blargh

Moody, lately. Malcontent. Feeling stuck in these places, situations, with no options. Taut, like the edges of me are pulling away. Do I get like this every summer? I feel like I go in these cycles of moodiness, almost every three months, and it always seems to get bad during the late spring/summer. Don't know why. Pleh.

I feel like I should figure out what's wrong with me, like there IS something wrong with me, I just don't know how to find out, and I feel ridiculous when I want to talk about it with people. And I don't want to go to a therapist, because I can't even be straightforward with a therapist... like the therapist is going to judge me... which sounds stupid. argh. I just don't know.

Too many wordless concerns, too many feelings that I can't express, that are trapped behind some means that I don't have.

Or maybe I'm just too scared to say. Because all the times I do say things, they don't seem to matter.

I don't even want to post this, it doesn't say anything.

Hawks

I'm in orbit
Held by magnet
And the force fields
So much closer than love

Logic offers no defense
Underneath this influence

Stop the room please, I'd like to get off. I'm tired of the wavering spiral of spinning the same mistakes over and over hoping for a different result. I'm not stupid, I remember the lectures from since I was little. "Do you know what the definition of insanity is? It's doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result." Well, Dad, I'm insane. The reverse psychology worked. Fear is the great death, the kryptonite, the nemesis of motivation. Of change. And the world, oh god, the world is full of so many things to be afraid of, just in my own house.

I'm such a perfectionist. Always been so hell bent on doing the things I know how to do well. I have a niggling habit of doing what I'm perfect at over and over. But I have tread a hole clear through this plane, carved myself into this rut till I've caught fire from the constant friction of moving in the same place. I'm perfect at being comfortable, I'm perfect at lying. I'm perfect at thinking if I don't do something, I can't fail at it. I'm perfect at being afraid. I'm perfect at starting things I never finish. I'm perfect at telling you what you want to hear. I'm perfect at listening to music in the middle of the night and writing things that I will never let anyone else read. I'm perfect at killing an idea before it turns into something I can't control.

The sky is faint, their tears remain
In me the rain has stopped falling
The fading light, walls barely white
In me the night has stopped calling

I will not lament with the sky
No longer feel night on the inside

 How do you kickstart yourself back into progression? Heh... back into progression... that might be the problem.

Sow the seeds
Of everything to be
Safe in sleep
I winter in my dreams

Speak your words
Define my grief for me
Out of reach
Some things just can not be

It's stretching like a tear, yeah? How much is left on the page? Why do I always have to have the edges defined? I want a motorcycle, I want to ride it till I'm over my fear of the edges of things. Till all the roads blur into one road and they don't scare me anymore. Till the country can just be the country and not all in pieces.

I'm so sick of everything being in pieces.

I have to go find some Pink Floyd and bury this internal head back in the sand of trivial things, the roaring keeps me up. It frightens the hawks that circle, on wide wings, in the expanse overhead.

Love Love Love

The point of the song is, you know, that we are fairly well damaged by the legacy of the Romantic poets--that we think of love as this, you know, thing that is accompanied by strings and it's a force for good, and if something bad happens then that's not love. And the therapeutic tradition that I come from--I used to work in therapy--you know, also says that it's not love if it feels bad. I don't know so much about that. I don't know that the Greeks weren't right. I think they were--that love can eat a path through everything--that it will destroy a lot of things on the way to its own objective, which is just its expression of itself, you know. I mean, my stepfather loved his family, right? Now he mistreated us terribly quite often, but he loved us. And, you know, well, that to me is something worth commenting on in the hopes of undoing a lot of what I perceive as terrible damage in the way people talk about this--love is this benign, comfortable force. It's not that. It's wild, you know? - John Darnielle, of The Mountain Goats

Been listening to this song a lot today, every couple songs that shuffle up on my iTunes, I come back to this one, replay it. It's a beautiful song. I think I've been listening to it so much, because this idea has been on my mind the past few days.

I've been working the last month on archiving my poetry, trying to track it all down from various places, various looseleaf sheets in my filing cabinet and notebooks, stagnant internet corners.

So many of the poems I remember writing, and wish that I still had, are lost, or missing, or scribbled out. Looking back, I wish I hadn't at the time. I wish I hadn't thrown them away, or defaced them. They were such an insight into my emotions, small filmstrips of memory and moment.

In all the efforts to conglomerate, I've been contemplating why I write poetry, why it's important to me, something that I've always been compelled to do. Leonard Cohen once said, "Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash."

Poetry for me, is love, is evidence of life. That if you live, you love, and that poetry is the expression of life, of love, and that even the sad poems, the hard poems, the ones that don't seem to be anything but dark or miserable, they're all about love.

Every poem is a love poem, every song is a love song. Every emotion is an expression of love, is a consequence of love, is the way that love moves through us, or the way we move through things without it, in search of it.

This is a song about poetry, and life, and the things - the thing - that makes either of those important, and more importantly, that makes them true.

Some things you'll do for money, and some you'll do for fun...some moments last forever, and some flare out with love, love, love.

Waver/Wuthering Heights

The more I read Wuthering Heights, the more I like Heathcliff. The more I relate to him, empathize, sympathize, despise, recognize. I dunno, it's one of those books that draws you because all the characters are repulsive somehow. At least, they are to me. Who knew you could write a story like that? Perhaps that's the draw of it. What makes it literature. Initially, you despise them all. Sequentially, you associate aspects of the self with the loathing, and you end up hating the fact that you like them so much because you feel like you shouldn't, but you can't help it.

Even ugly people have a fascination with mirrors, I suppose.

So, I like Heathcliff. I adhor him.


