i'm here again. i have been managing to keep my routines going, steadily. as i progress in certain things, it gets harder and harder to move through it. for example, in japanese, i am working on grade 3 level kanji, and it takes me a long time to study and go through one rotation. but what keeps me going is the steady improvement. in my last cycle, i think i got 50 something kanji right. (there are 200 kanji in the grade 3 level)...
i was also meditating this afternoon. so many brief touches with memories. but nothing new, no epiphanies. i think that the conscious mind lays a web across everything, touches everything with its life-draining blight. so the forms of things are honored and preserved, but the life- well, that's gone. i guess one of my hopes in doing all of these processes is to break through the dominion of my conscious mind... sort of like that one time (was it one?) when i get drunk, just to see if i would lose control enough to experience somthing new (i managed to keep a pretty steady hold, even when i got extremely sick). i think the only time i "tricked" myself out of control was when i took a hit of marijuana in california... i might have mentioned this before, but after inhaling and not feeling much of anything for a few seconds, i suddenly had this vivid sensation of being completely outside of myself... and not in a "cognitive" sense. i was literally outside of myself, somewhere off to the left (i distinctly remember the specific location). i somehow could see myself from this external vantage point. and i recall it was enormously difficult to focus. and i remember giggling uncontrollably...
ANYWAY, all of this is a struggle to remove the veil of reality, or rather, remove the veil over reality, and discover something authentic and true. and, i hope, i suppose, to discover a narrative that will be easy to write. that will come naturally... none of this contrived crap. because the contrived story is simply an extension of the conscious mind- a scaffold constructed from the splinters of a long ago shipwreck...
*****
i had fragments of memories. my bedsheet in college was purple. it had large purple blossoms on it. and it was located next to this heater grate. and i remember this feeling of enormous despair, speaking into the grate of the heater. in the darkness. in this dark corner. concealed, though next to the window, on the first floor, that opened out into the quad. imagining at times that a face would appear at the window, curious, and looking in, but no one was there. no one was ever there. i remember listening to the tape of james bond theme music that my brother had sent over, not because i really liked it, but because it was something to cling onto. something to hold onto, something familiar...
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i remember the first day i went to williams college. alone. brand new things. buying a tennis racket. buying these grey williams sweats. running up and down the length of those stairs, towards the back of the quad (i think). towards that kwonsett hut and the golf course. places i rarely ventured actually. the ironic pillars. that sandwich shop. and eating at colonial pizza, with deedee, who i imagined had a crush on me. stuff like that. the innocence, the terror, the hope of it all... i hated myself back then. (i hate myself now). so incredibly awkward.
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i remember the snack bar in my senior year. how i was so incredibly lonely and desperate. how i would go to the snack bar simply to have something to eat. i think i always ate a bagel with cream cheese, and a bottle of snapple iced tea. the girl that worked there was a japanese freshman. cute. but i don't rob the cradle. and besides, i was not someone that anyone was interested in. i would just sit at the table... and study. and look out at the world through those windows. the light as it came in seemed cold and insipid. what was wrong with me?
remembering different faces, like vines to cling to, because without them, i would fall forever into despair. i was always looking for someone to save me. for someone to see something in me. so needy and desperate. i remember lily oei, for some reason, this vision of her living somewhere in new york, and i remember the excitement of thinking she could see me, running and skipping over black ice on the sidewalk, and nearly falling flat on my face. must have been my junior year, living with phil in that house, garfield? don't remember... imagining the place where lily lived. why? i didn't even know her, but i imagined her asian face held some style and some interest in me. what was wrong with me? why so desperate and alone?
*****
i remember winters in mission park. the cold halls, empty. the smell of abandonment. that feeling. my day stretched on before me, with no plans, and there was a false excitement in it, although it was thin ice over this underlying despair. looking at pictures at this desk in this room that i was borrowing, seeing people at some hike, imagining relationships... hearing, somewhere, perhaps in the floor above, some woman gasp and moan in sex. and feeling, again, incredibly empty and alone. hating that.
for a large segment of my life, i think when others were celebrating, i felt consumed (and i mean really consumed, like eaten from the inside out) by loneliness and depression. it was, it is, it was, crippling. i am so thankful that i seem to have exited it somewhat normal...
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