sleep and dream.

i feel so very tired.

why was i filled with such longing? with half-a-heart. as though to see the world, the wonders of it, meant nothing, so long as i only saw it, them, with my own eyes. who cares about what i saw? who cares about the vision, the perspective, of someone who never mattered, who never had a voice?

i think it was good for abrianna to visit. i'm glad that she seems to be doing well. it made me happy, that she would take the time to acknowledge me, that in some small corners of random hearts, maybe i occupied some place of significance. because i really did want something good for these children. i really did want to make some kind of difference...

i felt, in the larger things, i didn't make a difference. i never saved my sister. maybe, it was my influence, or the ways i pulled away, that led to her trajectory. i'm so sorry for that. i wish i could go back in time and talk to her, shift the path that is now laid in the firmament... but it's too late. i was always too late.

people back away from me. they give each other that look. and then they turn away. i'm not sure what it is i did. but i'm too tired now. i mean, i've seen this all before. the ridicule. it's been my long companion. in despair, and perhaps a bit of relief, i've always thought of how i could not change the world, change the heart of it. people look at my passivity and they think it is abdication... but no, it serves a practical purpose, won through experience. no one ever shifted their opinion as a result of me saying anything. my brother thought me a piece of shit, and never responded to what i said. the hearts of others, it was like stone. i made myself small and invisible, and worked like water, slow, over time, to carve the hardness. but beyond that sort of disappearing act, there was, there is, nothing i can do. i speak of love for the children as my only motivation, but really, it is an admission that i can't do much about anything else- about the views, the way i have become a pariah...

are there good goodbye songs?

i feel so heavy and slow and clumsy and stupid.

the world around me seems populated by happy chirping birds, flitting around. i can barely hear their twitter-speak. it just sounds like cruel knives, needle jabs. and i- i just can't keep up.

i hear laughter even when it doesn't emerge from lips. i walk tenuously down these halls, and people look at me, and avoid me. i'm not sure why... or rather, why wouldn't they? i am of some different element, like clay or syrup. no one wants to- no one can- communicate with me.

"i'm sorry," i'd say, but they'd misunderstand, or flitter away before i could even begin to explain.

***

i'm looking for my exit pass now.

***

i lay down, watching my hand slowly close and open.

i can't hold onto anything.

i feel so very tired. and there is a pain in me, and i think it is so pervasive and eternal, that it almost mimics a numbness. but now and then it reminds me that it is pain. it is the pain of- never belonging?

i want to sleep and forget it all away.

***

i'm looking for my exit pass now.

***

when was it that i stopped caring? or have i?

there are things that i love. children. my family. i have no friends to speak of, not really, not people who i could honestly say enjoy my company...

***

my former student, one of my first students, abrianna, came to visit me. i almost didn't recognize her, she was so tall. she seemed so articulate, far more articulate than when i first worked with her. she seemed happy to see me. i was certainly happy in her company, thinking that perhaps i had helped her in some way.

most of the time, i wonder what sort of effect i have had on the world. all my attempts to help. i really- REALLY- only wanted to make people happy. it seemed the proper thing to do. for someone who- all his life- wrestled with this despair and feeling of worthlessness and alienation- it seemed a way to make it alright. if you smile, then maybe- maybe i was not what i felt inside.

but nowadays... the visits are rare. and people don't regard me as something all that great. most of my former students, they kind of look away. maybe they feel they've let me down. maybe they know i have.

maybe they understand what a crutch they are to me. like i can only look to those in my charge, because the larger world thinks i'm a piece of shit. "look, see? i am a nice, kind person. these little ones seem to think so."

***

the world is my brother's eyes. and it is always unconvinced.

no matter what machinations i may make, or things i may do, those eyes seem to deaden me, make me heavy and stupid again.

i see those eyes all around me now.

where is that damn exit pass?

