04/22/04
Unraveled like the Invisible man, that's what I felt like. With a bandage wrap for every self-applied label and restriction, tied tight in order to help conceal anything real. Hidden beneath a flamboyant display of primary colors, the lightning icon pulsing against my chest, charging my system, preparing me for the physical exhumation of the decaying ick of my soul.
The nights of chest heaving coughs prepared me for the pain of regurgitation. I squatted on the small patch of grass across the street and heaved out the mucus milk that had been gurgling inside. My stomach acids burned away all traces of infection. I was now purged of the poison, and immediately felt a swell of purpose and destiny.
The restless night had bared witness to the epic battle of the last remaining pieces of the decayed person I once knew myself as. The cardboard cutout personality that I had built so as to seem acceptable by society, or more precisely, my view of reality. I made myself what I thought reality was, and amazingly enough, I merely had to change my perspective to have it all shift. It seems so easy to say in retrospect. Choose to be happy, choose to be confident, choose to be optimistic. As much as you hate the clichés, it's the truth.
I am in search for answers to the simple, the true understanding of the most basic qualities of living life. We only reach understanding when we are removed from the situation we seek an answer to. Only through distance can things be appreciated for the positive or negative experience that they were. The bigger picture is revealed through hindsight, a greater knowledge of life is gained by simply leaving the moment behind.
Early fundamental moments therefore dictate the answers to all future decisions. First confrontation, first metaphysical lesson, first sexual moments, these are the pinpoints stuck on the map of our lives. These situations curve and bend the wavelength of our minds into behavior cycles, and only through a breaking of the pattern is knowledge gained and evolution of thought takes hold.
Awareness is first. You must awaken. Wake up. There's more than meets the eye out here. There's some shit going down. Take a look around and see what makes you mad, what makes you happy, what makes you sad, and then do it all. Confront and challenge and don't be afraid to speak up and say something completely stupid and idiotic. Fear humiliation no longer.
Naked. Exposed. Bare. In front of people. A class. Co-workers. Random strangers. They laugh and point and stare and condemn. Some see weakness and go in for the kill. Leeches, sucking you dry, bolstering their power for everything you have to offer in return. So afraid of betrayal that no real person, save the one that serves the parasite, is left inside you. A husk, barren, bored clean through so as no substance is left behind and so significant is the hole that no experience may ever fill it.
You're free now, free from the pain that you once needed so dearly. That suffering, lingering, demolishionist was finally evicted in three concurrent spasms of your digestive system. The future is yours and your shackles have been removed. I'm rubbing my wrists and ankles. Sore, but hardly worth a notice when compared to the weight lifted free from my chest. The hand of god has reached into my lungs and slammed them with enough oxygen so as to purify myself.
Blind from the light of life unbounded, I'm stumbling and mumbling and deliriously dancing through the metamorphic resonance. The tones and vibrations bounce and throb into my nervous system, rendering it numb. A melting candle branching into an upside down, thousand branched oak tree. Putty, reduced to putty, I mold into a new shape, one that fits and sits properly in the role I have crafted.
The Identity shift is the hardest part. That's what I'm sending back to myself from the future moments of my dawning tomorrows. Waves of smiling sanity wash over me and I just know that everything is going to be new again.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Monday, January 24, 2011
THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 15 - This Garbage Life (edit)
04/16/04
Crying tears of misbegotten moments. Sad frames of time that will never be. Lost in a desert of isolation, I am unable to scream for the pain is too intense. It feels like I have been impaled and perhaps I have been. Impaled on my own fierce and unwavering judgment. Trapped in fear and charged with anger, my body tears itself to pieces, as I lie writhing below. The sickness has overcome me and I no longer know or care about anything except the end of the pain.
It's weird to be suffering both mental and physical pain at the same time. You become lost between shifts of neurological insanity, nerves screaming, emotional implosion. You begin to wonder which was here first, or if that even matters, or if anything matters, or if it will ever fucking end. And it won't. It drags on through mindless hours of fist clenching sanity, dream-soaked brain hemorrhages siphoning out your will to live.
Sleep is the only comfort. Shut off from the body the mind lingers in its own universe, content to play with the clay of unfounded moments. Things that will never be, days that will never come, people that you will never know. Swimming in the ocean of eternal self, where you are the shining center of the entire fabric of reality and you don't need to feel a shred of guilt for loving every second of it.
Tried and tested, judged and sentenced, you awake into this reeking shell, this stinking and rotting corpse. Sludge and slime have eroded your insides and not even those fleeting feelings of being that delicious godhead can make the searing fragments of time any more digestible. You hate the world, you hate every person, you hate the act of hating, you condemn, you judge, you want to drive your fist through the center of the waking world and shatter everything that seems to matter to all these fucking robot slaves.