I've been listening to instrumental music more than anything else lately. Plateau music. I love that idea, the plateau. Jonathan gave me an image to go with the feeling, and I've taken it and run. It's where I am, most of the time, I think. The plateau is how I orient myself. It's a corner plateau. I climb there, and sit with my back against the walls, and survey the landscape below me, like David in his palace.

A time-share condo for the plateau. It's a fantastic idea. We all use it.

Strings, ends of things, you can sit and unravel them, or wind them tighter. Why do I think in pictures? It's how I think. I don't think in words, words aren't colored enough and when I have the picture the words just come. I don't need to think them.


Wuthering Heights, instrumental electronica-type indie stuff that I dig up from interweb corners. What else have I been stuck on this week? I kicked Adam out of my spaces for 4 weeks, it was an ultimatum I gave both of us. That's been odd. I feel like I set myself drifting toward something without anything to drift on but myself. What did Jack do? Lash together sea turtles and ride them in toward the island? Pah. Who wants the island. I like the drifting. I like the lack of control in my drifting. I can be immobile and things will still move me.

It's not true, though. I cling to other things. Stupid things, really. Facebook, for one. Not worth the time and effort I put into it. WoW? The same thing. It's a stupid computer game, and I only started playing it for Adam, but I got sucked in. It's like heroin, only worse for you. You laugh, but it's true. You pour time, energy and money into something completely unreal, you feel accomplishment for sitting on your ass hours at a time and ignoring life around you.

But I love video games. I love the way they pull me from my reality. The life around me is something I often prefer to escape, and video games and music are my only moral options, as far as vices go, and even then, they're not moral. They can be, but they're not. I don't do the drugs that I want to...what're those Neutral Milk Hotel lyrics?

"And the first one tore a picture of a dead and hanging man who was kissing foreign fishes that flew right out from his hand and when I put my arms around him, felt the blushing blood run through my cheeks and an airiness surrounded when his tongue began to speak, he said,'Oh boy, you are so pretty - enough to wrap tight in rice paper, string.' And when I finally kissed him the whole world began to ring, lost like a bell that's tipping over, with two cracks along both sides. And I knew the world was over, so I took a look outside and watched the fires that were reaching up to the weathervane and the tops of trees and the waiting scene and the Sunday dream were all waiting here for me. Deli markets, with their flower stands and the pretty girls and the burning men hanging out on the hooks next to the window displays. And I took out my tongue, tried to move from my place. I crossed the bridge and I crossed the mountains, threw a nickel in the fountain to save my soul from all these troubled times and all the drugs that I don't have the guts to take to soothe my mind, so I'm always sober, always aching. Always heading for mass suicide, occult figurines. And wasted gas station attendants, attending to their job and a nice drive in the country, find a nice cliff to drop off. Oh when this life just gets so grating, all the grittiness of life, but don't take those pills your boyfriend gave you, you're too wonderful to die. And the last one tore a picture from the pornographic page, but all the pleasure points attacking all the looks of love were staged. And it's a lie that you've been given that just hurts you every day, so why should I lie here naked when it's just too far away from anything we could call love? Any love worth living for? So I'll sleep out in the gutter, you can sleep here on the floor. And when I wake up in the morning, I won't forget to lock the door, 'cuz with a match that's mean and some gasoline you won't see me anymore."

The italicized part is what I meant, but I had to present it in context. Someday I'll have a host site or something where I can store all sorts of my music and then you'll get the music too.

I can always find a song to fit. Just can't write them myself, and I read lyrics like that and feel like I'll never do anything half as creative, pull anything near as fantastic and abstract and all-encompassing out of my bag of tricks.

I'm searching the cracks in the walls to remember that the girls in the middle are always the first to fall off for the dregs in the crowd.

Who wants to pull things out of tricks anyway?

I feel like spewing whatever's in my head tonight, avoiding cautious hyperbole. I enjoy being hyperbolic. It makes life ridiculously bigger, like the balloon Garfield in a parade instead of the chaff of some blown dandelion clock wafting on the wind.

No old guys at work today forgot their passwords. Do you know what I did? I played Scrabulous on Facebook for three hours (I think I'm losing all thirteen of the games I am playing) and then spun my novel a whole new direction: back into myself. Maybe the whole NaNoWriMo thing was a stupid idea in the first place. I'm stuck right now in a mental location where "stupid idea" is as expressive as I get.

Then I read the stuff Jonathan writes when he's not even trying and come to the conclusion that I will never sound original. Maybe the prose is just not my idea medium. Poetry isn't either. I feel mediocre at everything these days and wish that I could find a place where I can adequately express myself.

I still haven't finished the art I promised him, I keep starting over. Maybe I should take the half-done abandonments and turn it into a collage, but it would look as crap and disparate as I am feeling and wouldn't do for anyone's wall, let alone a friend's.

I've been drowning myself in Pink Floyd today. It's what I do when I feel like life is inexplicably dull and, even if it weren't, I'd be incapable of expressing myself or taking advantage of it.
It's been a day for Animals. Pigs on the Wing, part two. What is it that Waters sings in the dark and bluesiness of Gilmour's guitar? You know that I care what happens to you, and I know that you care for me too. So I don't feel alone, or the weight of the stone, now that I've found somewhere to bury my bone. And any fool knows that a dog needs a home, and shelter from pigs on the wing...

So, come. Bury your bones in my. Listen to me singing. Or just listen to me. I wish I were inaudible, or selectively audible, anyway. Can I pick the people who will hear?

I want to hear you. In other places I want to be the things that you need. In this place, I'm not and never will be. Here, I can only draw you in and then disappoint.

Am I in love with distance? I adore the idealism, the intangibility, the potential for perfection.

Instead of the reality of failure.