A dream - Shelter from Armageddon

It was the year 1800 and something or another, and there was a house. It was a big house, like the kind that would hold 3 generations worth of families, way back then when families were more close knit and stayed together, instead of scattering themselves to the four winds like we do nowadays.

I was running away from something and looking for a place to hide, and this place felt like home, so I sought safety inside. There was a trap door that I knew of which opened to a tunnel which led to a secret backyard, so I followed it through and emerged onto a green lawn and an overcast sky.

At the far end of the yard there was a tall, dead skeleton of a tree, gray and twisted, that thrust up about a hundred feet into the sky. The many stunted remains of branches spiraled up its length, jutting out in all directions like huge misshapen thorns; jagged and broken. Attached to them were what looked like the remains of some kind of construction, like an old tree house, dilapidated and abandoned.

I climbed up through this rotted mess of old boards and tangled pieces of twine to the top and found myself standing on the roof of the house, surveying a dreary and featureless wasteland that extended far into the distance, eventually merging with the gray until it disappeared.

After getting an eyeful of Armageddon, I jumped from the roof of the house and back to the tree. As I was covering the distance through the air, the passing of that event slowed to a crawl and I had plenty of time to ponder at length the strange feeling of having done this before many times, this crossing from roof top to tree top, this passage through the empty air, through this endless void.

Eventually I began to consider the possibility that I had misjudged the jump this time. The tree seemed much farther away than it usually did in all of those other memories of dreams in which I remembered dreaming of the memory of this particular dream jump.

I almost missed it. Normally (according to that memory of a feeling) I would land firmly on the trunk of the tree, but this time I had to grab onto one of the protruding rotten branches. I caught it and held onto it, and it bent alarmingly under my weight as my momentum was arrested. While this was happening I looked down, and only then did I really notice how high up I actually was, and how a fall from this height would probably kill me. The branch brought me within reach of the trunk without breaking, and I jumped onto it and scrambled down.

I went back inside the house and found a long banquet table set up and covered with food. All of my family and friends were there taking shelter, as well as everyone from church. I worried that Leah hadn't been able to make it to the shelter, and I looked around frantically for her. I finally spotted her on the other side of the room, at the far end of the table and standing in a long line of people with plates, waiting to get food. I shouted and waved to her, but I couldn't get her to notice me. Then I was surprised to see Nick over there too, in the same line and already at the table. I tried to get her attention again, but she was staring at Nick with a kind of dreamy half smile on her face, seemingly enthralled, and focused on Nick utterly. Nick, for his part, was completely oblivious to her presence. Neither of them took any notice of me at all.

I heard a loud crack of thunder and I went back outside, into the backyard. It was raining, but the sky was clear. The air looked like it was filled with falling diamonds as the sun shone through the raindrops, and thousands of tiny prisms of light washed over everything. Then somebody shouted 'Earthquake!' and the ground shook, the world opened up, and everything came apart.

Happy birthday

Happy birthday, Leah.

A dream - persistant evil

A nightmare. A really long, really bad one.

There was an evil thing, an essence of badness and ill will that pervaded everything. A vague, undefined presence of extreme malevolence. There was no help to resist it and no defense against it, and it was doing horrible things to people. This formless, persistent evil is a recurring theme in my dreams.

We were all afraid and coming together as a group to feel safer. It was myself, Matt, mom, Chey, grandma, Ed, dad, Glenna, Laine, and several friends and other familiar people. We were all walking single file up a stairway to an upper floor that had rows of seats, like the balcony of a court room. When we got up there, I sat next to grandma and sidled up really close to her. The girl in line behind me sat next to me. We were all squeezed in together on those benches as close as we could to each other for comfort. I put my arm around the girl next to me and held her tightly. I was a little uncomfortable holding this girl as closely as I did, but the general consensus seemed to be that it was alright, because we were all terrified.

It was gray and overcast outside. Empty cars lined the street of a small town business district and everything was still. I came upon one car with an occupant who was frantically trying to start it. He was having no luck, and was plainly terrified. He was a big man of about fifty, wearing a short sleeved business shirt that was tucked in over a substantial mid-section, with a pair of no nonsense black framed glasses perched on a sweaty, jowly face that jiggled as he struggled with the ignition. Then, without warning, he just came apart. His body separated into these little shiny, wet globules of semi-translucent fleshy matter. They all collapsed down into the seat and onto the floorboards, scattering and rolling every which way. The evil had done that to him.

