SHOCK THE MONKEY

this is what i do. always thinking. always escaping from thoughts. thoughts trying to get free, and then bring me along. to say; such a delicate operation. just the right edge, not too wide, not too narrow. it’s quite a trick. not to confuse, or over saturate. that fine edge we skate along, and we are free then, unbound. a most elegant trick, a supple confusion, filled with just a hint of something beyond our ken, but oh what a something!

Who are you to judge?

I judge too. I am a hypocrite. It doesn’t bother me too much. I’m not trying to be like jesus. I’m just trying to find a way to survive in a haphazard world. I will at times step back and realize I don’t know all the particulars. but some things are beyond sympathy. to damage your own children without struggling with every fiber of your being to get better. and that case is plain. when they don’t fight. that I can recognize. having been there, and done my share of harm. and having been on the other side of it, as I imagine all who harm the innocent have been. as my own parents were. I do not forgive them. some things should not be tolerated. they did not do their best. no one does, and I despise that adage. it is untrue and harmful. it is a lie which excuses abominable behavior.

I want to get to that core. to see inside. to understand. it is messy in there. if there were understanding, maybe you would all be a little less obnoxious. I could tell you what your obnoxiousness springs from. you wouldn’t like it. I have it too, but seeing it dampens it some, and it targets those who have the highest levels of contempt married to blind willful stupidity. it works the same though. I get to feel better than them, driven by insecurity. using others to prop myself up in my head, rather than building something with real value. this is what I hope to move on to. but so many never even get to the place where they can see themselves for what they are, and they die like that. whole groups of people help to build each others fictions. telling each other how lovely that shelf that they just put in is. it is the saddest story in the world, the one that pretends it is otherwise.

“Know thyself. A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever studies himself arrest his own development. A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never become a butterfly.” Andre Gide

but to grant factual status to a fantasy would be worse. I do not know what we are left with, then, but I am for trying anyway, trying anything.

open

here it is. still. it won’t go away. the wound. it opens less now. I think it festers, always. sometimes it seems better. I rise above; it doesn’t hurt. I can see the future; it is bright and open. I just have to take it. but it won’t stay. it keeps opening. triggers. and it opens. still there. old, very old. all the desperation, desperate moves to get away. then giving up, rat in a cage, being shocked, no escape, just settle down, let it hurt, no escape. and the desperation, you spit on it, you laugh, sneer. you fucking, fucking assholes. worthless, so much more worthless than what you look down on. born under a wing, knowing nothing, fucking nothing of anything real. run about, buy trinkets, suck each others dicks. and you think you feel real things, so sure of it. sad face, happy face, just faces. you can’t help not knowing; the wing never knew either. and you, under its shadow, can’t see out. don’t mistake it. but you can’t hear. you will anyway, think you can hear. you can’t hear me tell you that you can’t hear. I wish you could hear that much. so you could know, just a little.

irony

I have forever been fruitlessly agonizing over the meaning of this strange life. To understand where I fit in it; how to maneuver around these others that vaguely resemble me. I have wasted a lot of time, of life this way. I have made some headway, but not enough to balance what was put in.

The world around me is humming, while all around lay artifacts of my confusion. I stand ready to move, to clear the rubble and then, then I don’t know. I’ll step into something new.

(N)ever

It was going badly. So it was only a matter of degree. Not only, as if only a difference of mere unhappiness or agony; only a difference of discomfort and misery. How badly it would have gone I could only guess. “If only” never matters. It was.

Still, I imagine the day before and the day after. Always, this old movie in my head, filled in with memories of memories. Always sad, the pain always stronger, more poignant than what happiness I’m sure there was, what must have been a milquetoast happiness, mild and unremarkable. And I try to trace a trajectory of where I would have gone. It could well have been worse. I never considered that before. But I remember vague plans I had to escape my unhappy circumstances that might possibly have been realized had I not been shocked into a two year long catatonic state. Probably not worse than what happened, but one never knows.

He could have done worse to me had he lived. The things he did do, the ones I shrugged off as inconsequential, though they weren’t, had he stayed, he could have improved upon. Any number of things, from actively damaging me further, to abandoning me, even though alive. Mon Frere.

There was a sister, a mother, a father, who ranged from useless to destructive.

