Some People Have The Ability To Manufacture Reality For Others.

So... I woke up and thought

Being aware of your own internal life and spending time there makes you remember that others possess an internal life as well.

This has the side effect of wanting to make sure the world is gentler.

Half naked. 

Arms raised like some prophet preachin’ what nobody wanted to hear

but I bleed for ‘em 

so they love me

Get punched. 

Get kicked. 

The more it hurts 

The more they feel it 

that stuff people think is the holy spirit. 

Tightness in the chest 

need bed rest 

but the show must go on 

the roar of the diabetic souls 

that in the night 

tell me not to mix those two things 

gets me through another one. 

Fly to victory 

and then the waiting room. 

Mid-July

On a summer night in mid-July

the asphalt cools from the day’s baking

and a man recovers from a day that ends in y.

Legs crossed on the floor like when he was a kid

Window is ajar and the breeze is sweet mercy.

Mercy hard to come by

even in mid-July

if you live long enough.

Money

from my blood, my sweat, my crazy 

deposited in the bank account 

of somebody in another ZIP code

in the months I used to just chill back in the day. 

Back in the day is what feels okay 

Back in the day to make ‘em spend their pay 

to make ‘em feel like they used to 

before things got sinister and weird 

and too damn expensive 

and not worth it 

back when it was all in front of ‘em 

and lookin’ like a shiny kingdom of love and sugar

What the fuck do I call this?

If you know where the dream ends, you’re being watched. 

If you can find the seams, the stuff you jerk off to that you don’t tell anyone about is being written down by a government agent who is slowly falling in love with you. 

You make the nipples of their soul hard enough to cut diamonds. 

I clear my throat, “Look. This is bullshit. See, the beginning of wisdom is being able to tell where the dream ends while at higher frequencies. If you can do that, shit will be less scary.” 

See. There were moments here. Undeniably. Some of it was bullshit. Maybe most of it was bullshit but some of it was not a dream. Sometimes I heard right. Sometimes I heard just right. 

That song I know. That I heard somewhere. One time. 

Yo man. I don’t know how I feel about that song thing, man. 

This is garbage, isn’t it? 

Maybe. There were moments though. 

There were moments you thought I kinda had it. 

Maybe. 

Maybe. 

Maybe. 

The audacity. 

to try to utter the unutterable. 

Holy shit, I better stay in my lane, right? 

The crowd builds messiahs. 

Nobody is insane enough to believe that about themselves unless they are high 24/7. 

I don’t gotta worry about that though. 

I’m not that good. 

This though. 

This is courage. 

If you tried. Fuck. That’s cheesy. Good night. You know what I’m getting at though, right? 

Seriously though. Good night. 

Tuesday

I woke up before my alarm today. Damn. Isn’t that a sentence that just grabs your attention? You want to keep reading, don’t you? You gotta start somewhere. I woke up way before my alarm. I could have gone back to sleep but I decided to just get the hell out of bed. I wanted some extra time to fill up my tank. Having to stop for gas when you’re in a hurry gives me mad anxiety like so many things do. As a result, I end up in the office early. I’m typing away at my thoughts but to the untrained eye, it might look like I’m hard at work at some arcane IT task. People might be thinking, that boy works hard. That boy shows up early. That boy is going places.

Monday was uncharacteristically gentle. The world be fuckin’ with me. The world be slow rollin’ me into a false sense of security and then BAM! I’m asking my doctor if Paxil is right for me. Sometimes things go okay. Sometimes they even go well. I don’t ever trust it. The world always be up to some shit, ya dig?

The world is mundane and strange at the same time. Everybody goes about their business chasing nickels and dimes while the next apocalypse or whatever the fuck happens in slow motion. Life really does just go on.

Sometimes I wonder if somebody is going to stumble across this and recognize me and then it occurs to me that people who kinda sorta know me might read this. The fact of the matter is that some of what I’ve written here is cringe-y. I’m just going to have to live with that.

