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Chilled energy fixes me incomplete; writhing without sleep, I live an unfinished lie.
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Chilled energy fixes me incomplete; writhing without sleep, I live an unfinished lie. Here my thoughts and holes. Fill them in, please. I can't finish on my own. ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** |
| "When is it OK to lie? We all tell the occasional "little white lie". What makes them more acceptable than a regular lie?" "I am a fool. I lie. Men are fools," I think. The question is as simple as the consequence. When I'm caught, how will I suffer? If I say I'm on the way, but I'm really on the toilet, what would happen if someone burst in? Would they point and shout, "I knew it! Get up, we have to go." Or, would they kindly close the door and think better of me for not informing them of my convulsions, for not taking a picture of my pained face and sending along with the text: "See. I'll be late. Need to finish." Sometimes, the lies we tell are self serving. Sometimes our lies are in defense of another. Other lies hurt. Others heal. What this life of lies tells me, is that a lying is a tool. Honesty, integrity, and reliability are in the eyes of the beholder, for a true man isn't always believed. Often, it is better for one to lie than for another to know the truth. We lie to ourselves every day we remember, as we never remember perfectly. I lie when I speak, when I paint, and write, because I try to cut the excess I can't tell - I believe I can give you the scene without all the details. In the end, I always bias towards my character; my welfare is supreme - selfish, but true and likely embedded in evolutionary reality. I have grown to lie and lie better and truer than my neighbor, so that I can appeal to the truth others want to believe. I don't think telling the truth is always constructive. Honestly, I don't ascribe to the 'general' truths so many hold to be self-evident. Truth is taught and understood through hard misunderstanding. Nothing smooth as speak could hope to mimic a lifetime of learning. The best we can do is lie the right idea into the heads of those we address. Just don't get trapped in lies. Don't let a vale of falsehood grow so thick that your life becomes a series unseen opportunity. Lies are tools and as such need to build something. Any tool, used destructively, is a weapon. There's my answer. Lie constructively. Don't weaponize words. Make sure your propaganda is wanted before you egg a world already utterly befuddled by truth. |
| You have been named as a suspect in a crime that you didn't commit (and had no knowledge that it even occurred). It was a burglary and now you're being questioned by the police. Write the interrogation, from a handful of questions you are asked, to the answers you provide. "Why do you think I did it?" "It's good. Good about something bad. Too good to come from you; better than anything else we've seen." "And if it's my best work?" "Because it's not your work at all, that really doesn't matter." "I think I need a lawyer. I need some time." "You'll need a lawyer. More so, now." "Now how?" "Now like everything you've been working for is done. We can't undo what you did, but we can fix most of it. You put a lot of people at risk." "I gave them me. I'm harmless. They're dangerous. They don't understand, and you don't understand, and so I'm here. This is ridiculous. I'm done. Get me my phone. I haven't done anything illegal. I don't think you can keep me here, in fact. Yeah. I'm leaving." "You're not. Not as long as I'm here." "Then you'll get silence until you leave. Get me a pillow. You oughta be good for that." "That's right. Let it out. Tell us how you knew. Tell us who wrote the book." "My book has a name. My publisher picked it. Go ask them, so they can tell you I wrote it. Now, my pillow if you would. Your not being very useful, officer" "I'm doing the right thing for our country." "..." "I'm doing the right thing for my daughter. My wife can't stop crying because of you." "..." "This is the best way. You knew I'd do it. You knew it. You want it...Yeah, you do. Good? Good. Good!" |