***

i love my sister. maybe if i repeat it enough times.

i have memories of us. of us always playing together.

i failed her. i wasn't able to protect her from my brother. i never knew. but in any case, i failed her. and when she needed my help, i was so self-concerned. so full of self-pity. i hate myself for that. my sister never deserved the hell that she is in. i would go there myself. i wish i could. i'm not so much in love with this crappy self of mine that i wouldn't give it up if it would make a difference.

my sister, so vibrant.

yes, the world would have loved her outside.

they would have long since forgotten me.

please, take me instead.

***

i am so sorry everyone for the trouble i have caused. i didn't mean it. i can't have meant it. it was just what i was. i never belonged here, i was told that repeatedly at the start, but i pretended there was a way for me, a path and a skin to walk in, but that was all pretend. you all saw right through it, you rubbed out my footprints, and you looked away from what i was... so now i am like sisyphus's boulder, poised on the apex of the hill, relentlessly thirsting to fall again and again.

don't. DON'T pick me up.

i want to break and be forgotten forever.

***

i am close to my exit now.

i'll see you
(or not)

infinite sadness.

i'm not sure why i felt it / feel it, but it is inescapable.

to look at things, and to know that they will all decay and pass and be forgotten.

that all effort will ultimately come to naught.

that there is nothing in this world that contains any ultimate meaning or significance.

that there is only this play of emotions, the in and out of a breath, that ultimately leads nowhere, but simply passes the time.

***

i watched a horror movie, the witch, perhaps in a vain effort to feel. but it only turned my reality sour. earlier today, i searched for a japanese romance, but found nothing particularly appealing. currently, i am 40 minutes in to "how to talk to girls at parties," which, if nothing else, is not entirely depressing...

***

recognition and acknowledgment are empty things, hollow trophies, but i guess they mean something to me anyway. in their absence, i think i tend to float and harbor resentments... i want to die, depart, float away, into nothing.

***

my son. so tired, but i should help him, i should reach for him and pull him along. but i am so tired. and it seems as though it all is against the current. best to just let things be... that's what it seems to be at least, for now...

***

recalling the dirty woodshed, the place to store wood, how my father perhaps made it all? was it all by his hand? how amazing he was back then. but now, all the things he does has no significance or expertise, or even an ounce of care. it is all just to pass on to the next moment. what does he look forward to? he is tired, and diabetic. going blind. what is the significance of it? friendless, alone, bitter.

1/7/2018

tonight i write in the absence of music.  instead, i hear the wind roaring outside.  it can be a comforting sound, the wind.  i'm not quite sure why.  i suppose it is the contrast between the tumult and turmoil outside, and the calm and shelter within.  i suppose it makes it seem appropriate and sufficient to cuddle up and sleep.  it makes you think you have no business worrying about anything else.  it makes you think that there exists this thing called peace.

life is made up of contrasts.  the contrasts hide a truth that underlies everything.  in reality, there is neither peace nor chaos.  when someone thinks they are at peace, it is often only because of a relief that things are not worse, but if one weren't in the proximity of calamity, then one would only find other, littler things to worry about.  i suppose that's part of the crux, that there is no ultimate peace, or at least no peace that exists independent of the world.  or should i say, no peace that exists dependent upon the world?  we always rest in the world within a stance, and our weight is always placed somewhere, and that weight makes us dependent upon some fictional ground...  but the ground is perhaps ultimately always unstable.

***

i have been thinking about this idea of reduction.  in chemistry, there is this thing called a redox reaction.  basically, it is an exchange of a couple of electrons.  there is a "reduction", meaning a giving up of electrons, and then there is "oxidation," which involves the taking up of electrons, often with the accompaniment of oxygen.  but in any case, reduction, which in other contexts, usually means a diminishment, well, perhaps in relationships (human), there is a sort of exchange that occurs there as well.  when one is reduced (diminished), then another is empowered.  i think there is something desirable about being reduced at times.  i can't quite explain it...  i describe this in aesthetic terms, as an acknowledgment of the true nature of the world, of being ultimately completely vulnerable to it, but it is more (and less) than that...

i think that to overwhelm someone (with pleasure) is to simultaneously reduce them to something vulnerable to feeling.  and perhaps that is accompanied by a simultaneous empowerment.  i'm not sure...

