i was watching snatches of inception this evening.  it was the movie i saw just before starting my job over at wahiawa el.  i remember it being a favorite, for a time...  for the span of a dream.  characters who had a grasp of reality, even with all of its shifts.  i envy that...

certain things fascinate me.  the gestures of control employed by keanu reeves in that movie johnny mnemonic...  the use of a symbolic totem in inception...  these are strategies of control and centering. they define a sacred space...  i think i used a ritual every time i felt broken and shit upon, and needed a restart...  everything, everything would be innocent, in its own skin (yes, i've repeated this image countless times)...  there would be a tension in me, a gritting of the teeth, a spasming to briefly fulfill the anger or hurt i would feel.  kind of a whimpering, on occasion...  buying into a fiction that i was, at that moment, innocent, and compelled by a force, by a fate...  because, perhaps, in that moment, that is exactly what i wanted.  to repossess my own narrative.  in the beginning of the story, even in in medias res, there is always an innocence to the protagonist, he is being written in, he is being moved by forces introduced into him or around him.  there is a cleanliness in that...  i suppose that is what i wanted, what i want.  1) cleanliness and 2) belonging to a story greater than myself...

i have this image of my senior year in college.  one day when i felt it.  that old hatred and pain build up.  i took some cds and shattered them in my hands, allowing the edges to cut into my palms...  and out of the fragments building a kind of shape on the floor of my room...  for a time walking, as in a daze, speaking to no one.  but from that, everything for a time returned into its own skin.  everything became itself again...

no one helps you when it is just you and that hate.  perhaps no one can help you.

now, when i think of the imagery of the skin, etc. and my habitual ritual, i wonder about the pericardium...  and how it protects the heart from pain.  but sometimes in so doing, it keeps the old pain within, continually recycling it, until it colors the narrative with its poison interpretations...  i wonder, in light of my reflections of this individual that i hate, and what he has done to others in my family, whether there is something in my past that i must somehow remember, through all the pain.

i cannot stop at my ritual to reestablish a skin.  somehow i have to go deeper, and remember what, if anything, was the original trauma...

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yet another reason why i distrust any totalizing narrative is in its fundamental hypocrisy...  and fuck it, the world is so blind.  people LOVE him.  and who am i, this pathetic piece of shit that he has discredited, who am i to shed the light upon his crimes?  YOU want to believe in him, god bless you. god, who allowed all of this to happen.  the right hand and all of that, forever and ever amen.

i choose to bend sinister.  i think things are truer here.  people think this is darkness, and evil, but if you have a heart to see things as they really are, you would see how ass backwards the world is...  those who speak.  those who judge.  i don't believe in any of them.  any more.

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box within box within box...