Your pain wants to stomp on the happiness of a million screaming idiots, wants to crush the empty dreams of a shallow and morally vacuous society that wants only to drain you dry and move on to the next fresh source of smiling, stupid naiveté. Nothing is worth saving for it is all truly worthless and meaningless. A thousand chanting teenagers, psyche-branded by the Brand Names of a conglomerate of money hoarding sociopaths who live equally if not more empty lives, ushering in the further decline of me and this hopeless, Garbage Life.
Crying tears of misbegotten moments. Sad frames of time that will never be. Lost in a desert of isolation, I am unable to scream for the pain is too intense. It feels like I have been impaled and perhaps I have been. Impaled on my own fierce and unwavering judgment. Trapped in fear and charged with anger, my body tears itself to pieces, as I lie writhing below. The sickness has overcome me and I no longer know or care about anything except the end of the pain.
It's weird to be suffering both mental and physical pain at the same time. You become lost between shifts of neurological insanity, nerves screaming, emotional implosion. You begin to wonder which was here first, or if that even matters, or if anything matters, or if it will ever fucking end. And it won't. It drags on through mindless hours of fist clenching sanity, dream-soaked brain hemorrhages siphoning out your will to live.
Sleep is the only comfort. Shut off from the body the mind lingers in its own universe, content to play with the clay of unfounded moments. Things that will never be, days that will never come, people that you will never know. Swimming in the ocean of eternal self, where you are the shining center of the entire fabric of reality and you don't need to feel a shred of guilt for loving every second of it.
Tried and tested, judged and sentenced, you awake into this reeking shell, this stinking and rotting corpse. Sludge and slime have eroded your insides and not even those fleeting feelings of being that delicious godhead can make the searing fragments of time any more digestible. You hate the world, you hate every person, you hate the act of hating, you condemn, you judge, you want to drive your fist through the center of the waking world and shatter everything that seems to matter to all these fucking robot slaves.
Your pain wants to stomp on the happiness of a million screaming idiots, wants to crush the empty dreams of a shallow and morally vacuous society that wants only to drain you dry and move on to the next fresh source of smiling, stupid naiveté. Nothing is worth saving for it is all truly worthless and meaningless. A thousand chanting teenagers, psyche-branded by the Brand Names of a conglomerate of money hoarding sociopaths who live equally if not more empty lives, ushering in the further decline of me and this hopeless, Garbage Life.
Monday, January 17, 2011
THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 14 - Carcass of Calamity (edit)
04/07/04
I'm dying. I can feel it inside, burrowed deep in my chest. Returning to my life has caused the entire house of cards to crumble to the floor. The fevers cause the most restless sleep, filled with the most intense dreams. Life and death burst and bubble up all around me as something attempts to take care of me once and for all. Perhaps I have learned too much, or maybe my body is not able to withstand the pressure of a now fictional presence. I just want this delirium sickness to end and for some semblance of life to return to me.
The music that once guided me as I launched that hopeful dreamself into a world that is only thought about and wished for, is now gone. Adrift in my absence, the pieces I left behind continued the daily dance, but lost the connection to me. We both would have been goners if we hadn't come together again. However, now instead of one whole being, I am now two sick and fractured halves unable to fight off this virus we've been infected with. Once separated it seems as if society slipped in through the cracks and the toxin has torn us both apart.
Words are hard to find. My thoughts are stuck in dreamstates and lingering lost moments. The world is changing all around me and I can feel my body pinned between the gears of the communal seasonal transference. I need a cleansing of mind, body and soul before I am able to handle life again. The madness in my mucus must be expelled. Civilization's clumsy and uncoordinated actions, in respect to the changing of our collective perception of time, have always caused me great pain and suffering.
Disoriented from the hitting of the restart button, the changes of this year are about to begin. The training is over and all the aches and pains of our annual alterations are nearly upon us. There is so much to do, to fight against, to reclaim. I must somehow find the strength to forge ahead through this cell of sickness and finally free myself from this carcass of calamity.
I'm dying. I can feel it inside, burrowed deep in my chest. Returning to my life has caused the entire house of cards to crumble to the floor. The fevers cause the most restless sleep, filled with the most intense dreams. Life and death burst and bubble up all around me as something attempts to take care of me once and for all. Perhaps I have learned too much, or maybe my body is not able to withstand the pressure of a now fictional presence. I just want this delirium sickness to end and for some semblance of life to return to me.
The music that once guided me as I launched that hopeful dreamself into a world that is only thought about and wished for, is now gone. Adrift in my absence, the pieces I left behind continued the daily dance, but lost the connection to me. We both would have been goners if we hadn't come together again. However, now instead of one whole being, I am now two sick and fractured halves unable to fight off this virus we've been infected with. Once separated it seems as if society slipped in through the cracks and the toxin has torn us both apart.
