A New Home A New Rota

Not getting to sleep before 2am has been a regular visitor in my schedule. Tonight I stumble past 3 for sure. The causes are unknown, but the brain ticks on.

A Spot Of Feeling

Though the people were lacking
The world had a lot to say.
I was ready to give up
When I stumbled one day
On a rock
Or a sock
A creature of some sort
But what was this thing
That knew to contort
Into beings so sweet
That they hurt not my feet
But asked for attention
And then lay incomplete.

I was ready to move on when it said one word
A greeting and a smile conveyed in this bird
Or jellyfish, or bookcase
How absurd.
It said hello and I knew it was loving
It cared whatever it was
And I cared back
Forever and always I would care
And I wanted to never feel lonely again
So I took it with me and we talked until night fell
And until I next fell but I was not lost this time
I was content
In the end.

Searching For Words

The word of God was too short to comprehend
I forgot it when He told me and yet
Yet I ask for reiteration
I think I am changing
I have not quite set
But the word the spews forth
From my mouth or another
As though I was my own mother
For the creation of myself is my task to bear
I swear
I am told once more, that word from before
But as it comes in
It escapes out that door
The one that says entrance in bright shiny lights
A pathway to somewhere
That I must forget
Not by choice but by reason
It is not my place
So it is not my mind.

Again I awake in a numb aching stupour,
My memories lost in a vacuum
Disaster
I strike again, or my mind says I do
What am I doing when I only know later that I did?
Nobody falls victim
No body is found
I thank God and He says something
I think
I think and I think
But God does not speak
It was not His voice
Nor his mind
Nor his anything
I woke, I spoke, and I mistook my mind for another
But nothing is new
Not this or the next
Not the last or the first

I awake
But I was not asleep
This time from a thought or a feeling
I snap out of one world into the other
Travelling a mind
Meeting my brother
A variation of myself
On a closely linked path

Street lights are waking
The world is readying for the end
Of a day
I am alive
This, a thought I believe
This, a world that cares less every day
This, another dip outside reality.
For now.


- Shaun Berge Donald

A Light Was Switched On

The era of The Smile left long ago. But that is not to say there is no hope.

Just because things are bumpy, just because things feel consistently downhill, is not enough to warrant complete give up. Things are not in a total free fall. Things may feel like they are steadily declining, but there is still hope.

We are not as alone as we think we are, but we may still feel it. Just because we are supposed to be happy does not mean that we are.

Just because I am not in the right place does not mean I have to stay there. We may not have the power to manipulate time, but we have the ability to take control of our geographical positions. If it is a new background, or new faces, or just an abstract freshness that you seek, then there should be little to stop you.

I need to meet new people. Excluding this refreshing weekend, I have been unable to converse in a comfortable way with others. My current hometown is not (to be terribly general) of the same mind-sight or age-set as myself and it is not a healthy feeling to be alone around others.

But enough of that.

Blogging is still perhaps a negative thing put beside a positive thing. An abused power that is meddled with in various ways. It doesn't make me any better just because I feel aware of it. I'm still adding to the pile.

For now. Let it stack.

Listen To This Gargle

There is another possibility.

We are social creatures to some extent, and it has been known that we can talk a lifetime away. Perhaps this internet is not supposed to be something sacred. What if all of this is just humanity's dumping ground?

In adding to it, we are venting our needless aspects in a hope that what we can bring about in reality is condensed and a little more concise.

Oh nonsense. That is nothing like the truth of it. It's wishful to hope that this, all of this, is to aid in some way.
Sure, there is so much goodness online, there is a haven of free information that could set your mind free in a blissful glee. But we're not all willing to wade through waist-high shit to find a single diamond. A very materialistic image, I do apologise.

I'm close to moving to another country. Maybe I have just been given too much time to think. Maybe excuses are not what's needed.

Insert a suitable closing line here.
I'm churning out nonsense for the moment. Either I will get better or I will leave.

Purge

These blogs are not good places.
Another way to make us think we have something worth saying. Another method of personal diarrhea.

I should delete this.

And all that came before.

If something special is within these pages I should keep it to myself until it is fully formed.

Letting out the mind maggots isn't benefiting anyone. Adding to the pile of inter-shit does not help matters.

You do not go around saying, "Hey, I have a blog. Check out what I say about XYZ" you should surely just talk about it in person, or through an online conversation.

Oh who knows? When we get down to the question of whether anything means anything, it's very easy to get destructive.

