At this point last year I was telling you very same readers that I would like to use words to be happy, even though I might fail. “Then, at least”, I said, “I might know what’s going on”.
Rest assured fellow Sevenians, I still have absolutely no idea what’s going on. Actually, considerably less. All I know for sure is that I still love the people I love, and am tired of those who tire me. I still mean what I say, even if I don’t always say what I mean. I still burn with passion, and I’m still worried about whether I’m burning a renewable fuel source there or if age will dim me. But since just about everyone I know shares such knowings of themselves, it doesn’t bring us closer to just what the hell we’re all doing.
So instead of thinking about what I’m doing, or worse, what I’m going to have to go through in this brittle bitch of a stunning sunrise new year, I’m going to think about the safety of the old. I’m going to relish in what’s already gone on, because there’s not really much question there.
Preamble satisfactorily having strained the uninterested masses, we’ll get to it, as I present:
The Highlights of ‘Round Here’ for 2006
A beginners guide to my emotional line graph, featuring the best of the anger, contentment, confusion and staggering boredom that encapsulated my year. 22, 416 words condensed for your reading pleasure.
JANUARY
Catch, 22. Ah, you fucking dropped it.
Lately I’ve been busy.
as Joyce Cary said,
“The saddest thing is that we don’t know what we don’t know, and the more a man thinks he knows, the less he does.”
I find that everyone has one really interesting obscure place where they like to be touched, and for everyone’s it’s slightly different.
I should make an absentee list each day of people I should be seeing or talking to and not.
The more time I spend in this place of my head, the more I like the way you look from where I’m standing.
FEBRUARY
I am a spandex WARRIOR!
But then it’s picnics and whence-you-friendship all over again and we buy bigger padlocks to shut ourselves out. We say, “Well, I’ve learnt that lesson, I won’t open these doors again,” and every day we find ourselves kicking a few inches more sand off the raw earth where we buried the keys.
I have been worried about the present. The future is so far away and I have done what I have done, I make no apologies for that, but right now I could be changing what I’m doing, I could be a better or worse person, those decisions are now, that person is me, I’m not thinking about what I’ll become. Which means in this instant I’m not talking to people I could, not writing the sort of wonderful evocative things you want, to dance around you with little shitfest multi-syllable biting cynic’s eyes. I’m just lonely, a little tired, sitting in front of a computer screen and changing nothing, becoming nothing, reflecting over what? This? Hardly. Something like Valentines Day.
The storm rolls in! Cresting, furtive waves of pounding power, wreaks thunderous damage, sowing what we reap.
I don’t know what to say.
I wrote that last post after a phone conversation I never expected to have, which was nothing like I expected its unexpected existence to be.
MARCH
That trying to be the one who shared the long forgotten ashen trees with you, or whatever those trees were for you, is as useless as trying to go back there now.
So we have this group of largely repulsively ugly men, in various states of slave ownership, drug and alcohol abuse, womanizing and building the greatest damn democracy the world has ever seen, and they are known by nothing but what we place upon them.
I’m such a total prick. I just made that up. Why the fuck would I care about Philadelphia or what’s in it anyway? But you believed me, and that’s what’s important.
APRIL
I have touched the stars and they did nothing but burn my hands.
Fear I am alienating those close to me.
Never fall in love if it can be otherwise helped. It’s very similar to falling in-definitely, only just when you kid yourself into thinking it’s flying, you find that definite bit.
MAY
And it is! The heart is a hunter, not a victim, it isn’t broken, it does the breaking. The spearing.
Live lonely sweet lover of my night, your hacked-up rose bush will live on.
Let the readers do their thing. I won’t hoist my ideology rudely on to your carapaces.
I would rather die, than not be relevant. You don’t have to be right, you just need to be relevant. Terima kasih
JUNE
I’m actually kind of proud of all the cold hearted things that I have done. I know a lot of people who disagree. I’m guilty with lack of guilt.
You know in that movie with Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson… ah I forget the name… well there’s this bit where they’re Instant Messaging after they’ve broken up, and Jack types “I Miss you”, then erases it letter by letter, and it’s sad not because Diane’s character never knows he typed that, but because we audience know he did. And that thoughtful, weary, deletion of emotion is EXACTLY how I feel right now.
Crows just can’t take down elephants, it’s an obvious fact. But by giving up, they would be wiped out. This means they are fighting a war they will never be able to win, only prolong, and are choosing to do so. Neither the elephants nor the crows can decide if this is ignoble, but I can see it deep inside one elephant’s left eye that she believes it is. That eye, however, was one pecked out by crows, so it may be biased.
