Three Second Intervals

I live in three second intervals...

...Storm clouds over a sunset
Purple eyebrows over a single orange iris
Cut by eyelashes of ancient stone...

...I smile for what seems the first time in my life
Heart clear and mind wide open
Do you see it? There! There! is a bird on the telephone wire above me
and I can see its feathers barely moving in the wind...

...The field is dimly lit by the moon
Tall, wild desert grass swaying in the midnight breeze...

...His face is beginning to show the creases of age
Beard gone from a blend of orange, brown, and white, to more and more grey
I see myself in his edges of his cheeks, his lips, and chin
He's real, I think, and so am I...

...Sex is part of the natural course of relationships
But creating another human being is part of sex
Not just hedonism and intimacy and seduction and openness
How could I have never noticed these things before?...

...My mother reminds me of a six year old child,
Holed up in her studio brimming with crayons, yarn, rubber stamps, paper of all shades and textures, scissors which cut round or jagged lines, gargantuan, minuscule, scintillating, obese, skinny pens, and beads organized into thousands of small boxes.
"What are you working on, Mom?"
"I don't know." She smiles and I am infected with whimsical glee...

...I live in three second intervals.

How strange it is to feel my presence in this world slip like ebbing, lackadaisical waves against a shore of reality. To save myself, I retreat from living into a world juxtaposed by Plato's heavens and a keen, reptilian survival mode, but I sneak out, from time to uncertain time, to peek at life when the beast stops howling for the briefest moments. I'm collecting these times, drawing them into a tiny, wool bag and caching them away for a homecoming that may not ever come. These moments of living, these glimmers of light in the emptiness of days falling into endless days, may save me. They will hold everything that I am, stored like my soul's DNA, all information captured and recorded in those precious little gifts, waiting patiently for a time when I can be formed whole again. Locked away from disassociated pain and self, I bury these seeds for aeonios, for a time when the rain has come again, to bathe my body and soul, and renew my roots in this world.

Maslow, you old coot

I refuse you, Maslow, and your hierarchy of needs. I will pull down your great chain of being, destroy your pyramid, brick by brick.

Instead of laying back, and scraping by to find an existence without pain and fear; instead of trying to resolve my needs for safety of health, future, and body, I am leaping with abandon into the most shaky life-raft that I know. I will shove off into dangerous waters, into a realm of possible worlds, unknown causation, and ideal forms, into the Platonic seas and heavens where no absolute certainty lies, but only an adventure questing for perfection awaits.

You cannot keep me, Maslow, in the twisted prison of your ordered living. I cannot bear it, for I will surely perish were I to follow your whims. You see, I could keep my body fresh, my teeth clean, my hunger sated and my thirst slaked, but your agenda would destroy all that it is to be a human. My body would sustain itself, but my spirit, my self, would wither, slowly, atrophying, utterly enervated by my constant scratching in the dirt for flesh, bones, and sinew. There is no foundation to be obtained there for me, Maslow, because there is no hope today of restoration. It serves me nothing to seek my health tonight, because my health is not forthcoming. So I defy you and your rotten axiomatic ways of the human condition. I defy you and thus deny the truth your harmony.

Now why don't you step down from your self actualization and get working on something productive?

Too many options with too little fuel

I'm relatively unable to pursue anything with the energy and the passion I desire to do lately and I hate it more than I am able to express. Let me explain things as I see them, to the best of my ability right now.

If you imagine yourself to have X amount of energy to complete a certain number of things everyday, let's say 5 major things, I swing between having energy to do 2 or 3 of them. I've lived my life in such a way that I could write a paper, hang out with friends, exercise, read a book, make it through the day, and go to work all in one day rather easily to now being forced to choose between seeing friends, working, or making it through the day. I can't do all three of them in one day. I sometimes don't feel like I can do two of them. This infuriates me to no end.

More over, the more time that this headache ticks on, the more that I find myself unable to hope for change. I find myself more aggravated with the world, more distant from people, and more emotionally violent than I care to admit. I don't have the energy to keep at this forever. But I have to have the energy to make ends meet, to make sure that I go to work so I can be paid, to see my friends because without them I have no sanity, to keep writing because it is a lifeline to me, and to keep pressing on in life because standing still is painful as well.

A Brief Respite

In a rare moment of headache lull, I think clearly enough to know that I have so much to gain in this year. That I can, for the first time in months, dream and imagine the wonders I will see in a short time to come. I'm excited for the adventure to come, excited for the people I will meet, the experiences I will have, the growing that will occur along the way.

I'm taking my first step outward from what my parents have done in their lives, I'm doing something my father never did, nor dreamed of doing. That is wholly exciting and wholly nerve wracking. I embrace all that it is. I embrace the steps toward a freedom which I have never experienced and I leap toward toward the opportunity to prove my worth to myself and the world. However that may look.

I will not die

A few months ago, I discovered the blog "I will not die" and it became a source of inspiration. Dereck suffered from the deep desire to live to drink deeply from life, while surviving in a world which stifled this goal. He had his goal of university taken from him, but he promised to not let go, to press on, to eventually get back to university to study, of all things, philosophy. Dereck has since achieved his goal, but in so doing, he has abandoned his blog because he did not die and the mantra is no longer necessary for his survival.

