ok so, i mean, we can't end it on that note. there is redemption, after all, but our underground man hasn't been delivered yet.

so he wakes up in a field, and he says "i have faith, the faith that conquers all understanding." he's reached the end of his string, and his tumultuous affair with discord comes to an end. Or rather, the cancer recedes, allowing him to exist, to live his life, though, ironically, both it and him live to fight another day, each demanding their respective partials from the whole of his existence.

i am smart, but you cannot trust me, my words, i am too self-conscious. but im not that aware of how intelligent i am, i promise. its all a farce, i insist- the neurotic thing, i put it on, just a sham, nothing more than an average intelligence exists behind these eyes. there's nothing here for you, really, im not that smart. the only reason i can write this way is because i drank 2 cups of coffee at 9 oclock this morning. no, really, im not that smart. please dont tell me that, i dont need to know that. but i do believe it about myself, but i did not need you to tell me. ive always known. i know im attractive too, but im a little overweight, but please dont tell me that, its all a sham, and i really dont know, im hideously ugly and i play neurotic just to get a reaction because i want to be perceived as a good writer because i dont want to be alone. i know that i wont be alone, though, because i am a attractive person and you will grant me social graces that you will not grant my unattractive counterpart. i will not be lonely because i do not play neurotic around you. i act normal on purpose. i know how to be social. but you would like me anyway, or atleast have a natural predisposition towards liking me, because i am a nice boy who you feel safe around. i pretend we are best friends, and there is nothing you do not know about me. I know that you're a tight-ass so i play the fool around you so that i can laugh to myself and make myself feel that i possess a certain type of unmatched wit so that you will like me, or perhaps so that i will like myself, because, after all, i need to laugh too. i pretend to agree with your horrendously shallow observations about the world in order to fake a level of continuity that was never there. i was searching for someone who understood so i said yes youre right, but deep down i still thought that i was smarter than you. i thought that i was right. but i played the stupid around you so we could be stupid together, and i wanted you to think i was smart so that you would like me so that i could demonstrate my intellectual superiority over you through my amazing rhetoric. and i would write too- these brilliant essays on my opinions of the world- how they were unique and differentiated from my peers, and then i would win awards for these essays, and then i would write essays about how accomplished my essays were, but i would try to downplay it, but i wouldnt downplay it that much, because to really fake humility you have to own it just a little. and then i would write an essay about faking my own humility, and throw everything into question by making you think that i had deceived you into thinking that i was not only a moderately humble human being, but that i actually believed in virtue of humility itself, and thought it somehow attainable. but then you may think me a total nihilist and deconstructionist- that is a part i can play, yes, i can do it, and i will convince you, but you will be shocked when you find out just how wide, just how deep does human deception exist in the level of potential, and it exists in every human being. but see i am getting too smart again, i am expositing, which is what smart people too (and really smart people say that smart people exposit things) and i cannot get too smart or exposit too much, for all my friends would leave me because they cannot understand me, or perhaps they think my ego is overinflated, and i am trying to prove to them that i am smart by writing these silly little essays about god knows what and publishing them in these ridiculously terrible college newspapers. ive run out of things to say about myself, but you must forgive me, there is no one else that i know so well. i tried one time to get to know someone, but she wouldnt let me in. i was smart for a while, but i then i tried dumb, i tried emotional, i think i was, but i wanted her to think me smart so that she would let me get to know her so that she would be with me so that i did not have to be lonely, but it did not work, so i had to come up with some new roles. do you like them?

To drown you must become an addict.

Perhaps God says, "surround yourself in vice for shit's sake. it's for the sake of hearing." I mean, contrariness perhaps, contrariness aside for its vain rebelliousness, it is the present dispensation, is it not? Drown in sound. Become a bug, as Kafka says, because looming deep inside your soul is the mind of the same 15-year old attention-whoring slut who you used to look at with such vexed disdain because you could not understand how she got into such a fucked up position. She is a public beast, we are private. "I've got out at last," she says as she tramples over you to get to the door.

But when you take a knife to your own arm, you might feel it. I mean, you would have to "feel" it one way of the other- it's a multi-sensory experience. At least if you can't feel it, you can see it. Perhaps you can even smell it. But that's not really what she's interested in, is it? "For socialism is not merely the labour question," Dostoyevsky writes, "it is before all things the atheistic question."