Like a drowning man remembering all that he did wrong to the one woman he loved, crying silently kilometers undersea, Hold, everyone. Hold.
JULY
I am ambling through oceans of Mineral Water,
So let us drink to health.
I am scrambling through acres of wheatgrass,
But I can still see the sky.
EAT THE DAMN PIE YOU BAKED.
AUGUST
“I thought we still weren’t speaking… after the incident.”
“Oh Benny, you must hardly know me! I knew what I was getting into when I started dating her, and besides, you both promised that was a crazy drunken one-off.”
“Quite.”
“Not speaking to you!? Have I ever not spoken to anyone?”
“I suppose not and hey, look! Someone’s throwing up in that suit of armor!”
Five rules a man must live by!
Lacking Apologies
Fine Dining
Improper Passion
Lonely Success
And Supplementary Substances.
SEPTEMBER
So he rode it up and down a few times because he felt obliged to use; it’s fucking sad to see a good thing go to waste.
No one would read Bukowski if they thought everyone got him. What’s the fucking point? It’s a club people want to belong to, like owning a diamond, because it’s not worth shit unless they know how great it is other people are ‘sadly’ missing out on this awesome heart-satisfying poop on stick.
OCTOBER
He had been stroked, he had been hugged by whatever force your belief upholds, he had been loved as a single life for a moment by something greater, and he grew saddened.
Rob, I am in love with you,
Mandy admitted over the phone.
And because there is no answer to such words,
Words left him.
Alone.
Brenda, help me, I’ve fallen into myself. There’s me all down my shirt. How rancid.
If a car drives down a road and no one’s around to see it, is it there? If a person lives their life and no one’s around to care, do they exist?
NOVEMBER
Uh, I feel like I’m locked in a shop window, where a whole bunch of fat old women wander by and say “oh, and wouldye lookit thart” but nobody wants to buy. The price-tag is too high, and besides, the shop’s never open. Really, you’d have to break in and steal me.
Why’d you wanna live here anyway? For the people and for the sky. What’s so special about our people? They live under your sky.
We will hate and love ourselves for acres and lines into the eternal present, but it is now. Now we can do what will be now later, and only we can. ONLY US.
When I find the place where I am needed, but free to give myself as I please, that is my home. When I find the person who does not need me, but will have me none the less, they may stay in my home for as long as they please. And when everyone I know and meet realizes that I do not demand from them, that they are not mine to need, but at the same time are assured I will always provide, that I am open and alive, that I do not the hold the world against me embraced merely live and love like a wind through and over it, when those that I love know for sure that I love them, in no need of reminder or return, when I stand and realize that there is only myself to blame for my actions, and only myself to rule my future, when I know that I need nobody, and yet love people none the less, and when they long for that need I am able to reassure them, when the world does not beg, but applauds when scraps are thrown un-called for, when I can find an island in the sea between forever locked and forever adrift, when I can be that island, then I will be free
DECEMBER
When we were together, I thought I was a wolf. One of a special species, distinct in our solitude and bond. Now that she’s dead, I feel more like a buffalo; still alone, but an empty kind of alone, like I’d lost the things that defined me, and those things were other. The only of an extinct species, riding vainly across the mid-western plains because that’s where Hollywood last sighted me.
We are charged by existence with our own satisfaction, and the way we live can not just be letting ourselves down - but letting down life itself.
I will tell stories the likes of which the world has never dreamt of. That might make me feel better.
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And so y’all see… we end on exactly the same note we started on. My words have not brought me security, nor to feel better, but they are all spilt here before you none the less. All that hate, all those loves, the lost people, the gained moments, the ominous rolling cloud bank that built and waned like a dancing ink blot.
To the women, you know who you are, LIVE! To the men, and y’all know who you are. Please let my women live. And to the rest of you, who, like me, don’t know who you are, let us be as the man who made a contract with God and keep on doing what works for us until it doesn’t.
Run the canyon friends, for the 6th year has been a canyon. And every time I think, my stomach falls away and I can’t think anymore. I have to wallow in the past. I have to steel myself for what I must become. What I must do. And it’s a cold and powerful prospect.
“I feel sorry for him because cared more about revenge than he did about her.”
At what point do we forsake what we believe in for the people we believe in? When does an idea become just a thought, and a human being become so much more, a unique, thrilling, fulfilling reason to think big. I have such faith in my purpose and my ideas. It really gets inside me when they’re challenged.
It was a good year. It was the best of times, and of course, it were the others too.
Forgive me.
