Something

This post is designed to go with the Walk Off the Earth (Gianni and Sarah) cover of Say Something. If you want to read and listen (which I'd recommend) the link is here: http://youtu.be/fqVNm0c8nnQ

The expression isn't perfect. It can't be.
But I'm trying anyway, damn it.

Reflection

Where do you find motivation after confronted with the stark reality that everything you are, everything you are capable of, is not enough?

That question first weighed on my mind some years ago. I was just getting in to high school. I wasn't ready for it. Hell, I'm still not ready for it. I don't have an answer. I don't even know where to start.

If I had known, then, that this question would haunt me and break me down into this abject and barely functional...thing, I'd have burned it out of my brain just like so many other things.

I think I can safely identify it as part of the root of the problem, at least. That's nice.

But in all seriousness, that is the worst part about being intuitive or intelligent or whatever the fuck you call me. I could have played music for a living, or became a doctor, or gone into biochemical research, or started a business. The research is the strong option right now.

Thing is, staring variability like that in the face, most people default to what they enjoy most. Following your dreams, or what have you.
My curse is that they are all weighted the same. No option appeals more or less than the other.

Once I accepted that, ages past, I realized that was a component of understanding that nothing I did would ever feel like it was good enough. I could be an amazing doctor, and lament the musical career I never had. Or vice versa, etc ad nauseum.

It hurt. It hurt a lot. I shrugged it off and played the game day by day, but it all lead me to here, and all I have left is the sum of my failures.

Some of these things, I realize, it isn't rational to blame myself for...I should not be carrying all of the guilt that I do. Knowing it isn't rational, though, that doesn't tend to help much.

Insanity is portrayed as more glamorous, and that statement alone makes me hate the world.

Genius and insanity have that close-knit relationship and everyone loves to talk about it and not quite outright claim they believe themselves in the first category, but while everyone is willing to look at the heights of achievement one can reach...no.
No one ever, ever talks about the anguish and suffering. We're all about overcoming adversity. Truth is, those beautiful achievements do very little to soothe the misery. How would I know?
Intuition.

I do mean misery. I don't notice it as a significant factor anymore because it's been my resting pulse for nearly a decade, but I am relentlessly unhappy.

Most of that is predictable, if you have all the variables.
You don't, and I am not going to give them to you.

I used to have this notion that I could overcome all of this for love.
That was quaint and pretty and so very terribly wrong, and I'd give a lot to take back the attempt because it still fucking hurts to have failed so utterly - myself, sure, but mostly the truth of hurting another in the process of my downward spiral.

There's blame number one. Or is it? See, it's hard to tell. Do I blame myself for her feeling the need to leave?

Yes.
Same way I blame myself in no small part for the deaths of all my friends who had diseases that maybe maybe in some tiny fantasized version of reality I could cure.

I told you it wasn't rational.

I've been doing the isolation thing again lately. I didn't realize it until I considered how long it's been since I had an honest conversation with another soul. Go figure.

So it all boils down to that question. Motivation. I want to do something, but what? How do I choose and deal with leaving everything else unfulfilled? I can't have everything. I can't even have most of it. Probably not even some.

But nothing, nothing is getting old. I am tired of being goddamn tired all the time, and my mind is stagnating. I can't help but worry about the onset of rot.

I don't know precisely what to do about it, aside from seeing that for the moment, my only real option is to open myself up to all the guilt and shame and ache. There's a reasonable chance it'll spark something inside of me.

Or I'll drown in it.

But change is good, right?

Funny notion, that.
Some caterpillars endure metamorphosis and become butterflies.
Others get eaten.

- C

"You think you are safe? It is an illusion."

Just watched a video that presented the two-party political system in the United States in the same light as an NFL game. Two teams bent on dominating, not even just winning, but creating a dynasty...with the real motivation and power being the money involved in the product being sold - the conflict. Most spectators are at best only tangentially aware of the background machinations involved in sports.

The video presented the situation as analogous to the Democratic and Republican parties. The spectators (voters) remain unaware of the background motives, while the "teams" play out a bitter war for dominance, and the owners of the teams do nothing but profit on the often complacent viewership while essentially having coffee together in the "real" world.