I look at my LinkedIn profile and that’s my name. I really wrote that stuff on my profile. I don’t really recognize that guy. I hate LinkedIn. It feels strange to say that I hate the corporate world when I barely exist in it really. I’m barely in it. I’m low-level but I think I’m okay being here. I don’t really have too much of a desire to go any higher. It occurs to me that I’m fairly good at playing a role. I’m good at occupying a role satisfactorily. I guess my work persona is that of a semi-techy Mr. Rogers. Pretending. Double-lives. That’s sexy, isn’t it? Or is it? Day dreams about being a spy. Not James Bond shit. More like The Americans. Day dreams about infiltrating some drug operation in 1980s Miami. Modern but still retro reboot of Miami Vice. I’ve watched far too much TV. It’s only recently that I’m realizing just how much that has fucked me up.

Double lives? I wonder what kinda double lives people have here. Not even double lives. Just secrets. Drugs. Freaky sex stuff. Honestly, the only thing that interests me right now is drugs and freaky sex stuff. See. There is TV messing with my mind again. People are people. They are not characters in some shitty prestige TV drama on HBO. Real life is just real life.

I’m not always busy at this job. Sometimes things move slow. I’m always conscious of how busy I look. I always try to look occupied. No matter how slow it gets, you will not catch me playing games on my phone or on my computer. That shit looks bad. I will mutter things to myself that are technical so that it looks like I am chewing on some problem for someone upstairs. The last thing that I need is someone wondering what I’m being paid to do. I also get up and walk around so that people see me. I figure it looks weird if I just sit in my cubicle all day.

I’ve written just over 600 words today. I suppose that’s a good thing but there is very little in the way of insight in any of these words. Of course, I didn’t have a clear objective. I guess what this comes down to is making writing a habit. I want to make writing a habit because it satisfies me. It makes me feel better. I like the effect it has on my mind. There probably never will be a time that I’m not some neurotic mess but maybe I can do something with that.

It’s starting to become not enough to just write. I’ve written semi-diligently almost every single day. I want to say something. I want to get close to the inexpressible and get kinda close to expressing it. I want to get so close that god damn it, I actually fucking expressed it. 

Dog-whistling Dixie. That phrase kept occurring to me on my drive home today. Dog whistling Dixie. Dog whistling Dixie. I dunno. 

I’m actually close to having read an entire book in I don’t know how long. I got to spend a lot of time just reading at my desk today. That was nice. Seriously. I took care of some minor shit here and there but most of the time, I just got to read. We’re not talking anything that literary. It’s The Great Divide by Matt Taibbi. It talks a lot about the machinations of the financial collapse of 2008. I barely remember that. Seriously, I think maybe I was barely conscious. That event touched everything though. It was a complicated shell game that ended up torching the lives of so many people and no one was ever really held accountable for it. That’s crime on a massive scale. There’s crime and then there’s crime. 

Something that can send me into a rage is local news broadcasts because of all the “crime” stories. Maybe they’ll have some story about some thieves that are stealing packages on people’s doorsteps. I remember once seeing a video on some local news station’s Facebook page of some package thief nicking a package and then slipping and falling and the comments were all, “KARMA! IT’S A BIIIIITCH AND SO AM I,” and “THEY WAS LUCKY I WASN’T THERE WITH MY GUN CUZ I WOULDA GONE PUNISHER ON HER FAT ASS.” All this ire for some desperate petty criminal but where is the rage for the banker who ripped off their pension fund on Wall Street with a nose full of cocaine while getting head from a barely legal prostie? C’mon man. I know it’s not the 80s any more but I’m pretty sure Wall Street still runs on cocaine. You ever see that episode of Cops where they were stopping and frisking people outside of a luxury apartment complex and hitting Wall Streeters with coke possession charges? No you don’t because it never happened and it doesn’t happen. Nah, if you are one of the brain dead idiots who enjoys a show like Cops, you are treated to shirtless folk in trailer parks getting busted for meth and domestic violence and monologues from boring motherfuckers with crew cuts talking about how they are like a 4th generation pig or some shit as they drive along on patrol with their eyes peeled for people of color. 