Now, how can I, with all of this, imagine you? How could you, no matter how well I tell my tale, imagine me? How are we to weigh each other?

waiting

i’m waiting, my whole life i’ve been waiting, and sometimes they describe it so that i still believe it is, somewhere. do you know what i mean? i want to stop waiting, start living, but i don’t even know what that means. i want to crawl inside an e. e. cummings poem and then my heart will burst and pieces of me will fall glittering and content.

perhaps they shouldn’t tease me so. then I would give up my hopes and learn to live in a flat world, satisfied with flat people.

eden

at least i’m not ordinary. i could search for hours for someone with something to say and find only the most mundane and trivial thoughts imaginable. so no one reads and fewer understand what i say and feel. i begin to think less of myself, not in my usual melodramatic way of distracting myself from my true flaws and weaknesses, but by looking honestly at who i am and what i want. i don’t know fully yet, but i must leave behind this neurotic desire to be discovered and adored. a fantasy of being showered with money for the privilege of a view of the mess in my head. not that i can’t be a writer someday, i still think the potential is there. but not as i am now. not for the reasons that have been driving me. wrapped up still in that old childhood fantasy i thought i had left behind. to be saved. to sit pitifully until god or my brother or some kind-hearted philanthropist looks on me and is moved to pick me up and carry me off to eden, where i would never have to struggle or worry again.

He was born in a manger

I have been inspired. I never thought that would happen. I am the most cynical person I’ve ever know.

Everything is changing. I’m even capitalizing. I’m not sure why, but maybe I was wrong and I’m trying different things. A lot of different things. Such as not hating people for their ignorance and hatred. Like this republican on MSNBC right now saying Sarah Palin is real, accessible. Sarah Palin was a self serving liar. Maybe the woman saying this is as well, and it suits her agenda to say it, to pander to those taken in. I don’t know. But when my rage tries to rise up as it always did before at such people, I am calming it. The way he responded to hatred and insults is now my guide. I want to be better in a way I never have before.

I wanted to get out of a country I held in complete contempt. Now I feel hope. I thought it wouldn’t go away even if he won, because there are still so many people to hate. Still so many who voted for McCain. But I’m changing. The glass is more than half full.

It was a beautiful acceptance speech he gave. The tone of my feelings toward the ignorant and hateful is changing. Because of him. I have been intolerant. Judging everyone who supported McCain along with many others as wholly without merit. WWBD. What would Barack do? This is how I aim to live my life. This man has displayed such integrity and dignity and decency and intelligence and virtue, and I now see what I could be. I have not seen this level of excellence in anyone before. I have seen the worst. I have seen the mediocre. I thought that that was all there was, and the best I could do was to try to set myself up to be separate from them. Now I don’t know. Is it possible there is more?

I feel like I can. I have had a dark life. Now I have hope.

the lost

there is no point. only breathing, eating, finding shelter. somehow trapped in this close space, this asylum, wondering always if anyone at all is like her. no, not always, not anymore. that stopped years ago. an inconstant yearning, a foolish hope, running neck and neck with the hope that this need to breath, eat and find safety would be put to rest, finally. only fear and ineffectuality kept her breathing, as fear an ineffectuality kept her from wanting to.

that pot of beans. “is it ok if we put hot dogs in it?” “ok”, she says. what could she say? it’s not like she even has the money to buy her own dried beans or a place to cook them. so she thinks she will eat around the hot dogs and just eat the beans. for some reason she can’t understand, these carnivores always take exception to her abstaining. it puzzles them. the story goes like this:

the little girl loves animals. they don’t make her feel aberrant and lower than everyone else. they are beautiful and perfect when they are in the wild. she is beautiful and perfect when she runs with them alone in the woods. around people, especially in zoos, they become twisted and ugly inside like the humans.so now has she.

pass the roast beef. a slice of ham. they never told her what these things really were. “you mean i’m eating a cow!?” i don’t like it. but i’m 6, so i can’t really shop and cook for myself. this goes on for 9 more years, until two things happen in quick succession to turn things.

the fetal pig. “you will now learn intimately the internal anatomy of a pig.” they want me to cut this thing open and see it’s organs. i’m squeamish, but it is interesting. the formaldehyde is vile. on day three the smell has become unbearable, formaldehyde and decomposing pig. i take the strawberry perfume from my purse and sprinkle it on the pig. immediately i realize my mistake. now these three pungent odors battle it out, formaldehyde, rotting pig, and sickly sweet strawberry. i struggle through the rest of the class somehow coming close, but not passing out. then it is over; the relief is palpable.

arriving home that evening, i find my mother well-pleased with herself, announcing the rare treat of baked ham for dinner. i spend that night in my room with no appetite.

one week later, i am at my grandmother’s house. i just ate some soup she fixed for me.

“that was an odd clam chowder”, i say.

“it wasn’t clam chowder”.

“what was it?”

“pepper pot”.

“those weren’t clams?”

“no”.

suspiciously, “then what were they?”

“it was tripe”.

nervously, sure i don’t want to know, “what’s tripe?”

that was when i became a vegetarian. after throwing up for 20 minutes.