the stranger:

The afterlife will be a place where we can look back onto our mortal lives. We are all guilty in the end. We are all condemed to death.

there is no new. there is no old. there is only is.

Centripetal cycles spin us on a Mary-Go-Round -- though we never move at all. We twirl and whirl around until we're sick of it, then get sick from it. As we look up towards the sun, so many oscillations of fire engulf the eye's pupils, dilating the mind's consciousness -- though we never see the light. There was a moment in time when space was proof enough for our feeble minds-- that the new never was known, and the old was written in stone -- though this time has come and gone. And what is left for us to ponder? What more can we analyze? Where will our pensive thoughts lead us when we always come back to where we started? I'm sick of circles, sick of cycles. Let the instant be my guide and let my mind wonder into the depths of infinity. Let me slay the monster while becoming the monster. Let the abyss look into me as I swim deeper into its bottomless belly. It's time to move on without moving. It's time to let go of time, while continuing. It's time for the infinite. Let us see the light. Let us be the light. Let us travel faster than the speed of light. We shall pitch our giant tent to house the instant of love. We shall destroy the circus we've built around us, in the instant of anger. We shall create a graveyard to always remember that which we bore, that which we have murdered. Let me die. Let me live. The world is destructive, the mind is deconstructed. There is no truth without the lie. There is no lie without the truth; however, there is an is with only the is. And that is where our graveyard shall be planted: in grave yards of dead flowers and beautiful stars -- within the instant of the is.

question:

Outside of yourself, does outside exist?

at home.

I am sitting in my old bedroom. I am laying on Mindy's couch. It's 2:30 in the morning and I am waiting for my friend to pick me up so we can journey back to the land of the lost. It would be a lie if I said I felt apathetic to life right now. I feel quite the contrary actually. So much has happened in the last week, while at the same time, not much has changed.

When I wrote earlier about synchronizations (here), I was contextualizing what had happened to me last Tuesday. I met a new friend Tuesday night. However, on my way to the meeting, I saw Mindy and her friend Eli walking towards me as I got off the train. It was one of those 'what if i saw Mindy today' instances that actually happened to come true. We walked towards each other for approximately 20 feet, but she didn't see me. To me, it seemed as if we were looking directly at one another. However she must have been looking right through me. As we approached one another (honestly, we were 3 feet away from each other), I stopped and said hello, but Mindy and Eli kept walking by. I felt like a specter in her life. I felt like I had dreamed our entire encounter. I felt like a ghost haunting my old lover.

But I was on my way to meet my new friend, so I didn't let this instance of my old life deter this new beginning I was about to embark upon. The discourse shared was exciting. I felt like new horizons were waiting ahead of us. We shared thoughts and histories which flowed delightfully. My old neighborhood opened up new possibilities and attachments to thoughts and emotions. I was moving on, and I was happy to do so, or so I thought.

Alexia called around 12:30 AM, right after I said goodbye to my new friend. She informed me that our mutual friend had passed away that night. What a contrast to the happy emotions I was feeling. The news hit me like a punch in the stomach. It was hard to ingest. At first, all I could say was the word "fuck". All I could think was that there should have been someone out there looking out for her, someone to take care of her. That's what friends are for, right? Why wasn't I that person? Why wasn't someone there to save her? But in all reality, demons don't wait for friends to call. Our past haunts us like the specter in which I had felt like earlier when I saw Mindy. Our memories are tainted with human emotions the minute we establish them as thought. We can not escape our memories. At very best, we can cover them up with drugs and denial. But the past will always be there waiting for us in the shadows of our heart.

And so, why you may ask, am I here at my ex-lover's apartment (my old apartment)? I'm here because I had nowhere else to go. It's wet outside, and the ground smells like human stink. I can not escape my past nor could I resist embracing it. It's very hard to humble one's self. But a rich man knows no embarrassment. Mindy is asleep in the other room, and I am awake, contemplating who I am and what I am doing with my life. Why survive? Why not let life win this ever constant battle? Can the self be more powerful than nature? I think Nietzsche would argue that the self is nature, and nothing more, though nothing less. That with this great honor comes great power, if one can accept the responsibility of power. But are we not slaves to the divinity that created us? Won't we all end up dead like my beautiful friend, like my beautiful marriage, like the beauty that we love to destroy? I do not have any answers to these questions. All I know is that I am sitting in a dark room, waiting to be picked up, because I feel obligated, and rightfully so, to attend my friend's memorial service. She was an angel, lost like so many that came before her. It's almost serendipitous that she died is Los Angeles. I think, that is the hill I'd like to sit upon before I lay my head to rest. But until then, I have other demons to battle on many other hills. And for right now, I will lay my head back down on this couch, a couch which would be meaningless to anyone else besides me and my memories, and wonder what Mindy is dreaming about in the room next to me. Or maybe, I think I'll save myself the energy and not give that demon the pleasure of winning this battle. I will bow out to instead contemplate the more important things in life, things that actually might progress me further into my abysmal self. Yes, escape can be a healthy thing sometimes. So sometimes we all need to run away from our self by running into our self. For better or for worse, we have to wander into the our cerebral depths to understand just how vastly haunted our secret self can be.