Writers Writing About Writing

I don't write because I have to. I can get by without it. I don't continue to write because my life would lack any true form of entertainment, of course books will exist long after my own literary excursions.

I don't feel like I am the only worthy writer, neither do I believe I'll ever be the best. The best writers are those with a burning passion trying to prove a point that screams controversy but pleads sense. Some of the best writers are yet to come, fighting not a sole injustice but a horde of non-readers. Our greatest nemesis is the idle mind.

I write to ease an erratic wandering of my mind. I do it to answer a question, the only question that plagues my mind and the only one I don't expect to conclude in my lifetime. What's behind the curtain, and what does it tell us?

There is nothing more satisfying than playing God. There is freedom and there is power.

In this world, this parallel, I can play out any doodle, any philosophic quandary. We not only pander to the improbable, we can easily achieve the impossible. Day after day we change our environment, alter our personality, suffer atrocities for the sake of curiousity.

But there is one thing, after seemingly doing everything, we expect to happen. After playing God for so long, it is surely inevitable to expect someone to expand your own insight. A creator to the creator.

What I await is the flashing inspiration felt when a square met a cube. What I truly want is to reach an understanding greater than I am supposed. That is why I write. Only by creating can we learn what it is to be more aware than that which is created.

Strangers Than Myself

I look upon strangers with a cautious curiousity, for I know them less than myself, and that self even I am bound to doubt, so for this time that passes trust is found only in sparce spots.
This doesn't mean I should leave well enough alone, this doesn't allow me to hermit myself. I am just as much a stranger to them as they are to me. And without external consideration I may cease to know of my existence in a world filled with others.

But acknowledging this, it still leads me to wonder what I should be doing, it makes me question my motives and whether I even know of motives.
What am I trying to achieve?
But there it is, the greatest fallacy to befall our society, the lie we are given too young and then start to feed ourselves. We are going to achieve something big in our lives. We could do anything.
And given that empty promise, that gives us no direction but the idea of movement, we hope aimlessly that a path will create itself.

I Present The Present

It is a promise we make to ourselves when we are young that we will achieve something.
Although some of us feel forced to go to school and to sit tests, we still internally think about what our future should hold (even if this is a variation of superhero).
The way society deems it, our present isn't as important as our future.
Children are the future, you know.
Old people are the past.
But adults, those things we think about being when we are young and dream of when we are old, those things that feature as our 'settled selves', they are the present - and who needs that?

What does it matter what we do now, as long as we are better people later on?

Yes, the sarcasm is reeking. But even with this knowledge, it cannot be helped that I am sitting in a coma and waiting to be woken.

Our contradictory nature is sometimes enough to ponder and keep us going.

Always With That Catch

I am scared I will never be happy enough to write the way I want to. And I am scared that without writing what I hope to, I will never be happy.

Correlations and Kittens

Every time you masturbate God kills a kitten.
I'll be honest, it's been a massacre.

But do you think these two are related, or was it just that the relative average of kitten-killing to masturbation was pretty similar? Do they have to be happening because of the other?
Let us say that there are a billion ant deaths a day, and a billion footsteps made.
Or ten spiders become human sized a year, and ten new politicians come to power.
You see what I mean? Connections are only as strenuous as we are willing to allow them.

I set rules to go by, not always strict and not always difficult, and they create interesting dynamics. Most of all are when I break a rule, whether I am breaking a moral or simply making a choice. What difference does it make?

It doesn't, normally.

But sometimes I can't help but wonder if there are correlations between breaking a rule and a personal tragedy. A family misfortune and a morality destroyed.

If I set myself a goal and purposefully stray (fail) then am I doing something wrong? I mean that in the sense of judgement. Does it change who I am as a person? I suppose it does. I mean, surely it shows a weak persona if I cannot stick to a plan.

Finally, if you are punished (or feel that the event post-failure is connected to you) then does that mean you have taken the pain and are now back to neutral ground? How long can you hold a mistake in limbo for?

And how many more kittens are going to die without evidence to whether it was a selfish man's fault?

Inside The Joke

Have you ever told an inside joke to the wrong group of people?
Have you ever told the start of a story to one and the end to another in the hopes that one day they will meet and correlate their parts to create a whole?
Lay the seeds of a tale and hope it blossoms into something greater than itself. Create a challenge in completion and there will be an appreciation stronger felt than if it were linear and singular.

