Praan

I will not easily forget
The life that stirs in my soul
Hidden amidst Death
That infinite Life

I hear you in the thunder
A simple tune
A tune to which I will arise

And in that storm of happiness
As your music plays in your mind
The whole wide world
Dances to your rhythm

I hear you in the thunder
A simple tune
A tune to which I will arise

-"Stream of Life"
Adapted from Praan, a Bengali poem by Rabindranath Tagore
Via wherethehellismatt.com

Love is a many splendored thing/Love lifts us up where we belong/All you need is love

"I love the number of people you can love at the same time, one deep erotic love radiating even to strangers, crippling cynics, making a temporary sense of the senseless, choreful day." - Stephen Dunn

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

-William Ernest Henley

4.13-15.12

and in the end

what it all came down to

was that everyone here was here because they wanted to be

we all were excited to be there

i like to be different

i'm afraid when everything is said and done
it will be that i'm the one that can't commit

that i prefer to be alone
that in the end
i didn't live for love
but for loneliness

Dream Doodles from Spring-ish 2012

 Where is my mind? [a la Lisa's glass ink pen]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 night Mare [a la Bic's iPad app]                  

IF You Don't Know What to Do

IF You Don't Know What to Do,

Sit down
Take out a notebook
Make a list of every every every single thing you want to do.
Every every.
Don't stop until there is absolutely nothing left at all.
Stop
Let go of your breath
Sit back

Now,
Pick one.

E.E. Cummings

"Cummings, like quite a few modernist contemporaries, objectified langauge and even committed what we might call organized acts of violence against it. But this is violence with a cause, as Cummings’s linguistic innovations and typography serve poetic means within his philosophy. Theodore Spencer is accurate when he writes that through his typography Cummings “wants to control the reading of the poem as much as he can, so that to the reader, as to the poet, there will be the smallest possible gap between the experience and its expression” (120). Gorham Munson, writing as early as in the 1920s when Cummings was just at the beginning of his career, already realized that “Cummings makes punctuation and typography active instruments for literary expression” (10). The operative word here is active, action, process, and movement being prized concepts in the Cummings metaphysics. Norman Friedman highlights Cummings’s “obsession” with Making: “Experimental technique is the means whereby the poet tries to reproduce in the reader’s mind the vital flux of becoming which he (the poet) sees in life” (Growth 49). Something of this spirit is revealed by Richard Cureton when he says that “Perceptual immediacy for Cummings was not just an aesthetic principle: it was a central theme of his art” (“Iconic Syntax” 184)"

-E. E. Cummings’s Parentheses: Punctuation as Poetic Device - Roi Tartakovsky http://www.engl.niu.edu/ojs/index.php/style/article/viewFile/18/15

but maybe this is home

growing up in a place where the landscape is as meticulously manicured as its residents

(switch?)

romping amongst the fallen trees

like a survivor

we're still all play pretend

'

this world of make believe

when you're sad

when you're sad

wash your hands
go outside
drink a lot of water
take a shower
take two advil
take a dump

remind yourself that the day will end
and you might feel better tomorrow

On Heterosexuality

"Well, you know, minority politics has been a lot easier to sell than to just say, “Being human ought to get you human dignity,” full stop. If you can pin down the difference, if you can make the difference the salient issue, it somehow makes it easier for people to stomach the fact that they can’t go out and just beat people over the head. I don’t know why that is. I find it intensely frustrating."

- Hanne Blank,(http://www.salon.com/2012/01/22/the_invention_of_the_heterosexual/)

And,

"I do think that the issue of gay marriage is a very interesting one to look at in the context of the history of sexuality, because what I think it testifies to is not so much the tendency that non-heterosexuality has to destabilize heterosexual culture, but the incredible depth of the investment that our culture and our government have in regulating the kinds of relationships that people have in their lives."

Also, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality - http://www.amazon.com/Straight-Surprisingly-Short-History-Hetrosexuality/dp/0807044431

why do people say
they absorb things like a sponge?
one squeeze and all's lost

“ ”

had it been an earlier time, your car would have been your carriage

i like this feeling

i am content

you are a beautiful person

ah, but see, flailing is a sign of life

Unadulterated Brainstroms on Ambien

These were from November 2009. I should probably continue writing things down because some of this stuff is kind of really interesting. I like that reading them now, I still know what I was talking about then, even if no one else will. I love Ambien.

11/11/09 - "IDEARS.txt"

on the transfer of energy between oneself and ones surroundings. CHi, AUras, comes somnipressure, a new technology invested in sleep therapy purposes finds your best potential mate on best communal sleeping arrangements. ONE TRUE LOVE=PERFECTLY COMPLEMENTARY PILLOW???!! >>> dating service ("Refreshing the tried and true meaning of 'SLEEPING TOGETHER!'"

