sept 29

sneezes with the morning rhythm, puttering through a too hot shower and too cold exit to that warmth, coffee overflow, landscape is a sad grey/green wash and with hints of the impending great freeze coming to trap us in our box like snowed in hikers taking refuge in an abandoned fire lookout, our eyes will quit creating tears as will have had to burn them all for heat, for heat, the sky is a closed mess of dark clouds and rain to fog windows and let steam escape from the chimney when no trees are looking, swaying evergreen.

first time of new fresh week. large swirling coffee, silky, pumpkin chocolate chip muffin and a genuine lack of protein, though I need more of it to carry myself with any notable strength up those 150+ step staircase or the 20th street blues uphill, or the tree line fractured tear of a 45th street viaduct, good god damn, the options for height removal are multitude and nothing seems right because I do not feel right, this is all strange within because I can't seem to say anything concrete or real or sudden. 

I am rolling my ankle on the floor. I am nervous


-----

On approaching 23.

Well, anxiety swells up in me and rattles around like a big wave full of broken up boats crashing against the grey matter rocks of my internal shoreline. I do not know how to acknowledge the existence of myself on this earth for as long as I've had. Countless billions of humans, and countless billions more dogs, have died at a younger age than I. What do I do with my time and knowledge and experiences... they are puzzle pieces and I am a huge, hastily painted blue backdrop that we all automatically assume is the sky, the cardboard cut out people and their fear of box cutters, their fear of flames and aging, the decrepit little angst-ridden youth inside me is by now fairly well aged, a top shelf wine, a dying celebrity... The 16-year-aged boy within me has become an old man. Time is a vortex and it swallows potential relationships and sticks you with the sand and grit of the current fling until both sanded down so smooth that personality is floating sediment where there once was rocks.

What the hell am I. This is personality dissociative fugues states without navigable maps, all crossed out where the old roads once ran and into the woods where the forests are moody and don't want to talk and the tension rods in the air snap with electricity, with signal flow and the vacuum of carpet space is a girlfriend sick in bed, a cat sick in bed, a grandmother sick in bed, a mind of battlefield sergeant, some scars unhealed and tobacco smoke thick in the gravestone car and we looked out on the scene of the accident where the blood was still stained warm between the cracks, the guitar pick, the earring, the sad stifled silence, the lack of talking when it was time to go, we just gravitated to the tahoe and left wordless, and left wordless.

I have died a thousand times and had a thousand rebirths. I am not immune to self imposed prisms of pain. I thought I would outgrow the worst parts of me but I have found my quick trigger frustration to dominate my days in some form with red flashing light colors of ambulances traveling toward your funeral because god gave them an order to resuscitate. Oh flashing lights of whiz by time and the pain of being wrenched forward into an unforgiving future when all present is so nice and physically decent, and the future... next future... 24 and the suffering in friday harbor when the ocean drains and I need some time alone, please, thank you, no thanks I don't need a coffee. I'll take a tea. Cold shower. I'll take a new house and a palm walk and a broadway broadside and an editing internship and god almighty I'll take a place in queue with the other greats in purgatory who die in an abstraction when they do not wake up to realize the wide open space between them and their goal. me and my goals. no obstruction. just self. just ridiculous fallacious emotions that can turn a rose into a burn victim. 

30 minutes sept 26

5:41 pm-6:14pm

When I come home to write, I can imagine words shaping themselves into ellipses and spiraling out of the air into my mind, and I, transcribing wildly, might glean some truthful version of the events of the day, the mundane observation mixed with truth of unsettling detail. The soul of the situations all spread out onto the operating table. 

(I wanted to keep my sanity and write with method and patience and adequate timing, etc. Earlier, I avoided my free-write and have been a cloud ever since. No solid ground on which to stand. A downed bridge in heavy fog and the drivers are suspended through the crisp air above the ravine before plummeting.) 