Lots of other people suffered their own individually different and horrible transformations into insensate and purposeless forms of abominable insults to nature. They were crafted prisons of awful putrid chaos and suffering, pure manifestations of the will of pristine evil. Infinite hopelessness is what it felt like, to know that these things had happened to people. Back in the upstairs room we huddled together more closely in terror.

I could see downstairs that someone was vying for our attention. It was a woman with a harp and an accordion. She was a part of the evil, and she was going to play the evil for us on her instruments and she wanted our attention focused on her. People began to chatter nervously and a general panic ensured, but it was a still kind of panic as nobody moved. We all just waited for the evil to start flowing into our ears. I thought to myself, during this portion of existence comprised of palpable horror, what it would be like for someone who was deaf or blind or who otherwise lacked the physical means to sense the evil. I could only imagine that it would be even more horrible to have the evil seeping directly into their minds, skipping the nervous system outright, and just boring right through the skin and muscle and bone, right into the brain and heart. How horrifying that would be.

This segment passed, and a feeling of hope returned. People were out and about and gathering the broken and scattered pieces of cursed flesh, in all their torturous and unholy forms. There was hope that these people could be 'reconstituted', and brought back from their suffering. We piled all of the fleshy globules that we could find of that particular person back onto the front seat of the car, and he reformed in a reverse of the event which had torn him apart. He was whole, except that his flesh had an ashy, gray pallor, and it was missing from his head. The reformed dead man held a wadded up glob of skin and hair, which he pulled down over the bloody musculature of his head and face, and reverted to a look of dead normalcy. We asked if he was ok, and he assured us that he was, but he wasn't. He was dead.

I was in the back seat of that car, and we drove down the streets of that dead town. All of the other animated dead were there too, driving or walking or otherwise going about their business. An exuberant young girl in the front seat was turned around to face me, with her arms resting on the top of the seat back. She was joyfully explaining all of this to me and trying to communicate a sense of how wonderful it all was. "But this is horrible," I said, "that these people are animating their dead bodies from hell," to which the little girl replied, "No, this is the will of god. It's the miracle of resurrection." My mind quailed at this blatant lie, and I could only mutter to myself, no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no

I was back in the house again, and we were all downstairs, waiting for the evil to do whatever it was going to do to us. I watched but was only vaguely aware of something horrible happening to a friend of mine. We all accepted it as inevitable, and I stood with the girl I'd been sitting next to, and we held each other tightly.

At the end of it all, I managed to utter a prayer of desperation:

"Oh you wretched and perverse spirits, your presence has been felt and your power made known. Now I command you, in the name of the eternal Lord who made you and cast you from the heights of heaven, to cease from this disturbance!"

Then, with the intent of driving away the evil, I hauled a huge dry, rotting log over to a bonfire, and several others helped me to toss the heavy thing into the flames.

What happened?

Life got better once before.  Once, when I thought it was over and there wasn't anything more except for the wait, it surprised me and exploded and knocked the end way over the horizon, beyond view.  That was so weird.  And so unexpected.  But what the fuck is happening now?  I guess it's the same thing, or a similar thing, as what was happening before.  Right now, it seems like there isn't anything in the future, except for a slow decline into a continuous painful event, which gets deeper and deeper, until the pain becomes fatal.  I can't kill myself.  I just flat out can't do that.  What would that be like though?  Thinking about it makes my head hurt.  It's almost worse this time, because before, I had no idea that life was going to pick me up and turn me around.  Now that I have the memory of that happening, I can't just live inside of an ignorant despair.  Now I gotta keep thinking, all the time, what if it gets better again?  That's even worse than being completely hopeless.  It's a continuous 'what if what if what if what if', all the time.  It's like staying awake on Christmas Eve, and being so hopeful and anticipating something wonderful, except that there isn't any reason for being hopeful that anything wonderful will ever happen.  How can I sit here and say to myself, 'Ash, remember last time, how it was so hopeless, and you'd accepted it and didn't give a shit, but then life exploded in your face like a nuclear magnolia blossom?  Remember that?  Will that happen again? 
WTF was that all about the first time?  It's like... it's like it sucks.  That's what its like.  What happened?  I must have missed the part where everything went to hell in a handbasket.  I didn't wanna go there.  No wonder I missed it.

