interrobang.
big
motherfucking
interrobang.

and so i admit, i feel, i accept that there is finally a cusp (a favorite i’ve pretended to feel for so long) and there is actually a sincere sense of positive potential and open acceptance for whatever the hell might come my way.. but of rent and food and bills – i have six months of a future life paid and accounted for on torn pieces of graph paper in my head, on actual printed receipts, and strewn about as numbers in cells and imaginary boxes of nonexistent spreadsheets, and at the end of all the strings of partially formed equations just after the equals sign, there is a figure, a figure that, on the whole it has the smell of fried onions, so i guess i’ve just got to take that as a sign that these things are there to be accepted rejected embraced loved feared-

-and sweet jesuschrist, 5-hour energy comes in pomegranate now-

but the crazy disjointed feelings of elation and potential growth are dampened slightly by the feeling that things will never be the same, a feeling that always pokes me in my nostalgia nerve, so i can’t help but wonder after all if i’m doing the right thing (dampened slightly, i said – no going back, of course)..

these thoughts do not last..
(and neither did the ones before..)

so there is a new living space in which to grow and a new life cycle in which to define myself – all experiences and memories from here until sometime over there will be of an altogether new order, flavor, quality – one tinged with the foggy outlines of drastically altered perceptual cues.. the old days are falling away

but, wait – i’m getting off track
none of this is what i came here to say.
what i want to say, what i need to say is…

goodbye guardshack of solitude.
sweet barbed-wire sunsets, wish me luck~

The disturbing:
They hurt more when it rains.

The painfully amusing:
I’ve begun taking glucosamine.

So i decided that my hair has really been getting shaggy lately. I’ve been wanting to get my hair cut for over a week now, but somehow the timing never seems to work out. Since I finished my epic heart of darkness paper, I decided that I could spend a couple hours of slack on my break between classes to get a drink and get my hair cut.

As it turns out, today is scissorav shabbas, the barber’s day of rest. They don’t open their doors, turn on their signs, welcome new customers, and they SURE AS SHIT DON’T FUCKING CUT!

Scissorav shabbas.

That is why I sit on the back porch of the villa with a shaggy mane and intentions of getting a drink with Dr Mcdougal.

that’s my story.

As is probably the case with most people whose traditions are broken, I never realized the value of mine until they were gone. When I was younger, I was a greedy little boy with very little concern for Christmas tradition. I didn’t care nearly as much for the food or the presence of my family as I did for the presents from my family. If I could have traded in the pork pie (or even one of my siblings) for more presents, I probably would have done it.

That’s not to say I was completely unappreciative of the cozy familiarity of our Christmas traditions. I simply regarded them as secondary to the gifts. The symbol of Christmas was always, for me, Santa Claus. I loved everything about the jolly old man and he was one of the few truly magical figures in my world. I tried my hardest to wait up for him; I put out cookies for his reindeer; I wrote him careful and sincere letters telling him what I wanted and exactly how to get to my house.

My grandparents were always the hub of our family gatherings and it’s impossible for me to think of Christmas without thinking of them at the center. After I discovered that Santa Claus wasn’t real, I think I subconsciously began to associate Santa with them. After all, they were the people who made Christmas possible and they were also the bringers of toys and candy. When they went into the nursing home a few years ago, I was struck with the sudden and painful realization of how much those seemingly peripheral traditions meant to the whole family. Spending a Christmas in a nursing home is the fastest way to convince yourself that Santa is dead and never returning.

Over the past few years, we’ve been trying to pull our family back together and establish new traditions. It hasn’t been easy. The different branches of the family have fractured for various reasons and now Christmas seems to be several small gatherings that have yet to define new traditions. This year my grandmother died four days before Christmas. My mother spent Christmas in Texas with my sister and I spent the holiday with my girlfriend’s family. It was my first Christmas away from home. Though it was beautiful and warm, it was hardly the traditional Christmas of my childhood.