Mind wanders too far and it doesn't seem to know how to complete a thought to place in the head of a fictional character. Hear the muddled advice of a number of authors say, "Every character you create is yourself, an extension of your own fears, desires, joys. These exaggerations are not lies, and bending through your internal vocabulary is a psychological attempt to make sense of the harder-to-cope-with parts of your personality. Through exaggeration, that time you overreacted to the spilled cup of coffee can be taken apart and examined as a fossil found washed ashore on some rocky beach... then, with horror, you find it to match with exactitude your selfsame DNA. You are the author and you are your characters. You have the power to resolve conflicts within yourself through them."

I have tried to begin a sentence four or five times now and erased every word of it. This is not a free write. This is a sabotage of the creativity because of how self analytic it is. Of course I need inspiration to create the characters through which I can work through my paralyzing guilts and paranoid prosecution anxiety, where the characters are fucking real but heroic and never crack under the pressure that washes over me like a placid little flower being drowned in a heavy rain. Regret does not exist in the created world. Only in the terrible, depraved world of the creator, who creates nothing focused enough to share. Nothing nothing nothing. No combination of words from the ether can be shared reasonably or published or even re-read by me! 

Negativity die. Give yourself some astrological free will advice to warm up the cooling embers of your heart, the tight ropes wound round the lungs and the curve of the spine as it is swallowed up by the orange chair, the apples on the table, the digging I can do, the excavating of stories, the wonderful images and beginnings, the mountain erased by clouds, the packs of roving imbeciles on a campus that fuels me with a kind of sardonic fear of emulsion, yet the cynicism is louder and yells longer than their voices...so many, many, many. So terrible too. Their faults numerous in their acceptance of the status quo as a way to exist so happily in bliss and with god and the ministers of peace and justice are always self-proclaimed and never secretly gifting strangers the elected spirit of a positive mindset at random, with strings and syringes, in red brick public squares, illuminated by a cross breed mutt architecture and the green distances all, all, all directions. 

You are amazing, fantastic, great at knowing how to live. Creativity pours out of your eyes like tears of zeus. or lightning bolts out of thunderstorms caused by volcano eruptions. Yes! There are problems in the machinery. Your depression nearly laid you flat before you took a bus downtown to climb a 40 story building and investigate the public library. You wanted to sleep and in a dark place, it is understandable. You wished for an out at that point. A pill to swallow to paste a collage of smiling advertising faces on your self. No, no. What helped this time was velocity. Getting on that god damn bus. Looking out the god damn window at quickly passing sights and lives. Then wandering aimless through the downtown cluster of shining, majestic buildings, newer and fresher than Amsterdam canal water. See the sea down the hills while walking along 5th or 3rd. Dream of pods of orca whales.   Becoming one of them, or building one in the laboratory, and procreating to save the species. Helping them avoid quiet ferries among the loud motor boats. 

Velocity always seems to help. Drinking in a dark room as photographs of newly inputted memories are suddenly blotted out by a carelessly, mechanically cleaning bartender.. "oops, were these yours? sorry about that. another double?" and then drinking it down and feeling the world pass by with ambition and purpose as your bar tab rises and your depression surrounds your body like a snake skin too heavy for the poor little snake to shake off no matter how much writhing and rustling in the overgrowth, the undergrowth of forested lanes. 

This blockage is nothing! It truly is not a blockage! You're borderline personality disorder. Anxiety is one voice. Contentedness is a student who never raises his hand. Creativity is drunk and boisterous, yet always in the mornings finds himself a false promiser. Ambition is a kid who wants to be an astronaut but doesn't want to do math, just wants to look at the stars. Happiness is a white tiger in a darkening twilight snowdrift, bear in a cave, hibernating. Sadness is an atmosphere. 

