My Whole Expanse I Cannot See…

It seems like only yesterday that I was in the hospital for depression, fucked up on various awful drugs, upgrading the blog to WordPress 2.7. That was last December, now we’re running WordPress 2. قانون لعبة البوكر 8.

Time flies, doesn’t it?

I found some beautiful place to get lost, a place of gorgeous forgetfulness.

So gone, if only for a little while…

My head’s full of fragments of things I think about writing, but it’s just fragments, and nothing more. I can’t find my writing space, let alone decent inspiration. I’m obviously not finding the right experiences, and it’s experiences that feed my sort of writing.

I suppose I don’t have the imagination to just make stuff up. I have to make love to the right woman, or see the right tableau in the right bar, or a thousand other things that I, apparently, can’t find. I have to figure out what I’m not doing, and start doing it. I have to fight like Goddamn fucking Hell to get my life straight again. I’m twenty-eight, and I’m smart, I have no good excuse for this undeath in which I’ve been drowning.

I finally gathered all my flash pieces and poetry into the Creative Flash section. So, if you missed anything, or you’re really bored, it’s all in one place.

So, I write with the intent to be honest, completely honest. Even when I’m writing fiction, I open my wrists a bit, I bleed into the writing. I write whatever’s in me. I like writing the way I write, with such transparency. I write to be known, and maybe understood. I don’t write to make people like me, or love me, or hate me. Elliott Smith once said about his writing that he didn’t write songs to make people feel a certain way, he wrote descriptions, and those descriptions could be interpreted differently. It’s an idea that really stuck with me, it’s exactly how I feel about my writing. I don’t write to inspire people, or depress the Hell out of people. I write the noise in my head, to paint something subjective, and to use my craft well.

The thing is, while I like transparency, and I’m definitely committed to it, it’s not easy. People are fine with writing about puppies, unicorns, turtles named, Kurt. Happy is fine. Suicide, depression, drugs, liquor, sex, those things are often too honest for people close to me. People want to fix me, or save me, or avoid the writing. Sometimes people get angry, frustrated that I’m often so dark. I don’t want people close to me to react badly. I don’t write to upset people, to scare people. It’s hard for people to understand that I’m practicing my craft, I’m writing what I feel until I feel something else. I don’t want to wear a mask, to write comfortable half-truths, happy lies. I used to write that way, and I hated it, it didn’t suit me. 

Transparency is difficult, but I can’t go back to anything less. I think that at the end of everything, I would regret writing differently. Darkness is all I have right now, but writing darkness feels better than writing nothing.

I’ve always had a spark in me, something that lights up and shoves out the darkness. For a long time, however, I haven’t felt that spark. It’s like there’s nothing in me, nothing good. I’m sick of feeling this way, and I’m getting sick of writing about it.  I just want it over, this empty feeling, but I can’t find a way to make it over. I’m tired of killing time, and going nowhere.

So, I’m now up to twenty-one tattoos. It’s funny, to me, how my tattoos have evolved since I started three years ago. Images that are metaphors, then words that reflect the noise in my head. Tattoos that show the light and dark in me, the last three years, pleasure and depression, written on my skin.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about why I’ve marked myself this way, to this degree. Much of it is my odd devotion to transparency, the idea that anyone can look at my tattoos, and my writing, and see the most honest parts of me. Part of loneliness is wearing a mask, pretending to be something different than what’s inside. A person can be lonely around friends, lonely with a lover, if they’re wearing a mask all the time. I want people to be able to “see” me if they want to look. I never felt lonely around Sara (the ex) when I could be transparent, and she loved me anyway. It’s a better feeling than any drug, to be known and loved without a mask. Unfortunately, with me and Sara, she looked inside and didn’t want some of what she saw. I admittedly tried to hide things I figured she wouldn’t like, as I honestly never wanted to be without her. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. I think part of me doesn’t want that to happen the same way again. So, I write the way I write, I wear my insides on the outside for anyone who cares to see. Now, I have twenty-one tattoos, twenty-one acts of transparency…

