Unlearning Things Is Most Important.
Aside from a good idea and an ability to write, to compose a novel, one needs a deliberate organization of thought. That conception of form I lack in my own thoughts; therefore, I have not the ability to write anything with an overarching theme very effectively. At times I have trouble pulling my words together into something cohesive for an essay--I sit there staring at nothing, with the space between my thumb and index finger firmly glued to my forehead, struggling to make linguistic sense in a simplistic, obvious, and consonant manner. It's as if I know what I want to argue, what I want to reason, but I cannot seem to approach it, for it slyly remains beyond my touch. Just the other day, though, it occurred to me how necessary a flowing coherence, or form, for lack of a better term, is to any writing, especially a novel. I do not mean that one needs to know exactly what one wants to say, as improvisation makes up a large, important component of any composition, and Poe made an incisive point in his Philosophy of Composition about how silly one would be to assume that an author knows everything he wants to write when he starts writing. However, without confidence in an ability to remain logical, concentration levels fall, massing all mental energies into an ache. At those moments, my mind seems capable of taking in perceptions and starting thoughts, just not able to gather enough passion to delude myself into thinking that I know what I want to say. The worst part lies not in the sense of failure to produce, rather in the acceptance of frequently lacking the right environment for the whims of creative feeling. Moments arise that require action if they are to reveal anything, except those moments like to escape more than anything; they don't want force, although I will force them to surrender, or surrender myself in the attempt. Right now I want to try and gather enough determination to get out my scattered, formless musings into one disjointed collection of words, words not related in topic, related only by origin, like someone's offspring that look nothing alike but whom swear they share a common ancestor.
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Hemingway tried to tell me.
And I know he was right, since
Whenever I speak, I know that
I should have done so silently.
John Denver, I thought, spoke
It better than any when he sang
He was sorry--sorry most of all
For being himself, for being me.
But though I know what many
Have said, it never seems that
Anyone can say what I want
Without sounding incomplete.
So this leaves me to catch my
Feelings like a child who sees
His first snow falling, acting like
Leonard's heart in his secret life.
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Time for a character evaluation of a single trait: my hypocrisy. Directly and/or indirectly drugs have had a place in my life for as long as I can remember, but my attitude towards drugs has shifted throughout that time period. Upon my first direct involvement, I absolutely loved them. Combining the peculiar chemistry of a substance with the chemistry of my lobes proved unthinkably wonderful. Although, before that initial direct contact with them, I absolutely hated drugs and spoke out against them with a proper amount of sanctimonious indignation. I even recall the impression I made upon this one-time junkie that lived in the apartment across the way from one of my early friends. For some reason, in those days, I frequently found myself spending afternoons after school, with my friends, in Heidi-the-junkie's place. But preceding my ever walking into her dwelling, my introduction to her took place on the steps outside of Krystal (the friend who lived across from her)'s apartment. To set the scene, imagine myself walking up the steps to visit Krystal and coming across Heidi smoking a cigarette (addicts never seem to want to give up every substance, even when they claim they have quit) while chatting with Krystal's mom. As I passed them, I spoke some words similar to, "You know smoking kills you?" proceeded by a few feigned coughs. That behavior, the type that Bill Hicks astutely commented on, really pissed my future junkie-acquaintance off. Initially she only expressed shock in the form of the question, "What did you just say?" Shock soon became the type of advice everyone loves to hear from their elders, viz. "I don't think you should ever talk to an adult that way." I might have even replied, "Well, I don't think you should ever smoke," but my conversation with her pretty much ended there, on the best possible terms. Why did my contact with her not end after that? It turns out that, following my insolence, Heidi thought me a brazen youth and respected my conviction or some other bullshit like that, which granted me access to her inner-apartment conversation, and Krystal seemed to like her company or something. Needless to say, she assumed me a staunch opponent of any type of drug use. So much so that when she caught me and a friend trying to score a sack off of Krystal's brother she yelled at my friend only, reasoning that, "Garrett wouldn't be trying to get any." Sweet, sweet hypocrisy--my favorite part about it is that I fooled a Mormon with one of their old tricks. How I went from genuinely hating drugs to doing them I do not know and did not care to know at the time whatsoever; it appears doubtful that I will ever know, and it matters not anyway. What I care about now involves my reversion back to my early Heidi days of righteous ire.
