My Last Chance to Feel Human

ssoftswells: Asterios Polyp one of my favorite books

Thu, 23 May 2013 23:38:59 -0400

ssoftswells:

Asterios Polyp

one of my favorite books

- reaction to Robyn’s “With Every Heartbeat.”

Tue, 21 May 2013 02:28:43 -0400

- reaction to Robyn’s “With Every Heartbeat.”

Brave

Mon, 20 May 2013 10:01:00 -0400

I don’t think I’ve ever been brave,
it’s always been a strange concept to me.
Sterling screens swell my heart with dreams
but when the lights go on, and the eyes go down, I see
every decision I’ve made has been
a step backwards
into shade.

And it’s from the shadows I see
brave ones marching through the streets
crashing shining diamond boats floating in tow
note the livery of open hearts on shoulders shaking
beneath the falling snow, paper, paper snow.

I still love them
even if it is a strange concept to me,
even if it’s just a step backwards
into nothing.

Gasping epilogue
twelve years later, waking up
hear people, and smell places,
tear them to pieces when saying their names
this is how I’m brave,
too much,
too late.

Just watched.

Mon, 20 May 2013 01:21:17 -0400

Just watched.

People were outraged over this dog’s struggle for wiener....

Mon, 13 May 2013 17:59:00 -0400

People were outraged over this dog’s struggle for wiener. Thing became an opportunity to discuss realities of work and food.

Terrible person

Sat, 11 May 2013 12:29:22 -0400

Last night on the bus, this really tall teenager girl sits down with her friend and proceeds to pick up her ringing phone: “No, we’re not okay. You know what you said. Think about what you said, think about it. It sounds like you don’t need me in your life, so think about what you said. I’m not talking to you anymore bye.”

I thought she was talking to her boyfriend. Yet another trivial teenage love song. But soon she revealed to the entire bus, though directed at her friend, that she was fed up with her needy mother. The friend tried to empathize with both the mother and her: “Yeah my mom is driving me nuts too, probably because I’ll be going to college, soon.”

The tall girl dismissed this with a flick of her hair and an annoyed “Whatever,” and went on to tell her friend exactly why her mother was beyond the reasonable.

“You know what she said to me the other night? She said I’m a terrible person. She said I’m a terrible person! What kind of thing is that to say to your daughter?”

You know, I wanted to interrupt, You probably are a terrible fucking person.

Not gold

Sat, 11 May 2013 12:14:00 -0400

Okay every body bleeds moans needs owns,
sometimes I wonder why my dearest friends did me so.
I’ve found a truth outside that circle
but it’s no blanket for the cold.
I fear we’ll be strangers when I die,
I fear we’ll be closer than ever,
my desperation is an ignorance of life beauty bold
but I forget it every day just to be a person people know
and no one blames me, but alone
alone you know the state of the thing you whisper is your soul
look at all the healthy ones go, here they come
look at all them go.

Achtung baby, teenage me, Lion King

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 01:48:00 -0400

It’s late and I should go to bed. These words have been typed by me and countless others countless times to the point where the words themselves have lost all meaning. It’s late and I should go to bed. Instead, I’m listening to U2’s “Achtung Baby,” only I’m starting with the last track, “Love is Blindness.” This is one of those albums I’ve listened to from first to last track through and through, on car rides sitting in the backseat, studying for the SATs, falling asleep. Sixteen year old me. Skinny little dude, talks too much. Doesn’t know shit. How much shit will I not know, I wonder, when I’m fifty and I look back at myself now, twenty eight, turning twenty nine this May?

I heard “Ultra Violet” in a scene in the French movie “The Butterfly and the Diving Bell,” a stark shot of a woman’s long hair dancing quickly in the wind. I still get pangs of heart ache when I listen to “One,” the words, “Is it getting better, or do you feel the same?” It’s strange how you remember things. When Jack White covered “Love is Blindness,” I heard the song like I heard it first as a kid who hated god and church and hadn’t found much in his diet of mainstream rap music to help out with this raw and foreboding doubt about the meaningfulness of religion — I heard it as a song of rebelliousness. Even at the time, I felt the lyrics somehow plugging me into something bigger, contextualizing my teenage angst. Rage against the machine! Yeah, or something like that.