In the NFL, the illusion is created at some expense. But it's entertainment.
In politics, there's collateral. Real human beings suffering and dying while our attention is diverted to...what, exactly? Garbage attacks about the citizenship of a presidential candidate?

I find the analogy presented both immensely depressing and mind-numbingly accurate. If nothing else, it sums up the word that came to mind about the State of the Union address. Misdirection.

Brings me back to an earlier thought about the nature of services. If you aren't paying for them, you are probably the product being sold. Apply that line to politicians and tell me it doesn't smack of accuracy, if buried beneath a little bit of cognitive dissonance.

- C

Once in awhile I get these flashes of clarity.

It's like between them I'm living, breathing, thinking, existing in a haze. Nothing is distinct, everything is muted, but that's my reality so I don't notice it.

Then the moment comes and the fog clears and I see everything in my own mind the way it is supposed to be. I see the momentum I could have, the drive, the honesty and kindness and sense of purpose.

I hate those moments. I wish like hell it looked like a mountain I'd have to climb or some challenge or even something painful that I'd have to suffer through. Those I could handle. I don't have a high enough sense of self-worth to be that concerned about suffering.

Instead, it looks foreign. I recognize there is a distance between where I spend most of my time and these moments of lucidity. I can even see a path from here to there, but it's through a medium I don't recognize. It's like seeing a glimmer of hope at the end of the proverbial tunnel, only to find the air has become water and the ground quicksand. I don't understand how to travel in this medium, and so I can't move. I can only watch.

It's probably just another way my mind has found to torture itself for all the things I haven't done. I don't mind the suffering - not because I'm noble or strong, but selfish. Pain without purpose is indistinct like everything else, but pain from a clear source that perhaps I deserve, that can sometimes be sharp enough to pierce the veil of...all of this.

You don't know what that's like, and if you do I'm sorry.

Steps to a Happy Thanksgiving

I'm doing one of those list posts things. I don't like picking numbers, though, so it's "a few" steps to help improve the quality of your Thanksgiving experience.

Musical Moments #14

Not a concert summary? Oh man, I've actually gotta say something.

Today's rant:

"Mainstream" has got to be the single most useless attempt at a derogatory I've ever seen.
And I see it a lot. Everywhere. It's an excuse for people to hate bands, even hate -genres- of music.

But let's break it down, because mainstream has been applied to everything conceivable.
I've heard (in recent memory) Shinedown being called mainstream, In This Moment being called mainstream, Three Days Grace, Adele, Daughtry, Dream Theater (seriously?), and a whole host of others.
You know what they have in common? They play music. That's pretty much the sum of it.

Which means mainstream isn't in itself a genre, but rather a status. A status of being well-liked.
Which means in using the term as a derogatory, you are suggesting to me that you hate a band because other people like them.

Wait, what? Take your hipster trash elsewhere.

Isn't that what everyone wants for the music they enjoy? For it to be enjoyed by others?
Isn't that the whole point? To appreciate beauty?

I'll accept a laundry list of reasons not to like certain groups. Hell, just saying "I don't like them." is sufficient. I realize that taste is primarily - and if nothing else - subjective.

But refusing to give a band or an artist any credit because they are, at the absolute minimum, good at their jobs, is a sort of lunacy I can't really get behind.

I'm not saying there aren't "mainstream" bands that I don't like, mind you. But I don't like them because of their music, not their popularity. I thought - hoped - we'd get past garbage logic like that after graduating high school.

Disappointing to be wrong on that one.

Come on, people.

- C

I don't think I've really had a good grasp on what it means to have a clouded heart until now.
It isn't the recognition that you can't have what you want - that's base, simple, black and white...just wistfulness. A paralytic. Useless.
It's more the dawning of understanding that what you want might only exist inside your mind. Might not exist even there.

It never feels like burning too hot, but it amounts to that. Not in velocity, nor even in raw energy...just in intensity. Hues over-saturated, tones building into a cacophony, an intensity that makes even the barest glancing -real- touch a sensation so profound it borders on painful. Beautiful agony.