Words are hard to find. My thoughts are stuck in dreamstates and lingering lost moments. The world is changing all around me and I can feel my body pinned between the gears of the communal seasonal transference. I need a cleansing of mind, body and soul before I am able to handle life again. The madness in my mucus must be expelled. Civilization's clumsy and uncoordinated actions, in respect to the changing of our collective perception of time, have always caused me great pain and suffering.
Disoriented from the hitting of the restart button, the changes of this year are about to begin. The training is over and all the aches and pains of our annual alterations are nearly upon us. There is so much to do, to fight against, to reclaim. I must somehow find the strength to forge ahead through this cell of sickness and finally free myself from this carcass of calamity.
Monday, January 10, 2011
THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 13 - You (edit)
04/02/04
You've plunged back in, dove headfirst into the shallow end of the populace, as if there exists a mythical depth somewhere beyond your grasp. Those people that once surrounded you and seemed so secure and in control, now they seem little more than puppets, acting out whatever reality imposing ideas they embrace.
I feel sick. Motion sickness from the shifting seas of thought. Sitting in the center, somehow I remain mentally resistant to the ideas that have captured all those around me. I see the sadness in their eyes. Look at pictures of animals due for testing in laboratories and you will know the face of my family and friends. How can I just stand by and watch as these all-consuming, ideological entities siphon dry the life from those I once felt a connection to?
I seem to have lost my ability to speak the Polite American language that is so necessary and vital to maintain day to day life among these poisoned persons serving time in the Populace Penitentiary. I stumble and tumble across words and sentences that seem to be carefully constructed in my mind but come out as little more than incoherence with inappropriate intensity. Raging anarchistic tendencies surface and strike without warning, firebombing my speech center, cutting off communication and cries for help. My extremes are far removed from the culture radar, the ideas I have been fed as of late are seemingly from a world that is not my own. A world where ideas are confronted and possibly, language permitting, these ideas are consumed. With each exposure to the visual and audio library of rebellion, inducing liberation from toxic thoughts, I feel lonelier than ever.
Hopelessness is the first byproduct of becoming undone. Line by line, stitch by stitch, I am coming unraveled, and now, I feel lost and unsure of the directions that life will take me. My ideas on what is and what will be, the most important aspects of living life, are eroding almost as fast as my ideas about myself. Why do anything if everything is a game? Why get up in the morning, why keep working, why keep writing…if at the end of the day it's all just a simple, ever-expanding game where no one will ever win? And by winning I mean, to impose an individual's full view of reality upon mankind. At this rate we will just keep running like rats through a maze, which we just keep building up further and further from the exit. Where is the forward momentum? Why does every sub-division of every category of life just seem like a fracturing of interests? A lie conceived from boredom and deviation from what came from the generation before, just so we can have more and more small circle celebrities and awards and accomplishments that are in reality just a fraction of what they should be if the separate interests were combined. I may not be a writer that wins awards or gets on the best seller list, but if I try hard enough I can find someone to shower me with the praise and admiration that I crave. And that's what it comes to down to: rewards.
We all are seeking some sort of final prize for our actions. The prize I seek is acceptance and the love of mankind. To be allowed inside based on a display of my ability. To be the center of attention and be praised for my genius. To justify the existence of my partially subdued, over-inflated ego. In my hidden heart I demand your love and attention, but lacking the self-confidence to draw it from you verbally, I must instead put myself into words. I shape and form my brain into abstract symbols and slide under cover of a sly fiction and go to work in your psyche. Without persistence of a clear vision, all I wind up doing is driving myself into your minds and push you further away, burying myself further inside.
Why do I even want your love? Why do I have to prove myself to each and every one of you? What is it that you have that I don't? Is it just a search for communion with my fellow inhabitants of this demented dimension? I like to think it's something spiritual, something akin to the closeness we all once shared as a interconnected mass of bio-electric thought patterns, a veritable web of souls. But in reality I ache for a life where I find myself worthy of being part of someone else's story. Unable to stand and be the main character in my own dramedy, I instead designate myself as the coward, goofball, and jester. The pathetic wretch, old and young with a mind tortured by loneliness and despair that is in reality only a device developed to distance.
Once you take away your prize for any accomplishment, or question its ultimate worth to you, you lose focus and flap about like a dying fish removed from its fluid universe. Everything becomes empty and devoid of any worth because ultimately all acts give off the same rare reward: Acceptance. I think of god and free will and imagine that the secret is to embed acceptance of everyone into everyone. How can this be achieved without mind control? And what is mind control but an extreme form of what we attempt to do every day? With every casual conversation we are forming a fictional person within the memory of those around us. We tell them stories and they deviate from reality just like all fiction does, embellished for dramatic emphasis. With a culture so saturated with the structure of sadistic cinema, simplistic shows, and even some boring books (without pictures), we can easily choose to live our lives so as to produce the best possible stories to tell others. Which in turn if they accept those stories, they accept us and we become a little more fictional. Ever know someone larger than life that had a million and one stories to tell? How much of that person is fictional and how much is real? A sad, schizophrenic, selfish society built around the charismatic characters that fine tune their public persona with persuasion and purpose.
