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.

An excessively deliberate lack of purpose.

It's 7:00 am and I just got home after an eternity of walking around after work and thinking about the people I've loved who have killed themselves, and how much I've thought about taking an exit stage left, and how much I still think about it, and how much more thinking I would have to do about it to actually bring me to that point. Sometimes I think I can see that point pretty clearly, but most of the time it's well hidden. When I see it clearly, I slow down. I think I move in slow motion... breathing, thoughts, movement, decisions, processing information, making choices, all of that just kind of grinds down until every thought and action seems excessively deliberate, but with no purpose at all. Deliberately purposeless. Weird, huh?

So, I walked into the house at about 6:50 and I felt like a used up, wrinkled old motile turd, ready to fall down somewhere and just disappear from this thing called being awake for an extremely long time. My sister Chey was up and getting ready for work. I hugged her and said goodnight, and said to her, "I think there's hope for everybody, no matter what. Even the ones who killed themselves." It was such a strange thing for me to say, especially in that it seemed deliberately purposeful.

You know what I love more than anything?

You know what I love more than anything? I mean, really really love, more than anything in the whole wide wonderful world? Well, I'll tell ya. It's walking for miles and miles with a half collapsed umbrella in a torrential downpour while getting blinded by lightening and scared shitless and deaf by the thunder while trying to watch a movie on a tablet and covered in mud up to the knees and getting splashed by a cop as he drives past and almost flipping him off but realizing it was a cop just in time and deciding not to flip him off and then arriving at the house and after getting somewhat dry and comfy and situated using all the ice to make a great big refreshing satisfying awesome glass of ice water and then knocking it off of the dresser and soaking the floor and settling for a lukewarm glass of water and then going to sleep with the soothing, relaxing sound of thunder and rain. That's awesome.

Trans-Dimensional Hilarity

Let's see if I can describe what it looks like, and how it feels. The moon is about 37 degrees above the southern horizon, and it's full. The rest of the sky is completely clear; there are no clouds at all. Oh, and its 2:50 in the morning. I'm on Bonnie Brae, walking south, and there is a heck of a lot of stupid traffic. Why? Why are all of these cars with people in them out and about this late? Don't they know that I hold the sole power of attorney and exclusive ownership rights regarding and pertaining to all nighttime extracurricular privileges, and that they are BREAKING THE LAW by violating my own personal zones of exclusion? How could anyone not be aware of this? I mean, I don't walk on their front lawns during the day, I don't stand in their bathrooms with them while they are taking a dump, and I don't forcibly insert myself into the passenger seats of their vehicles every single time they make a milk run - grocery run - cigarette run - beer run - drug run - automatic weapons run - or just an old fashioned hit and run. You will never see me interrupting anyone involved in any of those activities, so what makes it okay for anyone to pull those very same shenanigans on me, simply because I'm walking at 3 o'clock in the morning?

Oh, and by the way, I frikin' hate hate HATE loud motorcycles. And I know that there's such a thing as a motorcycle muffler, by the way. I can't think of a single, solitary reason why a motorcycle should be so purposefully and obnoxiously noisy, other than the extremely likely possibility that a certain prevalent breed of motorcycle pilot possesses a sadistic desire to inflict maximum annoyance to any person or thing which happens to exist outside and/or in the immediate vicinity of their own self established ego boundaries.

Okay, now that all the birching and whining is out of the way... what I originally wanted to say was, wouldn't it be weird if, while I was walking along and typing this in the dark, if all of the air just disappeared

Sorry, but there went another frikin' stupid ass loud noisy f'ing worthless piece of shit motorcycle, right then, just then. We hates them.

And then a bicycle just rode by, just a couple of feet away from me, and scared the shit out of me, just like that guy did an hour or two ago! WTF? Oh, but that was when I was walking and recording the talking thing with a kind of video thing. I guess you wouldn't know about it unless you saw it on my YouTube channel. I haven't uploaded it yet. Anywho.

