My Life In Blue (A Pseudo-Autobiographical Account Of An Incomplete Life)

The following is a story I wrote in my head/on my phone as I was picking out a Christmas tree with my father one Monday night last year. It proves to be one of my favorite short pieces I have written, so I decided to post it.

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I suppose I could relate this feeling to that of jumping in a pool of water. I also suppose you might understand this a little better if you were aware that I can’t swim; my first deficiency as a human. Instead of temperate chlorine-filled pool-water it's glacial, so cold it hurts, and I begin spiraling down. It's refreshing as well as nerve-damaging and I panic as I don’t have a choice; I don't know how to resurface.
I am drowning, but in the midst of sinking I am dancing and smiling- deep indigo, the color of my mother’s dress that she wore when we went to church on Sunday mornings of light skies- violets painfully searing into my skin and flesh and I couldn’t breath; I didn’t need to breath yet. I'm still going down.

I used to compare living to pedestrian events. Now I don’t even try to make sense of anything anymore.
I caught my first glimpse of cerulean in the eyes of my older brother when our parents divorced, and I painted the same color in my new house that I lived in alone. Of course, I never finished painting it. I never finish anything; even the ideas so blue that threaten to strangle me with stipulation I cut off. It’s terrifying, more terrifying than drowning in deep oceans.

I’d never touched a woman, but I did love one once.
I was biting into a melody, shocking the nerves of my oversensitive front teeth. Long before I set away the violin, I played for a florist on the corner of my block. The only reason I noticed her was because she made a bouquet of hydrangeas and handed them to me in hopes that I would give them to a lover. It wasn’t uncommon that I remained in solace. Instead, I kept them until they rotted, and I still held on to them, and I am clutching them in my fists, not wanting to give them up to the sea.

I wanted to rip myself apart and consume my body and poke the eyes out of every living creature that ever looked at me. To become oroborous and leave nothing behind. My mother died never knowing my worth, but loving me nonetheless. I didn’t deserve her kindness, which was what unsettled me about parents. Unconditional love. The warm red colors. It was foreign so I refuted it, doing what man has done since the beginning of time.
You can see I had issues with relationships. Much the same as my writing, they would flow out of my grasp and I would ignore them, burning stares through the soles of my shoes avoiding human gazes. The dark navy of my fear for rejection liked to paint my body and present my naked self quivering distressingly in the cold in front of my peers. I was afraid of my own species. They were different shades and tints of a color I have now grown to despise, yet learned lives in the farthest reaches of my dreams, and hides under my bed threatening to smother me at night. I was the same hue, but it’s not as if I ever looked in a mirror.

I liked to kill the characters I created. It wasn’t out of wickedness, the reason was because they reminded me too much of myself. They ended up murky like the dirty periwinkle of the polluted city sky I lived under. Every bad quality I possessed was brought out and birthed into an innocent, fictional soul. It was the most harmless way to chastise myself, yet somehow split my personality on burnt paper.

And then I had a friend who saw the colors, too. I’ll never know if she was lying just to ease my anxiety, but she glowed turquoise, so I believed her.
Then she got married and sentiment turned her vision against me, and we dropped out of each other’s lives just as easily as we had bumped into one another in the produce section, ogling over the same piece of kohlrabi that seemed to radiate blue-violet. I tried to erase it from my memory.

Later then, I started seeing blue-green. It made me think of a flame, and made me wonder if fire was of wind or of itself. It was beautiful nonetheless, and I would smile cornflower smiles and sink in dark seas of failure and it was lovely, because I saw life in Prussian ink scrawling on parchment as naturally as breathing. For some reason I believed it would come as easy.

Deeper and deeper and I was now melting in the arms of a lover, multiple ones, never quite used to the constant touches or the dark blue fingerprints they’d leave over my body. I liked it when someone touched my skin, it was comforting and they were warm, and instead of a block of ice I was a small blue flame of a kindling fire.
The contact came and went, and I became serious about an unexciting career I had no care for, and I left promises of children and marriage in the lips of others. Being me, I left; every single one.
There was always a wave, one which I’ll describe as sea foam green, looking dainty on any beach but terrifying on the shore of my psyche. I left relationships because I was scared, and I slept in blizzards as punishment. I tried to find a way to avoid commitment and color, and escapism would seem easy in a snow storm, but the flurries were so white they turned an angelic heather, and I came to the conclusion that heaven is black and white.