Anger is actually the first step, cleverly disguising the helplessness underneath. At the moments of anger you are still bound in the chains of lies and distraction, frustrated by the futility of identity maintenance in the face of crumbling concepts. Anger is the first landmark on the journey to emotional self-confrontation, the path to freedom from the influence of corrupted and archaic beliefs. Anger is birthed from the most secure levels of your identity: race, class, religion, and political affiliation, the categories that seem to produce the most intense battles of imposed reality. Our physical differences, the differences in our opportunities and comfort, opposing stories of the great unknown, and varying opinions of how mankind should be governed. Unable to know what we should do with our brainpower, we decide to use it in the ways that best serve ourselves, and our number one priority seems to be to develop an identity. Am I White? Am I Middle Class? Am I a Catholic? Am I Liberal? Which one are we? Can we be all of them? How many categories and divisions from others do we need to paste upon ourselves so as to feel complete and whole?
Staring nakedly, wide-eyed at the sun is preferable than to look at the light within and question these choices and labels of self. Without the option of looking in we all turn outward. What is around me and how does it make me feel? I don't like to feel shame, loneliness, and weakness. I want then, to feel pride, unity, and power. How do I achieve these goals? I do what is safe, what has come before and I go with the group mind as they must know what is best if there is so many of them united for a common goal.
This group most likely has all the requisite outlets for the complex emotional engines that burn inside. This group provides an enemy, a focus for your animosity for its opposing beliefs. And it feels good to have an opponent as it draws out our beastly, competitive nature. The more we oppose, the more we are alive. The bigger the enemy, the greater the passion within us, defining us. This group will also give you the flipside to this identity equation and is totally necessary to maintain the 'US vs. THEM' program. This group will provide a sense of communion, brotherhood, and union with like-minded individuals. People that look like you do, think like you do, talk like you do. The greater the connection with these compatriots in the cause, the greater the sense of righteousness and identity. With a discerning eye we can see the game, the feud between brothers, battling against their fellow man in a societal game of chess. A trap of our own design, forged from our inability for introspection.
You've plunged back in, dove headfirst into the shallow end of the populace, as if there exists a mythical depth somewhere beyond your grasp. Those people that once surrounded you and seemed so secure and in control, now they seem little more than puppets, acting out whatever reality imposing ideas they embrace.
I feel sick. Motion sickness from the shifting seas of thought. Sitting in the center, somehow I remain mentally resistant to the ideas that have captured all those around me. I see the sadness in their eyes. Look at pictures of animals due for testing in laboratories and you will know the face of my family and friends. How can I just stand by and watch as these all-consuming, ideological entities siphon dry the life from those I once felt a connection to?
I seem to have lost my ability to speak the Polite American language that is so necessary and vital to maintain day to day life among these poisoned persons serving time in the Populace Penitentiary. I stumble and tumble across words and sentences that seem to be carefully constructed in my mind but come out as little more than incoherence with inappropriate intensity. Raging anarchistic tendencies surface and strike without warning, firebombing my speech center, cutting off communication and cries for help. My extremes are far removed from the culture radar, the ideas I have been fed as of late are seemingly from a world that is not my own. A world where ideas are confronted and possibly, language permitting, these ideas are consumed. With each exposure to the visual and audio library of rebellion, inducing liberation from toxic thoughts, I feel lonelier than ever.
Hopelessness is the first byproduct of becoming undone. Line by line, stitch by stitch, I am coming unraveled, and now, I feel lost and unsure of the directions that life will take me. My ideas on what is and what will be, the most important aspects of living life, are eroding almost as fast as my ideas about myself. Why do anything if everything is a game? Why get up in the morning, why keep working, why keep writing…if at the end of the day it's all just a simple, ever-expanding game where no one will ever win? And by winning I mean, to impose an individual's full view of reality upon mankind. At this rate we will just keep running like rats through a maze, which we just keep building up further and further from the exit. Where is the forward momentum? Why does every sub-division of every category of life just seem like a fracturing of interests? A lie conceived from boredom and deviation from what came from the generation before, just so we can have more and more small circle celebrities and awards and accomplishments that are in reality just a fraction of what they should be if the separate interests were combined. I may not be a writer that wins awards or gets on the best seller list, but if I try hard enough I can find someone to shower me with the praise and admiration that I crave. And that's what it comes to down to: rewards.