Screw it, whatever it was I was going to say. I hope all of the air gets sucked up by interdimensional beings who are squashing our universe in between two other universes which are made entirely out of an infinite amount of naked singularity in order to generate a fourteen billion light years wide Casimir Effect to establish a vacuum vacuum which sucks up our vacuum into another bigger vacuum which will turn our entire cosmos into a single, vast region of negatively curved space-time, populated by an equally infinite amount of exotic, degenerate matter of negative mass, in effect repurposing all of existence into a thirteen dimensional FTL spambot with the intended side effect of first annoying and then enslaving entropy after a period of 999^999^99999 years and driving the 2nd, 3rd, and 7th dimensions insane, just for the fun of it, and ensuring the ensuance of trams-dimensional hilarity on an infinite scale.

A dream - The end

Nuclear war was imminent, and Leah had been sent back to Denton to get her affairs in order before going back the monastery to await the development of events.  Matt and I were at the house packing, and Leah was there to say good bye to me.  I was in denial that any bombs would fall, even though we had heard on the radio that there had already been several cities around the world that had been destroyed.  I knew this, but I said out loud that I didn't believe it.  I didn't want to leave.  Matt was urging me to hurry, and I was putting on my boots and lacing them up.  I began to grow very afraid, and I found myself wondering if it would hurt more when the bombs landed since it was cold outside, and whether or not it would make a difference if it was summer instead of winter.  Leah told me that she had been instructed to get back as soon as possible and not to become distracted, and I panicked and reached out for her, and she was there, and she grabbed my hands and pulled me out the door.  Then I was in a car with Matt and Leah, and I could feel my mom's presence but I don't think she was there... but I cried out for her, and said "I'm scared mom!" and she said, "Leah's there for you, she's there, she didn't leave.  Hold on to her." And I reached out, but I felt like I was blind, and I couldn't see, but she was there, and she put her arms around me and we sat there together in the car, in the dark, holding each other.

Little blue fowers.

This is how I feel when I hear this:

A bad feeling starts to well up inside of me, down in the center of me. Like a spring bubbling up, but black instead of clear. It continues to fill up my insides, until a sadness starts to leak out of my eyes and my nose, and I feel like I'm drowning in it The awful, horrible, beautiful melancholy which is this sound pulls me toward it. I feel like I'm attracted to it, but that's a lie because it's pulling me. And I feel so stupid for being sad, because the feelings that these sounds evoke in me seem so familiar and beautiful, but my sadness is a dull monochrome compared to it, in the truth of things where nothing is hidden. And I'm colorless and embarrassed and I despair.

Taking a dump at 32000 feet.

Have you ever watched a plane fly over, late at night and during the small hours when nobody around you is awake, and imagined what was going on up there in that little tiny improbable capsule of comfort, isolated and exposed? You can probably assume that at least the pilot and the copilot are awake and busy talking to air traffic control and getting ready to land that thing. And there are probably at least one or two passengers either jibber jabbering away about something or another, or maybe reading a book or watching the last few minutes of the in flight movie, or fiddling around with their phones, or doing something else to occupy the time, like sleeping or just sitting there being quietly terrified, which is normally what I'm doing when I'm up there in the sky in a plane, a gazillion inches above the ground and rapidly losing altitude.

Or maybe somebody is simply taking a dump up there in the sky. Just think about that for a minute. Out of all the billions and billions of people who have ever lived and died on planet earth during the last several hundred thousand years - since there was even such a thing as people - only we few who have been alive during the last 50 or so years since planes with communal lavatories have been regularly criss-crossing the skies can claim the distinction of positively having been very nearly or possibly even exactly underneath a mile-high crap as it was being taken. I mean, it's simply an inevitable statistic that a dump has been had by someone, or more likely several somebody's, directly above your location at some specific point in your life. Probably many specific points.

So that's what I find myself frequently thinking about at times like these, at night, when I'm out walking and observing and soaking up the probabilistic expressions of quantum fluctuations as collapsing wave forms. What's going on up there right now above our heads in those hundreds, or even thousands of big, hollow lozenges that are constantly sailing through the skies at ludicrous speeds and getting ready to not explode upon impact at Love Field, DFW, or maybe even the Denton Airport?

