Mazzy Star Dreams Interjected with Philosophy 101
NaNoWriMo started this month. I thought about. Pondered about it. I even continued writing that first chapter of that novel I never told anyone about. I woke up too early on a day off from work. I registered on their website and read all the welcoming messages that were encouraging the thousands of people to begin their journey of writing the novel they always wanted to write. But all of that self-dobut got a hold of me. I hesitated even though they encouraged us not to hesitate, just write. But I'm beginning to think, I'm not a writer. I'm beginning to feel words are alienating me. Each word I type seems to pull the camera back. Another word typed and I feel even more disconnected with them. The camera is slowly pulling away from meaning. I see these words attempting to sketch a scene, attempting to document a moment but the more detail there is, the more words that appear, the more vague and distant they seem to become. Just a ghost of a memory I'm trying to recapture. A lingering memory that haunts me to this day but it seems so trite when I try and explain it, when I try to paint the chapter with all its emotion, with all its valorous adjectives. It's a moment that happened to me. It was a painful hour I spent walking up and down a street in New York City. Summer's over. September has brought along its first chilling wind. But there I was walking up and down 46th Street in Hell's Kitchen wondering, panicking about all that is about to happen. The culmination and end to an era, to a life, to a boy who should be a man at this point. But I find an empty stoop of some random apartment building. I sit on one of the steps and I'm fighting the tears, I'm fighting the rush of dread that is coursing through the highways and lanes of my body's circulatory system. It's unbearable. My veins feel as if they are going to burst. This poisonous venom leeching on to every blood cell. I can feel my blood mutating into something toxic; it's infecting my thoughts, it's plaguing my soul, that weird notion of who we are, that ghostly "me" trapped within the ribcages and flesh we carry around as bodies. The idea that there is this phantom of a "person" with characteristics that make us "us." From the idiosyncratic to the banal. This illusion (or is it allusion?) of a person embraced and imprisoned by skin and bone. This idea of a "soul" always bothered me. Especially the religious connotations. This idea of a "spirit" within a person. We use these words without really grasping them. They are just signifiers to something larger, to something more precise. But we use these words like soul and spirit as if we have this ghost swarming through our bodies. It's really bizarre when you think about it. I'm surprised we're all not hovering above the ground when we walk down the street. These airy phantoms of people floating just above the ground, levitating and competing with gravity and the heaviness of our bodies. The weight of skin and bone keeps our spiritual selves from the clouds and our earthly pleasures take over. But I guess it's this prison of a body that keeps us grounded, that keeps us from soaring up into the clouds like some balloon you accidentally let go of on your way to your cousin's birthday party. We're constantly at battle with ourselves. The pleasure of the body versus the pleasures of the mind. I have this idea of myself in the near future, where I'm no longer struggling with daily life. These economic pressures, the need for sleep and food. These pressures seem so meaningless, during this pursuit for something gratifying on a spiritual level, on an intellectual level. The pleasures of the mind and soul are so much harder to please, so much harder to nurture. If I'm hungry, I can make a sandwich. Simple. If my mind aches for pleasure, I struggle to assuage it. What exactly does my mind want? It's vague and obscured. I do find ways to alleviate the need for something more. Whether it's a long conversation with a friend on the opposite coast of the United States or watching a documentary about dreams and the subconscious. There are moments in conversation with other people where you feel truly connected. It's as if you found another person whose mind aches in the same way that your mind aches and in that indistinct connection you feel less of a human and more of a ghost. And I don't mean ghost as in a deceased parent haunting you under a white bed sheet at three in the morning. I'm just trying to refrain from using the word soul. Unless if I point out right now, that whenever I use the word soul, I want to eradicate any religious connotation. Soul, is the essence of a person, an indeterminate amount of characteristics that make us who we are, outside of any physical or visible attribute.
What the fuck am I even writing about?
