Lost in the Now; Lost Together

xWhen did my words become so difficult to find?

     It's hard to dust off the cobwebs, especially when you've made a subconscious effort to repress them. Wait, no: repress isn't the right word. 

           Bury.

           I have buried my words.

     What was once my greatest escape and means of understanding the world around me have become a liability. They are the warm droplets of blood escaping from a wound that I've tried to bind and hide and pretend doesn't exist anymore. They're scars only I can see that remind me of who I was, who I thought I was going to be, and what I became. But more than that, they're the opening in the armor that prevents me from blocking out the New Orleans style marching band of cacophony and discord that perpetually resonates in my head. 

     The good,

            the bad,

                 the beautiful and tragically ugly and utterly 

                                   inexplicable.

And yet as I keep these impulses at the tips of my fingers in chains, locked away in the dark... I can feel my grip on my own identity sliding away. How do you go so long with a singular purpose only to cast it aside like a soiled towel when you need it more than ever to find that balancing point on the see-saw called life?

     The answer is fuck you. You can't.

***

 It's been such a long time since I've sat down at this rickety little desk to put thoughts to page that my fingers feel arthritic, my mind feels atrophied. This was like breathing for so long and now I feel like I don't know how to take a breath.

    The only way to remember gravity is to just lean out against the cliff and

                           let...

       

                                    ....go.

How fickle this game of 'Twister' is.

     Change comes like the sea and yet things never really change under these quiet skies.

I lay in this room, 

           a place still unknown and yet I'm surrounded by pictures and faces and paintings that remind me of a place I knew as safe and mine. 

     I find myself in terra infirma, terra incognito.

                This tabula rasa carries a lot of chalk lines from the previous lives I've lived:

                        scratch marks of nails dragged in pain still linger just under the surface.

How do you lose track of people you're constantly around?

       A fever dream, a beautiful collaboration of a seven part symphony.

               Beautifully broken bodhisattvas brought together out of bond and purpose and collective bliss:

            a tribe of fallen stars, fitting together so perfectly as broken shards of glass to form something

                       beautiful.

...

...

...

...

      And somehow that mosaic seems so distant now.

               Where is that collective that was once stronger than steel?

    How is it that we're always together yet...

                            ...it feels like another life since we were together?

It's a strange sensation...

      ...being estranged in your camp.

***

Recompense isn't easily found for me.

     But once again I'm taught a truth from life:

                  

                    Words to page.

Solace isn't found. 

     It's accepted.

Maniacal Sightseeing

Bam, bam, bash...
who took out the trash;
someone owes someone cash.

     Crazy digital age we live in,
transactions are a rampant nonchalant necessity.

Want to sleep.
Want to sleep.
Need to sleep.

Day off tomorrow, need to do the adult stuff.
Trying to act responsible.

Little gremlin hosting a wine and cheese party in the brainpan:
     fire and battery acid pumping through the veins,
           Sleep is for the weak,
              peace is for the meek.


Jesus Christ doing crunches in Crenshaw,
how did it get this late?


Wasn't I just cooking dinner?
People needed to eat,
     lean into that paternal role in this crazy little collective you call
         home.


Easy peasy, making stir fry:
     meme-like journey to a grocery store leads to an epidemic of
fiscal irresponsibility and and untapped level
of hilarity.
Apparently someone got hard nipples thinking about ravioli....

The fuck?

Is that the sun or my neighbor's bathroom light?
I think I need to buy real shades;
     apparently a pirate flag and a Mongolian flag don't block enough light...\\


.....DA BEARS! DA BEARS DA BEARS DA BEARS!


...how did I end up outside again? And when did it start raining?
             Still...it feels a lot nicer than the hot box of a house called home.
My foot taps along to Led Zeppelin as I hear cries from inside about
     banana bread...


...fuck.
I am alone in a house of people.

     ....I was riding on a wave when I thought this dream came true...

I am tired.
I have been tired for days.
I lay down to sleep, switch off the lamp aside my bed, close my eyes and try and drift off to the sounds of familiar shows on Netflix...

...Holy fuckmonkey,
    I'm at my desk,
        I'm the very keyboard that is typing this absurd words,
and I've no clue how.

That table at IKEA today was nice, I should have bought it...
      FUCK YOU, YOU LUNATIC! STOP SPENDING MONEY!
     OH FUCK OFF...STOP BEING PARANOID. MONEY COMES, MONEY GOES.
     Excuse me, folks... but perhaps we should discuss a bit of balance in...\

<COLLECTIVE NARRATIVE>
       GET FUCKED STRANGER!!!!!


"Hey can you hang my curtains tonight," my beloved maenad asked. Was that tonight?
    What year is it?

BEARS BEARS BEARS!