Tattoo #21 by Colt, hardcore motherfucking badass at Doc Dog's, Ybor City

This tattoo is another Elliott Smith lyric from a really elegant song, A Passing Feeling. I love the song because it so perfectly describes what it’s like when life absolutely does not feel good, and no matter what, that feeling will not go away. The song is so spectacularly honest, and plainly put. It’s very much how I’ve felt for so long, I’m stuck here waiting for a passing feeling. I think the song also describes the idea that a person doesn’t start out feeling stuck, astonishingly depressed. It’s a result of things quickly and steadily going to Hell. It’s not how I want to feel, but it’s honest to say that I feel it. The feeling will pass, or it won’t. It’s kind of odd, I’m struggling and waiting to feel right again, both at the same time.

A few people have noted to me that I often give off the vibe of a song-writer. It’s interesting when I think about it, music does play a big role in my writing. I never write in the quiet, I’m listening to Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie right now. I really don’t like writing long pieces, I don’t think I’ve ever put more than twenty-five hundred words into a single subject. I like saying a lot without too many words. I like impact without length.

My favorite song-writers, Elliott Smith, Aimee Mann, Alanis Morissette, they tell gorgeous, honest stories in under five minutes of lyrics. So, I definitely think that music is so much a part of why I’m able to write the way I like to write.

I hadn’t listened to Alanis Morissette in a long time, years, but last night I dug out my favorite album, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie. I think it’s her smartest, often angriest album, and I spent a good stretch of years identifying with that sort anger. After high-school, for a solid six years, I had a great deal of internal anger. I didn’t end up going to college like I expected. I didn’t have any friends who weren’t online, let alone an honest to Christ girlfriend. I was going to disability advocacy meetings with my mom, not living like a fellow of twenty. I didn’t have assistants, nothing was what I wanted for myself. It all happened so slowly, steadily, and I grew to hate it. I never talked about it, never knew how. It was hard to live that way because I’ve never thought to myself, oh, I’m disabled, so I obviously can’t have a girlfriend, or leave the house without my mom. Fuck that, it’s not me. I couldn’t directly identify with Alanis’ lyrics, I didn’t share her experiences, but I definitely understood them on an intellectual level, and I felt the emotion behind them. My anger was in that I was lacking experiences, and the necessary support toward such experiences. That lack of experiences ended three years ago.

So, last night, Alanis starts singing Would Not Come. I’ve always liked the song, always understood it intellectually, but last night it hit me completely differently. I’m living this song, right fucking now I’m living it. For the last fucking year, I’ve lived it. I was so close to everything I ever wanted, and I lost it in a blink, so fast my head spun, so fast my head still spins. I lost my end to loneliness, the lover I wanted for so long. I lost my best friend, my muse. Right now, my life is a series of fixes, trying to find something that will not come.

Yet, when I don’t feel like bleeding in the bathtub, I realize that my life is better than empty. I feel awful, beyond fucked up, but I got here by way of so many experiences. I can genuinely identify with so many songs, I have so many of my own words to write, I’m not devoid of a life. Yes, the songs are of loss, addiction, depression, suicide. Yes, my writing is very dark. Still, bad experiences are better than abject nothingness.

I don’t want to be here. Sometimes I’d happily open my wrists and be done. Still, if I manage to dig my way out of this nightmare, if I don’t break, I’ll be a better me.

If I were 14, never seen a good movie, or read a good book, never made love to a woman, I imagine Terminator Salvation would have seemed absolutely brilliant. As it is, I’m not 14, and I’ve experienced all of the above, so this Terminator re-boot just made me regret that I wasn’t doing something genuinely fulfilling.

There’s a scene where a fellow dies and the audience sees it through his eyes, it was unfortunately very reminiscent of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. I had ridiculous flashbacks of being afraid to die. I’m sitting there, at this astonishingly bad movie, thinking about the fact that one day my eyes will go dark and it won’t be my idea. I’m at this bad movie, feeling disconnected from everyone around me, the full weight of wasted time pressing down on my chest, wishing I was somewhere else, with someone else.

So, I guess Terminator Salvation made me feel something other than bored.