It's a quick lesson that the world frowns upon that. No one will outright say it. Ambition is celebrated like the fundamental vices of greed and hunger and lust and selflessness. But the pursuit of simplicity - not reductive, not in lieu of accepting reality, but in tandem with it - is misunderstood as...unrealistic expectation.

People want their flickering lights and shadows. Not sunlight and darkness, those are too direct. Too honest, perhaps, if only in what they reveal. They want their walls and segments of reality and reductions and illusory logic. They want to absorb their truths in palatable and perceptible pieces, and to share themselves only as much as the risk seems justified by the reward.

What they want is not my fantastical reality. It is not what I want.
What I have may not even be what I want, as most often anymore I just want to feel connection.

Communication is a means to an end, even elevated into an art form...it channels and narrows an otherwise unbearable insight into a bite-size piece that can be presented in prose or poetry or pretty little ditty or parody.

Ultimately it is a tool to reveal these truths, but they shy away from that even if you open the doors for them. Pull back the blinds and let the unspoken seep in like so much gorgeous starlight, and they only slink into the corners of the mind and ask you to cover their eyes. To go away. Leave me alone.

Alone is a thing people say without comprehension, a word too big for the conception adopted in collective consciousness. Alone is a fundamental fear. We sometimes desire to be separate in physical space, in mental space, but the average expression slanders the innate need to feel connected. Not even in those dark moments, but especially in the light ones.

What I want is to reveal your truths. Not just lay them bare but touch them and connect them to mine, in the pitiful and fleeting hope that where words have always failed a singular moment can occur where you see what I see without a lens. Without perceptual bias and mental filters and reductive reasoning and wasting words on whimsical exposition.

I want to bask in that moment and show you what spatial and temporal relativity means to the depths of the spirit. Perhaps so a piece of yourself, cut off and starved to death on a diet of lies and misleading facts, can remember what it felt like when a soul touched yours. Before your mind cracked under the strain of perceiving, before walls, before words, before thought.

I use the word want because I can exist without seeing the want fulfilled again. But I've felt it before, and want, as all words, falls short. I want it like you want water and oxygen and to believe that you are real. Do you want to believe that as much as I do? More?

I say this having learned that you are faceless and nameless and maybe a device invented by my own mind to restore a hope I strangled so I could survive. I say this for the sake of saying it, not suffering from the delusion that it matters only in the reading and understanding of it.

Truth is a form of art, a form of beauty, and like the two it requires no particular justification to exist. It is, as you and I are, as everything is, was, isn't, won't be.

Perhaps can't be.

As much as I've come to accept that my particular desires are eccentric and border on egotistical and hint at insane, as much as I feel like my reality is not the same one everyone else inhabits, I still wrestle with why I should want to bother trying to show you - whoever, anyone - something so precious.

Someone should have done it for me.

Seeing it alone isn't just a meaningless non-event, but a vacuum that inhales and consumes the meaning in everything until it all suffocates and withers away.
Seeing it and sharing it only to have it summarily rejected or misunderstood or run away from yet again is a failure, an unacceptable outcome whether the norm or not...a suffering complete to the degree that pain is preferable.

The probabilities are not favorable, and the options amount to satisfaction or irredeemable insanity.

It's all predicated on the premise that you are listening, really listening.
I'm not even clear anymore on whether or not you - the soft you, lurking beneath other identities and craving, maybe, what I crave - are even real.

It's altogether clouded. I'm altogether clouded.

Let's face it. You aren't going to save me.
You - real or imaginary - are too busy being afraid of yourself just the way I was afraid of myself and terrified of the possibility of you.

Unlike wistfulness, fear makes an excellent motivator.
If your walls are what mine were, if no one yet dared reach inside...or worse, if they did without understanding what it meant?
I thought my damage was irreparable.

I've yet to be convinced otherwise, but I'm starting to entertain the notion. You, my dearest fairy tale, have not likely had a reason to do the same.

If you're real, if I find you, if I break down those walls and somehow you don't find yourself out of love and into loathing...if, if, if.

If is hope.
Hope is the catalyst for joy, or for torturous suffering, I haven't yet decided which it prefers.

For now, luckily?
Expression is my catharsis.
I wonder, what is yours?

- C