It’s not surprising that I dreamt in blue, I’d be lying if I said otherwise. But in my subconscious it was different, I was floating and wrapped in baby blue, and it was powdery and there were choirs and I was deeply in love with the sound of my mother’s voice. I was no longer in the oceanic memories of what I wished had happened with my life or what I had recorded over reality; it was the unedited program of my life and times.

The older I became the more I spent thinking about living forever. By virtue of my lack of self-esteem, I wondered if my life was even worth the pacific centuries if I couldn’t even write about it. Dissatisfied, I waited to die.

I wake up at the bottom, palming sand that strains delicately through my fingers, and laced in complete darkness. I think of my mother first, and how she had loved me so much and died, and my brother, and my younger sister and her husband and my father and grandfather and people that cared for me, and there was suddenly not enough time or lives left to acknowledge those I’d admired.
When I open my eyes, I learn I am not surrounded by darkness at all, but I am in a sea of thousands of me, all floating to the bottom likewise. Some are farther up than others, and as I watch I recap the first time I drove my own car (a brilliant blue ’70 Malibu), and when I broke my leg while riding a bicycle without training wheels, and farther up now, I see when I learned how to walk. The bodies closer to me are more disappointing: me running away from a relationship, procrastinating on writing a novel, ignoring my mother’s phone calls. I try to yell, but of course, like a dream, it is swallowed in the aura of ignominiousness controlled by only me. I want to tell myself to let people in, and to visit my parents more, to keep a promise. I had let so many people down, and now here I am by myself, in a personal hell that is no longer a comforting hue but tastes of bitter, plaintive semen.

Walker had wanted to marry me.
The only promises I made were the ones I knew I would neglect.
I am dying and regretting everything.
My body begins to rid itself of the oxygen I had formerly believed was unnecessary, and yet somehow I regain myself and smile and say, “Oh, well”, in my head and aloud and I close my eyes and think maybe I can compose my rhapsody as a dead man.

I should’ve learned how to swim.

Oh,

I'm pulling the flesh off of my emotions
And my skin crawls and scurries 
Up the walls and into 
The vents. 
I've been watching American Beauty; 
I've been smoking.
I've yet to make the drinking a habit,
But in time all flowers bloom
And what a delightful rose this shall become.

(I'm eating myself alive)

Quixotic Fixtures

"The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest."
Kurt Vonnegut

My dreams come in vignettes. One minute I'm being fucked by a narcotic professor and the next John Belushi's rotting corpse is grasping my hand and holding a syringe to my forearm, and I'm stepping off the edge. I'm sitting in the backseat of my sister's car at 4 am listening to Allen Ginsberg: "Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in a hour. Which way does your beard point tonight? " The engine is rumbling  and beat-up, and my legs are fucking freezing; he's gone and opened the window to smoke a cigarette. It doesn't matter because I'm dozing off, wrapped up in cigarette smoke and a fleece blanket, "The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely."
I wake up bleeding in an empty hospital room and screaming, and I know I've been dead but now I'm breathing again. I wake up like this, in other dreams and in other worlds, and I'm not sure if I really want to get back home.

It's 5 in the morning when we finally arrive, and I'm stumbling for my suitcase and history textbook, fleece blanket still around my arms. I don't register opening the door (perhaps it was ajar) and I fall in, and I think maybe I've stepped on the cat. It doesn't matter once I've settled on the couch; the blinds are still drawn and it's morning darkness I'm thankful for. I listen to myself breathe.

A close friend of mine appeared in one of my dreams that morning. He and I were inside a bus station, and my mind only registered the colors black and white.  His eyes were brilliant and heather gray, his mouth pulled into a grin.
My memory has become blurry, but he had tried to hold my hand. I pulled away almost instantly, and he was still smiling, and we were running through the station down the steps trying to get somewhere that wasn't where we were. It was remarkable and distilled and even now as I write this, the faintest cobweb of my dream has been swatted away.
Where were we going, Walt Whitman? I'm not sure you could answer that, but neither can I, and you seem better qualified than myself since you can manage your way through a lone supermarket.

I'm sitting on my sister's couch watching John Mulaney with Ryan. The only thing I have in common with my brother-in-law is that we both love stand-up comedy, and we'll sit for hours watching until one of us dips into  a dream. It's usually him who falls asleep first, and I can feign attendance of anyone I chose in his presence. It makes the apartment less forlorn.

The Microphones - I Felt Your Shape

We're traveling through a.m. radio frequencies and by god I hope we find out where we're going because the world is so unbearably large and we can't afford to get lost.


