2.35 Centimeters

             I don’t cry, of course, because I’m 22 and I only cry when I have margaritas. And when I say margaritas, I mean whatever affordable alcohol that repossesses my moral compass and all non-liquid assets I accessorize it with. But the thing is, it’s not just me (or all the collegiate seniors dancing with one foot on the roof and one off). It’s everyone. We fashion ourselves beyond the world of reason. Everything’s not that okay, in fact. People are afraid to be pessimistic. Everyone’s feeling it, most of the time (according to a recent study predicting the apocalypse following the assassination of SoapNet).

Just because I read a lot of shit that describes some of what I’m feeling doesn’t mean that the rotting apple on the side of my highway of hopeless emptiness, that skims every major vein and artery with the most painful kind of throbbing, that of mediocrity, is, by some sick stroke of karma, lifted and recycled, or at least knocked 2.35 centimeters to the right so that it can regally decompose in nature. Like what I imagine strolled through the mind of the former President of my University when he switched tanning bed levels and no longer ultra violated his skin five times a week, but two, because he moved to a warmer climate. We’re all rotting. And we have been for a very long time. Ever since we left the womb of creation and double clicked to enter the night’s womb, with breezy dispatch.
            Have you ever thought of that? That us standing in this fleeting world of woebegone wars and up-the-creek youth, is not standing at all. Who are we kidding? We’re tied to this womb, and while some of us have extension cords to bother and sponge up the rest of this place with, most of us don’t. Our entire existence, the oxygen we breathe, everything that we need, could be simply forming us into whatever we’re supposed to be next. And so yes, I’m floating in the amniotic fluid of Sophie’s Choice, either fighting the bottom line or accepting it (either way, donning a stellar Polish accent and stashing hams under my street-wear). I don’t know about you, but I get tired of fighting it, the inevitable unfolding heist of raggedy madness. No, I didn't choose between my children, throwing one, like a bone of humanity to the Nazi dogs. This false silence of optimism, that hangs on gangs of held-back tears, does not just decompose us that much more quickly, but does so while robbing us of the respectable 2.35 centimeters.

The whole point of this was not to disarm those rare, perfect roses of even one petal, it was to say that Meryl Streep is most definitely an alien. Uh-huh. You follow, I see. If identity theft is a crime, as some may say, then I don’t want to be law-abiding. In fact, we’re all probably going to exit this womb and enter the next as one of Meryl’s temperaments. Dibs on anything besides Mamma Meryl a la Mamma Mia.

Merry Christmas. Whatever the fuck that means. 

Where You'll Find Me Now

-bits from the work

"We airbrushed sunlight into our routine relations, careful only to enhance the sketches at times when our subconsciouses had shrunk away and buried themselves in the devastating mediocrity of day, by day, by yesterday. Years passed. We carried the instructions in the faded back pocket of our souls, in case we forgot to manipulate our perception into an illumination of something worth existing for. Strung-out on the constant, unquenchable feeling of something being very wrong, unsurprisingly, we removed all evidence betraying us to reason. And we would have gotten away with it. If it wasn't for the single, expired bulb that ruined the lights we had so meticulously mentally constructed for Babylon. If only we knew then, or any time before the end, that Babylon has no lights at all. It is all I think of now. But everyone was sunstruck once, then set adrift."

Christmassive Movie List:
-My Week With Marilyn
-Martha Marcy May Marlene
-Iron Lady
-Like Crazy (again)
-Melancholia
-Shame
-Something something Ryan Gosling
-Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (because I can't remember if I've seen it)

Exposed to the Elements

-bits from the work

"That's when I look up and find I'm covered in a quilted sky of postcards I would send to you. Of feelings folded and multiplied in the mutinied love we constructed on that first car ride. The postcards play the love we had been promised would come, where the smiles are tinted in the extraordinary and gel on the outskirts of wonderful. We fasten ourselves beyond the world of infinity, hiding behind the sun because the earth was too small for us anyways. And even though our blueprints disintegrated, we continued to burn and burn."

Now Playing: Ghibli's "Pythia."Before listening to the first track off this album, I had a predisposition to shuffle Ghibli in the deep end of Urban Outfitters muse ick. Tracks like "Making Out," "Bring Weed to the Cabin," "Fell Happy," and "Honest Effects," are tip-toeing on trippy musical tightropes thousands of feet above diamond mines. You never know what to expect next. 