We all are seeking some sort of final prize for our actions. The prize I seek is acceptance and the love of mankind. To be allowed inside based on a display of my ability. To be the center of attention and be praised for my genius. To justify the existence of my partially subdued, over-inflated ego. In my hidden heart I demand your love and attention, but lacking the self-confidence to draw it from you verbally, I must instead put myself into words. I shape and form my brain into abstract symbols and slide under cover of a sly fiction and go to work in your psyche. Without persistence of a clear vision, all I wind up doing is driving myself into your minds and push you further away, burying myself further inside.
Why do I even want your love? Why do I have to prove myself to each and every one of you? What is it that you have that I don't? Is it just a search for communion with my fellow inhabitants of this demented dimension? I like to think it's something spiritual, something akin to the closeness we all once shared as a interconnected mass of bio-electric thought patterns, a veritable web of souls. But in reality I ache for a life where I find myself worthy of being part of someone else's story. Unable to stand and be the main character in my own dramedy, I instead designate myself as the coward, goofball, and jester. The pathetic wretch, old and young with a mind tortured by loneliness and despair that is in reality only a device developed to distance.
Once you take away your prize for any accomplishment, or question its ultimate worth to you, you lose focus and flap about like a dying fish removed from its fluid universe. Everything becomes empty and devoid of any worth because ultimately all acts give off the same rare reward: Acceptance. I think of god and free will and imagine that the secret is to embed acceptance of everyone into everyone. How can this be achieved without mind control? And what is mind control but an extreme form of what we attempt to do every day? With every casual conversation we are forming a fictional person within the memory of those around us. We tell them stories and they deviate from reality just like all fiction does, embellished for dramatic emphasis. With a culture so saturated with the structure of sadistic cinema, simplistic shows, and even some boring books (without pictures), we can easily choose to live our lives so as to produce the best possible stories to tell others. Which in turn if they accept those stories, they accept us and we become a little more fictional. Ever know someone larger than life that had a million and one stories to tell? How much of that person is fictional and how much is real? A sad, schizophrenic, selfish society built around the charismatic characters that fine tune their public persona with persuasion and purpose.
Anger is actually the first step, cleverly disguising the helplessness underneath. At the moments of anger you are still bound in the chains of lies and distraction, frustrated by the futility of identity maintenance in the face of crumbling concepts. Anger is the first landmark on the journey to emotional self-confrontation, the path to freedom from the influence of corrupted and archaic beliefs. Anger is birthed from the most secure levels of your identity: race, class, religion, and political affiliation, the categories that seem to produce the most intense battles of imposed reality. Our physical differences, the differences in our opportunities and comfort, opposing stories of the great unknown, and varying opinions of how mankind should be governed. Unable to know what we should do with our brainpower, we decide to use it in the ways that best serve ourselves, and our number one priority seems to be to develop an identity. Am I White? Am I Middle Class? Am I a Catholic? Am I Liberal? Which one are we? Can we be all of them? How many categories and divisions from others do we need to paste upon ourselves so as to feel complete and whole?
Staring nakedly, wide-eyed at the sun is preferable than to look at the light within and question these choices and labels of self. Without the option of looking in we all turn outward. What is around me and how does it make me feel? I don't like to feel shame, loneliness, and weakness. I want then, to feel pride, unity, and power. How do I achieve these goals? I do what is safe, what has come before and I go with the group mind as they must know what is best if there is so many of them united for a common goal.
This group most likely has all the requisite outlets for the complex emotional engines that burn inside. This group provides an enemy, a focus for your animosity for its opposing beliefs. And it feels good to have an opponent as it draws out our beastly, competitive nature. The more we oppose, the more we are alive. The bigger the enemy, the greater the passion within us, defining us. This group will also give you the flipside to this identity equation and is totally necessary to maintain the 'US vs. THEM' program. This group will provide a sense of communion, brotherhood, and union with like-minded individuals. People that look like you do, think like you do, talk like you do. The greater the connection with these compatriots in the cause, the greater the sense of righteousness and identity. With a discerning eye we can see the game, the feud between brothers, battling against their fellow man in a societal game of chess. A trap of our own design, forged from our inability for introspection.
Monday, January 3, 2011
THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 12 - Waking Hole Home (edit)
03/27/04
Home. Four simple letters and yet the true explanation of the word could fill every book in a library. I was never sure of what the word meant to me. I suppose it's a place I forget to feel self-conscious and instead wallow in self-pity.
I made it here on zombie autopilot, lost amid a sea of red tailights flowing downstream from the sun's orange halo. The last few weeks at rest stops pass through my mind and I see them with a sparkly new clarity. Awkward snippets of pathetic transfers of sentences. A stolen glance here and there as I watch a muscular arm, a furrowed brow, delicate hands. Eye contact is immediately broken off after half-a-second, and I remain outside the circle walking among, but never within.