Though our family customs have been breaking down and we have yet to replace them with new ones, for me it has been a healthy time for reflection and deconstruction of past traditions. Over the past few years, I’ve been reading about the origins of Christmas and Santa Claus. Somehow, learning the truth within the myth has been comforting in a way that I have a hard time expressing. I found Michael Paterniti’s account of his search for Santa comforting and fascinating. I can relate to his search of “something that is nearly impossible to explain, perhaps more impossible to find, but boils down to a simple belief in, well, Santa.” Since the breakdown of my family traditions, I’ve been on a similar quest for Santa, albeit for possibly different reasons.

I look through photos of Christmases past while I read about Saturnalia and the Kalends. I set up my mother’s Nativity set thinking about Dies Natalis Solis Invicti. I light the Santa Claus candles with thoughts of St. Nicholas, Sinterklaas, El Gabal and all the other men behind the legend. I commit Clement More’s poem to memory as I remember the image of my grandfather in his rocking chair on Christmas eve. I set up my Christmas tree with thoughts of Odin and Yggdrasil. Reading about Mithra and the Magi reminds me of my grandmother singing “Away In a Manger.” This pursuit of origins is inextricably tied up with my recognition that my own personal traditions are gone. In a sense, the Santa of my childhood is gone forever. In another sense, I’m closer to Santa, Christmas, and my grandparents than I ever have been.

This recognition of my broken traditions has been enlightening and important to me because it’s allowed me to reflect more deeply upon what my own origins are. I have a better appreciation for my childhood and the traditions I was given growing up. I think in the future I’ll be in a better position to recognize the cohesive value of traditions, because of my search for Santa and his connection to my childhood.

these things are not new to me, but also not known by me, there are secret things that hide behind the walls, protean shapes that drift up from the dark depths – fins, scales, things that are never meant to be comprehended in full and i think of the word eldritch, what an evocative word, perplexities of imagination and we stagger around the world, perhaps its more of a wander or a saunter, but i like to think that the rest of the world is as confused by the whole of the mess of the cosmos as i am, never really solving the riddle, piecing together all the fragments that jaggedly fit in a thousand different combinations, putting together a jigsaw that hasn’t even been completely made, built, drawn, cut, and we go on with this look of determination and resolve, despite that the next corner leaves something to the imagination that cannot ever be hinted at or guessed at by even the best minds of our generation, do we grasp economic meltdown? ai revolution? battles of megiddo? can we really understand the depth of calamity or ponder the event horizon of a thousand converging singularities? are we destined to repeat and repeat or is there a sense of rising along the spiral?

some sort of progress as we look up the ladders and down the snakes into the unfathomable void of tomorrow? these aren’t just words and i’m not just playing with vocabulary here, i’m contemplating the vastness of everything we don’t know-

the crystal roads we walk along, with the pretense that it’s all granite, never accepting or even acknowledging the abyss and darkness below, never looking down into that inky crevice in all the knowns and certainties to accept that, yes, in fact, we are quite alone and quite scared and won’t somebody just take the time to explain it to us, there’s a whole sad world out here and every one of us is learning and integrating the “don’t worry, i know what’s going on” facade until it etches itself onto our features and we can even almost believe it ourselves – well, at least until that dreadful, inevitable dark moment where the cracks begin to appear under our feet, racing and tracing themselves along the outlines of our insecurities and we’re just looking for that one information booth somewhere along the highway that can hand us the pamphlet that says “here, this is everything you missed on orientation day” (and yes i’ll mix my metaphors) so we’ll read it and it will somehow explain away the cracks, or at least light up the darkness under our feet, in front of our faces so that all of a sudden-

but that’s not what happens and i need to accept that it’s not “we” and this is simply “me” writing to me about me and for me, and this is isn’t my usual brand of solipsism (but it’s also not something entirely unfamiliar), instead it’s the “we are all absolutely alone” idea that haunts me and wakes me up shivering in my own loneliness when i pretend i’m just going to the bathroom or to get a glass of water because goddamn it’s shameful to be afraid of the dreams of the space between people and the impossible gulf between experiences, but how can it be any other way, i separate myself and i set my thoughts, my intentions, my ideals apart – is this a defense, and if so, against what? what is the benefit of this separation when it’s the initial distinction between “me” and “you” or “us” and “them” that breaks my heart and mind into a thousand little shards, each incapable of grasping their significance to each other,

but i go on, and i smile, partly because i like to smile, partly just because there is, in fact, much to be smiled at, but partly because i don’t know what would remain if i let the smile drop -and so i question..
and i question..
for the yondering does indeed need pondering..