"Food is up," I groan, knowing it's not good enough to impress only me.
Is this now?



...


"Hey man, are you ok?" I stare into the darkness at the silhouette of my brother.
     Fuck, what did I do this time?
          Wait.... what day is it??

"I'm worried about you."
"I'm good, buddy." Images of self-immolation flash through my mind, countered by images of me as an octogenarian bartender in the Bahamas.
      "You know you can always...



"...go back to bartending."
    The fuck?
        Wasn't this conversation a week ago?
                   Two weeks ago?
"I just miss talking with you."


"...So doesn't the Pope," I mutter.
            ...."Excuse me sir?"

I look around and I'm at self-checkout at CVS on Harvard Avenue.




...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...

This looks like absurdity. This is what life feels like in MANIA.

     HAPPY MONDAY.


; )

Brink

Where do I begin? 

Where do I begin…

and where do I 

end?

I have found myself asking this question a lot lately. In the vast expanse of chaos and chorus and reason and rhyme I have been feeling like a half-deflated mylar balloon adrift. A feckless and reckless child throwing sand into the wind. And in that act of innocent insolence I lost my footing and fell off the seesaw.

What are the words that I can use to unravel this mountain of broken bricks and shattered bits that I’ve managed to bury myself under and ask you to excavate? I muse the idea of the Houdini act; flash of light and smoke and poof, I am but a specter… a mental splinter that lingers but is impossible to extract.

Exhaustion. 

My mouth runs dry, my already fevered cheeks flush with shame and humiliation and hope. I’m trying to sleep but I know I can’t before these words are down and inscribed upon this digital tablet from Sinai.

…

…

…

My courage eludes me.

I can face down the darkest corners of my mind and bear pain that breaks me and yet this is more than I can carry.

Fuck it. My six stars never cease to guide me.

Mine has been a lonely road.

For nearly a decade I have been alone.

I’ve had a few lighthouse souls that have stuck with me through the years,

but thanks to the growing complexities of life…

we’ve moved apart.

They’ve gotten married, they’ve had kids, they’ve become distant pleasantries.

Yet all the while I’ve managed to stay running in the same circle

at the bottom of the same dark hole I’ve called home for too long.

I’d grown close to members of this lunatic-saint family. But I always stayed at arms length to protect the cracked bits of porcelain I have left.

And then this celestial alignment occurred

and these six stars erupted into 

clear focus.

These exceptionally unique and dynamic and beautiful and bruised warrior-poets came 

cascading into my life and utterly

changed

my universe.

Such magnificent presence broke through the

veneer and alabaster 

that I’d shaped around myself and the part that I’d

buried,

my capacity to love and

let love in was cast into the sunlight.

It was like trying to wash your face with a tsunami:

I was and still am overwhelmed.

I am so rusty and unfamiliar with that part of myself that I let my demented mind start a 

Spy versus Spy series of misadventures

with my emotions.

I couldn’t fathom what I was experiencing without trying to simplify it like fitting the correct shapes into boxes.

And this dynamic… it is something in all of my years and all of my travels… something I have never experienced.

I love you, because of you. I love them all, because of them: the poet, the stoic; the young sun and the nurturing moon; the bonfire and the beacon.

I have lived a life with what feels like naught but pain and sadness and carrying those scars alone. But I am not alone anymore,

and I am terrified of losing that.

I live in the eye of the hurricane. I see the beauty of the sky and the storm, and yet at times I am overtaken by it. But I cannot always outrun the maelstrom. 

I have lived in dread of that.

As long as I can remember.

Yet when I am with you, I fear not: you are the guiding lights in these unknown waters.

You remind me of who I am.

You remind me of who I want to be.

I will always give everything I have for you,

because you have given me more than you know. 

I am beyond the point of sorry being enough.

We have given ourselves to each other.

You have given me…

…hope.

To quote:

“The Bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but respect and joy in each others’ life.”

-R. Bach

A Brave New World...

It's hard to understand these thoughts.

It's late. No later than I'm used to but I'm tired and I feel battered and broken. I've been living in a tempest after so long in tranquility that I'm grasping at ferns in a field that's been burned down and demolished for another fucking 'soon-to-be-failed' manufacturing plant.

Fuck.

How does one begin to process distilled madness and chaos and bliss and family and love and things you can't begin to even fathom? How do you make sense of the center of a tornado?

Moses doing crunches. I need another drink.

It's that weird hour where even the most night-hawkish friends I know are bunkering down, bracing for another day of reality. And yet here I am, stuck in a cognitive loop and trying to drown it all out with stimulants and vodka and the most beautifully depressive music a lonesome soul can find. I look around my apartment; this cabin in the urban woods that once was my retreat from the cold realities of the day has been injected with life, with lives. A diaspora of wanderlust souls have invaded my isolation and I am so much more the better for it.

