Oh, nuthin'...

I tried typing without thinking much. Here are some results.


One:

Ruminating over your favorites, marinating my soul in yours.

I am a mystery seeker. All paths lead

somewhere. My brain takes flight into the darkness, to where half-formed, half-seen, half-discovered realms be.

Reality dissolves into insignificance

in the face of fantasy.

Each:

Paragraph, sentence word, phoneme, motion, gesture, lift of an eyebrow
contains a nearly unending tunnel of possibilities, all awaiting my hopeful, sickly optimistic assembly.


T'other:

A sickly soft voice, shriveled and bound in love-coated malice

wraps and warps crying “Fragility!”

Each breath a shield, the exhaust of anger folded and tucked away

for future use.

Overflown, tops are skimmed off and released in exasperation.

Solutions (convictions) taunt just out of reach.

Car hum. Familiar dreary landscape.


And yet another:

“WHY?”

demands puddled marrow, seeping through splintered bone,

crushed by the dark and stifling sky.

Illusions (thin and fragile as a soap bubble on a friendly nose)

burst into a tiny chorus of condemnors--

suspicions inescapable, accusations unspeakable.

Night presses heavy on unready bones.

Remember when...

...I said I would occasionally post favorite poems? Here is Channel Crossing by Sylvia Plath.

---

On storm-struck deck, wind sirens caterwaul;
With each tilt, shock and shudder, our blunt ship
Cleaves forward into fury; dark as anger,
Waves wallop, assaulting the stubborn hull.
Flayed by spray, we take the challenge up,
Grip the rail, squint ahead, and wonder how much longer

Such force can last; but beyond, the neutral view
Shows, rank on rank, the hungry seas advancing.
Below, rocked havoc-sick, voyagers lie
Retching in bright orange basins; a refugee
Sprawls, hunched in black, among baggage, wincing
Under the strict mask of his agony.

Far from the sweet stench of that perilous air
In which our comrades are betrayed, we freeze
And marvel at the smashing nonchalance
Of nature : what better way to test taut fiber
Than against this onslaught, these casual blasts of ice
That wrestle with us like angels; the mere chance

Of making harbor through this racketing flux
Taunts us to valor. Blue sailors sang that our journey
Would be full of sun, white gulls, and water drenched
With radiance, peacock-colored; instead, bleak rocks
Jutted early to mark our going, while sky
Curded over with clouds and chalk cliffs blanched

In sullen light of the inauspicious day.
Now, free, by hazard's quirk, from the common ill
Knocking our brothers down, we strike a stance
Most mock-heroic, to cloak our waking awe
At this rare rumpus which no man can control :
Meek and proud both fall; stark violence

Lays all walls waste; private estates are torn,
Ransacked in the public eye. We forsake
Our lone luck now, compelled by bond, by blood,
To keep some unsaid pact; perhaps concern
Is helpless here, quite extra, yet we must make
The gesture, bend and hold the prone man's head.

And so we sail toward cities, streets and homes
Of other men, where statues celebrate
Brave acts played out in peace, in war; all dangers
End : green shores appear; we assume our names,
Our luggage, as docks halt our brief epic; no debt
Survives arrival; we walk the plank with strangers.

---

My favorites are the "smashing nonchalance of nature" and the "rare rumpus which no man can control". She doesn't romanticize or pretend prettiness, and I really like that there is somehow more comfort in the insignificance experienced in the face of wilderness than in the "cities, streets, and homes of other men".

Devilish

In front of our hotel is a little round-about type driveway for curbside service, separated from the rest of the parking lot by a planter-barrier, about three and half feet tall. If you're walking up from the side, it poses no problem, but if you're coming straight from the front (as I was, on my way back from Pizza Hut) you have to walk an extra fifteen or so feet to get around it. I wasn't in the mood to waste steps, so i hopped up on top and walked across.

From an onlooking tour-mate: "Oh Kevvy, only you."
"What?"
"Just... Anyone else probably would have just walked around."
"That's because anyone else is a bureaucratic retard."

Exeunt.

Spiraly, spiraly, spiraly trees....