I should go to bed. One last thing. I used to love “The Lion King.” I used to burst out into song, singing “Hakuna Matata” or “I just can’t wait to be king.” And you know what else? Words were never my forte. Consequently, I believe, I never did learn the lyrics to songs properly. Maybe it was laziness, more than ineptness, but I never understood what the bird Zazu muttered to himself when Simba was singing “Can’t wait to be king.”

He says, “This child is getting wildly out of wing… !” I finally get this! I finally understand that this is a play on the phrase “out of hand,” only Zazu hasn’t got hands, he’s got wings!

How fucking stupid is that?

Imaginary life

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:14:31 -0400

Every morning, especially Monday morning, I fail to convince myself waking up is a good idea. Yet, at the end of the day, I’ve shed most of the morning’s existential dread and self loathing. I’ve gotten a few things done, I’ve eaten, I’ve drank coffee, and most importantly, I’ve gotten out of bed. Why can’t I just remind myself at those crucial early hours this plain and simple fact: the longer you are awake, the better it gets?

But after a week of working late and enduring stress, I am tired. I am finite. This is how I feel in the morning. I feel the very realness of my limits as a human being, compounded by the millions of things I wish I were doing, but am not. Little things, like writing an email to a friend I haven’t spoken to in a long while, to bigger things like my blog about video games. I feel the weight of their absence. I recognize the emptiness of my life. And isn’t an empty thing supposed to be a lighter thing? It isn’t. I’m not.

Why am I even publishing these thoughts on Tumblr? Isn’t the point of the internet to simply self promote? There goes my self-loathing again. Time to click “draft” on yet another post.

I think about this for a while and come up with an answer: To write is to imagine a reader. This is the ultimate goal, even while scribbling in journals, the margins of books, or in letters unsent. And for as long as writers have imagined their audiences, they have also burned pages and pages of their own writing — and this is the kind of dramatically self-conscious, stupidly self-delusional act that clearly demonstrates that the existence of an imaginary audience can breathe life into even the most obscure and unimportant living soul.

Breaking Bad is still about cancer. “Few doctors in this country seem to be involved with the...

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 03:31:00 -0400

Breaking Bad is still about cancer.

“Few doctors in this country seem to be involved with the non-life-threatening side effects of cancer therapy…. In the Unites States, baldness, nausea, and vomitting, diarrhea, clogged veins, financial problems, broken marriages, disturbed children, loss of libido, loss of self-esteem, and body image are nurses’ turf.” – Rose Kushner (1929–1990). Quote from “Emperor Of All Maladies,” a history of cancer and humanity by Siddhartha Mukherjee.

Rose Kushner wrote the book, “Why Me? What Every Woman Should Know About Breast Cancer to Save Her Life.” From what I can tell, she was a major public figure in the fight against cancer and a polarizing one at that. It seems the medical community and many others felt that she was just another politician, lobbyist, or lay expert giving the public incorrect expectations about the disease and treatments for it.

But what she added to the fight against cancer was the tremendous human perspective. She captured the very desperate nature of the sickness, and she also brought a sense of urgency and honesty to the discussion of cancer. She did so the way other people have when they want to start a movement. Phone lines were open. Information packets were handed out. Conversations were sparked.

I see Kushner as someone who helped countless women confront a disease that held special contempt for their sex. She fought off that contempt with a kind of brave, no-nonsense compassion.

Muhkerjee’s book is pretty good, too.

It humanized cancer, for me. My father died of stomach cancer in September of 2009. Though I had seen it everyday for over a year, it had remained faceless and abstract, represented by nights spent at the hospital with my dad, by the physical transformation he went through, and by the way my life, and my family’s, changed forever. But cancer itself was not something I was familiar with.

This was something I felt great guilt about.

When my friend’s mom got cancer, she went and studied the subject of cancer and cancer treatment as if her mom were her own patient — she was studying to be a doctor, yet hadn’t taken her MCATs yet. She bargained for her mother’s life, with doctors, and god. She sought out the treatment she felt was right, and she prayed.