Criticisms/THeoryies: Is it an ultimate equilibrium or does it change and flow as people change and grow? It's like the new "forever" is really "forever for now"

"Sometimes I feel like 'I love you forever' now really means 'I love you forever, for now.'"

"No, it makes sense. I just need to think of a better way to say it"

Technology junkies.

Okay, I do this a lot. It's basically this thing I do in my head, where I run a concept by, around and around, exploring it from head to toe, like wikipedia in my head and then I come up with the search term. Like reverse google search.

Sort of like a reverse processing flow of information.

Owie, thinking all that hurts my robo heart

What if you compared evolution to data decompression like an unzipping of a file? OoOoOoo like technology and advances are unfolding. But you know how an old computer can't always handle the file it's working on and so it works harder to open it and sometimes it crashes? That's evolution. Life is God in the ultimate zip file. We are the computers and life is the file we are processing. Or something.

Lady Gaga makes me realize it's really all in how you market it.

Would you rather live without ever knowing sweet? or salty?

I love my dad!

HA HA okay. Breakie time.

---

11/20/09 - "ambiennight.txt"
GREAT night

apparently involved getting loopy around 11:30, as evidenced by IMs to [person]

then decided to pull the mattress on the floor, best decision ever, slept so goood

then had a great draem involving me being a vampire and my parents handing me a gun for protection except it was the end of the world i lost my mom, met a girl, her turning into a vampire was pretty convenient though, then she died from eating an infected heart (or so i thought) then i ended up wandering around in dc trying to not get killed and not eat an infected heart.

found a stoner couple who i figured i could separate but they were nice and as it turned out i stumbled onto a vampire meeting area, made friends with the girl who's day it was to get the first kill ("glass day")

;eanred about jessica girl who went to csuci (ucsf) who's mom died but stayed with dad who hated her so she could pay rent

went to raid the houses and find people to eat

woke up

haha
hotdamn!

This dream was actually super intense. I remember feeling affected for a couple of days. Mostly about the part where I "lost" my mom and had a lot of feelings pertaining to guilt/abandonment/betrayal (me to her). Actually, thinking about it now is kind of intensely affective too.

On Health

"I did that thing I do in my brain when I try to figure out if I can act like I’m OK or not, which lately has been one of my strongest indicators of overall health — not health or happiness itself, but my ability to imitate those emotions or project those impressions or inspire those reactions. I am not certain that I am wrong to describe health that way."

(via autowin)

Are haiku cryptic?
If no one understands me,
am I smart or dumb?

Stephen Dunn

Those Of Us Who Think We Know

Those of us who think we know
the same secrets
are silent together most of the time,
for us there is eloquence
in desire, and for a while
when in love and exhausted
it’s enough to nod like shy horses
and come together in a quiet ceremony of tongues.

it’s in disappointment we look for words
to convince us
the spaces between the stars are nothing
to worry about,
it’s when those secrets burst
in that emptiness between our hearts
and the lumps in our throats.
And the words we find
are always insufficient, like love,
though they are often lovely
and all we have.

Stephen Dunn, New & Selected Poems 1974-1994

i like you. tell me something you don't think anyone but you is interested in

40 minutes of unedited internal monologue that maybe i'll go back to edit or maybe just end up feeling like I said too much which I did

We took turns, each of us trying to top the other in rounds of If-I-Won-The-Lottery, driving around Covina, having tried to drive up the canyon only to have been turned around by a policeman because some body was filming some thing, probably a car commercial or a dramatic racing crash season finale, who had decided that our turnout should be the filming location of choice.

I remember being tired and happy enough to not care that I was tired and nuzzling my head into that pillow in front of them. I remember alternating between being all sprawled out with my feet up on the dash and huddled up on my seat with my legs pulled up close to my chest, feeling girly and vulnerable but strangely also secure enough and comfortable enough to not mind feeling that way and also showing it too.

---------------------

There may have been heartfelt proclamations of love towards Lady Gaga and there may have also been Jameson at that point but it might have been some flavored Smirnoff or maybe that was the night with the Seagram Sweet Tea or all of those things or none of those things. She had sang over that one song and it warmed my insides but maybe that was just the drink talking. She sangshouted 'Gaga sounds better with you' and I think I felt warm because I realized it was true.