sept 22

first day back from summer commitments and the grey is heavy on the rooftops. the grey is weighing down the green of the trees into brown and the branches are frozen in a tussle. I am going to be taking  early american literature, the second instillation of french, and a prose writing class. The elements of style in a story form. The elements of the periodic table in cosmic form. Possibility of failure is minor, so small, an etching on a paper erased by spilled coffee. These will be mornings of bounding up out of bed with the eagerness to pursue a dream, at least a temporary dream, as it flies in all directions, makes me chase it, lose it, find something else as beautiful and majestic in the forest of my life and experience, creatures walk the earth, all the time, and in between the spaces of the fictional and the real will be my own self, furry with fiery eyes, hiding among the grey branches of my world.

sept 19 free write

11:09 - 11:29

black tea wearing all grey, the house show last night was quiet, two singers and acoustic guitars and an awkward staggering of the self when surrounded by emotional triggers, like pianos, or a certain select series of notes to wrench out the heart from the chest, still beating, like Aztec god-kings and to let my head go rolling down the steep steps of a pyramid, sewn off with a dull slashing axe, a dull motion spun neck and my vision of the sky and the steps and the vast landscape, green, would alternate depending on what my skull bounced on, boing boing, the crowd below bloodthirsty and gut hungry and eye tired, they've been in the sun all day long with rotten fruit.

Piano notes tinkling along with the experimental haze of someone waking up from a fog. Is it clear that this person, myself, has begun to slip, to lose the mind into an eternity of insane thoughts so convoluted that there is no tether to line me up into a prose-poem even, or an avant grade hand me down bookstore where poems go to hide and burrow? Colors of friendship last night were the turquoise, aqua stairs that lead down into the basement. Hot in there. Our lungs filtered, filtered air and dust when the drunk banged on the furnace piping along with the rhythmic thump of the acoustic guitar and yelling vocalist, passion hitting the notes straining the vocal cords, it is an investment in the cause, the notes and the feelings rather than a simple gestural performance piece with stage lighting and make up and nervous hands in the audience. How does anyone without beer or a camera know what to do with their hands?

Low ceiling. Eagles rest. Outside the black cat chases off a raccoon. We talk freely amongst ourselves as if given an 'at ease' command by the sergeant. Whoever. The clouds hold themselves together, only shedding a tear at the mention of her name. Margot, perhaps. Jane. Sunshadow breaks through the clouds sadness and they disappear without the relief of tears. Well it's night now and the clouds can glower and threaten to sob all they want, the city goes indoors to hibernate for a few hours.

In my hibernation I experienced such obscure lucid dreams. I saw my uncle with huge scars tracking up his arms, huge arms, huge gashes, and his impatience. Taken somewhere beautiful to accomplish a task. Make my eyesight work. I had gone insane in my dream. I was perhaps hospitalized, or drugged. That is a common theme for my confusing psychological nightmares. I announce the causation of my forgetfulness on a strange drug someone slipped into my drink. Never had blue ice cream tasted so guilty, it turned to mustard and the scene swirled about. There were cathedrals. Jungle beaches. Perpetual sunsets. Two attractive lesbian women in the reception area, exceedingly cramped, with odd names. One was David. the other an inanimate object. something I can't quite remember like most the dream within the dream. I had forgotten the elements that made up that world as I was still a part in actively creating it. This forgetfulness caused anxiety within the dream. How odd. The world I created was within my rules and boundaries and I was embarrassed by my inability to remember what I had previously created. I guess that is similar to forgetting an old song you wrote with your first or second or third band. Some old art wears out and the new material replaces it with kashmir increasingly.