| "What is your biggest pet peeve/gripe/grievance/whatever you want to call it? Why does it bother you so much? Here is your chance to use your writing talent to vent about what ails you. Use it wisely. Without a doubt, I hate myself. I don't have body dysmorphic disorder. I am very realistic about how much my own fallacies fail me. I know, to a 'T' (or there about), how much I do not do, because of how worthless I am most the time. Let's run through a list. Call it 'Self Improvements I May Never Make' or 'Resolutions for a Future Date': I am fat, not exceptionally or dangerously fat, but fat nonetheless. How do I know this? Because other people are skinny and have far more sex than I do. I attribute all of this to my being fat. The scratch? I love food. I am an ex-cook, an avid sourdough baker, and an experimental pastry chef. Most cooks off-set eat. They eat a lot. While I'm not boasting an Italian rump bursting of pasta and gelato, I do have a defined layer of chub. That defined layer wiggles when I jump and settles when I lean. This makes me very self-conscious about jumping a girl or leaning over her. When I snag the girl, I fear sex. When I haven't got one, I stare at my tummy and think about sex. I am Freud's best friend apparently. Did I mention my mother is skinny as a twig? Beat that for best fit-fudged-up in the sexually blighted. I don't write enough. Sure, there is life. But, what of it? War torn Africans manage to eat three meals a day, kill a lion, and teach themselves calculus. Why can't I do something simple like work/school/write, eh? It makes me wonder if my support network is too weak to allow for anything less than complete downtime (generally thinking about sex in a very pubescent way). I've only three hobbies: writing, sex, and tennis in that order. You'd think I'd manage to find more time for number one. Instead, I cook, eat, call myself fat, go to school, and sleep the whole episode off. I need a kick in the pants, or a blind woman making me breakfast (preferably taller than 5'8", under 150lb, and blind -- maybe mute, but then I'd have to make her flash cards for my own emotional support). The rest is 'time'; not like I don't have enough of it wasted reverting to pubescent practices. No, I hate waiting to develop. Learning is fun, but takes far too long. Building is fun, but takes far too much work. Accomplishment is overrated and shortly lived, as if I fail to accomplish anything shortly thereafter, I find myself left with old stories, which I hate to tell. So, I wish there was an accelerate button I could hit when I'm doing well, and a slow-down when I'm not (to focus on lists like this, of course, not to change anything). All will come to pass. I will die alone, fat, with my hands in a compromising position. I don't find that sad, except for that I will probably never get around to learning how to dance. |
| "If you had to decide between the two, would you rather forget all of your memories or never be able to make new ones?" I ask myself a similar question all the time: 'Am I a product of my memories?' What are memories anyway? If it's just the flashes of image; the great smile and never-ending legs, the childish laughter, and hints at those special climactic moments, would I miss them? It's not too often I call on them, except when I'm writing (one). What if those flash memories are just memos; reminders of the encoded knowledge you developed and integrated into your behavior and attitude. Memory like muscle memory and defined instincts are not to be trifled with - they, more then any conscious recollection, will determine what you do, not what you dream of doing (two). Maybe it depends on what I'm doing for the day. Day One, I met the 8th wonder of the world. That day, I met the love of my life and nothing else mattered. [ What I want to remember will make me a better man. Everything I was before my life with Sasha, I needed to get her. I wasn't ever a womanizer. I was into my own development. I learned. I worked and taught myself how to fix cars. I read. So, when it happened, I had something to talk about. Her light made the room fall away. I didn't speak to the waiter, I ordered dinner locked in Roman eyes, seeking approval from her smile. She laughed at me for not looking away. It was funny because I was stuck. I would know that bronze hair as my morning; I wanted to carry her with me. My legs kept tensing. I was pushing off the floor like I'd need to leap up and seize her any second. That made me think of her in my arms and that caused more goose bumps than I could handle. I blushed and she laughed at me again. ] Day Two, I lost everything that mattered to me. A raucous tart in her mother's clothes and drunk on the feel of her daddy's car and cheap rum from the douche, now dead, who decided to sleep across the backseat splayed them across the road, out of my life. [ What I need to forget will allow me to move on. Little Anna wouldn't make it until morning. I had gotten the call at home and couldn't see either of them while the surgeons worked. I had a little breadth of hallway to get lost in - a pair of grandparents complaining about complacent generations that I could kill, white tile that