More of the same

When I hear a certain song, it makes me grimace. My lip curls up on one side of my face, almost as if I had tasted something bad. A disgusted snarl is probably a good description. It's one half of a frown, the bottom half... and left that way, it would just mean frustrated and pissed off.

But I can feel my eyes and my forehead clench up into an expression that is more grief than pissed. On either side of my eyes, near my temple on both sides, the muscles contract inward. The part of my upper lip directly under my nose scrunches up, almost as if it were trying to push my eyes closed. It definitely feels like a struggle between these two muscle groups; the ones at the top of my face and the ones at the bottom, as if this were a natural reflex to stop tears from coming out. Grief stricken on top and pissed off on the bottom and shoved together violently, like two magnets trying to repel each other and held together that way forcibly.

Its a feeling of extreme anguish. Its extreme emotion. A really hard, shiny, glossy pain; a beautiful bright and reflective pain that attracts with a compelling force. An irresistible force, like gravity when it crushes.

What? Why does it do that? What purpose does that serve, that kind of emotional reaction? Is that nature's way of thinning out the herd, by nurturing suicidal tendencies through beautiful pain?

Sadness

Here is a feeling of truth.  I have an extreme sadness.  I'm surrounded by people, good people who care.  I'm alone inside myself.  A sadness is debilitating, paralyzing, and it insinuates itself into my cells, from the inside out.  It's a thing that makes me very tired.  I'm so tired of it.  I wish I could peel myself open with a scalpel, layer by layer, and scrape out this disease with a paring knife.  It's so heavy and demanding.  I feel like once it turns me gray all the way through, I'll just switch off like a blown fuse.  Maybe a loud pop first. 

Going forth I feel things

Going forth I feel things, I get these feelings, these familiar feelings. That's what links all of them, that they are familiar. They can be lonely dark full of despair sad stagnant but all familiar, and all attractive. All of these feelings, that's what makes them the same, all linked together they're familiar and attractive. They draw me down into the shadows, dark places that I can see into that hide more mist shrouded apathetic and comfortable dangers which I'm afraid to approach. Like dreams. It's all like a dream, like that dream you remembered in a song that made you cry and despair and was oh so comfortable. I can't get away from that dream thing, the whole aspect of it, it's like a dream. It's like a dream. It feels like a dream it's like I'm in a dream all the time. When I feel like this, it's like it's like that, it's a feeling of foreverness and heavy like gravity, of being drawn into the foreverness, gravity, of being pulled into it, the heavy feeling of sinking into the never forever. It's it's it's I'm afraid of it. But but it's but I'm it's I'm pulled to it into it pulled in falling in I'm I'm in love in love in love in love with it.

A comfortable hell

I pass by a row of houses on a street in a neighborhood. Several of them aren't lit, and they seem abandoned, and they mostly just form big dark shapes. There's one that's lit, however, and it's a long one, with two front porches - one at each end. There are waist high wooden rails enclosing these little porches, and the porch lights are turned on. The rest of the house in between the two porches is lit by a dim backscatter, and there are a few darkened windows. My imagination takes over and I can see inside that house. I know what it's like in there... not necessarily the precise layout, but I know the feel of it. I've been in that house before, in a dream. I can feel it. It's an attractive feeling, one that I wouldn't mind dwelling inside of for an eon or two. That stagnant, warm, all encompassing embrace of apathetic comfort. Something about it is rotten, but I don't mind.

There's another house that isn't lit at all. It's another long one, set about 50 feet back from the road by a dark, wide lawn. There's a lamp post standing there at the top of a brief series of steps with an accompanying hand rail, and there's a sidewalk that continues on up to the house. The lamp is one of those old style street lamps which are made to look like they're supposed to burn gas. It's a tall, black lamp, and it only casts a dim light, as if it were on its last leg and about to go out. There is a huge, round tree situated off to the far right. There's only a vague outline delineating it from the sky, causing it to look like its just growing out of the side of the house. I can feel the dream memory of this house too... but somehow I know, without actually knowing, that I've never been inside of this one. All of the dark energy surrounding this house is focused right here on the steps, with the railing and the black lamp. I'd have to wait here for a long time before I could go inside. I'd sit right here, at the foot of these steps, under the wan light of this dark lamp and wait... forever dreaming about walking up that long, infinite walkway, and into darkness.

