Archive for the ‘ Love ’ Category

If I could

I want to sleep. I have a lot on my mind though.

I have not slept well often in the last several years. Post traumatic stress is a motherfucker on your subconscious.

I have special people to me, in my life, that suffer it’s awful effects. I wish that I were able to take all of their pain and make it my own so that they would no longer have to worry about the next minute, hour, day.

I know that I am strong, I don’t think that any of them are weak, it’s more that I know I was given broad shoulders and that I’d gladly carry their portion of the burden for them, even for just a little while.

Long enough for them to be able to reach deep and find a genuine smile. Some laughter amid the pain, hope rising from the ashes.

I wish I could.

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High-Jacked

What is there to say.

That’s a statement, not a question.

In some ways I think these long absences of I from writing in these very public blogs that only a few people know of are what generate the things I have to say.

I tend to speak inwardly more than outwardly. One of those things I still work on.

I have had odd premonitions at times throughout my life. My “danger sense” has been honed to a very fine edge.

I don’t like what I can feel coming, I know it’s going to be bad.

I don’t know how I know these things. I just do.

Hmmmm, seems my original intent for this post has been hijacked for an ephemeral feeling – fleeting yet so sure.

Can’t Quite

I am sometimes confusing. Confused and/or confusion.

I wonder what goes unsaid. I wonder what is between the lines I read and why those words aren’t in bold.

I wonder often of late at my complete inability to concentrate.

I am in a place, a place I don’t want to be, surrounded by people I do not particularly care for and some of whom I fervently wish I’d never met.

I think that the world is sometimes very dark.

I sometimes hear a sentence in my mind, a line from a book I once loved:

“…holding their swords with the ease of trained warriors and the sorrow of awakened dreamers…”

I identified with that line long before I was a trained warrior – I’ve always held the sorrow of an awakened dreamer just beneath the surface, where it is invisible to onlookers.

I prefer it so, I know not (now) why.

I am sometimes unquantifiable; I cross lines, blur boundaries, I am an odd amalgamate of often mutually exclusive qualities – I am the exception to many rules.

I don’t quite know what to make of that.

Right this moment there are more people on the planet running than were living a thousand years ago.

There’s a website called reddit – you may have heard of it.

At any rate I read a comment about running that resonates and I thought I’d share it:

This is sort of how I started running too. When my life was falling apart and I thought nothing else could go right I started going to the gym to force myself into something social everday. Just to interact with people. Just to do SOMETHING.
And then I started running. And then it started being about me. And that feeling. And the act. And how free it was. How independent. How strong. How I didn’t have to hold back anything like I did with the rest of the world. On the treadmill, on the trails, on the track, in my running shoes I was allowed to be raw anger and pain and frustration and loneliness and strength, too, because fuck the world that doesn’t think it takes strength to be alone.
Fast forward six months – my first 5k. Six more – half marathon. A year – marathon. I’m still the only one I know who’s done it. I’m about to start training for the triathlon. And yeah, I like my body a lot better now, not so much because of the way it looks but because it is a powerful, independent, free extension of the strength I carry and I can show that any time.
So you, more power to you. Run. Run for as long as it makes you happy. There’s nothing like that first ten miler that you take in the middle of the night without your phone or telling anyone where you went and you think it’s never going to end and when you finally finish your legs are fucked for the next three days, but fuckitall if it wasn’t worth it.
Running’s like that. Welcome to the family.

Actual post on reddit with comment.

A little off-topic but ever in my heart and thoughts – to my best friend holding down that bar, keeping my seat open: I’ll see you again someday buddy, but not yet.
David R. Greenslade
Kandahar City, Afghanistan
04/08/07

Where do I begin?

As the title says…at any rate 2012 is almost gone and it has been a year filled with both normalcy and insanity.

I rather like that.

I deleted my Facebook. Absolutely liberating that.

I dissolved the LLC I was partnered in, the short of the long – my partner never held up anything remotely resembling a fraction of a portion of a workload.

But out of that experience came my company. I’ve begun to build it ground up; bootstraps firmly held. Only gravity holds my feet on the ground these days it seems.

I’m learning several new programming languages concurrently…I wish I could say that it were easy to do so, but it’s real work.

I’ve thought rather intensely when I’ve got some free time about the major events of my life, many of which have been the kinds of things that can break people.

I tend to jump back and forth on the idea that things happen for a reason. If you asked me today I’d tell you that they do, and that they have built me into something that can take almost any hit right on the chin and grin through it.

Somedays I feel it more than others but I’m still looking up and that is pure encouragement.

I’m building worlds, some with words, some with pixels but I’m making dreams real, my own for the moment and hopefully someday I’ll be able to build it into something so big it can make other people’s dreams become real and tangible – to make those secret hopes they cling to in the deepest hidey-holes in their hearts become their lives.

I know that in person I can “come off” as arrogant, egotistical, hard, irreverent and sometimes (more than) a little crazy.

I am wild. I am unapologetic. I am the me I am because I was molded by time and experiences: in that I am just like you.

Underneath all of that still lives the little boy that looked up into the night sky and dreamt of setting foot on the planets that orbited those visible stars.

Well, failing that, the man that encapsulates that boy will do his best to bring those stars down here where we can all marvel at them.

Exhilarate/Annihilate

Inhale.

Life flows through me; something awakens within, something ephemeral and barely tangible. It almost doesn’t register on my consciousness.

My heartbeat skips and flutters, something tickles my mind.

Exhale.

Synapses fire, my pulse is pounding in my mind like drumbeats.

Drums, drums in the deep.

Inhale.

I cannot find words. There are none. I sincerely cannot think.