Staring at the Sun

-bits from the work

"By the twenty-third passenger window on the midnight train I wasn't supposed to take, you asked me if I was seeing anyone and I inhaled stars, binding them in a boxed set in my respiratory machine's gathering madness and the stars' velvet aurora lights the soul strings of my soul and lights the edge of the howling window like nothing I've ever seen and without knowing it or thinking it I respond that I see you. Because I do. Somehow that stolen collection of December stars reconstructed the language of my stringed respiration so that it was unable to orchestrate quite the same, while you and I balanced elegantly on the air reserved only for triple trombones and splitters of majesty."

"A cast-away graveyard of cigarette butts and homeless hearts. We try so hard to walk, anywhere, besides the sidewalks of life. We design walkable rollercoasters, and then discover they already have a father and mother."

Natural Causes

-bits from the work

"And we came back, but yesterday was already born and had grown old amongst the wheezing, pencil-sharpening waste of our everyday youth. We came back and it was a jilted town, struggling to swallow the winding veracity of the clock that could no longer tell the high from the dry. Every building was maddeningly mud-caked in ghostly negligence. And you wonder what we did day to day. You wonder how strange it is that we left, praying to be ruined. You wonder how this one happening kept us from downfall, yet ended up falling into the eerie hopeless emptiness. Without us."

We Were Promised Jet Packs

You know that it happens, we grow old.

Between diving into the espinaca dip and deep dishing on our agreed distaste for the dirty talk diction, an old friend and I caught up over my break. It was more refreshing than applying a heavy coat of Mango Burt's Bees. And DAS refreshing. She brought up some good points. One being, that I've changed. A lot. I know I have. The pseudo anklebiter that bounced from hookah bars to musicals, high on the organic energy of life is no mo. I wish that it could be enough. But it's not anymore. Not because it's too expensive, but because once replaced, it can never be reproduced. We get older and with each passing moon, we unconsciously fold the panorama of our adolescence into origami, filling canisters with these creatures of nostalgia until they brim over. It is only then that we wake to foreign temperaments and realize we have jettisoned these sacred vessels to the moon.

I was blessed with a semi-charmed pupilage, but I somehow convinced my fool of a élan vital that along with my diplomas, I had also graduated from that part of my life, mostly scar free. Right? Riiiiiii-ong. WHERE THE FUCK IS MY DIPLOMA PROVING THAT I WAS DONE, THAT I PASSED WITH PRETTY PASTEL COLORS? Nonexistent, apparently. We're knitted armor for our adult identities, yet when we come home, they unravel with the slightest grievance. For the family is too blunt an instrument to ever stay perfectly compact.

Yesterday's Parties

"I'll go for that, and smile when I
pick sand off myself in the shower.
It is the way Scotland looks to the South,
the way we enter friends' houses
to leave what we came with, or flick
the kettle's switch and wait.
This is where I want to live,
close to where the heart gives out,
ruined, perfected, an empty arch against the sky
where birds fly through instead of prayers
while in Hoy Sound the ferry's engines thrum
this life, this life, this life."
-Andrew Greig

-bits from the work

"Everything swirling, fast, so fast, that it dwelled on seeming ingenuine. We douse the fiery, inconsequential judgements we had consciously wrapped ourselves in. And it was just us, hanging on dearly to exonerated, sputtering utterances unfettered by the bud and the stars. Faces swam past our fishbowl swoon-diving, but we only had 16-year-old, swollen eyes for each other. Each minute the last minute."

"Heart-breaker waves, I long to love but can't. Sea salt teased my nose & tongue & eyes & I succumbed to blindness. Still, I strain my ears to make out the ocean's wanderings, of secrets whispered and lost in the unconsciousness of the waves. I've followed my nose to this spot of breadcrumb trails and sorry childhood beach days. I stay that way, slow dancing in the salty film, and this is where, finally, finally, you first find me."

"After your initial reaction to the shedding, lovelorn wallpaper, you want to reach out and touch something. But everything is immaturely competing for your attention, like three forgotten children high on the prospect of wonderfully indifferent, parental praise. And when the television deepens and eventually dulls their building block blues, their hopes drop into one rainbow on the floor."