There was one area where a house was supposed to be, but wasn't. It was just a black expanse, with a copse of trees to either side. I could see the remains of a broken, crumbling foundation, and beyond that, just inky dark. I stood there and regarded it for several minutes, waiting for some kind of feeling to identify it to me. I never felt anything though, except for an urge to get away from it, which I did. Quickly.

This is that dreamy feeling; the one I've talked about before and keep trying to describe. It's a lumbering, smothering tide... foamy and soporific, and pulsating with a long, slow feeling of lethargy. It's just a feeling, but it's also a thing... dead and heavy, like a sticky black steepness, accompanied by the stench of slowly undulating moments that pass unnoticed inside of a comfortable hell.

Pain shaker (good name for a band)

Everybody feels pain, right?  I'm pretty sure we all do... but I think you can break that normal variety of common pain up into little pieces, and depending on how you add them up and put them back together, you'll get different flavors. 

For instance - pain can taste good sometimes.  Kind of like how nobody ever notices that carbonation actually hurts like a bitch.  Why do we do that?  Think about it.  Drinking a Coke hurts, so why do billions of people do it and come back for more?  Huh?  Why is that?  Are we all just stupid, deep down? 

And slurpees hurt, too.  I'd even venture to say that brain freeze is probably the most agonizing thing you can experience as a result of just going about your regular old uninteresting daily business.  I had one today, and it was just about the most agonizing thing that I've ever felt, and I'm not exaggerating.  The pain was debilitating. I was at work, and I had to stop what I was doing right then and there and just wait for the unbearable, excruciating agony to pass.   The customer at my register thought I was having a seizure, and was on the verge of dialing 911. That's how bad this stupid brain freeze thing hurt.  After it was over though, I took another long slurp of slurpee.  Am I retarded?  Seriously, am I?

And then there's spicy food. Chili peppers and wasabi, and what not.  That stuff hurts! Why do we do it? Why do we put fire in our mouths, and enjoy it?  It makes me think about that movie, K-Pax, and how Proat described the physical act of sex for his species as an overwhelming feeling of nausea, accompanied by the sensation of having your nuts squeezed in a vice while being rolled around in corroded alien sauerkraut.  When you think about it though, is that really all that different from putting a hot poker in your mouth and enjoying it?

So anyway. When I started writing this I was feeling pretty depressed, and my intention was to prepare this elaborate and profound exposition on the delicate subject of personal pain, seasoned with a dash of self pity to make it serious, and definitely not a joke.  But then the lid came off of whatever shaker it was that I was shaking, and this thing happened instead.

Befuddlementedness

Occasionally something happens to me that causes me to question my sanity with actual bona-fide fear. An event occurs which escapes the parameters within which I define reality.  You know, common sense reference points.  Things you rely on, that you can count on, like... the Sun will rise, the Sun will set, there is oxygen in the air, the moon is up there going around the earth, I have a job, I know people, my mom loves me. Things like that. Things that are facts.

Then a thing happens that throws all of that right out the window. Just tosses all of that away like a piece of paper thrown out the car window, like it weren't never worth anything at all.  Your sanity.  Tosses your sanity out the window.  My sanity.  I guess that's what I'm getting at.  So here's what happened:

Tonight I got off work and I walked up to Albertson's to buy these steaks that they have on special.  They're buy 2 get 1 free, which is crazy, but they keep doing it, so I don't know... I guess they're crazy, so I keep going up there after work and buying them.  It's like the recent gas prices.  I never thought they would go below 3 dollars again, but here they are, below 3 dollars.  I guess the whole world is crazy, which is kind of what I'm getting at with this.  Anyway, back on track.

I bought the crazy steaks with the crazy prices at the crazy store, and I walked my crazy feet across the crazy highway to the crazy Racetrack convenience store.  What with everything being crazy and all, I did this crazy thing and went inside and bought a crazy bottle of crazy water.  Then I left.  With the water.  Right?  You'd think that's what would have happened, right?  That after doing that crazy thing; buying that crazy bottle of water and all, that I would then do this crazy thing, like... that I would actually leave the store with the water?  And that there wouldn't be anything crazy about it at all?  Huh?  Right?