We've got to get him to respond- come down out of the clouds, illicit a response, as it were. It's already too loud, but we must make it louder- unavoidable. The whole creation groans, you see, she's screaming "fuck," how could you not know that this is what she is saying? Yet her skin only gets thicker, but to thin it out it must get thicker.

So the white noise of man's disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree, our own creation, swells perpetually, and indeed it must, and indeed it should, as we will continue to cut ourselves deeper and deeper until we hear a voice from the heavens.

"Godot will not come today, will he?"

"No sir, not today, but perhaps tomorrow."

"Nothing to be done, then, nothing to be done."

a story

It all took place in an unsteady time- a time in which perceptions and loyalties and identities avoid constancy, and the threat of leaving a place in which you once felt as though you could potentially have everything but to which time was allowed the opportunity to take hold of, forcing you to accept the possibility that you may leave with nothing, or no one.

The first time, she said, "I am not able to be strong on my own." So he initiated the arduous process of forcing death upon a thing not yet born, and he wounded it into submission and infancy within the confines of his subconscious, and kept it deep in his basement underneath dozens of unpacked boxes. And there it remained throughout the winter.

But when spring came, the rays of the sun penetrated deep into the caverns of his basement, and, one day, to his amazement, he discovered a green stem buried between several stacks of old books. It was the stem of that same seed, and it had started to grow. Believe me, it caught him quite off guard when he saw it. In fact, it startled him so much that he took a step back, and he questioned to himself whether what he was seeing was actually real.

Because, you see, he still didn't know much about her, but when you see that a girl's been crying all alone in the library, you ask if she's ok.

And so, for the moment, the weather was getting warmer, and the plant continued to grow as its sprouting leaves reached desperately towards the source of its life. It was then that the boy began to remember and realize that he had not completely destroyed the plant back in the fall, and suddenly began to realize that he couldn't really destroy the plant at all, even if he wanted to. The plant, in all its tenderness, made him feel terribly human, and he became suddenly aware of how it connected him to emotions he had forced under the surface for a long time.

Immediately he got a lamp and started unpacking all the closed boxes and rustling through the stacks of old books, all the while watching the plant, uncertain whether or not it would continue to grow.

And then, almost as suddenly as it had sprung up, in the middle of May, the plant died. The boy didn't know what to do, and he talked and cried, and was unsure of how he wanted his pain to be perceived by those around him. For, in some sense, he knew that he would be fine; he had lived years and years without this flower, or any plant, come to think of it, and he had not died. But the boy did not particularly want to go back to his life before the plant, a life in which he had suppressed his loneliness and need for other people, and retreated deeply into the shelter of his own bedroom. The fact was the plant had made him suddenly aware of both his emotions and his pride- he could actually feel now, and, even if all he felt was pain at the loss of his dearly loved plant, it was certainly better than feeling nothing at all. He struggled to understand what he should do, and he even worried when he started to feel ok, because this, for him, felt as though to some degree he was losing his humanity again, and would be forced to accept the numbness necessary to exist completely alone in this world. He wondered whether he would have to painfully repack all those old boxes, and restack all those old books, and he wondered whether he would have the patience to wait for things that were never promised, and whether or not he would, ultimately, die alone in this world, without any plant there to give him life.

writing

i know that they know they think they know how i am going to sound, but i know that they cant know. how can i lower their expectations?

does honesty equal beauty?

there's a lot of people in the room tonight, and theyre people i know, and im going to share a very private thing with them, and im scared its not going to be beautiful.

right now i need this. i need to have nothing, so that i cannot lose, but even more so that i can feel.

i need to feel. if i can feel i can feel into that note that i wrote.

the words on the page.

am i any good? or, in the words of conor oberst, is everything ive written cheap...and trite....and false?

am i ok with these words? uncertainty. bleed in me humility.

where did i go?

self-conscious speculation

in the crowds,

and you dont know

the level in which i scare myself.

But, Jesus, please calm me down. peace, right now, is my friend. peace is not the enemy. is peace ever the enemy? is melancholy the enemy? Jesus please calm me down. I have need of you.

im tired of knowing that when i wake up tomorrow, i will be just fine.

im trying to cry, but i cant force tears.

cultural nostalgia in a place ive never been- its not just the language, there's an intangible here- a house that is a coffeehouse on a Christian school campus. Im experiencing nostalgia in a place ive never been because i recognize the potential that my life could have happened here, and i see the effects of looking through the lens of the life of a friend whose life did happen here. So he experiences spatial nostalgia, and i experience cultural nostalgia on his behaf.