with beer gut and zero great ideas. Those awesome ideas will tumble around at your feet until they become an anchor to your past... your lost potential... and you cannot get unstuck from those heavy quicksand arms, my god, those beasts we fend off are making advancements, breaking down barricades and frothing through fangs, they are us and we are them, interchangeable aside from the angle of the fence, those European perspective claws and nonsensical ranting like ravens cawing over. Let this be the end of those anchor dreams! I will rise my body up through the floorboards with enough side projects to enlist a side kick and then an accountant to handle the empty stream of revenue and the self efficient hybrid old money/new money entrepenuerial sweepstakes... running rampant through black friday walmart parking lots with sociological note pads and daddy's bmw. there was never a discussion of finance that I've enjoyed even if the proposed dangling carrot was meant for my gaze and my bell tone timed salivating. I am not drooling for these emerald green bank notes. I prefer real life and danger. Proximity to those edges and constant awe when surrounded by creaking and groaning forests up in mountains where traffic cannot be seen or heard or smelled. the sense of smell up in those mountains alone is enough to wipe the memories of los angeles dead stop traffic out of the head, or the arizona flat lands with curvaceous and deceiving women lounging while old money affords them the opportunity to be legal prostitutes and skip class to pay slave boys to write papers for them, they fan themselves in that past life and eat grapes of wrath from the empty space in between their tits. There is no heart there.

night is not young and I am itchy and anxious with a sore neck and pulsing lower back listening to the mechanical rumbles from an old home heating filtration system and the red light string lights feel down off the window sill and onto the ground around me. this is not a heavenly scenario because I could not sleep last night either. the hands were tied and I am lost in thought, consumed so eagerly in thoughts that never seem to arrive anywhere. I am on a switch back between mental canyons of extreme exhaustion and self doubt... the other side is peace and contentedness, which I never trust long enough to choose as a resting space. I must round the bend once more and dip back down into that canyon of depression wondering about how that vantage point may of been to bask inside of for awhile. man oh man these lofty heaights when I'm swamped in furtive waking annoyances. gosh that waitress was absent minded and so I am. we invaded each others consciousness with the wet thud of a dead fish slapping down on a partially sunk dock. grab a handlebar off a parked bike to sell at the machine shop. grope about in the dark for the contour body of your hardly breathing girlfriend or the huge piling of broken glass ornaments everywhere else. this is not a time to wish for duct tape or bandages. it is far too late for some insipient dreams.

it must be because my dream catcher is in seattle. I left it up there in a drawer. that new huge apartment in a quiet alcove of the city in which i must whole heartedly explore with many happy tangents and proud sleeps without covers or noise complaints or parties with kegstands or anything nonsense, nonsense, nonsense. i need something new in this weird young adult chapter of my life when I realize that alcoholics and legends are both formed during these fragile, quick paced years and if I am not alert and agile, for anything that comes my way these days, I might have to tie a noose around my dreams and let them drag behind me for another 40 years or so. this cannot happen. i must not allow my body or mind to be consumed by the shoulder weight of anxious knuckle cracking time. i must compete with all versions of my best self so the whole team of my selves can rise up to my intrinsic podium. i must receive the gold medal for mental craftsmanship. i will win that log roll, snow mobile race across desert tundra and charge through great walls with my dynamic horns until nothing is left but a faint shimmering hope that I was still alive to meet you, my lover.