So here's what happened. Again.  By the way, it may seem like I'm building up to some really big thing, but I'm really not. I mean, at the time it seemed completely insane to me - like it really was a really big thing, what with 'big' meaning 'insane', you know - and I still think that it was, but in hindsight it doesn't seem that way.  I mean, in retrospect it would seem to me that it wouldn't seem like a really big insane thing to someone that I might be telling this to, right?  Like, it seems that it would seem to be a big deal to me, but not to you, right?  If I put myself in your shoes?  Do you get it?  That is, what I'm getting at?   Do you get that?  Right!  ANYWAY!

So... so.  So what the heck does so mean, anyway?  What is that?  Why does it seem natural to continue an interrupted thought by re-introducing it with the word 'so'?  Is it just a sign of insecurity, like 'like'?  Or, you know... like, 'you know'?  I mean... aw crap.  Isn't 'I mean' one, too?  Anyway.  Hells bells. That's one too.  Isn't it?  Isn't 'anyway' another one?  Yeesh... whatever.  You know, 'whatever' is probably even another frikin' one, come to think of it... you know?  And you know another thing?  Fuck it, I'm tired.

So anyway!  I bought this bottle of water, and after I'd walked about a hundred yards away from the store, I decided that I wanted a drink.  And since I'd just purchased a bottle of water not a minute and a half ago, I figured that I would just take me a nice drink out of it... only.  Only, you see... only there weren't no bottle of water...! 

? thought I, as I rummaged through my plastic bag - the exact same plastic bag inside of which I had fully expected my bottle of water to be contained.  However, this was not the case, as it was not there.  I realize that it's strange that I should wax eloquent over such a seemingly trivial matter, but unusual events compel me to do so.  Allow me reiterate, as this is a fairly important observance - THE BOTTLE OF WATER WAS NOT THERE. 

The bottle of water - the one i had just purchased - was not in my plastic bag.  I looked inside of it and all through it... up, down, left, right, forward, backward, inside, outside, between, betwixt and behind, before during and after.  I retraced my steps to the store, and back again to the place where I'd first noticed that the bottle of water was missing... twice. I rummaged through my bag again.  You know, that plastic bag I was just going on about.  I went through it the same way, again.  I mean, there ain't a whole lot of real estate inside a plastic bag for a bottle of water to take up residence, you know?  Well, continuing under the assumption that I am a relatively sane person with no legitimate reason to fabricate a story about whatever this is going to turn out to be about, I'll continue. 

So (there's that word again), having searched for the bottle of water that I had just purchased only minutes before, and having come up empty handed, I was understandably befuddled, now wasn't I?  Certainly.  I had just purchased a bottle of water, but I didn't have the bottle of water.  I'd searched well for that bottler of water, high and low, but I still didn't have that bottle of water.  Anyone would have been befuddled.  I was legitimately befuddled as I retraced my steps to the store, and it was in this state of befuddlementness that I finally decided to go back inside and ask the clerk if I had even left the store with the dang thing in my possession in the first place, as this often happens at the 7-Eleven where I work.  I had high hopes, but to my dismay, the clerk seemed to be similarly befuddleded.  So, despondent, I thanked him, and as I was turning to leave, the clerk said, "Hey, just grab you another one.  No biggie."

Wow.  Incredible!  I thanked the guy - the clerk - my hero, over and over again, thinking about how rare it is that we'll run across an authentic human being during the normal course of events throughout the day, like this one, and how it kind of sucks that my default reaction when it actually does happen is to be amazed.  I kept thinking that though, that it was just incredible, and I kept thanking the guy as I walked out, and thinking, and thanking... and thinking.

Do you want to take a wild, random guess as to what happened next?  Do you?  Go on, I dare you.  Take a guess.  Come on, guess!  Guess!  Never mind.  As I was putting the bottle of water in my plastic bag, I saw a bottle of water in my plastic bag.

The stupidest thing you've ever heard, ever.

I see freshly mown grass, where it wasn't the last time. I see a little dog on a porch, being very still. I see a couple ride by on bicycles. I see the guy take a look back at me after they've passed by. I hear something explode. Way off in the distance. I don't know what it is, but I guess it could have been fireworks, or a gun, or maybe even a bomb... but not thunder.

I pass by insanely familiar sights. I try to open a pack of cigarettes with one hand, and it frustrates me, and then I feel like my awareness is unlocked. Just because of that little thing - that little episode with the cigarettes. I understand that my equation is unbalanced, and that there is more sad than joy in my particular situation, and that I'm starving for beauty. Then I realize that took too long to say, and that the beauty of it was lost, because it became too personal. Beauty should never be personal.