***

i want to remember something.  but i can't recall what it is.  so i won't know if i've found it.

"wish i knew what you were looking for.  might have known what you would find."

i think what i seek is a feeling of continuity with the past.  perhaps if i felt the solidity of my past, i would feel more confident in the flow of my present.  because things have seemed quite fragmentary of late.  because there is a constant questioning, and interrogation, of being...

***

the directions we seek to move in life...  how time mocks us.  it finds us still in the same place, with the same unanswered questions.  and yet we have changed.  we are older, more diminished, less relevant, worn, faded.  the questions, the feeling, the urgency, it becomes tired.  our hopes and dreams become laughable myths.  once, i might have wanted to learn a martial art- but then, time and tide questions me, and says, "for what?"  that effort is like a sandcastle vulnerable to the waves.  work and work and work at it, but if you stop for a moment, it all disappears into the soup.  and what for?  there is no one to see the sandcastle.  no one is there to witness it.  was the point to have a witness, to impress someone?  and if not, then what was the point?  is there an end in itself?  is there a reason outside of the "play" of relations?

***

i have often asked that question.  i have wanted to know if it were possible to devote oneself to art, apart from the eyes of others.  i remember training in the graveyard, in the snow...

1/5/2018

cry baby cry.  this is the old beatles song...  i forget what album it came from.  but it is evocative...  the accordion part particularly recalls some seaside jaunt (?).

***

now thom yorke is singing something live, it was something weird, but now it transitions into "everything in its right place."

i am following some thread.  it is a loose thread i dislodged in the knot of my soul.  now i am following it, sometimes pulling it tight, sometimes picking at it like a scab to find a way to untangle and loosen it from myself.  i am hoping this thread leads to something significant- or that it opens me up to some nothingness, a freeness, a liberty.  but it could be another red herring, a deception.  endlessly to find no heart to myself, only another deception, a clotting of blood at its exposure to the air.  there is nothing within me.

shodo's poem hinted at this.  that the heart is a heavy stone, tacit and silent, at the top of a hill.  and that our job is to repeatedly cast this stone away.  or that the heart is an echo of the shell of a cicada.  and that our job is to repeatedly try to listen for its voice, its beat, its nonexistent instructions...

***

having an image of the first culdesac i lived in, and the red house on the corner, and the two story house outside of the culdesac that intersected and caught the kite that i had released from my hands.  all these young families, all innocent like my own.  they are all gone now, all grown up, all old or dead or jaded, which in certain senses is also dead...

***

we are all flies and maggots buzzing.  that is what i think.  i hear it all around me, the voices of children mocking and singing.  and thinking of richard's praises, as though his opinion meant anything, that i could catch poetry in my words, that i could be a source...

***

there is nothing else.  i am irritable and empty.  there are no friends to speak to.  we are all strangers passing.  no one wishes to recognize me, because i am a bomb of emptiness, a blast of meaninglessness.  i can make anything transparent and translucent.  i see your bones.  i see your ugliness.  but be aware that i see it in myself first.  i always saw it in me first.  but nevertheless my eyes are cruel and penetrative.  they stab through and impale the surfaces.  they cannot help but do this.

***

the drumming.  my heartbeat (or lack thereof).  we are empty rhythms interpenetrating.  there is no rhyme scheme or time signature that can contain it.  the one we have settled on is a compromise, and it seems to hold us together.  but actually we are always tempting to fall out of sync, and transform everything into some cacophany.

help me.

***

it is now...  the rims of buildings, with ticker tape running around.  a building somewhere in seattle.  somewhere where the weather is temperate.  there is an old black man who is an expert at bagua and other internal martial arts wandering around.  beatnicks and hipsters.  and the air is creativity, a kind of snarky crunchy creativity that feeds off itself, cannibalistic, but vital and thriving in its life-death.  and there is sex there.  free sex.  women with large afros, and color in their hair, large circular tinted sunglasses, and bell bottoms, and others in tight leather dresses, every fetish imaginable, exploring their wants on anyone available to serve as raw material for fantasies.  and i live in this place.  in my dreams.  i walk on in a time where there is enough time for dreams, for wasted time.  the oregon of leslie eleveld, this place of self absorption, and anxiety of self-absorption.