Now I'm home and things should be different, and they are but, just as expected. The abrasive and rough edges of my old life are just as ill-fitting as it was before the escape. Ahh, what a beautiful word. Drugs, drinking, running, driving, escape. Fleeing from everything makes you forget you can never get away from the enemy inside.
He's still here, lurking, poisoning this life and those around him. Dwelling inside he thinks he should have been aborted, allowing his parents to shoot forth from their feeble frames and into something gloriously beautiful. But he knows that they would squander the chance and destroy the beauty somewhere/somewhen else. I guess none of us can escape our internally twisted twin.
Sleep comes easily as it feels like I've been awake for months. A complex series of biological changes takes place and I see myself sitting on a rock on a mountain. Maybe it's the mystery of the Native American tribe who once called this massive rock home that causes the spiritual merging of self. Looking out on the horizon, through the mass of dead skeletons of this ancient forest, I lose myself and succumb to a mental exorcism.
All of the delicate flipside persona comes crashing down the mountain, sliding and smashing to a billion pieces. The mountain itself seems to shake and laugh at my misery, almost mockingly asking, "Is that all you've got boy?"
And then I wake up. Home.
Home. Four simple letters and yet the true explanation of the word could fill every book in a library. I was never sure of what the word meant to me. I suppose it's a place I forget to feel self-conscious and instead wallow in self-pity.
I made it here on zombie autopilot, lost amid a sea of red tailights flowing downstream from the sun's orange halo. The last few weeks at rest stops pass through my mind and I see them with a sparkly new clarity. Awkward snippets of pathetic transfers of sentences. A stolen glance here and there as I watch a muscular arm, a furrowed brow, delicate hands. Eye contact is immediately broken off after half-a-second, and I remain outside the circle walking among, but never within.
Now I'm home and things should be different, and they are but, just as expected. The abrasive and rough edges of my old life are just as ill-fitting as it was before the escape. Ahh, what a beautiful word. Drugs, drinking, running, driving, escape. Fleeing from everything makes you forget you can never get away from the enemy inside.
He's still here, lurking, poisoning this life and those around him. Dwelling inside he thinks he should have been aborted, allowing his parents to shoot forth from their feeble frames and into something gloriously beautiful. But he knows that they would squander the chance and destroy the beauty somewhere/somewhen else. I guess none of us can escape our internally twisted twin.
Sleep comes easily as it feels like I've been awake for months. A complex series of biological changes takes place and I see myself sitting on a rock on a mountain. Maybe it's the mystery of the Native American tribe who once called this massive rock home that causes the spiritual merging of self. Looking out on the horizon, through the mass of dead skeletons of this ancient forest, I lose myself and succumb to a mental exorcism.
All of the delicate flipside persona comes crashing down the mountain, sliding and smashing to a billion pieces. The mountain itself seems to shake and laugh at my misery, almost mockingly asking, "Is that all you've got boy?"
And then I wake up. Home.
Monday, December 27, 2010
THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 11 - Mental Traffic Delays (edit)
03/22/04
The world blurs in my peripheral as I guide my Scarab in and out of traffic. I'm heading home as a beautiful sadness overcomes me. Thoughts race through my greymatter and I find myself coming to no solid conclusions.
The names of automobiles pass me and I feel sick. Escape, Adventure, Liberty. Empty promises bought and sold and never experienced. How many of these truck owners have had the picturesque off-road experience that was staged, filmed, aired, and consumed? How many drivers of slim, sleek, and stylish sports cars are starring in the superspy scenes that run through their minds as they shift between gears stuck in traffic behind the thousand other like-minded consumers trapped in the same mental snare?
Nature itself seems to be doing battle today. Snow, sun, rain. Something has disturbed the essence of weather, and it now seeks to punish or cleanse as the changing of seasons sneaks up on us. The cycle continues its march forward as the cold death slips away and life shakes free from its icy grip. A new season is about to be born and we fuss about it as if it were the most humdrum event of the year. Nature tearing itself free from one stage and pushing us all towards a renewal of ourselves, while plunging another part of the world into a seasonal slumber.
I feel a sickness coming on, self-generated or not, that makes me shake with fever. I'm heading home and I can't think straight. My mind wanders and dips and bends. I can't come to a conclusion on how I feel about anything. A malleable mind, eager to destroy or accept all the pain and love of the years of yesterday.
Ahead lies friends and family. Loved ones that have not seen me for some time now. My brain runs through simulated meetings and tries to come up with the most likely course of events while planning and preparing for the most dire.
Now has come the time for confrontation and a final reckoning. A balancing of scales, and a excavating of the heart.
The world blurs in my peripheral as I guide my Scarab in and out of traffic. I'm heading home as a beautiful sadness overcomes me. Thoughts race through my greymatter and I find myself coming to no solid conclusions.