liked to reflect and smell awful that I could smash, bad prints of good art that would be best burned under the grandparents to scar the tile and give me something else to think about. Up to the nurse - she watched me carefully; back to the old fools on the couch - they were stuck in their own mess, which is unacceptable for the elderly (How dare they be so selfish?). Up and back, heavier every lap. Three hours into the marathon I gave up and splayed out on the floor. No one even asked why I stopped. No one came over and offered water, or told me to sit up. The grandparents finally shut up. The nurse stared. I was trapped in my own, pinched between their laser stares. I didn't think I would ever smile again. Not really. I'm not sure I really do anymore. ] |
| “There was an old woman, who lived in a shoe. She had so many children she didn't know what to do. She gave them some broth without any bread. She whipped them all soundly and sent them to bed.” Why was her thinking limited and she didn’t know what to do? Don't be put off by her harshness. Don't be lost in the red welts across the little kid's backs. Hard life demands hard people. Dumb little children need to learn. Often, it's best for everyone that they learn the quick way: 'stupid hurts'. This question appeals to me for a number of reasons. First is the narrowing of someone's perspective when they are 'in the muck'. Being buried to your eyebrows in an issue makes you the least likely to come up with a transformative change - your simply too busy to invest in making the situation greatly better, if even stepwise. Second is the absence of a man as the disciplinarian. I look to the newest generation of children (especially those in affluent households) and see a coddling I could never have imagined in my time. I'll start with the second. My philosophy: 'Whip that dumbass 'till he understands; spank her until she stops.' Why? Simply put, as long as the parent if following a consistent risk-reward pattern (as you would a dog - don't think too much of humans, now) being so blatantly upfront with the consequences prevents a mess of fuddled understanding as the child grows up. If you whip a kid when he curses, and only when he curses, except maybe when he breaks a leg, that child will not likely curse as much in the home. Will he curse elsewhere? Probably at some point. Though, your training him will have instilled an aversion to the practice. Whether or not the child finds himself comfortable being a little s*** outside the home rests primarily on his peers - if he hangs around with other, lesser, s***s, don't expect him to be a high school prince and a college star, expect a druggy. The lesson here is, as long as there is a sense of fairness, or at least reliable risk/reward, parents really can't mess up their kids too much. If you're a psychiatrist, f*** off. You know as well as I do they'll be fine or they won't and you're only helping 20% of your patients, so f*** off. So, now that I believe in her freeing up time by silencing the little mongrels, I come 'round to the first point. The poor gal lives in a shoe. It probably leaks. I'm sure there's an awful smell (think boys, girls, pubescent mess, and no way to properly bleach the place). On top of that, what of school lunches, eh? Or welfare? I don't see a check in her mailbox. And, I doubt opiates had made their way to her doorstep - she's rural, and you need a modern gas station to pick up the goods for meth. I see a lone woman trying to instill discipline in a band of stinky, playful, wonderful, starving, little kids without the bustling support of a man or community (who would want a stained shoe next door?). Where would she get the inspiration? It's not like she was a college educated architect and her children were the future labor of a dream-house down Sockberry Lane. And nowhere to my knowledge are the kids contributing gold pieces towards a mortgage up on Sole Avenue near the Stiletto district. I'm facing the facts: this gal is a poor, uneducated, single mother, trying to raise a unnecessarily large family. Maybe once the boys are a bit older, they can start farming (but who they'll learn it from is beyond me - maybe she can apprentice them out and get 'em some trade skills). Listen, it's gonna be a tough few years. Shut the kids up. Stay alive. Get it done. Be there, healthy, fit, disciplined, for a better tomorrow. That's all any of us can do. |