***

now chimes.  chiming.  the song is about what.  beeping, the interruption of electronica.  heaving and heaving.  slipping into something else.  what is it.  the onset of a transformation.  whether you want it or not.

***

thinking: i am being watched, i am being listened to.  and the strings, the catgut strings of my heart, being plucked.  the electromagnetic fields of eyes.  the tense strings of awareness.  taut.  i hear it, vibrations like spiderwebs.  even though we are disconnected, connected.  an arc of electricity, making real the search for a connection in the charged atmosphere.

1/3/2018

Heaven.

A plain, with small figures, and clouds boiling up into the sky.  A vast sky.  The figures are a small boy and an old man.  The plain is actually a field of crops.  And they are walking barefooted on a patted down mud path beneath these clouds, this sky.  The sun, by the way, is exceedingly bright and brilliant, leaving flares in the eyes of those who dare to look in its proximity.

***

I am walking along a cramped pathway.  Beside me runs the waters of the canal.  At this one point, the point where I am on now, the edge of the canal steers close to the border fence, and the presence of overgrown weeds with knife-like leaves, makes me teeter on the smooth concrete edge of the canal, with small stones skittering into the cold flow...

There are houses beyond the chainlink fence on the far side.  And I remember this scene from the Childcraft books, a scene of houses in some foreign country, with windows, each with lives.  Each with open lives in open opportunities.  Other perspectives.

I remember the song, something like that P--- I can't recall the name...  And a huge bursting sunflower, on some staircase, some slightly crumbling staircase, in the sun.  And the pathway, along Anania Drive, and seeing the yards of other houses.  Wooden stairs.  Wooden fences.  Shifted and lifted sidewalks.  The click click as you ride your bike over the electronic equipment.  I can't recall much else.  But every place has a sort of epiphenomenon, whether you are aware of it or not; it is the aura of hope or fear that you as the observer imbue upon a place.  And I suppose I imbued everything (as I recall it) with a kind of 70s air, the air of bell bottoms and hippies (post 69) and songs of sunshine and rainbows, like the Brady Bunch kind of reality...  And comic books, of malleable characters, and other things like that.  It is difficult for me to capture or evoke that sort of reality.  The reality that I recall.  People were not exactly real.  They were slightly overgrown haircuts and clean cut smiles.  Everything was slightly faded, like a picture over exposed.  And the cartoon Jonny Quest.  Which I loved.  And other things like that.  Girls.  Prepubescent (because I myself was a child).  I was surrounded by them.  And I thrived on their attentions.  I was a child, something of disgust in retrospect, living off of their figurative breasts.

The 80s mentality was somewhat different.  I was a bit more conscious, but not much.  I can't recall too much.  There were different themesongs.  At the moment, I can't hear it...

Recalling the one time we went to Kahala Mall, and seeing tons of Rubik's cubes, with fruits and other symbols.  The T1000 Sinclair computer that I used to program, in black and white.  Writing the 2 lines of code to see words scroll across the entire screen.  The overheating of it all.  OK computer.  Or rather OK TV & Appliances.  And seeing the wall of computer games.  And that place in Pearl Kai shopping center that I used to visit.  And friends who were ardent gamers (and little else).  And how I touched on a reality back then, an alternate reality, again, an epiphenomenon...  Seeking a happiness, a completion.  Games that were impossible to complete without hints.  And thinking there was a reality where someone could figure everything out.  And I was not a part of it.  It was a while before I was able to actually delve into and complete my first game.  It was an accomplishment.  Remembering the game: something about Phantasy.  Or something.  I know the third game was about Nikademus.  But I can't recall much else.  It was a pretty stupid, crappy game, actually, but I liked it.  I thought it was interesting.  It was largely due to the influence of my friend Kendall.  It was my link to him.  I recall that a friend (forget his name) inherited my characters, and thought they were pretty powerful (had a Minotaur and a Pixie, among other things)...

