On Spills

Run and you take the risk of spilling yourself on the concrete. That's what happened to me. A big mess of F'er, sprawled over pavement. I should be a skater. Then there would be a method to the madness. I would have tripped on that curb, but it would have been in an attempt to grind it. And that would be admirable.

Will I run again? It will never be without a remembrance of today's infamy. It will never be the same. The laughter will have lost its original meaning. Perhaps that is why comedians use new material. One night they screw up, forget the precise delivery of a joke and change the meaning. That's why Radiohead refuses to play "Creep" live anymore. Not because they're any more mature of a band. They messed it up a few years ago in concert. Thom Yorke forgot the words. The drummer dropped his sticks. It was embarrasing. They could never play it without conjuring up that moment of failure.

Okay. This has gone on long enough.

25th Post Celebration

Time to celebrate! This marks the 25th post of JiVE! And everyone knows that celebration must ensue on the 25th of anything. Well, okay, this isn't an anniversary. And even television shows don't usually celebrate a benchmark until they get to something like 100 or even 500 airings. So this is a modest, but nevertheless appropriate celebration, because I don't really have anything more significant to discuss. I say we take a look back and revisit some of our more notorious posts of yesteryear (or yestermonth...or yesterweek)...

Tuesday, June 22, 2004:

Man, this was a big day. 3 posts! Something that has not been repeated to this day! And what an ecclectic group of posts it was. I wonder what was going through my mind. Here is a quote from each of the three posts...

from "About my Blog":

"Our journey towards an understanding of the universe will be travelled upon different roads, even if we accept the same religious truths."

Wow...I was probably being a little too deep for my own good.

from "The Official 22 things that I Want to do Before I am 22 Years of Age":

"What was I thinking?"

That sounds a little more like me.

from "In a word...'exceptional'":

"And the word was 'exceptional.'"

Once again profound...but this time, I believe, more focused. I must have certainly come full circle on June 22nd. Deep ambitious thoughts, followed by doubtful catastrophe, but restored with epiphanous clarity. Isn't that life? Isn't that the epitome of the human condition? We are all of the time caught up in a cacophanous funnel cloud of abrasive, half-formed ideas, broken in their embriotic development by the very tulmultuousness of our ever-changing horizons. Even solar systems are unstable, unpredicatble entities. What?! Am I completely moronic? Why do I even bother with this blog nonsense? I don't even feel like I'm in a whirlwind, so why did I even say that? I should have seen this coming. Wait! I think I understand. The only certainty in this life is uncertainty! That's it! I've done it again!

Well, I don't think I have enough energy to sort through any other posts for the time being. That was too taxing. But they are all archived for your and my perusal. So thanks to all of you who have been faithful and supportive to JiVE over the past few months. The uncertainty. The renewal. The laughs. The thoughtfulness. The hiatus to China. The comeback. The new challenges. The new experiences. And once again...the uncertainty of the future. What will become of F'er 25 posts from now? Will there even be 25 more posts? I can only hope. But who knows really? And more importantly...oh yes...who bloody even cares?

Drift

I remember that day you tripped on shrooms. That was weird. I didn't know it at the time. I just thought you were high. All those old feelings and thoughts cramped into your halluco-world in that kitchen where we had the munchies one night and Charlie went the way of the buffalo. How did it look in comparison? A part of you was about to drift away like a floating chunk of glacier melt off. Were you able to keep your bearings? I only ask because I have no clue. I'm pretty grounded.

I'm really not giving a hard time. I miss the stuff I can't get back. For a time, it was good. It was what I needed. And now everything seems to be drifting away from my center. It has been. I have to travel too far to get to where everyone has gone. I'm just an island anymore. Used to feel like one, but I wasn't, not then.

I had an old life. I have a new one. Like you. You had an old life. You have a new one. For a while we seemed to intersect. We ran a similar curve. "Actually, that's not true."

So I wonder what it feels like to know what you know. I wonder if I could have followed you to that halluco-world. What would I have seen when the walls of 21 years of construction were made to bend and shift? I bet it would be more than a feeling, sea-bottom walking. My revelations have come from a different source. It's harder to believe in them. Sometimes you gotta force yourself. And then it pays off. I like where I am. But the continents have drifted. The globe is unfamiliar, and I no longer recognize it.

can't fix it

I regret walking into an unsolvable problem. There are some people that become obssessed with fixing broken things. Their computer has crashed. The programs aren't working properly. Something is wrong. So they spend the next four hours utterly in vain, trying to pinpoint what is wrong with their computer. The longer they remain at the task, the more frustrated they become, because nothing changes. I'm not exactly like that with physical things. I don't really bother with busted machines or stupid math riddles or jigsaw puzzles.