I will be going in and seeing a therapist on Monday. Fuck! A god damn Monday. So, I am going to be groggy and ready to just go to bed after a long day but I can’t just go home. I gotta go talk to some guy I’ve talked to exactly twice. I better think about what it is I’m going to say. Damn. I wonder how honest I really am going to be in there. I’ve got to make at least some attempt to be honest or there really is no point, right?  So, what is it really? 

Hmm. So. Here’s what it is. I’m really fucking bored, lonely and I can get really anxious. Look, I’m doing better than I have in a long time but god damn it, what else should I be doing? 

Tucker “Heil Trump” Carlson

I woke up irritable and thinking of Tucker Carlson’s stupid fucking face. It’s the weekend. It’s god damn lamentable that my thoughts are dominated by that soulless motherfucker. 

I struggle. I chase my nickels and my dimes. Dolly Parton sang that workin’ 9 to 5 was a hell of a way to make a living. It is. You do what need to and then in the background, you got Tucker Carlson corrupting the minds of your parents and your grandparents with hatred for The Other, immigrants from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. 

I loath Tucker Carlson. I would not mind him undergoing some kind of Damascene conversion. That would possibly be a beautiful thing but real life isn’t a movie. Real life is messier and sadder and dumber. I doubt he has it in him. Barring some kind of Damscene moment where he comes to see the strangers in our land as not strangers but brothers and sisters, I would love to see Tucker Carlson and others like him hit with urine filled balloons everywhere that they go. 

The Tuck is on my mind because I saw a clip of him last night where he basically called undocumented immigrants trash. It’s not surprising. The man does possesses a seriously kinked social conscience but it’s chilling. It’s clear to me that what we’re seeing is an insidious campaign of de-humanization aimed at undocumented immigrants. 

I’ve said it before but it’s hard for me to shake. We all live our lives. We deal with all the insignificant bullshit that comes with that but in the background, the way is being paved for horrifying crimes against humanity. We shouldn’t kid ourselves. The crimes are already in progress.

I’m no expert on the infamous Rwandan genocide but I’m reminded of the fact that Rwandan media executives were convicted of inciting genocide. See, the poison that was being put out over the airwaves primed the population to grab machetes and go out killing. 

Do I think that we might see vigilante mobs going out to kill Latinos? We’re about one Fox & Friends segment away from something like The Purge. Okay. Yeah. Maybe I’m completely wrong about that but you can’t just write people like Carlson off as harmless clowns. We do that at our peril. 

Thing with dreams is 

sometimes they are just too shiny 

and they blind you. 

Dreams burned into your brain 

by people who finished school 

and always work late

and you can never tell the difference 

between yours 

and theirs. 

That kills. 

Porn bots keep following me like it's cool.

The President

I’m going to tell you the truth. 

Not gonna put sugar or honey on it. 

It’s not that I disagree with the President or his policies. 

It’s not that he represents everything that is soulless and wrong. 

No. 

It’s that I fucking despise him. 

With everything in me.

I hate him. I don’t give a flying fuck about discourse or listening to or understanding the other side. If you are going to come to me with that, fuck you. I don’t care. We are past that. What has the fucking discourse ever gotten us? What has being respectable gotten us? 

You can tell me that I’m wrong in my hate. That’s fine. Maybe you’re concerned with the effect that such intense feeling has on my health. I mean, God bless you if you think that. Let me tell you, it’s hard to carry around, aight? 

See. I’m owning the hate. I’m not dressing it up in some pretty three piece suit and calling it something polite. Nah. This is me owning it. It’s ugly. It’s awful but I’m owning it. 

I go off sometimes. I fucking lose it. I lose my voice. I get told by people, “Oh. You’re so full of hate. Everybody hates him so much. It’s scary.” What the fuck?! WHAT THE FUCK?! What do you think he’s full of? Love? Hell no. If you are going to put on that stupid red hat, you do not get to play that card. That’s perverse.