Happy Birthday, William.

Thought Experiment: Deck of Cards

I thought of this idea long ago while sitting in my Web Design class, 1. because I am immeasurably fast at coding Web sites, and 2. because of a scant influence of Schrödinger's Cat, and my impressionable teenage mind.  I will delve into the logistics of my experiment, hopefully understandable by anyone with a functioning human brain.

In the context of the experiment, there is, in fact, No experiment. Just you and me, alone in the dark. Well, harshly dimmed lighting, I suppose, as you do need to be able to see. Anyway, I am in possession of a gun. The only thing between us is a table, on top of which is a standard 52 deck of cards, my gun of course, and your folded hands, resting.
The pretenses behind how we both got here are unnecessary to understand.
I explain to you the rules of the game.
First, I will shuffle the deck, and arrange the cards into piles of 4, with 13 cards each.Then, you select a card. If the card you select is, say, a Jack of Hearts, I will hold the gun to your head, pull the trigger and kill you.
I will only play this game once, as will you.
You, of course, pull a Jack of Hearts, and, following the rules of the game, I kill you.
Now the fact that you and I play this game once factors monumentally into this situation.
Because there is one time that I shuffle the deck of cards, there is a fixed solution in which there is a Jack of Hearts on top of one of the four decks. Ultimately, no matter the odds nor the numbers or probability, the outcome of my shuffling is that there is a Jack on top of one of the groups, and you, unaware, select that card.
What I'm trying to get at is, in that time, in those seconds between you picking the card and me blowing a bullet through your brain, are you already dead?


Anyway, life has been okay, and I'm working toward my ultimate Nyota Uhura costume for the Star Trek Into Darkness Premiere (!!), as well as my (hopefully) first finished novel. My friend Michael told me my last blog post sounded like Henry Miller, though I doubt the beacon of inarticulate thought in the realm of my head is anything close to:
“Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.”
― Henry Miller

Perhaps I am just a younger H. Valentine, waiting for more life experience.
I'll get there soon enough.
In the meantime, look at the sky, and have a nice day.

Neurotic Strip Tease: An Introduction

The other day, I watched a strip tease without music.
I've seen enough porn in my life to know where it all goes: unrealistic-use-of-tongue kissing, blowjob/animalistic rutting, penetration by either fingers or penis, Big Finish worthy of an honorary mention, repeat. They all vary in length, 3 minutes to 12 minutes to 30 minutes and up. They're all the same.
Without sound, the usually imploring surmise of a barely legal woman undressing became less appealing, arousing... it was distasteful.
I never made it through the video.

I sleep with my window open to hear the night sounds, airplanes flying overhead and front doors being slammed, car windows rolling down and gusts of cigarette smoke. I'm lying now, because you can't hear cigarette smoke.
I hear my brother yelling at his girlfriend and her dropping a supposedly 'secretive' sock of crushed up marijuana and her bong shattering on the street.
I hear clouds rolling by, completely oblivious to the birds flying through or the suffocating smog.
I hear my own beating heart, I hear my lungs stealing air and my knowledge decomposing.
I hear it all, my erratic breathing and the hair on my knuckles tickling the inside of my thigh.

I remember a conversation I had with my friend Noah, who I have slowly lost touch with.
He told me that women were confusing, but I wasn't.
"You're a good woman."
I like to keep this in mind because 1. I would not consider myself a good woman and 2. I suppose I have fooled some into thinking I am.
I write because I'd look barmy talking to myself more than I already do, narrating imaginary lives in crowded bookstores and slamming poetry against the diaphanous brick walls of my house.
I write because written words look beautiful, and my personality is too repugnant for me to have anything nice to look at anymore.

I write poems, ones that have no correlation to each other except that they came from my decision to use my words without using my voice.
My sanity is a slapdash hooker with a brown paper bag I used to bring my 3rd grade lunches in over her head, and I write to remove it, to slowly poke holes where her eyes should be, rip out where the mouth should breath.

I want to replace the void of the mute strip tease with the music I hear coming through my window at night. I want to hear Chopin every time I take a piss, and falling rain against wind chimes when I'm around to see the world implode.
I can allude to many things, and my emphatically obvious love of existence tears through every medium I pour thought into, and I'll go anywhere to chase the words I exist to write.

For now, however, I remain an insolent teenage writer, a Kurt Vonnegut wannabee and a gender confused lump of skin and muscle and tissue and 6 quarts of human blood. So grotesque, yet so wonderfully alive.