Cardboard Combustion

It's like walking through an empty door to a barren reflecting pool.  No one is around.  Only the blank space between you and your reflection will hear you scream, but you only shout inside yourself.  Barely a day ago you were surrounded, though your surroundings felt foreign.  You place markers on the side of the mountain with hopes of making it back up again some day, but no one responds, or if they do, their colors quickly fade again into the background.

How do you create from nothing?  How do you find something where there was nothing to start?  Where is the life in a ghost?  Who will respond?  Who will be the one I miss who misses me?  Yes, alone time is good, but this continued isolation cannot be healthy for anyone.  Swipe right.  Swipe left.  What does it matter?  No one will respond anyway.

All of these cardboard cutouts won't cut it.  There is something out there.  There has to be.  If not, then I too am fading into the background.  People press their faces into smiling masks, holding onto fragile hope that happiness will save them.  They hope in flashy lights and smoke machines, and when the man behind the curtain accidentally shows his face they hide their eyes.  I'm not falling for it.  But it's a lonely life living in the knowledge of the truth.  It's a lonely life living beyond forced ignorance.

Preaching transparency and powerlessness to the masses.  Beating down the flock with a cursed compliment.  A subtle hint of their true worship as he nudges a ball to the side.

They say I am bold, but I just cannot stand to be lied to.  I will not fall for your lies like your fallen ones.  Does the wool make you itch?  Does it irritate your wounds like the ones you pour salt on every day?  I cannot lay down and let the smooth lies slide into my like syrup.  A silk robe may be precious, but it will not hide your fangs.

No one can know any of this and so it shall go onto the public forum.  Remember the ancient ones and their laws?  Maybe they aren't all tombs and temples.  Maybe that's just what we see today.  Think of the materials we use today, how many of them would last millennia aside from the stones and the structures they hold.  The rich and the elites know this and so they build their towers not just high, but strong.  They build their stories (their versions of history) deep into the zeitgeist so they can cement their place in history.  They leave us behind but feed us bread and entertain us with circuses so we won't notice them as they slip out the back door.

Their distraction is our destruction.  Well, we've noticed.  We may be late to the game, but cheaters never win and winners never cheat.  Prepare for the end of your reign.  Even sturdy cardboard falls.

Self-Denial/Self-Discovery

I need freedom.  No, not the kind of liberty that breaks chains and opens up previously unseen worlds.  No I need freedom to know who I can be and, in a way, some sort of slavery that binds me to who I am.  I know it may sound absurd, but that is what I'm looking for: something tells me who I am and what my purpose is.  I guess you could call it an anchor, but it has to be so much more than something that holds me down; that's not freedom.  I need something that inspires me to reach out and continue to achieve more.

Burning this match at both ends creates a blinding smoke that I cannot see through, and it chokes the air from in front of me.  Just tell me what to do.  Tell me who I am.

Though I can already see that part of that is where the problem lies.  I will not let you tell me who I am.  I will not conform to your standards or expectations of who I ought to be.  I will not be your marionette.  All the boxes you create are confining and I don't fit.  Can't you see that's why we're leaving these paradigms behind?  Still, I want something that won't choke me when I am merely months in.

Something that involves storytelling.  Something that lets me be myself and pushes me to discover more of who I am.  Something where I am teaching but I am not a teacher.  Some sort of influencer, but not the sole source.  I need to be able to look up and over while talking down and out.  I don't want to talk down and I'm sick of feeling down and out.

Give me a personality test, or better yet, an aptitude test.  I'm inept at talking back to my reflection.  What could it possibly have to say to me that I do not already know myself?  How can mentor the youth and be a storyteller?  How can I use my professional skills, both acquired through education and through practice?  How can I open the seemingly locked windows to my secret strengths that weren't hidden in diplomas and certifications?  Where can I be myself and not become so complacent as to be stagnant and die?

I want to rely on sleep for rejuvenation, not as a means to just escape into dreams.  I want to find the motivation, the ganas, to work when I'm inspired.  I want color flooding back into my life, not just a flash here and a flicker there.  If this is me dreaming, why can I do little more than sleep when I return home?  Why does the picturesque mountain village feel more like a bland desert town made for industrial, nomadic cowboys without a home?  Why are the edges torn and faded and where did all of my friends go?  Maybe this is just the opposite end result of some recent mania, but it keeps coming back.  Why?  Where did it come from?  Where did I come from?  And where am I going?

Everyone's leaving and entering this place, but I'm trying to find a home.  And those who have only ever known this place can't wait to escape.  I'm falling into their trap and fall further down Maslow's hierarchy every day.  Nowhere is safe in compassion fatigue and no one will save you if you're the imagined superhero martyr.  If you're swimming away from the life preserver, you cannot blame the lifeguard when he doesn't save you.  If you're avoiding the hammer, you might be safe from the pain, but how effective can you be?  The nail must hold the planks together and it cannot do it alone.

Alone.  That's it.  Maybe that's it.  Alone.  Take a vacuum to this clean room and suck up any semblance of life that still remains.  And that is where you'll remain: alone.  Complacent.  Barely beyond useless.  Don't blame the other for your own ability to escape the comfort of the soft cover.  A softcover.

Learning to start again without a proper beginning

Connecting dots.  Drawing lines.  No one can tell I'm going this time.  I want something beyond what is here but I'm not sure how to find it, especially when I'm not sure what it is.