life

Life is the external mirror in which vanity abuses to examine the secret self. When the mirror is broken, we slice our selves with the shards of existence to watch the blood run red rivers.

A song.

This was our happy ending
This was our tragic song
Together we were defeated
Grown together we were wrong

I continue on and dream
In the plight of our men
They scream to me in foreign tongues
In signs I never understand

We were children embracing
Swaying we surely danced
No wonder we were punished
Together in these forsaken lands

We've always been a tragedy
Becuase we think in terms of comedy
We dream in our own binary
We live our self fulfilled prophecies

And the world keeps on spinning
And the time's never change
And the days keep going by
The only difference is who we blame

A broken record repeating
And the needle's stuck in your arm
We try to sing the words we know
To choke on our bloated tongues

The devil's inside your pocket
Singing gentle desperate songs
Your wallet's inside your gaping mouth
And your heart's not where it belongs

Born defeated and we're dying
The floods will wipe us out
You're money can not save you now
You're love is full of doubt

So hang on to your loved ones
Hang on to your tears
You'll need them both again someday
To sing away your devil's fears

-sid

the correct response to life:

Bring it on!

synchronization

"In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order."
- Carl Jung

This presentation of the human mind is brought to you by the the letters "C" "H" "A" "O" and "S" as well as being brought to you by the numbers "1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34...".

What is it about our lives that drives us to fulfill the lack in which we innately desire? In other words, why survive? Why is it that there must be conflict within the power hierarchies of the self so that we can achieve the levels of intensity we so desperately desire for our own survival? Can we fulfill our void with anything other than conflict? Is not life always strategical, a computation of binary sets historically defined, continuing to be redefined, conflicting with one another, which outputs rhetorical dichotomous results? There can not be chaos in strategy. There can only be unpredicted variables of binary sets. Yet a variable is still a sign, and can be placed in an equation to predict trajectories of thought or action.

But what about spontaneous actions? I doubt spontaneity exists. Spontaneity is a construct of the mind, an excuse to believe in free will. Does not the moment a decision is made bring organization to the action? The length of time spent on decision making is irrelevant to the ultimate action of the decision. Naivety can no longer exist as well. We never begin; quite possibly, we are always beginning.

happy warm feelings

hmm...the title says it all I guess.

She says move on. I say I love her.

"There is nothing you can do or say that will change the way I feel as there is nothing I can say or do to change the way you feel." These words echo through the chasms of my soul. They haunt my dreams, causing me to suffer every day and night. Not even my naps are safe from her tongue which cuts through me like the knife she carries with her. Only, my soul is not an empty cavern of long lost thoughts and wishful thinking. Tears mixed with warm memories pool together and pour out of me and into a sea of unfamiliar faces. I do not hide my face when I cry. In public, I allow those who dare to stare into the the eyes of this hurting man the opportunity to cherish their own happiness. That is my gift to the unknown soldiers with whom I share this battle ground. That is their reward for being brave enough to share a moment of pain with me.

She said she has looked into the eyes of my kind before. She thinks I am the same as the others. She believes in the cycle of her own fears and doubts. But she is wrong. As I was wrong to believe in my fears on that dreadful night, she is wrong to believe she can no longer trust me. This is not self pity, this is self empowerment. It is not de-powering to examine your naked fears, to share in the nudity of the self. Love is a space where you can define your fears to another, where you can grow from the pain of understanding your self, your weaknesses, your history, and your fuck ups. Love is a space where you and your partner can work together to mollify your differences, where you can smooth out the blemished psyche, together as a unity. Love is more complicated than a stupid fearful drunken letter and its repercussion. Love is more complicated than battling your own doubts. Love is not giving up on happiness. Love is not giving up at all.