Is that weird? Not that all of those thousands of mid-air loafs are being pinched every single day... no. What I mean is, is it weird that I even think about it at all? Is that weird? Am I weird... e.g. defective, and/or deformed? Mentally, that is? Has my fragile little mind been warped by 43 incessant years of jury-rigged jihad by the tin-hat terrorists?

I don't know, but it keeps me up at nights. See what I mean? It's 4 o'clock am (4:23 now) and I've been thinking about this since at least 12:30.

The despair of failing to deal with the failure of dealing with despair.

When I'm all filled up with anxiety, I gasp with short, staccato exhalations, like some kind of dysfunctional panic attack. This is the way I express despair, by puking up oxygen. Why is that the overriding motivator in my life? Despair? It's very uncomfortable and I don't like it. I assume that there are some people whose lives average out on the right hand side of zero. Right? That's true, right?

The me I sense inside of myself is a misshapen caricature of something that used to be, or might have been, or could have been good at some point in somebody's memory. What is this ongoing thing that's happening with my being awake time? It feels like I'm surrounded by a polluted cloud of defective potentials, continually collapsing like an elaborately set up domino fall which leads straight to hell. Is this all my fault, that I don't know how to be strong, or just ain't strong enough to figure out how? I don't like it and I don't want it, but it sure feels like I'm stuck with it, so is that my fault?

I know that these are terrible things to think. But I have this compulsion to express myself, and when I start up that machine, this is the stuff that comes out. This ugly thing that I've just written is the common denominator by which the moments of my life are divisible.

As an alternative, I could either lie or just write nothing at all.

On the bright side, I'm pretty sure it doesn't have to be this way... but that's kind of like saying, "I'm pretty sure there's a million dollars in gold buried somewhere."

The abiding sadness

Earlier tonight I went outside to smoke a cigarette.  This, after spending most of the day inside and in bed, idly watching crap on youtube and thinking about how much church I've been missing, and regretting the heck out of it.  And being tired, just so tired and not up to anything.  I use that as my excuse for neglecting that which is the most important, my spiritual health; as I am too tired to think of anything else that might be more accurate.  I console myself with the knowledge that I'll make it up in the future, when I live close by again, if ever... and that I'll even go to church in the morning.  But I know that by then I'll be too tired. 

Anyway.

I stepped outside at about 7:30 and sat down and lit up a smoke and loaded up my e-book on my phone and commenced to reading of True Grit.  I didn't even know it was in my e-library.  I ran across it yesterday and started reading, and it's a helluva good book, by the way.  So, as I was getting settled, I looked up and was suddenly and forcefully cognizant of the living evening as it passed through and around things such as the sky, the clouds, the grass and the leaves, and the tree branches and the air, and myself.  Even in the dead things, like the painted wooden and artificial structures of the houses, and the hard substance of the pavement, and the scattered gravel.  I got up and wandered in a kind of daze over to the road and did a slow 360, looking at everything and mesmerized by the beauty of it all.  You'd never realize that there are so many colors of green until you have the knowledge battered into your eyeballs, which is what it felt like to me.  Getting battered by beauty comes somewhat close to almost describing the feeling of wonder, but to attempt to go further would almost feel like an insult to the plain and simple truth of it.  So I'll just say that at the time, I felt overwhelmed by the simple feeling of the moment and the fact that I was imbedded in it, in this one, particular coordinate of ongoing existence, and that I had the senses to absorb the information which describes it, and that I was this thing which could soak it up and turn it into a sensual phenomenon that my body and soul could recognize as beautiful.