Perhaps it's nonsense, but there's a symbolic feeling to telling the wrong thing to the wrong people. They don't acknowledge anything special, they don't even realise you were speaking a double-entendre. But you know. Which means it happened. It allows you (and often only you) to acknowledge that the world is definitely bigger than the conversation you are encompassing, because where did that joke come from if not from these people? It's a small and meaningless method of internal complexity, I suppose.

Sometimes it is comforting believing in something that isn't there.

Crowding Voices

I don't know what's lonelier. Having very few people to truly talk to, or feeling like everyone around you is so tightly connected and you are somehow consistently out of the loop.

I can look at you and have a conversation with you, and of course this is great, but hidden between the silences are glances at a mobile phone, holding multiple stray conversations that may mean more to you than the person standing in your vicinity.

Our importance is never quite set out in an obvious manner. Our relevance to others can be so variable - oh, my best friend just logged in, this is important, bare with me.

How long have we been straying from reality to talk closer to the screen, our focus diluted by simultaneous yet absurdly contrasting conversations. I could be breaking up with someone whilst quoting TV shows to someone else. I could be telling jokes to one and laying shit down to another.

Our social webs are becoming ever so intricate. I think this is what scares me, really. I don't know what to trust at face level when there is no face to perceive. I want to know where I stand in someone's eyes. I want to know that I am not just a distraction, or that I am not just an obstacle standing in the way of something else. Someone else.

I am not naive enough to think this sort of social complication is new. But it is current. We can be holding a private message, a public post, and a face-to-face all at the same time, and from there you have to wonder where our attention is lying, and whether attention means the same as it used to.

We'll Skype now, it's free, but you are not looking my way, you're fiddling with something, typing something out (but not to me, we are speaking through microphones) and I'm halfway through what I thought was an interesting anecdote but I can see you don't really know what I'm saying as I purposefully misspoke several times and there is no indication of any recognition of the humorous parts. Perhaps I am not funny. Perhaps I hold no interest.

I am fully aware that to hold attention is a harder thing now, I can hardly keep my own eyes focused on something that interests me, but people should still be given full attention - while we still make the effort to look each other in the eye, we need to keep this going.

Online gaming has allowed 'hang out' to mean speaking over the internet while pressing endless combinations of buttons. Befriending has meant following an online persona.

It would just be nice to know that there is a feeling of uniqueness, and not of being one in a mass crowd vying for attention. We shouldn't have to fight to be heard. Our voices shouldn't be shouting so loudly, as noise increases noise.

Maybe there is a point here being missed altogether. Perhaps we just need to slow down and take a look around, find out who we really should be speaking to. Who means a lot to you? Let them know.

It's not about speaking to as many people as possible. It's not about spreading your connections as far as you can. It should be about the group of people close to you, that stir you.

We should not be representing our online personas. We should be representing an organic individual. Computers can make hundreds of connections with little thought, we should be focusing on the few that matter.

Sidelining Sanity

Just write. Do the bidding of others.
Take orders. Listen intently. Forget your own existence.
Live to serve. Become whatever is needed of you. Shape not to your environment, but to your exterior group of souls.
You are a fluid state with no solid reason unto yourself, so become whatever others want.
Personality? Another word for a belief that we stay the same. We are always different, to each and every other. A parent gets a different treatment than a stranger would, a lover something that an ordinary friend won't see. So how can your personality be anything but a ruse?
So do what you're told and see what it makes you. Live the lives of others and pray that you get to understand something.

Where does this leave us? Nowhere. You can't take orders and be done with it. To make everything work we have to share our lot of requests out to others. Give, give, give. Take, take, take. Don't forget the incessant tug of war we play.

If you are tired and cannot be bothered to do something, are you sure you are tired? Are you sure your body isn't making excuses in itself? Empty the bin. But why? I can't be bothered, I'm currently doing less than nothing and will continue to do so for at least an hour. The bin will take three minutes as a slow, sluggish movement. But those are three minutes on a path that I had not charted out myself. They go against whatever plan I had initially anticipated.

Oh woe is me. What does any of this mean? It means that I am tired, and my mind is not.

The bin doesn't need emptying for now, but if you don't mind fitting it into your schedule later...