Strega Nona has entered its final, four-week, mid-western leg. The finish line is in sight.

I’m still depressed.

I have spurts of joy, but it is the wild, careless, devilish kind of joy—grounded in rage, but with overtones of sarcasm and misanthropy. Not the silliness, contentment, and love that I feel around my handful of close friends. Not Home.

“We’ve spent so much time together, we’re like a family now!”
Au contraire, amalgamate castmate, we are co-workers who can’t escape each other.

If you didn’t know (which isn’t unlikely), I auditioned for some BFA acting programs this year. I have been accepted by SUNY Purchase’s acting conservatory, which was one of my top choices and will probably be attending in the fall. The initial excitement of just being accepted (they’re quite selective and it’s something I think I should be proud of—eighteen out of about a thousand get in) quickly gave way to weird apprehensions. I like the East Coast in general, and New York City in specific, but how long will the big city novelty last? If touring has taught me one thing, it’s that in the end, it’s not as much about where you are as who you’re with. Of course, I would actually be staying in one place at Purchase, providing more opportunity to form meaningful friendships, so that point is mostly moot. The uncertainty remains.

“New people aren’t any better than the old ones. I bet they almost never are,” says George to Emily in Our Town, as he explains why he would rather stay in Grover’s Corners with her than go off to agriculture school in the fall. My rare close friendships are so special to me. If I manage to form new, meaningful connections, might the already established ones diminish in importance, shriveling, maybe eventually crumbling?
If I manage.

The other possibility is that I would feel as isolated and mordant as I am now.



Through most of elementary school, I loved the Animorphs series. In the books, a race of slug-like alien parasites has slowly been taking over humanity, oozing into people’s ears, then flattening over their brains and taking complete control of their bodies. A small group of teenagers, who have gained the ability to morph into different animals from another, much kinder alien race, are the only people who can stop them. What struck me about these books was the idea of a few odd-ball kids trying to navigate a world where anyone could turn out to be a mindless vessel for an intergalactic colonialist slug. Our heroes and heroines referred to their adversaries not as The Yeerks, but as them. Third-person objective collective pronoun, italicized.

I did then and still do feel sometimes like there is a massive, inclusive community of people with a similar knowledge of etiquette, pop-culture, trends, fuck if I know what else, all with the ability to interact happily and believe the same lies, THAT I AM NOT A PART OF. At home I am spoiled so by people with a similar brand of cynicism and distrust for the mainstream that when I get to know others, I am often surprised by how seriously they take this petty little world of theirs. I am able to make polite conversation, and occasionally enjoy the company of Yeerk-vessels, but I wouldn’t be able to handle being surrounded by them for nine months of each of the next four years.

Isolated. Mordant.

I find satisfaction in finding very precise words to describe my moods. It’s somewhat of an indemnification for negative moods, but I would so much rather find satisfaction in the precision of: placid, lustful, vivacious, wistful, untouchable, kiddish. Anything, really.

Other words are imprecise, and can shape-shift based on usage. My cast-mates call me strange sometimes—I am a novelty, interesting to observe, but in the end made up of unfounded opinions and nonsensical actions. My friends call me strange sometimes—I am unique, surprising, out of place, but justified in thought and action. The word strange can carry an air of reverence that makes one feel as if they’ve found something nearly invisible, but truer and more meaningful than what most others find.
I like my people like I like my trees. Spiraly.

Dream:

Sarah, Alex, Lauren, Lindsay and I were accompanying my mom to see some lame musical act. I made an off-hand remark about how they were going to be performing at Coachella this year. Mom asked what Coachella was. We shuffled our feet and explained it as kind of like Strawberry Festival but different.

"Oh, I'd like to go to that," she said.
"I don't know mom. It's much more crowded and there's a lot louder music and stuff."
What I was trying to say is that parents aren't allowed.

In order to break the tension we abandoned her to perform a high-speed parking lot shuffle. We were at Ponderosa park btw. I was somehow separated from the pack. Alex took this opportunity to throw a sheet of grass at me. For a moment I thought it was cat-shit. Everyone was running except Lauren, who just kind of glided. I noticed how small she was and how her speaking voice was so cool.