Posts tagged with "uncertainty"

Fighting Oneself, Revisited

This is one of the strangest times of my life. I remem­ber feel­ing some­thing sim­i­lar to this over four years ago, but I haven’t had it since.

I’m fight­ing my old self again. Fighting against these feel­ings and past habits.

I wish I could define and explain it. Vincent Gallo has a song he titled “Glad To Be Unhappy”, filled his dis­tinct­ly min­i­mal­is­tic piano and acoustic gui­tar sounds, so sparse you don’t know where the down­beat falls. But there are no lyrics, and I think I’m start­ing to under­stand why.

Everything is so sim­ple when you’re set in your heart. But when you’re filled with such para­dox­i­cal, con­tra­dic­to­ry feel­ings, noth­ing makes any sense. The world is turned upside down.

It’s frus­trat­ing1 and beau­ti­ful all at once.

I think a part of me wants to think about it. I want to keep this feel­ing, where every song sounds as good as the first time you heard it, and the lead­en sky is urg­ing you for­ward with every step you take. To be so inspired.

And while part of me knows that to fight against ones inner nature is fool­ish2, anoth­er part of me knows how destruc­tive it can be.

  1. The orig­i­nal title of that post was actu­al­ly just a 5x5 pix­el square, meant to con­fuse the read­er into not know­ing what to think. Trolley tried to cor­rect me once and told me the title was bro­ken, and I had to let him know it was done on pur­pose. With my new head­line images plu­g­in, the graph­ic title does­n’t quite work so I had to change it. [↩]
  2. To add anoth­er lev­el to this, I’m fight­ing against fight­ing myself [↩]

Thoughts On Missing A Play

In post war England, an immi­nent mur­der is announced in the local paper. A mur­der does occur, but not the one expect­ed and it is Miss Marple who comes to the res­cue to solve the mys­ti­fy­ing case.

Two tick­ets, but I’m on the down­swing. It’s the intro­vert­ed end of my cycle and I can’t meet new peo­ple or go out­side with­out feel­ing some kind of anx­i­ety. I used to live two blocks away from the the­atre, pass­ing it many times but nev­er in atten­dance. I always kept an eye out for a play I want­ed to see — Equus, or Hamlet, or Picasso at the Lapin Agile — but noth­ing piqued my inter­est. This time, the oppor­tu­ni­ty pre­sent­ed itself, Pearl dou­ble-booked with extra tick­ets, and I could­n’t say no.

I force myself to go.

It’s a lit­tle warm to be wear­ing a blaz­er, but noth­ing else affords me the pock­ets for my Moleskine, pen, lens cloth, and iPod. Waiting at the bus stop, I write.

At this time on a Sunday, I’m usu­al­ly wind­ing down. Taking out the garbage, doing the dish­es, fin­ish­ing off an entry, get­ting things squared away for anoth­er week. Instead, I’m head­ing out. For days I’ve been try­ing to write about how jum­bled I feel. There have been new devel­op­ments, both good and bad, leav­ing me with a mix­ture of excite­ment and dis­ap­point­ment. The most I can say is that it makes sense, how I feel, and I can trace every emo­tion to a cause.

The bus comes. On it, I lis­ten to my music but I can’t get in the right head space. Nothing fits. I’m not feel­ing sad, or hap­py, or jad­ed, or ener­getic. I skip song after song.

Stepping off the bus, my ago­ra­pho­bia begins to choke me.

Continue read­ing “Thoughts On Missing A Play”…

Awakening: Introduction

Sharpen a blade too much
  and its edge will soon be lost
Fill a house with gold and jade
  and no one can pro­tect it
Puff your­self with hon­or and pride
  and no one can save you from a fall

—Verse Nine, Tao Te Ching

Every time I start to write, I’m led back to this. It would appear that it’s time to express myself. Perhaps I’m ready. It feels like I’m only scratch­ing the sur­face, try­ing to cov­er aspects of some­thing that I have yet to under­stand. In the show­er I decid­ed to split this into sev­er­al entries of a series, and in my room the lights are all on.

There’s been more insta­bil­i­ty in the last month than in the last three years of my life com­bined. Everything I knew, every­thing I believed in, has been turned upside-down. Although I’m still try­ing to fig­ure out what hap­pened, the fact of the mat­ter is that there was a long, drawn-out cri­sis. This cri­sis, which appears to have passed, still affects my thoughts, my actions, and my beliefs.

Even though I don’t com­plete­ly have my feet on the ground, it feels like I’m com­fort­able enough to explore what’s hap­pened now. This is not an easy task. A sin­gle, seem­ing­ly innocu­ous thought can end up break­ing the strands of the del­i­cate web I’m tread­ing.

If I can get it all down, I’ll know I’ve gone that far at least.

The Awakening Series

  1. Introduction
  2. Cause
  3. The Reborn Dreamer

The Second Introduction, Part 2.5

Sometimes I think I see the let­ters on my desk rat­tling to the bass, but when I look, the let­ters are still. I sus­pect that my eyes are twitch­ing.

It was a heavy day. I’m too scram­bled inside to eat. I know I’ll be hun­gry first thing in the morn­ing.

“Malice”, he used. Not great, but good, and cer­tain­ly more than I deserve. I’m still para­noid.

Through every­thing else, some­one is test­ing me. Testing my new found seren­i­ty. Testing the very thing that I’ve been fight­ing against, for the last few years. The only per­son who can bring me to a desire for phys­i­cal man­i­fes­ta­tion of my rag­ing frus­tra­tion (aside from peo­ple who smoke around babies). On the bus, I uncon­trol­lably pic­tured wrap­ping my fin­gers around her neck, and stran­gling her. I know that that’s bad. Sometimes my own thoughts scare me. I’m not a vio­lent per­son.

The world is a twist­ed, twist­ed one-act.