December 6th

Your hand on my thigh. We sat on this cold couch entangled like vines climbing up the side of an office building while inside, the men sleep on their desks, ties hanging down. Everyone needs a break. Every office boy trapped in a business suit fit for a man needs a crazy tie day. Hawaiian shirt day. Because every one of them have been to those remote, remote islands in the pacific in order to fit in on Hawaiian shirt day. This species of vine hated to be ignored and pulled the building down with force, a rippling effect from bottom to top, but no glass panes shattered, they simply melted and assimilated into a temporary glass pond where hundred of ducks immediately attempted to break through, with intent, to the imaginary water source below. They look at themselves, realize they are ducks, and decide this time to fly north for the winter, to find a black diamond and excitement. The building came down like a stretched out slinky let go. Almost as if nothing was destroyed, that the building merely became an underground inversion of itself to match the underground inversions of all of us in the tunnels and caves of our doppleganger culture which we aren't allowed to believe in, like jesus and leprechauns, and pots of gold, gold, silver, or chocolate coins. An edible currency is a moral dilemma but allows the donation to a deprived man a greater decision. Food or booze? Eat or save? Only the office boys turned accidentally into men that were awake during the great entangling, the news outlets are calling it, were injured in the sudden inversion and collapse of that grey monster of a building they climbed through the gnarled teeth to get inside. Luckily, all of them slept with their heads on their forearms on their cubicle desks, dreaming of the forests, when the angry mother nature struck. With calmed heart rates and dreamy, nice thoughts, they were suddenly suspended in air, but did not plummet to the earth out their reverie, but allowed the dream to carry them, softly down, like a downward drifting rose pedals, to wake up upside down in a cavernous wasteland where nature had ultimately lead them. There is a breaking point for this fight between private enterprise and beautiful nature. Sometimes there is communication from that unspeakable vast diversity of plants and animal life in its attacks and subtle whisperings. We must listen with our ears and eyes to ground or else lose everything.

Your hand on my thigh. It is cold. Really cold. We can see our breath out in front of us like speech bubbles in cartoons. We are not talking. Just waiting for the warmth of our bodies to either cease or counteract the cold, tightening air.

december 3rd

This is a well lit idea but how am I going to know that it becomes worthwhile. Purpose will slowly wash over me in cryptic waves and then plummet, dragging me down with the worst of them, until I'm a frozen corpse underneath an iced over lake. There is no why. There is only how.

Complex isolation at first. Seattle is my new city to conquer in the cold. Let snowflakes determine my moving date. Let the leisurely strolls through the neighborhood commence unabashed. Trees with gnarled roots will crawl toward me and I will walk nimbly by, up hill, to the estuary with winter birds.

I will be able to nourish the parts of my personality that are most hungry. In a small cottage, high-strange, feeling odd about it, sanctuary of beautiful thought and too much space for my poor college attitude. A part time on campus job might help me face my fears. Reality here is a strange thought. I'm not sure how much I believe that I'll be in seattle soon, captivated by the colorful lights and bus routes to and from wonderful, fun, places in the city. Here is a place to grow roots. I will be aloof for awhile, as I find my way through the forest of concrete domes and bone chilling screeching tires, and music venues to find friends, friends, friends, life long acquaintances with bold actions and activities, I will jam, jam, jam with musical geniuses until the windows crack from spreading frost bite. Our hands will ache and the notes will rush out of them. The moments will not be scripted. It will be easy to be discouraged from discovering a sociable personality buried within myself. I'm there for school first and foremost. I will be a nice guy in my classes and an honest, appreciative one. My time at other schools cannot convince me that I'll be anything like that in the future. I have grown because I have crawled through the desert and hollywood dream states to get here and to earn this. Who I was in Portland, Arizona, and Los Angeles is not who I am anymore and this will be clear as day to me. I cannot blow this because I have come too far to get here and my desire to live so well and free up in this foreign neighborhood is so compelling that I could not muck it all up. My intent will vary but the melody and the progress will remain, remain, remain. It's all up from here my beautiful counterpart. There is nowhere else to go when you're lasered in so tight and so passionate to the city of emeralds and ferris wheels and salt water.