But something much more abstract is broke right now, and I'll be damned if I know how to fix it. I noticed it earlier today. I let it go. I moved on. I thought about it later, checked on it. That may have been a mistake. I feel like my tinkering has made it worse. I feel like a complete idiot. Two hours gone by now. Other broken things, things that I can fix, have been neglected in the mean time.

Where did this come from? As the theme from Full House posits, "What ever happened to predictability?" And all I can think about is what I possibly could have done wrong to make this all happen, besides not just leaving the problem to run its natural course. I begin to think that I am the very source of the problem. And now all I'm doing is journaling, and that's not interesting. That's not even productive. So here I go. I'm gonna force myself to forget about this crap and work at things that are within my knowledge and power.

...I want to blame my blog (which is pronounced B-log, by the way). I feel like this thing has gotten me into trouble before.

we have eyes that speak

we have eyes that speak
louder than muffled words
easier to stare sunward
than to withstand your gazes

words that do not cut
but impart more truth
than can be held in
cheap paper gift bags

(though gifts we readily
receive and cherish)
words that convert only
with almost vain effort

a touch strikes deep
sprung from unseen recesses
culminating surface caresses
and returning to deep

transferring unsung truth
that is nevertheless
a sort of betrayal
and a resulting frustration

a taste of something too
sacred for young emotions
and all that remains
is a struggle for words

hard-fought words and
timid muffled breath
hard-formed truth but
proper understanding restored

we do not forget but we
know more new truths
dark and good in a curious haze
let our eyes focus on the lines

hardness on the brow

My life is like a volatile substance. And I am an incompetant scientist. Somebody pushed me into an expensive laboratory with a new immaculate white coat and told me to observe this chemical. I don't know what it's doing. It's splitting and conjoing and exploding and bubbling. As soon as I notice something worth recording my cell phone rings and I have to answer it. Or I reach into my pocket protector to realize that I left my pen somewhere around the room, and by the time I find it and get ready to jot down information on my notepad the chemical's behavior has already changed, and I forget what it was I had planned on writing down in the first place.

What's with my crazy similes and metaphors anyway? Really, this is nothing more than a classic example of blogging about blogging. What makes things worse, why I feel even more ridiculous, is the fact that I just wrote about two paragraphs and lost them because I went to a new web site in the same window. I've just spent the last ten minutes or so trying to rewrite what I had already written, and for some reason it doesn't sound nearly as good as it had before. That's frustrating. All a part of what I was talking about. Now that happened and my feelings have changed.

Oh man. I need a vacation. Luckily, I'm getting one. Pretty much starting now. But I'm tired and still stressed about school and work and school and relationships. I never intended this to be a journal. But it has kind of replaced my journal, which was updated infrequently anyway. There's probably only a couple people at best who read this, one of them likely being myself. My feelings have gotten in the way of my art.

But I still want to say something interesting. And something interesting happened today. I have a quote that I heard from an astronomer today:

"In the beginning there was hydrogen and helium."

Wow! The way he said it was not Biblical or profound. I don't even think he realized then how ironically funny this sounded, at least to someone like me. Whenever I hear a sentence start with "In the beginning..." my mind is confronted with unfathomability and religious theology. It makes me want to insert some deductive reasoning and begin a Third Testament:

"God is hydrogen and helium."

But then I would have to accuse myself of heresy and get some friends to burn me at the stake. And that would be awkward. Then later today, I read the opening of a William Faulkner story:

"At first there was nothing."

Granted, it's easy to take a sentence out of context, and I need to read the continuing 23 pages of the story. But I'm pretty sure there was an intentional religious allusion on the part of the author. It's hard for us humans to understand the beginning. We're not supposed to understand it. We don't remember being born. There might as well have been nothing before our existence, because what is the purpose of anything but for our own interaction with it?

There was always God. Weird. And there was not always us, but there always will be? Eternity. Weird. My life feels volatile and changing. God is changeless. Will my life always be an unstable liquid? Especially if my life never ends. Unfathomability. God is hydrogen and helium? People should not talk to me, in spoken or written word. I've heard enough for a lifetime to play around with and figure out. Give me 2,000 years to order everything I have observed thus far. Check up on me. Maybe then I will be ready for more. Or just give me five minutes and maybe I'll forget it all.