I said that like it was some kind of nugget of wisdom, didn't I? What the fuck do I know? I walk down this same path every day, every night. The same one, over and over. Every day every afternoon every night every day every noon night day night and stuff. And again. I do this over and over and over and over. Do you want to know what it feels like? It's like this. Imagine that you have a red hot poker shoved up your rectum, and it hurts, but it's also funny at the same time. The reason why it hurts is obvious, but the reason why its funny is pretty personal. Or vice-versa. Whatever. Who cares? That part is different for all of us. Are you getting it? Are you relating to this in any way? If you are, then that feeling of a red-hot poker up your ass might actually mean something. That's funny, right? But damn don't it hurt.

Anywho. A lot of things are like that. A lot of things try to mean something, which kicks ass because that in itself means something; that things just kind of want to do that naturally... to have meaning. That's one thing that rules about being awake. So if you're ever being tortured, try to remember that. I don't know if it will help, but ask yourself this (while the torturing is happening) - would you rather be a nothingness, or would you rather be a potential for joy, pain, beauty, despair, and stuff, with the possibility of being extinguished always ever present? If you're ever being tortured, that is... that's when you'd ask yourself that. I guess it all depends on what you think is interesting.

But horror exists at the same time. Horror is an undefeatable injustice, and it's always right there, and its always ready. Like quicksand... or what I imagine quicksand to be. That seems like it might be a little bit too commonly vague, actually. I'm trying to describe the feelings I have as they occur, but by the time I think of the words for them, the feelings have passed by. And then I have to try to remember what it felt like, and I try to describe the feeling based on that memory...

And then I walk a little further, and I vegetate a little more, and my stupid cabbage brain remembers that people are afraid of me. I'm just a small person, with a bag, and a light, and a cabbage, at night. And people get freaked the fuck out by me. They don't understand that I would try to save a life if I could. That I would do a good thing to check an act of evil, if it was right there in front of us. That I'm in the light and I'm a good guy, and that I'm carrying the fire.  Even though I'm an asshole. They don't understand that. They're afraid. I understand the fear, but it still hurts that they are afraid of me. Heck, I'd give one of my kidneys to save anybody's life if I could. I'd do whatever I could to help anybody, even though I'm an asshole. Assholes can be good guys, too. Look at Han Solo.

It's amazing how we don't concern ourselves with each other. What's really weird, and what really sucks, and what's weirdly and sucky, is realizing a thing like that because you're in the middle of it. For example...

I'm a self-aware bottom feeder with a galaxy-sized ego, capable of swallowing the concept of 'screw it' in 13 dimensions, which hurts pretty bad. But in my defense... just being alive hurts Ok? We breathe oxygen, and we need it to live, but it's corrosive and it hurts. I forgot where I read that, but it's true. It has something to do with free radicals, or rust, or something. Anyway. Trust me. Oxygen is corrosive, and it's killing us. We are all like crack babies, except we're born oxygen babies. Isn't that the stupidest thing you've ever heard, ever?

Little pieces of life

Sometimes it feels like I can only live my life in little snatches. Little tidbits of beauty, or meaning, which are a part of something which has motivations beyond my own. These little pieces of life are only available to me in special circumstances, and now that I've recently become aware of them, they seem like they are elusive. I never used to look for them, but once I realized that this phenomenon was a recurring thing that had an indescribable meaning, it got weaker, and it stopped happening so much.

I used to get filled up with it on my nightly walks. I guess that's why I started doing this so much, all of this walking at night. I think I may have described a little too much of it, or I've given too much of it away, and it doesn't want me anymore.

Lately these walks of mine are tired, empty, gray things. I don't know what to do now. Maybe it's just that I've walked everywhere there is to walk here and didn't, and there isn't any more prize or magic or life in it. Maybe that's it. Maybe it's just all too familiar now, and I've drained all of the stuff out of things here. It feels like it's all dead now. Everything feels dead now.

What is a word

Intimate is such a delicate word, isn't it? No hard consonants, no long, obnoxious vowels. The sound of the word seems intrinsic to its meaning. It's a soft word that rolls off of the tongue and dissolves like cotton candy in the air. It's such a fragile word... an almost perfect ononmatopoeia for the concept of vulnerable trust; exposed and defenseless.

What is a word, anyway?