Post-initial exposure, I ended up getting caught enough times to bring about a five-year hiatus from any substance abuse. During that hiatus I eventually took up my hatred of drugs once again. In stopping their use I genuinely disliked them. This reprise, looking for variation in repetition, did not surface itself in any type of public proclamation against them; instead, it led only to an internalized bitterness towards anyone who did them. At this point I started noticing the primary annoyance in dealing with addicts: their inability to stop a behavior that appears entirely under their control. Outwardly, it looks supremely stupid. Why not quit an activity with such obviously deleterious qualities--chiefly its plundering of personality, the way it makes interacting with other people an impossibility and creates a frightfully delusional person unaware of the intellectual equalizing they have taken apart of. In all the difficulty of many situations, this one grows more arduous once it becomes too simplistic to ask, "Why not quit?" Human behavior, I fear, cares nothing for reason, it functions more savagely, on an unconscious level, without much thought put into it, something learned through early contact and something ineffable as part of nature. If it weren't that way, addiction wouldn't exist. Addiction turns out to still make little rational sense even when looked at with compassion. A disease, something out of one's control, sure it is that, but since no one forces one to begin the habit, it is also in the unenviable category of a self-inflicted disease. Part arrogance, part emotional retardation, part pitiful, addiction challenges the condolences of any one: it is something you cannot really be mad at someone for, but it is something you must hold people individually accountable for: while its origins are understandable that understanding cannot substitute as a excuse. Realistically, avoidance represents the only way to handle the realities of addiction. With anger in place, avoidance encounters no resistance; with weakness in place, anger seems less important, and feelings change.
Slave to the past that I am, my avoidance and dismissal of drugs saw themselves die last year. Blame goes partly to the situation I found myself in at the time and partly to Bill Hicks (I can't just blame myself). His pro-drug screeds started making me want to try shrooms, to think about life, to gain some type of vision like the ones he described, e.g., "Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves." And I couldn't help but blink in agreement when he said, "No, I don't do drugs anymore, either. But I'll tell you something about drugs. I used to do drugs, but I'll tell you something honest about drugs, and I know it's not a very popular idea, you don't hear it very often anymore, but it is the truth: I had a great time doing drugs. Sorry. Never murdered anyone, never robbed anyone, never raped anyone, never beat anyone, never lost a job, a car, a house, a wife or kids, laughed my ass off, and went about my day." My ideas and wishes seldom come from myself as I can be swayed and coaxed into many things through the persistence of another person. Naturally then, I went back to drugs after several years of sobriety. Except every time that I have tried them again they have bored me. After five minutes I want it to end, I have experienced enough at that point to not need it any longer. Also, I have either ended up humiliating myself, hating myself, or making myself sick every time I have done anything recently. And, after every recent exposure, I always speak with announcements about how I will not do anything again for awhile or ever again. Yet, I always do. Why? I know what the consequences will be--that it will take away everything I find lovely about existence (the ability to concentrate and follow the conversation of another among other things)--and I still go ahead and ingest. My credibility has greatly diminished this summer--I don't believe myself any longer--and I am still claiming quiting and/or vacations. I wonder why I even say things like that in the first place. No one cares what I do in that respect; I can do it or not and it wouldn't matter too much as long as I don't experience a rapid deterioration in my life. I think I speak those words because, whenever high, I can hear the requiem taking place, I can feel the loss too keenly and life stops making sense. But now when I make those statements I make them not in anger towards drugs and their users, I make them as a result of my thinking about what it does to me, about how fragile I am. It hurts me to admit that I will probably go against my word sometime in the future.
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I could hold you like I owned you,
Like you were my child. But I am
More like a grandmother about to
Die, watching her family go home.
At first your leaving left behind its
Goodbyes; then, suddenly, it all hit
Me: I need you more than sleeping,
To stay awake, to accept being alive.
Please, don't worry, I have no sadness.
What you see is my knowing that my life
Is me waiting to sense again that you don't
Mind me holding you, even when far away.