I think I always use these opening paragraphs on my Livejournal as a "free write." Like those writing exercises you used to do in your high school creative writing classes. I think I was going somewhere in the above paragraph but I kind of lost my direction. Basically, I want to write more. I want to document more. But I find myself tortured by daily life. Bills. Overnight shifts to pay such bills. Family members falling apart which requires lengthy phone calls and wallets being open. Commuting to and from work. Making plans with friends you genuinely care about who need your support and hugs. Sleeping too little or too much. There is never an in-between. Aunts are diagnosed with cancer and cousins who are far too young to have melanoma. Netflix queues building up and Facebook news feeds to be read. Regurgitated news is needed to keep an understanding of the world. NPR and the New York Times. I listen on my way home from work in the mornings blowing smoke out my window. The NYT app on my iPhone. Instapaper is genius. Without my daily dose of pop culture, I'll lose it. Tell me what you're listening to. Tell me what article you read that exposed you to an idea you never though of before. What movie pulled at your heartstrings and what movie disgusted you? I want to know these things. I watched Red State the other night and I was very uncomfortable. All the protagonists were dying left and right, I didn't know where to align myself. It reminded me so much of Burn After Reading. My birthday just passed and my age is an odd number and it's so off-putting. I hate odd numbers. They make me uncomfortable. I spend too much of my time avoiding all the things I should be doing. It's so much easier to glide through life watching episode after episode of Gossip Girl or trying to find a reason to keep watching Sarah Michelle Gellar in Ringer. I keep finding myself in situations I don't want to be in. Sometimes my empathy levels get the best of me. I think I'm a rare breed of human that has high levels of empathy and compassion for other people. Sometimes those characteristics are misconstrued, mis-communicated and taken wrongly by other people. Sometimes I'm taken advantage of and sometimes people misread my intentions. Sometimes boys fall for me without me realizing it until it's too late and I leave them hurt and broken. The feelings are not mutual and I blame my empathy. Sometimes being too nice is a bad thing. But in all honesty, I'm a dick. I like to be alone, I crave that aloneness. Some people don't get it. Just leave me alone. But sometimes in that aloneness I crave the attention of others. I want to connect with people, but only on my terms and that's not fair either. I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Fort Greene and there's a boy reading Ulysses next to me. He's adorable and taking notes while reading. I read Ulysses once and it was one of my crowning achievements in college. I lived and breathed that opus for an entire semester. The Irish part of ethnicity was bursting through my skin; I longed for Dublin in a way I never had before. I saw Martha Marcy May Marlene with a cute boy the other night at BAM. I woke up hungover the next morning despite going to bed by 1am and not drinking any alcohol. Elizabeth Olsen messed with my brain. She's beautiful. Brady Corbet is just as beautiful. I can watch them have sex all day every day.
[Insert a 48 hour break]
Hunger pains disrupted my last wave of writing. I walked up the street looking for something to eat. I settled on a Chinese take-out place. I ordered then proceeded to step outside to smoke. Shucks, no lighter or match. I (im)patiently wait for a fellow smoker to walk by and the only person I saw was across Dekalb. Normally, I would avoid people like him. He's tall, scruffy and wears his heterosexuality on his sleeve, and this aura of I'm in a grad program you've never heard of before at Pratt down the street. Of course, he looks at me as if I'm asking the most bizarre question in the world. Do you have a light? He is currently smoking, so it can't be that strange if a fellow scruffy dude who perhaps wears "queer" on his sleeve instead of "hetero." He hands me a Zippo and I haven't touched one of those since high school. As I lean my cigarette to the flame, the smell of butane is overwhelming. If the cigarette doesn't give me cancer this noxious odor will. I close the Zippo and it makes that obnoxious clap. It seems fitting that a guy like him carries around something so obnoxious. I thank him and cross over Dekalb to stand in front of the Chinese place. The lighting coming from the storefront is gray and unsettling. It seems to correlate with my current mental state. Gray, dreary, over-caffeinated. As I inhale all of these toxins in front of these dreary lights and signs advertising lo-mein and pork fried rice, I wonder about my purpose. Why am I here? Why am I standing outside a Chinese take-out place, I don't even enjoy Chinese food. It makes me sick every time.
Lighting cigarettes on the gas stove like my mom used to do. Careful not to burn those long eyelashes. Toenails like daggers when you're cuddling with a boy in bed. Showers make me thirsty. I'm wearing Cher's Taking Back Sunday shirt I stole from her like 10 years ago.
What the fuck am I even writing about?
