dear god,

when i asked for people to challenge me, i meant smart people.

my cat is admiring me from the carpet. hes twisted his head around and tucked it in. now he watches the loudmouth coming down the stairs. i find him cute. the cat, not the loudmouth. i took him on my lap for a go at the swing. i think he liked it, because he only resisted a little. the cat, not the loudmouth.

i was an asshole today, but not enough.

it seems people are not even capable of realising how ridiculous they sound when i prove it to them anymore. i no longer get excited over work because im surprised by new levels of stupidity every day instead.

i am bitter. that is the truth. but i shouldnt lose sight of my goal. my day was spent writing sassy responses and deleting them. write, delete, write, delete. being mean wasnt the point.

but im frustrated now.

telling any ordinary person of the incident stuns them with absurdity, and i am berated for my cool.

i see that too. that i was too nice. a coward. i grow resentful towards the person, but not as much as towards myself. my attempts to express it come in intervals after long bottling, scathing but punctuated by a smiley "no hard feelings" when we all know i meant every word, truly.

there is no write, delete, write, delete, when you talk in real life. so it is a (i assume) shocking mask slip to anyone ive been wave and smiling at for the past year. suddenly it is revealed to them that this quiet, agreeable nerd is in reality a stuck up snob that has no idea on how to be a proper person.

.

.

.

surprise!

never made any promises.

i got no sleep tonight, oscillating between committing to the asshole or the nice person bit. tragically i couldnt remember what soothed me in time. but here i am. feeling a tiny bit better. and wanting to cry. something really is wrong with me.

forgive me for the abstraction this time. i dont want to type our the sentence "an automated parking lot does not generate the same amount of heat as an ai data centre" anymore. sometimes i wish i was the fool. blissful, blissful, folly.

and to my friend in the land down under: i miss you more than ever.

daylight, nightlight, they have fused. eternally hopefully not. because i am writing from my attempt at a fix. sun up, hopefully my head will be on a pillow after sun down.

two types of honey. phlegm and diesel.

in a nightmare my favourite bodega is turned into a white interior fast food place. bright lights, tiles polished with grease. pushing past a neat file, i only recognise it by where it used to be.

i used to bike there for ice cream, and then bike back for more. taking too long, my mother would walk the streets looking for me. nothing really stops you from pedalling back when ice cream costs less than a dollar.

little bodega, wonder of my world.

the cool cashier is cornered in his podium, watching the vinyl curtains slap your face with a greeting. i bet it didnt happen to him. because hes cool.

nobody came and if they did they wouldnt stay. but i did, held by short shelves and a low ceiling. the fridge lights were probably harsh, but i remember it all dark and cozy.

recently two forgotten memories resurfaced in my sleep wake state.

one was my first day of school, waiting in the car. cant remember if there was a blizzard or if its the linen cloth reel my brain uses. my dad told me to watch for the school opening while he took a nap. and i misunderstood which gate, misfiring.

the other was me telling the teacher everyone liked that the pen he was holding was mine, and that i wanted it back. a playful argument over custody of a light blue pen. i always thought adamancy was an obligation, secession was never an option to me.. weird.

i lived all of these scenes, still they threw me off.

there must have been a crease in the transition. some seedlings push the stem out first, hunched over because the cotyledons are still stuck inside. i find them in my garden sometimes. whats the rush?

i should ask myself.

i dont think i ever wanted to be taken seriously.

i dont want to turn into a fast foooud restaurant.

found an old smell, the smell of my unemployment. a smell i hoarded along with the mess of that time. now unburdened, i come up for air. to welcome it back.

not warm enough, this summer

i want to lay on the ground

to absorb its heat.

i stare until i wear the eyes of an outsider. i become a stranger to myself, a character. many caricatures can be projected onto this stranger: an intellect, a lisp, a loud, assertive brutality. and none of them feel wrong. i would believe them if i were not familiar with myself.

meh. i dont feel like writing. is it because i dont want to admit where i am, or is it because i dont feel the need to write neat resolutions to help myself anymore, i dont know.

i will start posting my compendium quotes here so i can remember where i was when they resonated with me.