Singing Too Deep

Everyone wants to tell their sad song. I'm noticing that people want to tell their story to each other, but of course not every story is worth hearing, and not each is sad. But they want to show their cloudy rainbow of emotion.
I am stood listening to a girl sing an original that you can tell means something to her, but she also wants it to mean something to us. And it does. I can feel it, the angst and the lost hope. I want to tell mine, as I feel we all do, but I don't feel it to be necessary for everyone to hear it. Her playing as smoothly and singing as roughly as she does, breaking notes for dramatic purpose, holding others to elongate the turmoil held within. She makes me want to learn an instrument. I want the eloquence of song to put forth my tales. It seems so easy when she does it.
I could marry her and we could have a creative life together, I write my things, she hers and then we use our work as a collaboration. A beautiful future of corresponding emotions. But I wonder if others think of this, too. Maybe not, maybe the thoughts of her are different with others.
She sings a cover, I can hear the same feeling. Does it mean the same to her? I can feel it but this isn't one of hers.
Everyone wants to tell their sad story, strangers - when opening up - will mention the fact that they suffer from depression "Just a minor case," of course. We all do. Without our depressions we couldn't thrive to be as good as we can be.
I don't know. Perhaps it is not my place to discredit depressions. Perhaps I just don't want others to feel more than myself. Is it resent, or jealousy? Am I scared that I won't be as deep if others feel such dark depths, too? I'm not sure. I get tired of this talk of depression. It's tiring. It's aimless and so far doesn't get terribly far. It's self-indulgent. I don't like talking about how great I am. Not directly, certainly. I would rather get the point across in a subtle sweep of modesty and self-congratulation.
I'm drunk. Going nowhere. But heading somewhere.
A point? A reason? A triumph!
I am twiddling my thumbs in a new productive way this evening. I'm hoping to finish out somewhere new. I'm thinking of things afresh.
It doesn't matter whether I am actually doing something, but if my thumbs are twiddling in a meaningful way, perhaps that is enough.
Perhaps. Enough is enough. I wait for the future. Simultaneously I head towards it.
Your life is what you take and what you get, it is everything and it is anything you want it to be. If you want meaning, make sure you know how to present it.
I want to feel what you do.

The Door Swings To And Fro

Looking at the date I realise it has been a week since I last wrote anything. Fiction, I mean. It has been a little longer since the last blog post (dipping in and out the two worlds, you see).
It doesn't feel like a week. Time and reality are so easy to lose grips with when you're not trying.
I could go a year without writing and not notice, surely. I would think about it (and lord do I think of it) but whether I would actually get into the act of doing writing is a completely different thing.

The 10K word limit was made. It was achieved in smaller chunks - 8 stories. But made the count, and I voiced new (to me) stories. Most of the ideas are not particularly new, but the words are in an order I have never seen before. Because of this, I shall call it my own.

What does this mean to you? Any of it? Nothing whatsoever. I have created something but I am not showing it for now, for reasons of being too raw and too badly written (oh how we love it as we make it but when we look at it there are deformities that were not initially apparent).

Consider this just a pop in to say I am alive. I am written. Perhaps if I get my act together I will be writing, too.

Awake

I know I should be asleep. I will be waking at half 4. But sleep is not something we can always plan. We can force it, but I would like to learn to make it come natural.
The mind plays games, unnecessary and often unhelpful, but it enjoys it for some depraved reason.

I want to be asleep. I'm waking super early, have you heard? But sometimes there are thoughts that just keep you up. Sometimes they are of heartache, sometimes they are of regret, others are of a restless nature that just wants so desperately for the time between one stage and another to disa-fucking-peer. The restless thoughts can get quite aggressive, they are borne of a frustration that is often as childish as they are eager.

I don't actually ever want to sleep. It's true that if I could spend all my moments awake and be cool with that, then that in turn would be pretty good. Right now, and maybe for some time still, I am not comfortable with my own company, but were this not so then I would be super hyped about having all the hours of the day to my conscious mind's self. I have so many things I'd like to achieve that I don't feel that I should sleep. Ever. But there's a difference to having achieved something and doing something. I am finding more often than not that I don't actually want to do anything. I just want to have done it. The present me is not the me I want to be.

I'm going to write some fiction over the next three weeks. Three short stories if this plan works out. I've made the mistake of rewriting an old heartache. Bringing it forward and giving it fresh pain. You know how us writers roll, we bleed for our art. I don't think it's very productive working with it, but it has been started so I suppose we'll see how it ends.

My mind is racing with thoughts. Most of which I won't divulge. This isn't that kind of blog. I'm supposed to be mysterious. One day I'll even be adventurous. There may even come a day when a fart doesn't spark a giggle.

But who're we kidding? Life is just as averse to sudden changes as we are.