| I feel the tide building; a wave of life on the way: NanoWrimo without sleep NanoWrimo desperate to eat NanoWrimo with homework to do NanoWrimo NanoWrimo I feel the tide building; a wave of life on the way, that threatens to shake my day to pieces and pierce my night with sleeping pains. Such is coming: NanoWrimo. Yet, still I want to write in the mean time. I'm not channeling anything. School hasn't kicked my ass yet. I'm doing too well to be terribly stressed about the whole thing. Whatever am I due to do, in this wakeless limbo? Wait, I suppose. Wait for the turning of the tide to be swept away. Antsy. I feel antsy. |
| “Remember grandmother's house and all the happy times there? Share a memory.” I was young. My life was BonBons by the pool and cookies for lunch. The Southern California sun watched over our valley. The scent was ancient and home. Every glass clean, and bowls loaded with goodies were all stationed within pleasant reach. That was my grandparent's house. I would run out the sliding doors to their yard, twirl, and simply waddle aimlessly, lost in twinkling wind chimes. I loved to swim. I was SoCal-in-love with sand, foam toys, and everything belonging to water. That day, I took the longest swim of my life. I remember being so at home submerged. There, weightless, I felt I could breathe underwater. It was warm, San Diego-warm, which is perfect. The prunes scared me; not the ones my grandparents ate (though I often wondered why bother with such awful food), but the way my body pitted and shriveled. Always, I would hide my hands and cover my toes under a towel so I wouldn't have to stare at the folds. I'd manically pat-pat-pat, eat, drink, and jump around until my skin was restored. That day, I didn't wait. My grandmother had shag carpeting throughout the bedrooms and out into the adjoining hallway. It was an dark, alien, green, I remember. Soft strands stuck between your toes when you walked wet through the house. It kept the pool close, and magically managed to turn chlorine into a homely smell - mixed with feet and old perfume. We were leaving. I knew we were. The visit was over, and I was in a hurry. I crept into the small Victorian bathroom and ducked near the tub. I needed to 'go'. That's why I didn't dry off like normal. The carpet was there again, satin soft on top of the toilet, still that odd sort of green with a sheen, now so more alien as porcelain's hair. I stared at the toilet for a good, long, time, like I'd never seen it before. Maybe I hadn't. I just remember thinking 'toilets shouldn't be fuzzy', and 'that's probably really dirty, but it smells good.' It was that indecision, the hurry, and my being young and stupid that made forget how much I hated pruned skin: how strange it is, how it hardens like putty and slips and sticks between things it ought not to. I ripped my swimming trunks off - the real kind with a fake underwear layer of small holes and inelastic fiber. I ripped them to my ankles and started crying. There I was, tanned, naked, young boy, pants around his ankles, crying over the fuzzy toilet. Blood flowed down from the torn skin, that extra bit that had managed to squeeze itself through those small, inelastic, holes and expand on the other side. I watched the fire progress through the twin peaks, just like lava pooling in all the pruned, hard, folds, then drip, drip, to those Victorian tiles. I was suffocating, pinched between a bath rug and ice-white tub, blood and wrath from my member, studied all the while by that wronged toilet. The gush stopped pouring at some point. I think I stuffed toilet paper into my pants and hid the bulge the whole way home. I still love to swim. |
| I wish I could show you this view, Siri. The sweeping of green, rich, twilight to a cool, jeweled dusk, then, with the last rainbows of the sun's waning rays, the world passes onto grey night, broken and illuminated by lights of the city. Up on this hill, the dawn is lush, brushed in memories of your lips; glossed by sparkling lemons and avocado orchards. Though my the pure day is you naked before me, here I am softly reminded of you, and tonight I know my memories: your warmth as the sun, your scent as lemons and grass, always on my mind as I sleep at peace over the city. |
| “A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.” ~Charles Peguy Lets Begin: Some work words differently. Some take polished crowns from their repertoire, and repeat unto a dazzled crowd - clean and usually effective. Some take the words that mean most, which seem at the time to represent that everything that is their feeling - primal and often effective. The difference, I think, will come from the editors, and whether or not they (the editors) understand what is trying to be said the first go around. You see, inevitably, it's the same image. The "word" may not be the same to one writer as another, but a horse by any other name is still such. Whether thoroughbred steed or wild mustang, though, you need to