I'm a result, an effect.  There have been so many causes to lead me to where I am, but still I feel inadequate and ill-equipped.  So what do I do with these incomplete leanings?  Where do I go?  How do I move on?  I don't know why I try to be something more when my boat is anchored to the shore.  How can I expect anything more here?

I want to write a story, or maybe to be one (to be in one).  I'm not sure.  I want to make a difference, but it's so hard when everything is the same.  I need to move my feet and not be afraid where I'll land.  I don't know why I try.  I don't know what for or why.  Maybe some day words will align and mean more than jumbled ransom notes of words again.  Maybe I'll find my voice again instead of just filling empty space.  I have found something, a light, a flicker, a passion, in academia, but I want a little more, or rather a little something different.  I want something with life, imagination, and creativity, not dry, clinical research.

Creatures, unfamiliar features, narratives, and plot lines.  I want characters with character and places with history.  I want to leave this nonsense behind to explore the rationale behind the nonsensical.  Maybe this can be a month of exploration.  Maybe the effect here can become something beyond the mundane for a change.  Maybe something will happen if I work at it.  Maybe I'll actually work at it and not beat myself down with familiar meta narratives or numbing half-truths.  Maybe.

Hand-Crafted for the Masses

Popular art in this place is decoration.
It's soft.
It's not always easy but its risks are usually safe.
The calculated, concentrated artist is not one.
She's a designer.
Art is not design, though design can be artistic.
Decorative artists don't press hard
against the canvas.  Decorative artists
are not artists.  Decorative artists
are capitalists.
Art can be a means, but if that is all
it means, it is not art.
Art is not just
for looking, it's about teaching you
to see.  Creating art can be learning
to see.  Creating art can be
observing the act of observation.

Popular art here is for the masses.
If it's all the same
I'll keep to myself.
Art is not wallpaper,
and yes, wallpaper can be
art, but art is expression.
It's experimentation.
It's learning to see by really looking.
It's questioning the familiar
and answering a question with another
question.  Everything you see
is not art and somehow we are
all artists.

Popular art in this space
is not art.  It is decoration.
Decoration doesn't pinch or
even prick.  There are no
certain risks.
Popular art is not
my medium.

Three Friends

I miss you.  Three words.  Strong words, and a truth hurling deep inside.  I saw your picture today and remembered your gone.  I missed you today and that's fine.

What is the book inside me?  What are the pages waiting to be set?  The ink of the text falls flat until my eyes become heavy or my energy is dry.  I'm looking for something that's not there.  I'm writing invisible lines just to keep going.  None of this seems with a concrete purpose; none of it appears to come from anywhere beyond my fingers.

August isn't always great and this year is similar.  A move. A first house purchase.  A totaled car (or three in the family).  A new job.  An online class I started late.  September seems to be much better (coming from one that can't stay put in the present).  A four in the ninth month, a question of sanity.  Still, people trust me.  They come to me with questions.  I'm not sure where any of this is going, but I hope for hands to hold.

Codependency, interdependence, and intimacy.  What a combination, really.  A heart, a head, and a hand.  Like three people directing a show.  Three madmen leading the tour.  Is it worth following these men?  Where are they leading us?  Will they help us find our way?

And I do not want imitations of myself.  I don't want clones or colonies.  I want empowerment of others.  I want vigor and valor from timidity and turbulence.  I want the disdained to learn to trust, the fearful to learn to fly, and the lonely to know the embrace of a true and requited love.  I do not want for myself.  Yes, I will need headwaters to keep this stream going, but largely I just want to flow into others.  Water rushing, flowing downstream into new life.

Time.

Is it the same today, yesterday, and tomorrow?  Do we all experience it symmetrically or somehow the same way?  Is it anything more than a complex social construct?

Ask the pioneer who ventured into the unknown how his time passed.  The rugged, wrinkled man that went searching for adventure and returned to restlessness when the trail ran dry.  Time quickens to a pace unspeakable when the journey is fresh.  Once his heels have become buried in the ground complacency slips its mask on.  Adventure doesn't ever last.  Time crawls when joy dissipates or interior smiles evaporate.

The grandmother waiting in the hospital lounge.  No one can disturb her except the slightest movement or touch.  Maybe there's a chance her grandson will make it.  Maybe he'll walk.  And what about her daughter?  How will she fare? Time loses track of itself.  Time gets stuck between floors in the elevator.  It pulls out its playing cards and teaches Joan and Jill to play crazy eights.  No sign of maintenance coming and there is no need.

Field of Vision

I cannot look behind me.  That's just one reason why I need another.  I cannot see through the blinds.  Looking backward there will always be something behind me.  I think the late twenties (and into the thirties) is a spectrum vacillating between isolation and intimacy, community and loneliness.  It's rain clouds outlined in silver permanent marker.

And in this day this age range is an extended adolescence.  Where have we gone wrong?  What needs repairing?  How do we make adjustments if we do not know where the leak is?  Go to the root but when you get there it's cold, dark, and empty save for your own reflection in the shallow cesspool.

Alone and lonely are not always good friends.  A lonely neighbor can be surrounded by cardboard cutouts while alone is a location.

Maybe this is just my field of vision.  My perspective.  My lens.  My point of view.

Basta.