Exhale.

For the first time in my life I realize that I don’t need to be able to describe something to know that it is real:

“I read once that the ancient Egyptians had fifty words for sand and the Eskimos had a hundred words for snow. I wish I had a thousand words for love, but all that comes to mind is the way you move against me while you sleep and there are no words for that.”

-Brian Andreas

Inhale…

Clarifying

Insomnia.

When you have insomnia you’re never really asleep but you’re never really awake either.

I don’t sleep well, I never have. I don’t keep what one might call regular hours and I’ve learned to function productively on very little rest.

Sometimes, just sometimes, I can sleep for more than a few hours at a time.

I think that this post is going to be a bit more about the mundane parts of my life. I’ve got a headache and that’s not really conducive to exploring the things I generally like to discuss here.

I still feel compelled to write though, even when my thoughts are moving at the speed of cold sap. That’s actually weirdly encouraging.

My back hurts. I pulled a muscle in my lower back a week or so ago. Pretty much awful, I’ve never had back problems so rather naturally I was unprepared for just how limited your world becomes when you can’t tie your own shoes.

I’m stuck at the dividing line between the end of one novel and the beginning of the next. Foggy, gray area you have become my home.

My poor beaten up civic has been acting oddly all week, maybe it’s sympathy pangs, that car and I have been through a lot together. Side note on that: I have, since my first ride at sixteen, named my cars after early twentieth-century starlets.

Strange? Maybe.

That scene in the first matrix movie when Smith is having a bit of a breakdown interrogating Morpheus is close to the surface. I must escape this place and in this mind is a key, my key.

I am seriously going a little crazy since I can’t run. I need to run. It’s something that I don’t think I can really live without.

This annoying injury makes me feel old. I’m not a fan of that feeling in any way. I will say this though; still no gray. Not much leaves marks on me, yeah I’ve got some (fairly serious) scars but I’ve earned every single one of them.

I think that my blog has been far too serious and somewhat depressing for a while now. I hardly ever write down the things that make me happy, or any of those things that make me laugh. When there are days between posts you can be certain that I was smiling enough that I didn’t need to write through anything.

I think that I need to change that.

Here’s something. Sandwiches. I freakin love sandwiches. Probably my favorite food. I love bread, and cheese, do not get me started on cheese. Sandwiches have an endless variety in terms of fillers and condiments. One can never be bored with a sandwich if that sandwich has been properly made.

This is from a conversation I had today about cheese and sandwiches, it illustrates my views perfectly:

Cheese is the most important part of a sandwich – adding both flavor and texture and also getting another food group into your hand…that being said, I think it’s chief virtue is that it provides a stable platform for condiment deployment.

I tend take an engineers view on sandwich construction. Probably because my undergrad/grad roommate was an ME guy. And handy with a grill.

But I digress, I’m quite happy right now. I want to get back out of Ohio like no other, (why did I ever come back here again?) and I really really want to tie my shoes again but other than that life is quite good. I do like to explore some serious concepts here, but a large percentage of the time I’ve already worked through it by the time I finish a post. Sometimes I don’t even post them, unless it’s something I think might help someone else or provoke some discussion. I just delete them after I’m done because the act of writing it down solved whatever it was that I was dealing with and I no longer have a need to share it. For example there is a post sitting in my upload cue dated February twenty-eighth.

As for the concept I brought up in my last post, I’ll get to that after I’ve gotten some sleep. I will say this though, right at this exact moment my heart sleeps under a starlit sky, the beat of a desert night keeping its rhythm.

Quest-ions v2

A conclusion has been drawn and redrawn among the people that know best, and that conclusion is that I do not feel feelings.

This is more or less true at most times. For a large part of my life I had thought that feelings were a weakness (how very Sith of me, I know) but I’ve been learning, and relearning that there is a peculiar strength that lies in that weakness. Perhaps even intrinsically tied to it.

Therein lies the question.

How does being weak make one strong? This question excites the social-scientist in me. However, my socio-cultural research was almost always confined to the fringes of the societies I studied.

Deviance in all of its forms is qualitatively exciting, I always have questions for people that are considered ‘deviant’ by their culture. It is most likely a function of the ‘why?’ part of my personality.

At any rate, I am digressing and talking about myself instead of the question. I thought about it, ruminating furiously. I decided that this particular question is one of pure conjecture, perfectly subjective.

There exists no paradigm for testing it. Therefore it can be explored only with opinion…ugh philosophy…sure philosophy sounds good on paper but really? How useful is a philosopher in any crisis? Unless that crisis involves a poorly deduced fallacy or a badly designed Venn diagram…not much. Again, I digress.

So really, how does being weak lead to strength?

That’s not a rhetorical question. Input pleeeeeeease and thankya.

And I’ll tell you, in a post not-yet-as-written, what I’ve come up with.

Призрак

Призрак means ‘ghost’ in Russian. Pronounced: prizrak

Sometimes I feel like one. Especially as I have truly begun to be able to let those little stressors, and the big ones, go. The ability to consciously choose what matters and what does not, to let what does not just slide by without feeling it.

Ghosting through my life, like a wraith; invisible thoughts that never cross my face.

Sometimes you just have be, without thought or reason.

I constantly remind myself that we have such a brief time in this place, too brief to dance to someone else’s beat. There will come a time in everyones lives that they will just have to say: f*ck it.

Be yourself, smile, be as happy as you can because who knows if you’ll ever come this way again.

Life is awesome today. And it will be everyday, even when it isn’t.

Chew on that for a while.

Slip

I’ve got my hand on the rail, holding on so hard my fingers are cramping, my grip – so seemingly sure – begins to slip.