As for me, when my dad was diagnosed, I slinked away into passivity, and figured the doctors knew what they were doing. Just listen to the doctors, dad, I said. And I assumed, whatever treatment they were giving, that was the best we could afford. I gave up even before it was over.

I’m trying not to do this to myself. I’m trying to fight this way of thinking, and pull myself out from this spiral of self hatred and depression. And part of that effort has been reading this book, “The Emperor Of All Maladies.” I guess I’m making up for lost time? All I know is, a few pages into the book, I turned to the copyright page and checked to see when it was published.

It was published in 2010, the year after my dad died.

After I finished reading it, I felt I didn’t need to read another book about cancer for quite a while. This was it. It gave me a kind of relief I couldn’t earn from the guilt and anxiety I felt thinking about the what if’s and the should have’s. It gave me facts, it gave me science, and it gave me history. It also gave me stories. It gave me characters. It gave me such perspective on the disease, I learned to look at my own experience as one of many, in a very long and tragic battle with an incredibly diverse and complex disease.

In the summer of 2012, I was watching “Breaking Bad” and I was reading Muhkerjee’s epic book. I had started watching the show shortly after my dad died, in 2010. I blasted through the first two seasons and continued watching each new episode, each new season, and yet it was those first two seasons, when Walt’s cancer is a very prominent part of the plot, that I was drawn into the show. The story of a man who was getting sick and given a death sentence when his life had been such a long and hard failure — it just spoke to me. Watching the show, almost everything became a metaphor for the fight against cancer. Watching the show, I couldn’t stop thinking about my dad.

I think “Breaking Bad” describes what cancer does to us as individuals, as families, as friends, as a society, as a culture, as a body, as a soul, and as a citizen. It is drama. It is the unknown twist in the plot. Cancer is the strange friendships you make, the wild moments of manic determination, and the truly dark moments of desperation.

It paints everything in red and gore and human excrement. It is cold and cruel like a gangster, turning doctor’s into criminals. It’s like a drug, promising you nothing, yet taking everything. It is a priest, mumbling nonsense. It is your mother, screaming. Cancer plucks you out from the decay of mediocrity undergoing in your soul and it confronts you with the violence of your mortality. It wakes you up. Cancer is methamphetamine labs in a suffering American city. Cancer is multitude. It is not singular. It is a metaphor that is literal. It is alien, and it is you.

“Breaking Bad” also makes me think, what if my dad had survived cancer?

I imagine him, Walter White, causing massive chaos, blowing up buildings, shooting mother fuckers in the head. But so what. So what if he makes millions, and if he rises to the top. So what if he kills everyone standing in his way. So what? Just to get greedy? To forget that just yesterday, cancer was staring him down? To shed the fear of death, just to burn in a glorious flame? Just to tell a damn good story?

Just to feel human?

Morning commute

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 11:08:03 -0400

Hot water from the shower head
staring at your feet, your every day
happens all at once: the stilted drive to work
the tumbling commute on the train, the bike ride
between angry cars, the ferry on choppy morning waters,
the long wait on the cold, grey runway, the determined walk
across those large avenues, up the steep, wooded, and wild
mountain to the town way on the other side, distant, lit under dawn’s darkness,
the brief ski down slope to where you cut the clean white snow like a razor shaving off the clean white soap —
your head dripping water from your nose
your chin, your cheeks, your lips, your
eyes closed.

Louis CK does a reddit ama

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:54:27 -0400

Louis CK does a reddit ama

Achievements

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 10:20:20 -0400

Meet with Thalia Timsh, the Barrister’s Niece
Get the information you need from the Rothwild Slaughterhouse
Purchase all of the Favors in The Knife of Dunwall
Complete The Knife of Dunwall in High Chaos
Complete The Knife of Dunwall in Low Chaos
Complete The Knife of Dunwall without alerting anyone
Complete The Knife of Dunwall without killing anyone

Attach an arc mine to a rat, resulting in a kill
Perform a drop assassination from atop the Empress statue in The Knife of Dunwall
Speak with the statue of
Delilah Copperspoon in Timsh’s estate
she will tell you you’ve done a good job
going through high and low chaos
And with one hand upon your head she’ll say
You’ve completed the game and now you can go
And sleep with The Knife of Dunwall beneath your head
Speak to it as you dream and complete it
Dream to it as you speak and complete it
Meet me outside and outside you
will complete it.