I think I always use these opening paragraphs on my Livejournal as a "free write." Like those writing exercises you used to do in your high school creative writing classes. I think I was going somewhere in the above paragraph but I kind of lost my direction. Basically, I want to write more. I want to document more. But I find myself tortured by daily life. Bills. Overnight shifts to pay such bills. Family members falling apart which requires lengthy phone calls and wallets being open. Commuting to and from work. Making plans with friends you genuinely care about who need your support and hugs. Sleeping too little or too much. There is never an in-between. Aunts are diagnosed with cancer and cousins who are far too young to have melanoma. Netflix queues building up and Facebook news feeds to be read. Regurgitated news is needed to keep an understanding of the world. NPR and the New York Times. I listen on my way home from work in the mornings blowing smoke out my window. The NYT app on my iPhone. Instapaper is genius. Without my daily dose of pop culture, I'll lose it. Tell me what you're listening to. Tell me what article you read that exposed you to an idea you never though of before. What movie pulled at your heartstrings and what movie disgusted you? I want to know these things. I watched Red State the other night and I was very uncomfortable. All the protagonists were dying left and right, I didn't know where to align myself. It reminded me so much of Burn After Reading. My birthday just passed and my age is an odd number and it's so off-putting. I hate odd numbers. They make me uncomfortable. I spend too much of my time avoiding all the things I should be doing. It's so much easier to glide through life watching episode after episode of Gossip Girl or trying to find a reason to keep watching Sarah Michelle Gellar in Ringer. I keep finding myself in situations I don't want to be in. Sometimes my empathy levels get the best of me. I think I'm a rare breed of human that has high levels of empathy and compassion for other people. Sometimes those characteristics are misconstrued, mis-communicated and taken wrongly by other people. Sometimes I'm taken advantage of and sometimes people misread my intentions. Sometimes boys fall for me without me realizing it until it's too late and I leave them hurt and broken. The feelings are not mutual and I blame my empathy. Sometimes being too nice is a bad thing. But in all honesty, I'm a dick. I like to be alone, I crave that aloneness. Some people don't get it. Just leave me alone. But sometimes in that aloneness I crave the attention of others. I want to connect with people, but only on my terms and that's not fair either. I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Fort Greene and there's a boy reading Ulysses next to me. He's adorable and taking notes while reading. I read Ulysses once and it was one of my crowning achievements in college. I lived and breathed that opus for an entire semester. The Irish part of ethnicity was bursting through my skin; I longed for Dublin in a way I never had before. I saw Martha Marcy May Marlene with a cute boy the other night at BAM. I woke up hungover the next morning despite going to bed by 1am and not drinking any alcohol. Elizabeth Olsen messed with my brain. She's beautiful. Brady Corbet is just as beautiful. I can watch them have sex all day every day.
[Insert a 48 hour break]
Hunger pains disrupted my last wave of writing. I walked up the street looking for something to eat. I settled on a Chinese take-out place. I ordered then proceeded to step outside to smoke. Shucks, no lighter or match. I (im)patiently wait for a fellow smoker to walk by and the only person I saw was across Dekalb. Normally, I would avoid people like him. He's tall, scruffy and wears his heterosexuality on his sleeve, and this aura of I'm in a grad program you've never heard of before at Pratt down the street. Of course, he looks at me as if I'm asking the most bizarre question in the world. Do you have a light? He is currently smoking, so it can't be that strange if a fellow scruffy dude who perhaps wears "queer" on his sleeve instead of "hetero." He hands me a Zippo and I haven't touched one of those since high school. As I lean my cigarette to the flame, the smell of butane is overwhelming. If the cigarette doesn't give me cancer this noxious odor will. I close the Zippo and it makes that obnoxious clap. It seems fitting that a guy like him carries around something so obnoxious. I thank him and cross over Dekalb to stand in front of the Chinese place. The lighting coming from the storefront is gray and unsettling. It seems to correlate with my current mental state. Gray, dreary, over-caffeinated. As I inhale all of these toxins in front of these dreary lights and signs advertising lo-mein and pork fried rice, I wonder about my purpose. Why am I here? Why am I standing outside a Chinese take-out place, I don't even enjoy Chinese food. It makes me sick every time.
Lighting cigarettes on the gas stove like my mom used to do. Careful not to burn those long eyelashes. Toenails like daggers when you're cuddling with a boy in bed. Showers make me thirsty. I'm wearing Cher's Taking Back Sunday shirt I stole from her like 10 years ago.