I dreamed myself incapable of getting the story straight within my dream. I had persecution delusions all from within a world I could absolutely control.

scattered notes (compiled sept 17th)

a riddle

scent of pine or cedar, pulled along toward greater things, move food & give height to the banquet- rapid pace for the brave, aimless drift for the sun burnt drunk, muscles fight the current near the fall yet only w/ teamwork - or just go in circles.


receipt from a bar

I know the snowflakes attached to the lights are common to you but, damn it, they are new to me. Never neglect the small details, they might come back and remind you of who you were for the rest of your glorious life. Those reflective beer signs, I'm sure you see yourself -- do you call yourself beautiful in your mind? Or is there a block of some kind, a resistance... it will become futile with time... cheap beer trivia night, does the vibe personify your soul? I doubt that. It must be transitory. This is something to endorse and fund a greater cause, great! Be an artist! a magician! I still love those snowflakes. The chalk sign or trivia, by definition, mean less. Where we grow on these sticky, marked up tables. this is a poetic, constant experience. Patron - bartender, to bouncer-patron.. if something does not work out of these relationships maybe the paramedics will be called again. many actors on stage tonight disappear in an instant, look a shot of jameson as a man took...

open mic night notes

set up, acoustic guitar, bass, trumpet, tuba. storytelling song structures, humor split between. I say two without connecting them with words coherent, open forum for all forms of performance art. the wide, expanded minds of artistic, soft spoken writers, and their evident creative output.
"build a city in your image."
funky, folk art, multiple materials, mixed media words

(poems in the mail) dark philosophy, creation myth, infinite decisions (spacey cousin of eternity). this house is like.... (body metaphor).

news articles from different perspectives.

back corner with my lemon herb tea, to dominate my nerves as I signed my name up first... bricolage, literary arts journal. Trekked up the mighty hill keeping blood flowing in my hands, those cold strings... creative writing vs. literature (nearby same classes just with additional workshops)
- mic set up with curled up cable - tiny amp for the voice. went first, nervousness subsided though difficulty knowing what to do with my eyes (only used microphone after songs).
scattered applause, connects & future open mice (spoken word dramatists) started the trend of microphone ignorance
- shaky hand poems, indecision what to read, self-affirming poem of family

torn out from notebook

bright world music, primary color scheme, yellow beams & ceilings, red table, blue painted bricks, now the pier & the sleek, covered ferris wheel salt scented summer heat. We misunderstand and tear apart. I'm embarrassed by my credit cards and my ears. I returned to a life that is not mine, a guilt swelling up like a riptide and a cigarette sounds an alarm in me. (today I am terrible a depression fails my arms) Fuck this feeling. Return to a unique life. a velocity. return return.

I tried. The octopus with its fervent oscillations cheered me.

torn out from different notebook (tangled vines)

tangled green vines (coliseum ivy)
those glory days, before the woods became tamed, my vision held through rose colored glasses, she was a wild flower whose petals fell and caught in my eyeglasses
the ambulance took hours making sense of the wreckage my sudden shifted broken lens try  to piece together with duct tape and bandages but the view is lost in haze of coal fire smog, gently lit the carriage wheels ablaze only plunging in the river could they be saved....
caffeine when we need the rest
fire when we might freeze to death
water when we burn alive
an awful sight for sore eyes

tingling with fireworks and lightning flashes

re-drafted letter

jeremy-
I had difficulty waking up this morning, the sleep too comfortable, dreams too lofty and safe because my logic knows they will extinguish themselves like moths to flame with the morning. Then I ask if any of these dream-ideas, below my comprehension or acknowledgment, blood or grow wings rising from the ashes of cloudy morning as a dazzling fiery bird? The dreams I can't remember most likely guide this pen across the page.
Background, first fresh pot of coffee brewed in a few days. Smells smokey. Foreground, a temperamental plant with purple clover leaves that faux-wilts if it has too much sunlight or water and then folds up as if to cuddle itself at night. (pause to pour a cup with eager, shaky hands). There is a large stack of books to my right. External motivation will help me with a pace for each without my normal distractions that disallow prolific reading when I inhabit free time... I must make breakfast and walk up to campus, I'll write more this afternoon...

thoughts in a cafe 9/18

she rolls up her sleeve to show a hand-shaped bruise
dress made out of bath mat material