and i wonder to myself if there is a way to bridge this, and not simply a connection between me and my fellow man, nothing so trite or so sentimental, but something altogether more fundamental, the recognition that if i could build a bridge, the cracks in the facade beneath me wouldn’t matter, “rise above” as someone once told me, but, seriously honestly truly, why the hesitance, why the divide, this immeasurable chasm between the known and unknown, the familiar and the other – so scared of interaction, so scared of isolation and i mostly just want to sleep, just want to hug and fuck and smell flowers and i want to cry a little, not into my pillow but into the neck of another person, in the neck of every person, just so they know, so they feel that it’s not just them or just me, it’s all of us, i want to be able to say hello and have it carry all the emotions and connotations of a thousand pages of poetry and prose, with that one word, i want to convey the whole vacant and ineffable terror of what it is to be human, i want to tell someone that i’m scared and alone and afraid and sweet god-

this isn’t what this post was about, this rambling just started as rambling and now i wonder if i can turn it off in time to go to my next class – but there’s a whole fucking world out there of students and smokers and loungers and professors, a courtyard to cross, people’s faces to look into and i will love and hate each one, i’ll want to smack off the look of smugness, throw cellphones into a burning heap and consecrate it in the names of mammon and moloch, i want to kiss a hundred pairs of lips, and yell and scream and make someone do something, i want things to be different, i want to see people get mad, i want to see people cry, i want to walk out the door and see people fucking in the student lounge, i want my professor to scream and shake with rage, do a strip-tease, quit her job and walk into traffic, not because i hate her, but because it would make me love her-

i get goosebumps and i want to cry when beautiful, strange, epic things happen – this morning i saw a car driving up state street the wrong way and there was a screeching of tires and honking of horns and i turned and watched and my heart began a long an empassioned scream of encouragement to that driver, a bold, clueless, and determined mechanical salmon, a scream so loud that i almost, almost forgot where i was and what was proper for one single second, but i wanted more, i wanted weeping and gnashing of teeth, not pain and suffering and not a tragedy for anyone of the drivers – i don’t have a bloodlust and this isn’t about any sort of retributive aggression in which humanity must pay for its sins, this is about a million people opening up their windows and screaming “i’m mad as hell and i’m not going to take it anymore” this is about spiking the town’s water supply with lsd or mdma or ketamine or battery acid just to see something different..

i don’t want the world to come to an end (at least not yet) i want it to come alive, and of course admit that i’m most likely just projecting here..
and that gives me pause..
…

but not for long because the blood is boiling and i think that if i can type myself into a rage, the other people around me will do the same – essays will become rants, whispers will become chants, and computer desks will become pulpits for madmen and prophets, i want to watch the whole world erupt and spew out indifference and drudgery until the white-hot emotion of an entire species finally screams with the voices of billion discontent souls, i want someone else, right this second to stand up and scream!

the things in my head are getting dull and no one screams, no one stops the smiles and the frowns long enough to let the real feeling seep from around the cracks, and the earth is cracking, the world is cracking, the crystal palace of my ego is cracking, there are shapes in the darkness beneath us, within us, shapes that will eclipse us or destroy us or renew us, but goddamn, someone’s got to have a better idea than just go to sleep, wake, repeat – and i can feel the boiling point, the breaking point, a thousand other points all coming to a head around us, the air is crackling and cackling with madness and energy and i think i’m going to discorporate..

someone do something.
someone do something.
someone do something.

OHMYFUCKINGCHRIST!
can someone else be sane? can someone keep their shit together with me? i swear i’m doing a fanfuckingtastic job of keeping a level head and i kind of want to melt into a spineless puddle of self defeat.

no time for words.
boss demoted. possibility of being fired.
girlfriend has lice. i will have lice.
have no money.
can’t catch up with schoolwork.
the world is moving on.

the end is imminent.