One day I hope to become accustomed to the concept that I am never going to be fully accepted by the people around me.
In every moment, we are deciding what is important to us. We make time for the activities and the people that matter to us; unconsciously prioritizing. Usually I just forget about it but sometimes it wears on me, that I have never been a priority in the life of another person and that I likely never will be.
It gets old, seeing other people make time specifically to see each other. I am inevitably reminded that, if I want to spend time with other people, I have to track them down or find a way to make my time coincide with a place or time convenient for them.
No ome goes out of their way to see me. Hell, if I stop taking the time to stay in touch, no one even takes the time to know me. I have no desirable social traits.
I am not one of them.
Fell off my board again. Bruised my patella and damaged some cartilage in my knee. No permanent damage.
I’m on crutches for a few days and instructed to rest and keep my leg elevated.
The codeine makes it all worthwhile.
Her,
writhing, rich wilted
taste of spent needs,
in memory seeds thick
in every vessel
and her,
autoclave mouth-
clipped, kept and-
cooked me, living.
My shift manager, Tomi, does not like me. We do not get along on a personal level, in any sense whatsoever. That is not entirely uncommon for me; I’m not particularly friendly or formal.
This particular situation is problematic though. In a display of typical human pettiness, Tomi has attempted to change my schedule block for several weeks, placing my days off to coincide with the days she works. Unfortunately for her, this would reduce me to working three days a week, which won’t even cover my rent.
Today, I looked at the wrong schedule page which resulted in a rather severe delay in my arrival to work. I am on the bus at this moment and I will be approximately one hour and ten minutes late. I would only have been half an hour late but Tomi did two things: she waited until 11:20 to call me, a full twenty minutes after my shift starts and she called my roommate, not myself.
I can’t classify this as anything other than a complete failure to carry out her responsibilities as management. She has allowed her personal feelings to prevent her from acting as a professional.
And all of this shit? It doesn’t even make me angry anymore. It just makes me tired.
I’m just tired.
When something finally kills me, I hope they get the eulogy right. Let them say that I was bitter and passionate about it; that I lived poorly, did terrible things and never paid for any of them.
Let them say that I was luckier than any one person deserved, for no reason at all, and that my life amounted to less than a single letter in a book too large for imagining.
But more than that, let them remember that our book is bound in sinews, lacks narrative, and is written in tongues and madness. A short but endless story about nothing whatsoever.
If we could all remember the smallness of ourselves- know it, grasp it, internalize it- we might find time for more than squabbling, murder and sex.
You barely exist and that tiny existence has no knowable purpose or value. It is a fluke. Whimsy.
Do not forget.
I have this awful tendency to consider everything abstractly:
“I am eating chicken. This was alive once; this lived and now I am ingesting it. Proteins, carbohydrates, saturated fats. Carbon and hydrogen (why is everything made of hydrogen? What sort of universe needs so much hydrogen?) and also a bit of glycerine in the preservatives, I bet. The acids in my stomach will break it into base materials. My body is full of acid. Acid! Oh god, my body. I have a body. A vessel made of meat to carry my essential essence- electrical currents? The soul? I will die never knowing and then…. then we will see. Or we will cease to exist….. or some other wild thing that is beyond the meager imagination of men.”
It goes on like this no matter what is happening. Longboarding, working, having sex…
Apparently I am not content to merely live. How did Hume go on, once he poked his head out past the veil? Is there something I have missed? Because now that I know, I can never un-know. And I do not know what place the knowing is meant to occupy in this animal psyche.
I would say “existential crisis” but I dread sounding like an undergrad and frankly, I feel much too subdued for the word. Existential rut? Dissonance Lost? At least it has not robbed me of a good laugh at my own expense.
According to a report yesterday on WFTV, the FBI may charge George Zimmerman with a hate crime:
Zimmerman admitted to killing Martin in February during a confrontation. However, he claims the shooting was in self-defense. He’s facing a second-degree murder charge, which carries a maximum possible sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. But if Zimmerman is charged and found guilty of a federal hate crime involving murder, he could face the death penalty.
When the “Justice for Trayvon Martin” Facebook page reported this news, in two separate posts, the excitement was palpable. At the time I sat down to write this, last night, their initial post that linked to the news story was shared 270 times, drew 1,455 Likes, and was commented upon 306 times. The second post, with its shares, Likes, and comments, is screencaptured above.
The Tumblr community reacted as well, with one post linking to the story drawing nearly 1,500 Likes and Reblogs as of this writing.
The reaction from those who have commented is largely supportive of killing George Zimmerman and, more often than not, the language that’s employed is positively dripping with brutality.
People often assume that my extreme distrust (and dislike) of capital punishment is somehow related to the specific case being discussed. It’s not. It’s more about the idea of inflicting death on someone we find reprehensible, and what that says about us. I would go on, but if you click that ‘read more’ link and read it all, you will see how I feel but worded in a much better fashion.
The death penalty should never be used to “inflict” anything. It is a last resort, to be used only when a person acts so heinously that reintegration into society is not an option.
A life sentence in prison, I think, is much worse than a painless death.
The problem with being recognized as a poet by your friends and family is that at some point, you become a caricature of your work. You are introduced as “my son, the writer” and “my friend ______; he writes poetry.”
Your art becomes a part of your identity; your own little scarlet letter- and no one ever let’s you forget it.
With spindled wrist
that deft, curls in-
furls out -
turned left, and then
drawn to a fist
She plows a tiny field
ringed with stones,
with lion’s mane to yield
a flowering in bones
And her scent
has drawn and sent
me lifting- perched - precarious
beneath her petals.
Childhood is cannibals and psychotics vomiting in your mouth. Yes.
RIP the wonderful Maurice Sendak
We’ll miss you.