get the reader to the point. So it comes, as it always does, to the editing. Style, finesse, or tumultuous egress are ne'er meaningless. Still, the question of whether or not the emotion is sent resounds. While the polished approach is almost always more readable, and likely more liked by an editor, it doesn't always do to use drummed up metaphor, to quote the quoted as they have been. Yes, much has been felt, if not all that ever could be. No, you, the writer, are probably not feeling it the same way as the gentleman you are quoting. Hence, beware. A quote deserves supporting evidence. If you're creating a scene, it may be best to know you are not yesterday, but today need new words for what was already felt. The problem with changing is keeping up with it. That is difficult to do using archaic, presumptuous, prepared, phrases, even if you wrote them. Don't tell the same story twice. We already heard it the first time. The raw approach, akin to s***ting on a canvas, has definite potential to convey, now, what is to be portrayed. The problem is that it can run against the myriad consciousness that is you the writer. There will be distractions that must be weeded. There will be alternate storylines that must be sorted through, dregs discarded, streams of thought stopped. The benefits, though, can be astounding. When the writer is willing to cut through their free-written jungle, the path to reason is lined with such unique flowers, the fresh cut stems of your editing will scent scenes and lend visions to the prose that is difficult, if impossible, to imagine cutting and pasting another's words. When it comes to bringing a reader along for the ride, I say give them what you see, the dream of your eyes and ears. I wonder what I do? I wonder how I write? It feels like a voice. I hear the words. Here they are, my fingers say. Here I am, am I? |
| What is it, the fear that can make us neglect our loves? How strong can that emotion be, to override the instinct to protect and nurture? I think much depends on the person. More depends on the conscious expectations of life and worth, of the incidental purpose and opportunity cost, of our loved ones. A boy is so much more than a pre-masculine child. He is the future fixer, the future guardian and authority. A girl is so much more than an embodiment of innocence, a princess. She is assistance, apprentice, and next mother. I see the same expectations of our domesticated cousins. What is our dog besides playmate and companion? Our dog is a sense of security and purpose. What are our cats if not reminders of ambivalent promiscuity? Now, when something happens, as something has, to the caretaker, the parent or owner, what of the responsibilities to our family? I've seen fear of loss keep a mother from scolding her child, when that child needed loving discipline. More recently, I've seen fear of going outside put the health and welfare of her and her family on a chopping block. With the adults lost in confusion of priority, defining the best modes of self preservation with irrational facts - an finitely useless exercise unto death - what happens to the little ones? He won't take his dogs out anymore. It used to be two or three times a week, not enough, but enough to make him feel like he was being useful. Since the rape next door, the criminal still on the loose, he hasn't taken them out. That was two months ago. They look on with bright, hopeful, eyes, panting, salivating, at every touch that it might mean escape from their domestic prison. The poor animals, whose food is now bought in rotten bulk, whose lives have become being companion to depression and mismanagement, have nothing to do but wait. They waddle across the bone back yard, tired and dreary, barking at every moving thing. They come inside wondrous and cheery, like air conditioning and dirty couches are their penultimate prize in life. They eat greedily, then mope - a half-aware of the stagnant evening and lonely night that awaits them. They come from their bowls in a slow trot, but their backs are no longer straight. The twin puppies wear their head low, butt into ever caress as if waiting for their masters death and their inevitable decline. Their resignation scares me. I know their just animals, but they don't know to fight for a better quality of life. Sometimes, for a few minutes in the morning, they cry. They whine in long dark notes at their failed master and joyless existence. Grey. German-Shepherd-grey, Blue-Heeler-grey, soaking the furniture, lifeless hair shedding from what should be lustrous, happy, little puppies. So sad. I need to leave. This is not a good place to write. |
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