The names of automobiles pass me and I feel sick. Escape, Adventure, Liberty. Empty promises bought and sold and never experienced. How many of these truck owners have had the picturesque off-road experience that was staged, filmed, aired, and consumed? How many drivers of slim, sleek, and stylish sports cars are starring in the superspy scenes that run through their minds as they shift between gears stuck in traffic behind the thousand other like-minded consumers trapped in the same mental snare?
Nature itself seems to be doing battle today. Snow, sun, rain. Something has disturbed the essence of weather, and it now seeks to punish or cleanse as the changing of seasons sneaks up on us. The cycle continues its march forward as the cold death slips away and life shakes free from its icy grip. A new season is about to be born and we fuss about it as if it were the most humdrum event of the year. Nature tearing itself free from one stage and pushing us all towards a renewal of ourselves, while plunging another part of the world into a seasonal slumber.
I feel a sickness coming on, self-generated or not, that makes me shake with fever. I'm heading home and I can't think straight. My mind wanders and dips and bends. I can't come to a conclusion on how I feel about anything. A malleable mind, eager to destroy or accept all the pain and love of the years of yesterday.
Ahead lies friends and family. Loved ones that have not seen me for some time now. My brain runs through simulated meetings and tries to come up with the most likely course of events while planning and preparing for the most dire.
Now has come the time for confrontation and a final reckoning. A balancing of scales, and a excavating of the heart.
Monday, December 20, 2010
THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 10 - "Rest Stop Bloodbath" (edit)
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Monday, December 13, 2010
THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 9 - The Ride Home (edit)
03/15/04
I don't recall actually leaving the rest stop, but after spending so much of my time there in a delirious daydream, that's not really a surprise. I found myself in my car blasting a new CD, windows dropped, and gliding down a stretch of Americana.
I didn't realize until I stopped for gas off the parkway. I was headed south, I was heading home.
My dreams have been plenty lately and the intensity of them has been draining to say the least. It's almost like my body would much prefer the simplicity of dormant identity. In hazy dreamscapes I find myself talking to old friends and revisiting boyhood haunts. But I'm seeing them as they are now, not as I recall them. They're changed, hacked up, and shown as something completely new. Something clean.
A beautiful blue sky lies open above me, welcoming me to this world of possible unity. It's hard to say but hope is stronger in me than ever. Something happened to me back there at that rest stop. I feel stripped of my pain and confusion.
I look at the cracked concrete between my feet as if seeing such a sight for the first time. I see it as if it were the most important thing in the world. It might be, but then this cold metal gas pump in my hand is no less important, nor the many ordinary things that dance the daily routine around me.
With the change from the last of my money I get a bottle of water and a bagel. Once out on the road again I've found that the bagel is the best I have ever had. My final meal before facing whatever is coming before me now. I wash it down with the water and I swear I can feel my body breaking it down and converting it, sucking from it the nutrients it provides.
I take a break from singing at the top of my lungs to laugh heartily as I cross over the bridge and approach the tollbooth. I've always been afraid of bridges. Well, I used to be anyway. I hadn't thought about it in so long but now I can see this bridge just as I did when I traveled over it twenty years ago in the back seat of the family car.
Frantically worrying about paying the upcoming toll, my mind releases itself. I'm suddenly a kid again, sick from the smell of exhaust and the bouncing of the road, my mind slipping into a daydream not unlike the experience at the rest stop. A blurring of the edges, riding through the physical pain, and winding up somewhere in a place where all the rules you've made up for yourself no longer apply.
I don't recall actually leaving the rest stop, but after spending so much of my time there in a delirious daydream, that's not really a surprise. I found myself in my car blasting a new CD, windows dropped, and gliding down a stretch of Americana.
I didn't realize until I stopped for gas off the parkway. I was headed south, I was heading home.
My dreams have been plenty lately and the intensity of them has been draining to say the least. It's almost like my body would much prefer the simplicity of dormant identity. In hazy dreamscapes I find myself talking to old friends and revisiting boyhood haunts. But I'm seeing them as they are now, not as I recall them. They're changed, hacked up, and shown as something completely new. Something clean.
A beautiful blue sky lies open above me, welcoming me to this world of possible unity. It's hard to say but hope is stronger in me than ever. Something happened to me back there at that rest stop. I feel stripped of my pain and confusion.
I look at the cracked concrete between my feet as if seeing such a sight for the first time. I see it as if it were the most important thing in the world. It might be, but then this cold metal gas pump in my hand is no less important, nor the many ordinary things that dance the daily routine around me.
With the change from the last of my money I get a bottle of water and a bagel. Once out on the road again I've found that the bagel is the best I have ever had. My final meal before facing whatever is coming before me now. I wash it down with the water and I swear I can feel my body breaking it down and converting it, sucking from it the nutrients it provides.