the dream world

The common repsonse to lonliness and depression is sleep. We can kill the day by entering the dream world. But for me, sleep is much crueler than the time I spend awake. Every night, Mindy and I break up. Some nights, we get back together. Either way, I re-live my fears over and over. I wake up in the morning freaked out, trying to piece back together some sort of understanding as to what's real and what's not. The saddest mornings are when we get back together in my dreams becuase that's when I have to convince myself it didn't happen. "You lied to yourself again" I'd tell myself. "Go on, get out of bed. She still doesn't love you, and you're going to live with that". I try my hardest not to continue the dreams where we get back together, to wake myself up from those taunting thoughts. The longer and more believable they are, the harder it is for me to accept the fact that they were imagined. But I must accept them as not real. Otherwise, I'd be in real trouble.

Of the Friend

"And often we attack and make an enemy in order to conceal that we are vulnerable to attack."
-F.N.

the X

Is it possible to erase matter? Is it possible to totally eradicate a specific existing sign? When we write our thoughts, when we formulate thought into linguistics, when we write a word, draw a line, make a statement, can we metaphysically play god and erase that sign from existence? There can be no erasure. Yet it is possible to cross something out, or cover it up, to morph that sign into a different meaning. Since meaning is a fluid and subjective device, we are able to transcend signs so that they continue to exist yet intend to mean something different than what their original intention had been. To cross out a word, to cover up a line, to turn around and reconstruct meaning through the simple device, the X, we are able to transform signifiers into completely new signifiers. This, I believe, is called a contextual shift. Crossing out signifiers reestablishes form, thus reestablishing intentional meaning. This is not to say that there lies any truth to either meaning, uncrossed or crossed out, however, the intention of the sign is where we find ourselves asymptotically approaching what humans call truth.

I was considering what it means to be an ex-boyfriend, an ex-husband, an ex-lover. By using the X we are essentially crossing out the context of our relationships. We never forget the history of the actions; moreover, we never allow the words themselves to forget their own history. Our system of linguistics is built in a way which allows a historicity of language, an institution of hegemonic relationships between reestablishing signs. Lacan once wrote, "A human without language is considered clinically insane". Language controls our memories, or rather, the signs of language allow the human mind to develop a sense of history, of a past and present. Without language, the mind could not interpret signs and therefore could not differentiate the stimulus input. (Language here is not necessarily words, but rather a system of categorization for input and definition as output).

And so, with the X, we can continue to exist with our histories, never forgetting, but rather, re-contextualizing and re-categorizing our relationship with the signs we use to construct our reality.

Overwhelming sadness.

The sun is shining brightly today. The clouds are big puff balls of cotton. The wind is gentle and the temperature is toothsome. If I were any other man, I'd say it's a perfect day. But alas, I get to be myself today, which means I won't be enjoying nature's delicious adjectives. I awoke this morning, saddened by my loss. It seems that's how the day shall shape itself. Sadness looms over my head, a foreboding cloud of despair. I'm not trying to be poetic, nor am I trying to feel sorry for myself. These words aren't being written so that I can understand and express myself. No, I'm writing this text to waste time and to kill this disturbingly contrasting day in which I have to exist within.

I tried watching a movie the other night. The film was about a family who's father was an alcoholic tuff guy. One of the sons was joining a gang, the other son was sent to social welfare, and the daughter wanted to be a writer. The family was poor and had no way of keeping itself together. Eventually, the writer-daughter killed herself after being raped by the father's best friend. The father beats the shit out of the mother, the gang-son gets initiated into his gang, and the social welfare kid becomes "a man" by leaving home. It was a terrible movie to be watching at three in the morning by myself.

Yesterday I took a trip to the Golden Gate Bridge to walk across it. It was a simple distraction at best. The weather has been wonderful here in the city, especially on top of a couple hundred foot tall bridge where you can see a panoramic shot of the city. But no matter how distracted I try to make myself, something always pulls me back into my depression. From the middle of the bridge you can see the cliffs where Mindy and I were married. I think about the wedding a lot. It's strange to think that we made promises to try to work through the hard times, to embrace each other with our love when our fears get in the way of life. I just wish we weren't walking away from this like it never happened. I feel like we can work through this, but Mindy seems to have already committed to it being over. Well, I guess it's sort of ironic. The one commitment she's not afraid of is the one which tears us apart. I'm not mad. I'm just overwhelmed with sadness. I love her so much. I guess love isn't enough these days.

p.s. - I need to find my sense of humor in all this. I'm turning into a very sad person.