Rumi : “Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”

im getting a little sick of words. words can only do so much, id like faces. tripping over faces.

at the pizza parlor there was a phone labelled "existential emergencies only"

i dont think they know what that means.

it was offensive

there are things i absolutely cannot say, or do. but i think its time i close the chapter to chop wood and carry water. this doesnt have to be my story. not for now at least.

to a life well held onto.

my god sometimes i look at the world around me and it is just so ugly. ugly is ugly. beauty becomes ugly. i dont want either. but why of all things did it have to be hard and up to me. its best to switch off the news and olds. even though they remain very much tangible.

literal translation, but a poem:

coming in a carriage
anchored like the army commander
the neck like a column
pure, and the face a mirror
from her i became dumbstruck
pride is no longer in me

tweaked a little bit of what i wrote on the 6th. my words did not "pierce the thoughts suspended in the air" effectively enough to pin them down. i have tried a little harder, but i dont know if its any clearer. the thoughts themselves arent entirely clear yet anyways. so the abstraction isnt intentional this time. ah, abstraction. this site is tagged as abstraction but i know its used more functionally than creatively. becoming interested in it creatively though. but i know nothing of it. i must read and beyond what i read to read the world. ever heard of fun, me?

if written abstraction is so hard, imagine the struggle with visual abstraction. im not an artist. to fail at both humanities and stem is a little embarassing.

in proper (amateur) abstaction though, the trench is infinitely deeper this season, but an elevator is being built down. interesting.

on a rocket to mars, nothing can change your trajectory. on new land, you can pretend to still be on earth. but you are on mars. and no bridge can reach.

after a day of venturing beyond the edge

i turn off the lights of my small room

and i realise

it is lonely

it is scary

it is everything i feared it was going to be

to realise, that i indeed am a byproduct of clearly demented human history is a blatant violation of how my world ought to be. makes me want to rectify it.

resilience, as preached by men i admire. standing up a million and one times. that life is so much more than this circus. and that you deserve to stand up. that you, lady, are a human.

in retrospect they were all questions circulating that i rendered invisible. and for very long. bravo.

but in line with my promise of self honesty, i face them. and i have no defences.

but i never made a fuss. a fuss is the only way out but i resist the premade caricature itll cloak me with. i mean fuck both sides, really. the citizen and the chief, all sides of the same coin. i do not buy the lies. but i do not buy the self destructive anger disguised as a catharsis either.

earnest transparency entails dragging the curtain down for others if they do listen, which i both want and dont want. id not like them to sit where my mind sits, as if i know whats best for them.

i cannot go on now that i see my habits for what they truly are. i could have been a hippie. my parents got to be hippies, grandparents got to be hippies, why not me?

as the most untethered, shame somehow crushes me the heaviest.

this is unfair. but as the man i admire says: life is not fair.

previously i would cower from individualism and get chummy with swallowing it and ending it with myself.

i still dont want kids, but id not like to swallow anymore things. as for individualism, i realise it is inevitable. but i am scared. i cannot swim. but i will not before i am able to.

i try to not fall back on lofty fantasies. but sometimes this is when id like a man to stroke my thinning hair most.

to tell me that we live and die together. that we are not wrong. not bad. and that forgiveness exists in bounty.

to give me an answer.

i have been giving (female) equality a try mentally and well fuck me i guess i am not fit for it sorry. or maybe it never meant being devoid of these wishes. yeah, i always knew that in the down and the deep.

i remember rumis poem of the field beyond.

and that is the difference between me and the cynical lover. the lover i feel i need. i retreat into poetics and imagery, he logic and science. i do not know if i like that conversation. but that is mostly fear of being seen foolish. and in truth, poetics hide the particulars of conviction--something that devastates me, a foreign language to me--in light airy clouds.

so lost in my thoughts that my food gets cold.

i remember to eat some of it. but its not the same to me. i am not interested. i dont want to be cold

i would never work with you. but i will always talk with you. exchanges relieve burdens.

in a ten minute limbo. nothing i can do will change the pace. its best to sit back and write. like this. its strange to know you can finally relax. if only i had a little book in my pocket.

i see the empty page now. in alignment with themes of deposition i dump some words here.

to a jolly june.

and younger years.

happy birthday.

to me.

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A Note For Jo.
“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” ― Henry David Thoreau