Taking a break

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 01:52:36 -0400

Where to start, here, at the joint?
Or here, at the heart, but how, to break
from heaviness, from habit, from self-hate
break from hiding, from believing the lies
break from the hands holding you down without
holding you up, break from the world even if you love it
break from the public, and seek the private,
break from this poem, and seek your own, break
from comfort, from home, from health, break
from love, from passion, from self, break
Into a house, into a room, into a box,
break me here, and here, amd here, and especially
here, where I am weak and unoriginal
and give me peace to lie here broken
so I can listen, just listen.

Endings

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:20:56 -0400

I sometimes listen for a cry
a life crumpling up under the pressure of
too many expectations laid under the doormat of a corporation.

Sometimes, I hope that this is our last fight
looking for cracks in your love, for the smoke rising
underneath the pile of roses atop my running car.

It’s a little like a snow day, you know what I mean:
Hoping strange nothings fall from the sky, covering everything
stopping this absurd parade, this silly convention. Lights
out, everyone wanders outside. A crowd forms in the
parking lot, where a single deer stands to stare — and
then it’s off.

Night lights, no music

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 11:14:27 -0400

I’m hungover
on the radiant nights of some time ago
why’d you have to smoke so — slow,
have to wrap your legs so tight and pour the drink down
the outside of my throat, is this still
how you drink when you’re dancing laps around the floor
little red tongue curling between your sharp teeth.

Dust settles on a dark oak chair
heavy under the influence of the afternoon glow
a cat, curling her spine, her tail, around the legs of a bed made static
made solid like a brick just begging to be taken down
unmade into a mess like a face whipped up in a hasty race to
take everything down from the shelves of your one shoulder
from the shelf of your hips, falling books from the
wooden limbs fighting for life, fighting to turn off the lights —

Your house stands alone on a distant parking lot somewhere
there’s music playing somewhere in the air, somewhere
you’re not there, I’m not there, of the difference I’m not aware
because there’s no music in these words except the words themselves
I’m writing — hungover — on radiant nights of racing to turn off the lights.

"There were no unmanned aerial vehicles in the Middle Ages; a drone was a honeybee. But there were..."

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 15:28:00 -0400

“There were no unmanned aerial vehicles in the Middle Ages; a drone was a honeybee. But there were assassins. “Assassin” is, in fact, a medievalism; the word gained currency during the Crusades; it derives from “hashish.” It meant a Muslim sent on a mission to kill. … The Past is often figured as dark, a prison, a tomb; the future, bright, blue sky, a spaceship. This is an inheritance of the Enlightenment, with its faith in progress and reason and law. Part of the terror of September 11th was the gleaming skyscraper becoming a tomb, the seeming backward march of time, the horror of the unreasonable. What, then, of the assassin become an unmanned flying machine?”

- Jill Lepore, “The Dark Ages,” New Yorker March 18, 2013

"Since then, I’ve certainly given it a go, but my day-job is at times a night-job, I’m..."

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 10:29:04 -0400

“Since then, I’ve certainly given it a go, but my day-job is at times a night-job, I’m getting married this November, and the list of books I’m half-way through is almost as bad as the list of games in my Steam Library. Also, I’m partitioning a few hours of my weekends to watch old movies. And on top of all that is the question many people my age face, often in the voice of our parents, ghostly or real: what are your plans for the future, and — this one is in your own voice, and possibly the voice of some pepsi commercial — where is your heart?”

- Playing with myself

In the cradle of death is life

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 21:49:33 -0400

In the cradle of death is life

I love poetry because there’s a chance to create new worlds out of old worlds, to turn memory...

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 22:37:00 -0400

I love poetry because there’s a chance to create new worlds out of old worlds, to turn memory into fantasy, and to do all this in a way that might one day come to you in a moment of day-dreaming while waiting for your kid to come out from a long day of school — a mangled phrase that unfolds in your mind like a melting gem in your idle mouth — a single line of poetry or a flood of verses coming one after the other like a boisterous train coming into the station, chugga bam.