So I will take up the mantra for my own sake. Let me explain.

I have had a headache since November. And not just a "wow this is annoying headache" but the sort of headache that I wish I could lie down and cry from the pain every day, one that fogs my thoughts, and kills my pleasure in life. But I won't do that, not until I have to. See, I know that my life is valuable, I know that I must live for my own sake and for the sake of others. I owe it to myself and I owe it to the world to not give up.

But I'm getting weaker as each day passes. My headache is getting worse, my thoughts are getting cloudier, and I am less and less able to find the endurance to press on. I am dying. I don't believe that this headache will kill me physically, at least not soon, but I am terribly certain that I, who I am at my core, may wither and perish. I find myself in writing, find myself in philosophy, find myself in dreaming deeply and each of these things is atrophying as my headache continues to grow.

This first post of perhaps many posts is measure of remaining worth. I vow here and now that I will not die. I cannot give up on myself, I cannot let my headache get the better of me. I am bitterly aware that I truly cannot see the end of this, that I may be wrong, but I do not have the strength to look into the abyss yet. So, instead I choose defiance, I choose be a bitter freedom fighter for the only thing that I have left to fight for: myself.

I will not die. It's not nearly time yet.

Clapping through an Anthropologist's Eyes

My anthropologist senses were buzzing today and as a result, I started to notice weird things about people. I was particularly intrigued by our cultural custom of clapping, so I'll do a bit of off-the-cuff analysis.

Clapping is which is produced by rapidly slapping one's hands together in a such a way as to produce noise. This noise can be raised in frequency by keeping one's hands flat, or muffled by cupping the hands. Speed, power, and frequency of the clapping can be varied to produce different noise effects.

Clapping, in American culture, is used to convey congratulations, or to attract attention of those in the nearby area. Additionally, it is sometimes used as percussion in music.

Clapping serves a purpose of conveying congratulations within a large group. It most commonly occurs when those in the group cannot convey their congratulations individually, so instead they do so by clapping together as a group.

Clapping may also serve the purpose of avoiding American adversity against individual congratulations, as it can be viewed as embarrassing to congratulate someone.

And that's all I have.

As a bit of a side note, I recognize that I need a lot more practice at this sort of analysis to get very good at anthropology. I suppose it could be just a matter of inexperience, but I also think I need more time and I feel that there is probably a process that exists to recognize the common elements of a custom, but I just don't know it. Perhaps a checklist of some sort. I'll poke around for one, but if not, I think it would probably be worthwhile to create one for myself, so that I don't miss important things in my analysis.

Weak Confessions

My foot slips while I am trying to loop the rope around the bicycle wheel frame I've managed to suspend in the limbs of my tree. I feel a rush of air across my body, a blur of green maple leaves, and suddenly the ground has flung open its arms to embrace me. I lay there, at the ankles of my dearest pal, unable to breathe for some seconds, shocked, muscles already tightening like boa constrictors in my neck and back, and I cry a little.

In the next few, achingly long minutes, I manage to crawl to my front door, only to be scooped up by my mom and rushed to the emergency room. I spent the next week or so in a neck brace, and the next month stiffly walking around, but by the end of July, I had climbed my tree again and I'll be damned if I didn't finally finished the pulley system I was working on.

Right now, I'm in a lot of pain, caused not by an accident of youth, but an unknown spectre, it's ethereal teeth gnawing at my skull in all my waking moments for the last eight months. I'm weak now, my endurance is flagging, and I'm finally starting to feel the effects on my fortitude. I'm ill prepared to deal with this sort of injury. I imagine that I could relive that fall over and over again, and survive it, but I don't know where the edge of this is and I don't know how much longer I can keep at this and still pursue the things I desire.

Ultimately, I'm scared that this headache will end up being something like that fall could have been, something to end me. I'm on the edge between pressing onward with endurance and determination and just stopping while I'm here, because I'm uncertain that I have it in me to keep this up forever, or much longer for that matter.

One thing I think for certain, when and if the time comes to stop pursuing school, or education, or my dreams which require much of me, it will come like the fall did, unexpected, shocking, and hard. It will happen all at once and I don't know that I'll be too terribly ashamed of it.

We the Living, the whole of it

We the Living is a constant toil unto the death. The little apple rolls, rolls, and rolls, ever onward, and downward, through sunflower seed shells, rotten linseed oil, backroom dealings, tuberculosis, and finally stops at the tombstone of Andrei, or the icy, bloody site of Kira's demise, or the nasty, Party offices where Leo's soul was broken, even though his body went on.

Rand wrote a very difficult book to trudge through. It felt like wading through sludge, like the final journey of Kira, numbing, and deadly; I was only moving onward because I knew the end was necessary to understand and because a friend had asked me to read it once, her eyes explaining more than her words ever could how important it was to her.

I could write ten pages of thoughts that the book has provoked and a ten dozen more on the sadness and numbness it evoked in my heart. We the Living was a book addressed not to the living who lived through the Red revolution in the communist nations, but we, the ones who can live and can survive and are not forced to give our lives for the sake of the collective. Rand asks us to think long and hard about our lives and what we are living them for, and whether we are laying them down before another when we should be clinging tightly to her highest moral good: man's reason.