Remembering playing a game of stepping on the roots around a tree, when I attended summer school science classes.  And longing for the eyes and attention of some girl.  Her eyes were wide.  Lips perpetually parted, as though to speak some hidden syllable.

1/2/2018 (2)

Hope is the enemy.  We kill it whenever it rears its profligate head.

We are a machine, and nothing more.  We handle anomalies with care, but with an end to eliminating them forever.  We run for greater and greater efficiency.  Not to produce anything, but simply to maintain a flow, the grinding of our gears.  Bugs and other things to be ground to powder or less, to "grease the wheels."  Yes, the grease of our wheels is the blood and cartilage of our errors.  We grind on and on.

***

What is there to write about?

A monster hides in the core of our soul.  We let it out periodically so that it can sate itself.  What does it want?  It wants a certain measure of violence and sadism.

***

The mind of action, of instantaneous decision making, and "intuition" is fundamentally racist, sexist, -istist.  This is inescapable.  People like to talk about a "race-free" discrimination-free world, but that is a world with the luxury of endless time and introspection.  In reality, we make judgments about people all the time, constantly.  We can try to make it seem as though those judgments are fair, but when it comes down to it, we are relying upon biases (inherited or not, conscious or not), and those biases have at their root something that is fundamentally irrational.  After all, we cannot know everything instantaneously.  We are not god, we cannot see the story written in each individual's apparent suffering.  We don't know, and can't know.  Maybe the person we extend a hand out to is a liar and thief; maybe the person we assume needs no help desperately wants just a word to keep from suicide.

We could adopt a stance.  We could be merciful and sweet to everyone and everything, like a cloying, rotting flower.  Or we could close ourselves off completely.  I guess I tend to take the latter stance, if anything.  But then again, I was hoping that it was possible to take the middle ground.  Not a paranoiac stance that is perpetually wondering.  But a stance that is at once ignorant, blind, and open.  I can't know everything, but there are things that are apparent to me, and if they are strong enough, I follow them; and I might be wrong, but I forgive myself.

I am definitely not god.

I like to be systematic and strategic.  But the world is not.  It does not obey any rules.  People, moreover, are always attempting to up the ante.  They prey upon the assumptions made by others.  That's another reason why this Hegelian idea of the absolute subject absolutely knowing itself is ridiculous.  People by their very nature try to obfuscate and deceive.  It is the game of life.  Women try to appear clean and attractive and open and available, a soft landing spot.  Men try to appear together and masculine and protective and gentlemanly.  Or whatever.  It is all a game.  We play to the crowd.  And perhaps even without a crowd, we would play the game, because without it, what else is there?

Sure, we could focus on some idea that is philosophically derived, like acting out of necessity, or saving the world, or what not.  But that does not feed the monster inside of us, the thing that is desperately irrational and violent.  We like to think that modern society will be rid of this thing, and maybe one day it may be, but it won't happen until we evolve out of our lizard brains...

...and besides that, who WANTS to evolve?  I for one enjoy conquest and violence, to a degree...

***

I am still stuck with perhaps 5 minutes of writing time.  I am now attempting to write for 15 minutes, uninterrupted...

Things change.  The park that we used to bring the kids to when they were much younger, it has changed.  It has new playground equipment.  Meanwhile, the rope swing in the lower section of the park is no longer there.  The branch that it hung from has been cut.  I tried to see the remnants of that branch.  Not sure, but there was a big oval where a significant branch once was...

I was recalling the idea of rolling down the hill in the back of the park.

I was recalling the Tenrikyo marching band practicing on the field.

These are all gone.  No one knows that they were there.  No one cares.  No one can hear the music of the past.  Things move on without remnant, without anyone to remember, without anyone to care.  What is the significance of a life?

What is the significance of a life?