I take a break from singing at the top of my lungs to laugh heartily as I cross over the bridge and approach the tollbooth. I've always been afraid of bridges. Well, I used to be anyway. I hadn't thought about it in so long but now I can see this bridge just as I did when I traveled over it twenty years ago in the back seat of the family car.
Frantically worrying about paying the upcoming toll, my mind releases itself. I'm suddenly a kid again, sick from the smell of exhaust and the bouncing of the road, my mind slipping into a daydream not unlike the experience at the rest stop. A blurring of the edges, riding through the physical pain, and winding up somewhere in a place where all the rules you've made up for yourself no longer apply.
Monday, December 6, 2010
THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 8 - Sitting Alone (edit)
03/04/04
Sitting alone, quiet in my small defecation booth, I realize that I've put up some sort of barrier, impervious to entry. Secure in the knowledge that no ordinary citizen would attempt to slither underneath nor parachute in from above. I was protected in this four by three excretion chamber. Although there were men in the stalls on either side of me, most likely engaged in the same shameful acts of natural behavior as I was, I felt distanced from them, and from the threat they would normally present themselves as outside of this rest stop bathroom.
Recognizing the power within my mind, assisted by the two metal walls and the haphazardly locked stall door, I knew that I had it in me to protect my aura from these masculine intruders to personal safety. Here I was, just a child living in an adult male body, sitting alone in the great wide world, ruling my universe from a porcelain throne. Having reached this moment of safety and security opened doors in my mind, and I immediately wanted to extend my borders.
I exited the stall, having waited long enough for the guy next to me to remove himself from his lavatory cosmos, and went to wash my hands. I found myself looking into the mirror itself, as I wrung my hands free from the dreaded bacteria, the silvery shimmer is the oddest material I could imagine, one that so accurately casts back an imaginary self, projecting an external persona that is a lie constructed by the inner workings of our minds. A clever cover slid over insecurities and doubts. A construct comprised of imaginings about the person we wish to be. On the other side of this wall is the man I long for, deep in my heart.
Maybe mirrors show us more than we can imagine, if we look closely enough. A mirror is an inviting snare for the self-absorbed, allowing us to shallowly look upon ourselves not as we know ourselves to be, but instead as we appear to those around us. An impartial view of our shell, our scarred surface self that takes the brunt of our bumps and bruises. Swimming into sorrow filled eyes, I enter into the sacred center and truly evaluate. Distanced from the person being examined, I am able to penetrate into cellular psyche.
The water is scalding hot as I slide back into this reality. My eyes adjust to the surface of the mirror and I take in the room behind me. Men coming and going, leaving behind the waste that had built up in their bodies. Over my shoulder a man with an abnormally large penis is staring absently at the wall while urinating.
Sitting alone, quiet in my small defecation booth, I realize that I've put up some sort of barrier, impervious to entry. Secure in the knowledge that no ordinary citizen would attempt to slither underneath nor parachute in from above. I was protected in this four by three excretion chamber. Although there were men in the stalls on either side of me, most likely engaged in the same shameful acts of natural behavior as I was, I felt distanced from them, and from the threat they would normally present themselves as outside of this rest stop bathroom.
Recognizing the power within my mind, assisted by the two metal walls and the haphazardly locked stall door, I knew that I had it in me to protect my aura from these masculine intruders to personal safety. Here I was, just a child living in an adult male body, sitting alone in the great wide world, ruling my universe from a porcelain throne. Having reached this moment of safety and security opened doors in my mind, and I immediately wanted to extend my borders.
I exited the stall, having waited long enough for the guy next to me to remove himself from his lavatory cosmos, and went to wash my hands. I found myself looking into the mirror itself, as I wrung my hands free from the dreaded bacteria, the silvery shimmer is the oddest material I could imagine, one that so accurately casts back an imaginary self, projecting an external persona that is a lie constructed by the inner workings of our minds. A clever cover slid over insecurities and doubts. A construct comprised of imaginings about the person we wish to be. On the other side of this wall is the man I long for, deep in my heart.
Maybe mirrors show us more than we can imagine, if we look closely enough. A mirror is an inviting snare for the self-absorbed, allowing us to shallowly look upon ourselves not as we know ourselves to be, but instead as we appear to those around us. An impartial view of our shell, our scarred surface self that takes the brunt of our bumps and bruises. Swimming into sorrow filled eyes, I enter into the sacred center and truly evaluate. Distanced from the person being examined, I am able to penetrate into cellular psyche.
The water is scalding hot as I slide back into this reality. My eyes adjust to the surface of the mirror and I take in the room behind me. Men coming and going, leaving behind the waste that had built up in their bodies. Over my shoulder a man with an abnormally large penis is staring absently at the wall while urinating.
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