the fade out

I hate looking at old pictures. It reminds me of what I dislike the most about myself.

Looking at the faces of friends long gone, teachers that I learned from then discarded from my life like a used tissue. I'm terrible at keeping up with those that aren't in my immediate periphery. It's too easy to let them drift away- time preserves them as "that person that I was close to when I was [still singing/16/at camp].

I've always been jealous of people who are good at keeping in touch. That prideful, almost arrogant way they say "My friend/mentor of [numerous] years...I've known them since I was [blank years old]". What they're saying is giving that person context in the story of their lives. What I hear is "Keeping people close for years on end is a priority to me- it signifies that I can be friends with people for years on end without the relationship fading away into obscurity. I have stronger values than you do". Clearly what I hear is a projection of my insecurity but I end up berating myself in the end anyways.

With the exception of a select few, my friendships are like chapters in a book. The rush of the beginning, the climactic moment, then the gradual end where we pass by each other through our respective lives like ghosts in the night.

the halves that halve you in half

I'm not young enough to know everything.
But I thought that at least this... this precious little bubble of my life was safe
Protected and true.

And even when it burst I denied it to myself
but now the pain, the incomparable pain rests upon my shoulders
pressing down until I become a smudge of the self I'd always known

No one ever told me that knowledge and truth were anguish.
I feel the agony but at the same time am removed as if I'm watching my actions on a screen from a seat in a movie theater.

It doesn't feel real.

THERE ARE CERTAIN things about women that men will never understand, in part because they have no interest in understanding them. They will never know how deeply we care about our houses—what a large role they play in our dreams for ourselves, how unhappy their shortcomings make us. Men think they understand the way our physical beauty—or lack of it, or assaults on it from age or extra weight—preys on our minds, but they don’t fully grasp the significance these things have for us. Nor can they understand the way physical comforts or simple luxuries—the fresh towel or the fat new cake of soap—can lift our spirits. And they will never know how much our lives are shaped around the fear of bad men and the harm they can bring us if we’re not careful, if we’re not banded together, if we’re not telling each other what to watch out for, what we’ve learned. We need each other’s counsel, and oftentimes it comes when we’re talking about other things, when we seem not to have much important on our minds at all

the disaffection of romance

Edit: this post doesn't reflect my personal life but more of an observation/amalgamation of thoughts from reading scripts, articles, and situations.

Of course you've seen it all before but you always forget until you get to that place again. Past romances which had slapped the hurt into you always become shrouded and cloudy, withered memories like an Alzheimer's patient, in the face of the new object of desire.

Yet eventually, the perfect little seed that you've kept close, polishing it like a pearl nightly with love and fevered breath, begins to stain with every verbal sling, every injured feeling that gets buried, only to bubble up when least expected.




In the face of a world where new love objects are a click away, albeit virtual and remote, how do we persevere when most other daily activities of our lives have been simplified? Considering the breadth of our access to a wider range of partners, is it easier for us now to dismiss potential relationships because of some perceived or imaginary slight, knowing that our physical and intellectual ideal could still be out trolling the web highway?

It's so much easier not to care. Love/like/sex is so much simpler. A groping towards some sort of mutual satisfaction with no side of emotion, no risks, no problems. After all, how many couples actually make it, who don't just maintain appearances to fool their children, where the appreciation and respect grows instead of falling by the wayside. Does the dissolution happen because two people were never a right fit from the start or do the ravages of monogamy chip away slowly but surely, like the waves beating against the rocks on the beach?

We do it because it's precious. When we find it, we resort primitively to guarding and defending it to the death. We do it because we want to feel needed, we want it to be realized when we're not around. We do it because it feels good- not just the physical benefits but those moments after an argument where you realize that little fightquakes aren't going to tear it apart.

we can cross rivers with our will

Usually these photographs that I post are an abstract image that I find captivating, an image that I think is "cool"- whereas this image is a literal depiction of my state of mind.



Off-kilter. Off-balance. Twisted and tumbled over.

I know this from certain tendencies. Eating the same foods over and over. Whenever my brother was feeling this way, that was the time that certain foods populated our refrigerator. Dozens of vanilla yogurts, a bunch of poppy-seed bagels, whatever made the chemical connection that united mood with taste buds was plentiful in our household.

I haven't listened to music in a week and a half. I always vacillate between listening to primarily podcasts or music. I'm in the podcast mood because music access a too raw and primal set of emotions. Podcasts are comforting and clinical- dispensing stories, information, or hilarity- I can choose the conversation I want, I can choose the company I keep.

I'm being irrational. I don't want to say it aloud because speaking words breathes life into it. So rather I will type. I'm allowing the demon of my past rear his ugly head. The victim is not a comfortable role for me to play, usually an awkward and cumbersome fit, yet for some reason I'm slipping into it comfortably. The devil's dance that I entertained for three years left more scars that I realize, scars that manifest themselves more prominently in the face of a relationship with the opposite of everything I have known. Time to rewrite my emotional neurons.

I know I will climb out of this.

but a little fantastic, fleeting, and out of reach

I came to this realization. Just now. While watching ADAPTATION. The movie about a guy writing a movie-which is in fact the movie that you are watching.



I realized this while watching the movie while simultaneously searching for reviews on the movie I was watching. Reading other people's words, other people's perspectives. Because I was doing this, I didn't watch the movie intently. I wasn't fully engaged.

I also do this with restaurants and food. For some odd reason, I have to read these reviews and see how other people feel. I can't just experience anything for myself. I have this need to know something before I get in. I can't just leap before I look.

i'd always known it would be like this

there's something so seductive about apathy. about disconnection.



if you really want to break it down, thoreau was the first hipster. he said (in a less eloquent way) "f*** this. i'm going to get away from our society and live in the wilderness". He broke away from the bullshit, from the socially established constructs, "to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Okay, Bright Eyes.
I mean, look at the name of hipster bands lately: Fleet Foxes, Caribou, Wolfmother- if that's not an attempt to harken back to native roots then what else is it (perhaps the members really just enjoy nature)?

Whatever, back to the main subject of this post. Now I've read number upon number of articles bemoaning that our increasingly virtual lifestyle causes depression because of the lack of real human contact. I grew up in the time where AIM was prominent and numerous soap operas of the teenage era unfolded in the minutes of those exchanges therefore I can understand the assertion of these articles and the logic. Despite the fact that what we write on Facebook posts/blogs/comments etc is essentially like tattooing yourself with the inanity that you post on the web, we do it because its easy, instantaneous and seemingly harmless. Also the problem with this shift in living also causes ourselves to critically and fully construct our identity via likes, dislikes, music taste, and quotes. Everything we post, every sentence we write continues to label our identity in this vast space.

But the vastness is appealing. The remoteness is freeing. The fact that we can say what we really, truly, in the deepest and darkest recesses of our mind think without fear of immediate societal repercussion- I mean is that nothing but truly freedom. Although Thoreau's journey was much more of the kind of a confrontation of natural forces and the human fallibility in face of those, I think that what we are dealing with now is the struggle to force oneself to be heard in the face of the abyss of empty space. And although people may respond favorably, you know the emptiness of their validation. It's all a lie.