I stood there inside it for as long as it took to finish my cigarette, and then I walked back into the dark house.  Upon leaving that moment behind, I immediately felt a strong sense of regret and remorse for just being away from it, and separated from all of that which I had just witnessed.  And I realized that, even though my heart can break for the beauty of the world, and I can marvel at the miracle that I am this persistent witness to it, I despair at my awareness that none of that wonder has ever touched the deep, abiding horror which occupies the roots of my soul and stagnates there, and it doesn't quell the abiding sadness.  This puzzles me quite a bit.

1:08 am

It's 1:08 technically, the a.m. part.

Okay, running commentary. It's starting to rain now. For a good long while, it just threatened, with lightning and a few little drops.

Haha, okay. It looks like another false alarm.

What's up with all the traffic at 1:15 a.m., anyway?

So that pre-rain smell is happening pretty good right now, and yowza wowza, dadgum but that lightning is bright... it's blinding.

Okay, its raining now, but still kind of wimpy like. I seriously hope I don't get struck.

Uh... I don't know why I felt the need to qualify that with a 'seriously'. Or why I had to even mention it to begin with. Of course I don't want to get struck by lightning. But maybe I do, huh? Maybe? What if getting struck by lightning gives me super powers? What then? Do I still want to get struck by lightning? Do I, or do I not want to get struck by lightning? It's a tough question.

Its 1:28 a.m. now and rain. Lightning, too. Now the rain is just a couple of plitter platters on my umbrella, so I'm closing it. I don't have to worry about spider webs.

Uh oh, now it's coming down again. Whoops, and it's also 1:42. Dang. This ain't exactly the most comfy I've ever been, you know. What the 'ef am I doing out here anyway? Yeesh. I must be retarded. Oh yeah, that's it. Man, am I stupid.

Emergency, emergency.

Well, that just happened. It was a bona-fide emergency, and it just happened. And I actually had to deal with it. Just now, you know. And now that it's resolved, it's done. But I'm not going to say what it was, because its too hard to explain. And it's raining, and right now I have feelings of hatred surging through my uncertainty principles.

Okay, this is what happened. No, never mind... anyway, it were just this thing, you know? So anyway, just forget about it. I've already forgotten about it.

So, what happened was this... aw, for Pete's sake! I already forgot about it! What's wrong with you?

Now my phone is getting a little wet on the inside, because a couple of months ago I bit down on the front glass part pretty hard with my teeth while I was trying to unlock the side door, and it cracked the screen, and so now the wet can get in. Who would'a thunk that would happen?

But it did.

2:15 a.m.

A dream - Missed the train

I had to catch a train at 11:28, and it was already 11:00, and I was supposed to meet Jennifer at this coffeshop/bookstore to hang out before I left.  I looked around and saw that I wasn't even packed yet, but I went ahead and started walking to meet up with her.  I was late getting there, as I was supposed to be there around 10:30, and I didn't see her anywhere, but the door guy said that she was waiting for me in the back where all the regulars hang out.  So I went through the store, and on the way to the back, I passed someone who I thought was Jennifer.  I looked at her and smiled, and she smiled back, nervously, and kept walking.  I turned and started to follow her, and she looked me in the eye and I got a good look at her, and I saw that it wasn't her.  She said, "Sorry man, I got nothing for you!" and hurried away, afraid that I was going to accost her.  I said, "Oh, it's just that you look just like somebody I know..."  but she had already gone.  I examined myself mentally to see if I really presented a threatening image.  I decided that I didn't, and that the girl was just weird.  So I got to the back room, and Jennifer was there, lying on this big mattress/sofa thing with a bunch of other people.  Jennifer looked up and waved me over, and I kind of picked my way through and over the mattress thing to get to her, stepping over people and items and books and stuff.  I got there and plopped down right next to her, and my arm naturally went around her shoulder as I settled down, but not purposefully.  I just seemed natural for it to fall there.  I hurriedly removed it, because her boyfriend is super sensitive, and I didn't want to upset him.  He wasn't there though... so I looked at Jennifer and said, "My train is about to leave, like... right now!" And she laughed and said "You don't have to go anywhere, you can just stay here with me!" And I looked at my watch and saw that it was 11:30, and that she was right, because I had missed my train.