Yeah, I do worry; I know that I shouldn't
Be this way after what you've told me--
I fear everyday anyway that I don't do
Enough to make me worthy of you.
But what does anyone ever do to be
Worthy of another? Nothing but be
Alive. So that's what I'll do, hoping
You want me with you when you go.
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Okay, I lied. More character evaluation coming up, only this time with less prolixity. If I were another person and, as that other person, I was having a conversation with me, I would turn homicidal. Homicidal not because of my voice or my ugly face or anything like that (although those are all valid reasons to become murderous) but because of how I listen. Some do not listen to others at all, or, if they do, their attention does not get betrayed on their face by any kind-of recognition. I, on the other hand, listen so intently (usually), that I frequently attempt to finish other people's sentences for them. Either I listen too intently like I proposed before, or I have such a low attention span that I cannot stand to wait out the pauses that occur naturally in the cadence of people's speech. No matter what the motive behind it, either way, it ends up being an annoying practice that annoys even myself while I do it. Whenever I notice myself doing it, I make a mental note to wait out the duration of the other person's talking before I ask any further questions or reply to what they have chosen to speak about. Except that mental note usually goes unheeded, as I fail to stop and listen without interjecting my own guess at where the conversation seems headed. Also, I have a terrible tendency to allow people to converse tangentially. As I attempt to finish people's sentences, I ask too many questions before a complete thought can come out which drives the conversation to a place I never intended it to go; sometimes, after I ask a question, I see this look of shock and uncertainty as the person registers the digression I have introduced. It all comes down to my terrible habit of interruption. Even though I actually listen and try to remember what people have spoken, I still end up interrupting things most of the time or interrupting the original topic in favor of unrelated, swerving discourse. Actions, in my disfavor, tend to provide definition for the character of a person, so, while I attempt to digest the words of another, I succeed only in damming the rhythm of the dialogue and shall be remembered for that solely. In conclusion, I apologize in advance if I ever induce wrath into your soul while I listen to you.
Wait. Did you ever notice how discursive the act of speaking to another human is? For the first time in my life, following the last time I got high, I noticed that. While high, most communication between me and any other living thing becomes extremely uncomfortable and strenuous. In that state, I developed an increased sensitivity to people bringing up topics of discussion not related to the topic previous discussed. For instance, it damn near made me insane to hear someone bring up action movies when, originally, the conversation dealt with the hurricane in New Orleans. Insanity, I tell you. But, then, it dawned on me how absurd bringing up any topic is. Any time someone chooses to speak, they do so arbitrarily as far as subject matter goes. When breaking silence with speech one has to take a chance that the person they are speaking to was thinking of the same thing as them or it causes the receiving party to alter their inner-thoughts to accommodate the bludgeoning speech of another. By talking, one encroaches upon the thoughts of another and forces them to acknowledge what they wish to talk about. No one experiences it that way--conversations are generally accepted--but it doesn't change the underlying absurdity of it. Now that I think about it, it does seem that conversation might not always have such a quality, maybe in a situation where two people want to engage in the same activity. Yet, even then it seems presumptuous to me that anyone would get to the point where they somehow wanted to take part in the same activity with the same rules as another person. Okay, I think I am disproving my own point. Possibly I look at it incorrectly, as my labeling all talking as absurd in its interjection of a topic into silence presupposes that to get by in life requires no communication with words. That seems highly unlikely. I wonder if every system in place as we know it come about because someone had the nerve to speak, to converse with another human and take the chance that they might not want to talk about what they want to or had even thought about the same thing. Humans could not function without language, without speaking. It is their main way of expressing a need or a want; when only talking about feelings, still, a want to be heard, to have an empathetic repository lies behind the urge. Selfishly, vocalizing requires another person to hear it but it also requires that another person stifle their own thoughts for a moment to listen to someone else's. All society seems built around the interactions between people, primarily through language, but it cannot all come from language. Something else must cause someone to think a thought and know who to speak to--where the first need to speak arose from I do not know, although it developed somehow, from a place before language, before anyone spoke and absurdly brought up a topic not needed to be commented on, but sought to be discussed--where those needs, those needs not necessary to survival, arose from astounds me and makes all my language feel like it was introduced without reason. I have nothing, I'm sorry.