Make your move and be reborn. Grow roots under the sidewalks.

unsuspecting calm before the vengeful storm

An eerie windy night outside. Tree branches scrape on tin roofs. Animals howl and wrestle in the distance. Dogs aren't barking because dogs are not outside. Too much fear of the unknown. They could run away. Their could be a predator lurking. Humans are just as fearful. They like bright light and electronic humming sounds. The white noise of a modern kitchen. The television acts as a sedative and we all know this and appease it's satellite gods. Beam us down your power of choice. Too many channels to choose from. The night is black. Inside, objects reflect back unseen red light. No sound in this attic without hearing aids shoved in ears. I can hear my own voice louder than I need to. That's why I can't talk to you on the phone. I'd rather explore this insomnia-tunnel with perked up ears and a head lamp/hat like the tall unknown neighbors without compulsion to meet. No lives are lived in social community. We are isolated in our historic homes like the roots of a family tree growing beneath a city side walk, fucking everything up. Nature reclaims what was lost. I hope there are beasts out there in the stormy night. They come when others are locked away in their castles. No moat. Rain reduces footsteps approaching. Sharing stories of fear, nightmares are deep, dark deaths, friends and lovers in a blood bath. Nothing nice to describe. They conjure images to implant forever. I want to see the horror of lunatics with weapons in the woods. The haunted corn maze that hires real ghouls and psychopaths. Sign me up. I want some fear. I want the eerie night to enter my bones and turn me white, skeleton white, with fright, skeleton fright. The wind carries voices of dead souls seeking vengeance. Avenge your grievance on me! oh spiritual breath, this evil masquerade. I wished to be killed prematurely and unjustly by a ghost accidentally exacting vengeance on the wrong human body. Therefore the ghost thinks it's haunting has ceased and rest is here for him. It works like magic because he believes that his wrongs where righted by my ghastly murder at the river with a drowning by invisible hands. I become another link in the chain, on the other side. I can be aware of a vengeance to seek. I would choose someone at random and then study them. See if they have the guts or knowledge to continue the tradition of vengeful killings and a continuing story of afterlife confronting life. Freak accidents happen when the weather is about to turn like tonight.

November 5

There is a weight on my spinal column caused by a frieze embedded with a great idea. The idea is a shallow relief. I must chisel away until I can form the right tiny characters and the epic battles presented like sea monsters versus cargo ships in the pre-flight night. The only way across that vast pearl-blue sprawl was a fearful journey by boat. You would wear a uniform with a little tin flag affixed to it upon your awaited arrival back home. That shipping village comes out and throws a party, with floats and parades, streamers waiting for your silhouette to appear on the horizon. I guess they had nothing better to do.

The great idea causing neck pain is about making some sense of all of the writing I have done over the years, the manic passages of pain and loathing, searching and questioning, all of it. I am baffled by the best way to go about it. This is a mighty project, an undertaking, especially if I wish it to flow well. I could arrange them into poetic divisions, with titles, if the transitions can't seem to be smoothed out. It just requires a step back at each individual part of the machine to discern its purpose. Everything becomes possible. In sound production, whiskey bottling, denture making, and writing the greatest focus for the efficient execution of a beautiful glimmering final product is to be aware of signal flow.

I must understand how the steam is passed through the pipes to turn the latch. Sound comes into the microphone. There are wires attached to a computer. I hear the sound through the speakers attached to the computer. Every mechanism for creativity can be made into simple machinery if all of the parts are figured out and the grease helps the correct hinges. Run of the mill creative output is a grand machine of social misdirection. Everybody influences everybody. Many concern themselves too much with the desires of glorified strangers on the glowing boxes.

Even with the perfect formula, only an altruistic mathematician would use the equation for purely good. The mad scientist is a power crazed genius. Discovering a cure for cancer that also kills all of the rainforests in the world. Ethical and moral dilemma of the artist/scientist/professor/engineer.

I need to sift through all of my old ramblings and try to piece particularly grand passages into some wonderful prose-poetry, partial autobiographical, non fiction narrative. It would make a discordant narrative if I did not have a thematic intent in mind.

I could write a chap book about Arizona surely. Otherwise I must isolate an emotion or a feeling and search through the tomes for pieces that fit.

I'm finding gems in all cavities and sections. Must find thematic similarities for a congruent-feeling portrait. I can sift through these reams once more for other intents and purposes.