But of course there's that little asshole sitting on my shoulder, whispering in my ear nothing but negativity and sorrow and self-pity. He's been stapled there for what feels like an eternity. He tries to tell me that I've made a grave mistake; that I'm not worth the love around me. He sabotages me at every single step along the way, trying to convince me that I'm too fucked in the head and too broken in the heart to be apart from my isolation; too fucked up to be a part of something more. He looks a lot like me.

And then I look at the slumbering faces around me... I think of those luminous torches that are not in the room but whose fire burns so fucking bright I'm scared I'll burn myself. I look back at the pictures we've taken over the last two yea...wait, fuck, no... the last two weeks. How does such a short period of time have the gravitas of several lifetimes?

I'm fidgeting. The anxiety monster is close.

I close my eyes and lean into the slipstream daydream of my memories with these bodhisattvas. Two miraculous spirits learning to play and sing and harmonize together; family I never thought I'd have bandied together over Amuuricah's birthday which included really lousy tequila shots; three people lazing on a couch talking shit while watching 'Stranger Things' ; the simple joy of a friend you love beyond reason giving you a hug as you pass by in the shift change.

I am terrified. I am not prone to change. I am hurt, and I have lived that way for so long that I didn't think I'd remember what it felt like to feel anything different. Yet despite all that, here I stand on the edge of a precipice... ready to take one of the greatest risks of my life because I have power and force and creativity and love backing me. These beautifully flawed and wonderfully scattered and immeasurably unconquerable saints saved me when I didn't even know I needed to be saved.

There is no force in this world stronger than love. And there is no love stronger than that which we choose.

Dream

And just like that…. she comes back to break me. She, the  loving phantom from my dreams, from my nightmares… the spectra of my joy and my torment. Oh those soft spots in their porcelain soul; how can you protect against such innocent cruelty?

“Do you remember…”

the pause is noxious…

“…that…”

and she goes silent. 

My breathe stops: I know this moment. This is a moment I constantly dread; it's a moment that is just inevitable.

Fear in Truth

How is it that the world can change so much for you without you ever even noticing? When does the reality of what you are actually doing coincide with the dream life you’ve always been living? What is the worth of a life if it is one spent in mere repetition and subservience? 

This is never the world i thought I’d live in. I never thought I would be this person. I have made countless mistakes in my life… most of them a direct result of my decisions. Some of them are actually consequences of other peoples’ sins that I cannot control, and yet I am held accountable for. And yet still, through all of this, I always held on to a few set principles and paragons to live by. Until I didn’t.

Somewhere along the line, I lost my way. It is not an easy thing to come to terms with: you realize that all the sacrifices and mistakes you’d made until now were all for naught. This idea of writing seems such a simplistic, noble idea in principle. And it always came so easy to me. While that might come off as arrogant or egotistical… it is a matter of truth. I was never the one to be the life of any party. Instead, I was the one always on the perimeter, the chronicler of the world I saw around me. Ive always been fortunate enough to be blessed with friends and family that understood that outlier trait about me. In that characteristic, I’ve been able to see the world in front of me and, to be honest, multiple worlds that could be. Be it imagination or simply a different perspective… the ability for me to put down my rationality of the physical world via words was always a way for me to find my place.

Until those words stopped. Or, more accurately, until I stopped listening to those words. As the days, the weeks, the years pass… life has a nasty habit of distracting and discouraging us. Drama comes up; people you love disappear from your life; those you love are broken from events you couldn’t begin to predict. Long and the short of it is that it is so easy to lose almost anything to the nebulous schism of the moment to moment existence.

I really sound overly sanctimonious preaching like this. I have no right. These last past years have not been kind to me, but I have seen so much worse that I feel like a complete asshole even talking about this. Yet finally, after what feels like an eon of rudderless emptiness, I think I’ve found myself again. 

Every day is a struggle. The joy (said facetiously) of living with mental health issues is that I cannot predict what comes next, who I will be next, or how I will deal with any amalgamation of this fucked up arithmetic. But I know that it is worth fighting through. While I feel that pain of loss, of sorrow, of losing… I know there are darker valleys to be in. And though this platform of mine is still diminutive, I feel its important to stand with a sense of pride.

I needed to put words to page tonight. I just needed to. It is how I process my reality and my pain. And it is also how I create my great joy.

I am not famous. 

I am not a household name.

I am a writer.

I am a survivor of emotional disorder.

I am not alone.

And neither are you.

The Good Fight

Hello my darlings, my dears, and my not so nears...