That's like saying why do people ask questions, or...

After giving it quite a bit of thought, I arrived at this description of what a word actually is:

The thoughtful essence of a thing.

Or... The attempt to describe, or translate the essence of a thing by condensing it into terms which are, by necessity, finite and truncated in order to fit within the local structure of language...

...an abstract essence which, by....

...is made more accessible as a concept... and more manageable as...

...has been made manageable by reduction to finite terms, in order to more easily fit into the structure of...

Words are extremely limited and simplified descriptions of abstract ideas, condensed to the simplest finite terms which, due to the limitations of language...

A word is an abstract idea contained within simple boundaries consisting of...

...an abstract idea which is given meaning in finite terms in order to contain it and to separate it from other bounded, word-like ideas.

Yeesh. What the heck just happened?

Alone. Not the definition, but the simple expression of a few bits of information. Hollow sound that feels like an endless, empty tunnel. It has just enough structure to thoroughly describe the concept of isolation, and...

...just enough substance to build an echo around...

...the yearning for the simplest, most basic compliment to define it.

I feel so far away from everything, especially.

A frightening thing

Tonight after work I was walking. Very slowly. And at one point I was getting pretty far away from myself. Far away from what it was like to be me. Stepping outside of myself. And almost escaping myself. That happened for a good long while. Hours at least. I got lost on a real country road. Miles away. Really. It was wonderful. I had to use an electric map to get back. Before that happened a cop found me. He made a thing clear to me. That walking. At night. On a public road. Is deviant behavior. It's threatening behavior. It's suspicious behavior. People don't like it. They don't want me to do it. They will try to stop me from doing it. They will get others to help them. This was made clear to me. I am not. One of you. It is not okay. To be me. This was made clear. 

During and around all of this a seemingly interminable period went by. I wound up in Denton again near where I started from. Walking close to the store and away. And I see headlights forming around me. So I move over to the right onto the sidewalk. To give them room to go by. The headlights don't go by but they fade away. I keep walking. Then they come back. I keep walking some more but they don't go away again. They stay with me. So I stopped. I stopped and stood there motionless. Waiting for the headlights to go by. They never went by. They just stayed there shining on me and I stood still. Shining on my back as I stood there. Motionless. 

About a minute went by. Finally I turned around. I stood there turned around and looked at the car that was there. Shining its lights on me. It didn't move. I didn't move. I stood there looking at it for a while. Another minute of silent standing went by. About fifteen feet separated me from the car. I was on the sidewalk. The car was pulled over to the side of the road. I took two steps toward the car and it sped away. It sped away instantly like a bat out of hell. Like a frightened thing. Am I a frightening thing?

The awfulest horriblest thing

I feel sick. I feel like everything around me is just this thick stuff... like the volume of space that I move through is made out of some kind of transparent, suffocating yuck. I'm nauseous and I want to throw up, but its all up in my windpipe and down in my lungs, and into my stomach, and its like I'm embedded in jello; without any flavor or nourishment or purpose, except to just make things slow and difficult and awful.

Where did this stuff come from? This is bad with a purpose. To hurt and injure, and to wound... deep down. This ain't like looking at a rock and imagining that you could carve it into something nice. This ain't even like just looking at a rock because it's a rock. This is like looking at a rock and knowing that it wants to dash your brains in as hard as it can. This is the essence of evil expressed as a fractal. It's pure malice; intricate and infinite. It's not like a corrupted thing around me... it is corruption itself that I slog through every day and that I am smothered by every night, as it slowly insinuates itself into my pores. It's the thing that is inspiring me right now to describe it in such detail and with such passion. It's the stuff I'm inside of that is trying to remake me out of it, so that I'll disappear inside of it and never know that I was ever a thing apart and separate from it. It doesn't want to corrupt me - it wants to disappear me inside of it. So that I become corruption.

Isn't all of that just the awfulest thing to think, and to write down, and to publish publicly, for everyone to see and know? Isn't that just the horriblest thing for someone to have inside, and to acknowledge? It's a slimy, malignant, vicious and repugnant thing that slips through my mind as if it were in my hands. As I pull it up to the surface of my awareness, I can feel long, stringy pieces of it - cancerous tumors which are forced to function as veins and arteries, filled with putrid, rotten puss blood shit - pop and break and spew as they are exposed and die. And then it all just turns to ash and dust.