And maybe since the canyon was blocked off, that was the same night we went to Chatterbox where we thought we got roofied but then later that week I talked to that one girl at work who smiles nice and looks me in the eye and makes my brain kind of mushy and in the end i think i decided that it was probably the L.A. waters that did it or perhaps we had roofied ourselves.

before that part that we forgot, there was a real drunk but also earnest and honest conversation about the three of us and what we meant to each other, like how a year ago in my dark place, she had come and maybe glimpsed it and left me a post-it that said to mark her words she would be back and it had been a year later and she had.

i remember asking no matter what happened between them or them and other people that they keep me around because those fuckers changed my life and maybe even saved me a little bit. i remember our knees touching even though most of the time i feel like she actively avoids contact with me, maybe because this is a bromance that toes a line or maybe because i'm smelly or awkward or creepy or gross or maybe all those things or none of those things but i remember being grateful that she was okay with the contact this time or at least she put up with it because sometimes i can't keep all the needy in and i like the stupid things like that.

---------------------

i remember talking heads on the jukebox that night, if that night was actually the same night that we tried to drive up the canyon to look at the stars and if it was, then that night was also the one i managed to have a drunk but maybe halfway decent conversation with the bartender with the hot back tattoo and the beautiful smile, who i tipped a lot and felt this overpowering need to be friends with.

i vaguely remember her telling me how she used to work on the campus i work at now, at the big hotshot place that maybe einstein and his wife had stayed at with all the other smart people who i imagine discussed atom bombs and string theory, quarks and neutrinos and stuff over coffee and a bagel or maybe eggs.

---------------------

sometimes i feel like i'm on the cusp of dissociating entirely or psychosis even or maybe that i am really actually a sociopath but enough of maybe a regular person to be freaked out by it or maybe this is what a sociopath looks like when they have a lot of feelings or maybe a sociopath that sucks at being a sociopath.

i think maybe i'm crazy mostly but just sane enough to know that i'm crazy and to feel the need to not be myself because maybe i think my crazy is the unacceptable kind of crazy and also because i think this is probably not how everyone else feels all the time.

---------------------

sometimes when i think about happiness, the feeling i get is like i am maybe remembering someone else's feelings because i can understand the feeling but remembering it feels a little surreal and maybe a lot contrived.

if i'm honest though, sometimes in the moments of happy, i do forget myself and don't think of any of these things i'm thinking about right now at all and even if i tried to, i could wave them off real easy but maybe that's how happy works. happiness is really just a solid distraction.

---------------------

sometimes i feel kind of broken, but not always in a sad way, lately more in the way that i think sid's toys from toy story would feel compared to andy's toys and then i wonder in a passive, curious, thought-experiment kind of way if this will ever change, if one day i will just wake up and realize i don't feel broken anymore, where happiness is the baseline and being sad becomes only a thing that incidentally happens to you

---------------------

i feel like i don't have anything to offer to anybody and that maybe nobody really has anything to offer to anybody else except that maybe they think they do and so they go and do it and that makes it something to be offered but i don't do anything so i still have nothing to offer.

i havent been royally fucked up since that night i got arrested coming back from the avalon aside from the ambien i may or may not have been making advantageous use of lately because the haze feels like crawling into a blanket whose scent i've grown familiar with that covers the whole world and makes everything just fine because then it becomes okay to not think about everything all the time and that's nice even if it's just for a little while.

---------------------

i think maybe i am really actually right and that i am a truly sorry excuse for a person and that i am a waste of resources and probably also life but i don't mean it in a sad crying way, just in a neutral that's-the-way-it-is sort of way. which is probably still maybe a little dysfunctional to think but i think that is okay. i think it's maybe okay that i feel this way because i think i still want to live because then i can still see everybody else live and you know what they all tend to turn out to be pretty lovely great wonderful things and i think that maybe seeing everybody else be people is good enough for me.

(suprising)

Hello again Pensieve

You know that thing they say about people surprising you.

I would like to be

In full Pavlovian form, I can feel my whole body start to relax already, even though I just barely popped two a few moments ago.

The urgency to word vomit all over the internet has pretty much died, but I'm thinking that this could still be, maybe, a worthy romp in the loopy parts of my head.

The good doctor refilled my prescriptions today and after having me fill out a 10 point checklist for a variety of mental perturberances, upped my dosage on Lexapro.

Except that I haven't even been taking them.

Although after today, I'm thinking that maybe I should. Because yes, I did feel better, but no, I don't know how comfortable I am with me feeling that kind of better.

I'm also seriously considering getting the name of that crooked Dr. that someone had told me about because I feel like I stumbled upon a very good pharmaceutical cocktail and it would be just lovely to have it readily at my disposal.

[Note to self: Removed a malformed thought about James Franco.]
[Note to self: Link to the article and his short story from Esquire]


But I'm pretty sure that the Ambien's kicked in because when I close my eyes, I see a movie.

Goodnight Pensieve

---

we are lost and found
but love is gonna save us