     It's been some time since we've done this dance. I promised that I'd keep in touch and keep preachin' the word, but I guess I broke that one didn't I? Though I suppose that's of no surprise to those of you who know me: I have a reputation for being capricious and absent minded. A completely warranted reputation, mind you. Now I could cite the current state of affairs in the world today as reason for my absence and neglect but that would just be making excuses. And we ought to be better than that.

     No, I cannot blame geo-political intrigue for my languor and hiatus... despite my desire to. And for once, I will hold back on my verbose, vitriolic political rant. For now. Instead... I think it's time that we had a heart to heart, but to do that you'll have to forgive a moment of introspection and self-reflection.

     I am not an easy person, in any definition of the word. I am impulsively compulsive, irrationally rational and vice versa, obsessed with organized disorder, and a generally pessimistic som'bitch to use the parlance of our times. I know these things about me, and those closest to me do as well. How they've managed to stick around is beyond me because frankly, I tire of my own company on a daily basis. The problem is something beyond behavioral explanation or even cursory understanding. And that is the real problem, isn't it: we, as a nation... we still lack a supportive, embracing, and understanding dialogue about mental illness.

     I suffer from depression, and I'm at the will of mania. Some of the doctors in the day have said Manic Depressive, some BP1, some have muttered incoherently about lemurs with pitchforks... though as I type this I think that might have been me. The point is there is something not quite perfect in my genetic makeup that causes me to struggle. What feel like daily annoyances can send me off into a hysterical fit of mischief and self-destruction, while a passing glimpse on a sunny day can spiral me into unstoppable sadness and tears. For those of you out there who manage with these feelings understand without question; those of you who don't probably never truly can. And while I know this sounds preachy and all self-important the truth is that's not what I am trying to do here.

     As I've grown older and experienced more and more in my life I have also had to find various ways to cope with this. In the earliest memories I withdrew and insulated myself within myself; college was a blur of booze and bullshit with some of the best friends I could have asked for... people who put up with my fluctuating psycho-emotional state of mind without hesitation. As my dear friend Glen once said, "There are like five different you's, and I never know who to expect." In reality, I'm sure all five of those me's came to the dance each and every night. I've always hoped that it would get easier to deal with as I got older but the truth is, it gets significantly harder. It's a hell of a lot easier to spend a day prone in bed hiding from the world when the only consequence is a college course. When you have bills to pay, responsibilities to fulfill, people to consider... that is exponentially worse. In the time it takes for a cliche jackass to type about a drop of a hat, I can have a trigger that moves me from the ecstasy of doing cocaine with Maxim models at Mardi Gras to the sensation that every thing in my life is falling to pieces. The cliches really do not do justice to the feeling in those moments. Hope, peace, reason, simple existence becomes a goddamned fucking crucible that feels insurmountable. It is as if the very blood in your veins coagulates and your heart becomes a furnace; every smiling face is a razor blade drawing against the skin, and while you seek isolation, that very looniness just compounds the feeling three fold.

     I have had close people in my life question this, and while not intentionally... chastise me for it. "Just stop it," or "get out of your head," or "so don't." If only it were so easy. I really wish it was, because I would probably be better at this whole life shit than I am now. But the fact of the matter this isn't a conscientious decision: it's just a part of who I am. I have come to terms with this, and over the many years I have learned a lot of tricks to help me along the way. I have been blessed with several compatriots and guides who have battled alongside and taught me a few things. I have also lost more than a few dear friends who couldn't keep fighting... leaving a legacy for the rest of us to continue on. All things considered... I am in a place of contentment in my life. I have a wonderful, albeit complicated family; I am blessed with a cadre of brothers and sisters I call friends who have all been there for me without question; I am on a career path that I enjoy and I am rediscovering my literary voice. It doesn't mean that life is easy, and it doesn't mean that I'm always ok. But I fight the good fight because that's all there is to do. I was raised with a Bostonian disposition and quitting isn't in that DNA.

     Alright... self-righteousness aside, let me say this: open up the conversation. For those of you who don't face this obstacle, try to be patient with us that do. Understand that we are sometimes the victims of our own brains and aren't in the best place. And for any friends, family, or complete strangers that may read this who are struggling with this but keeping it inside... don't. Talk to someone: talk to your family if you're comfortable enough, your friends if you're close enough, a trained professional simply because you can and they help. Just start talking. Silence is never an answer.

     To all those I referenced earlier... you know who you are. That won't stop me from saying thank you: thanks for always being there for a late night call or midday distraction beer; for being a shoulders to cry on and a supportive arm when I fall down from laughing too hard. Thanks for putting up with my impulsiveness and every other character trait that might be flawed. Simply thank you for being you and being part of my life.

Cheers,

      -s.



P.S. Like the rising tide of activism in our nation, I will not be silenced nor ignored. More to come soon. Nighty night.