Brass Tacks

I try to be normal. I try so hard, but I never make it near the realm of normalcy. I surround myself with abnormal people to make myself feel better. My brother… he is normal. I thought I had escaped him; thought I had chopped off that one, ordinary, looking branch off the tree.

I live with him now.

This tall, Panamanian branch still has sap, leaves, and everything. But its normal sap, normal leaves, and normal everything. So much normal. I can’t breathe around normal. My heart starts pounding, my legs start jittering as my body yearns to wander, and my mind wonders how anyone can be normal. How is there a normal? I lived with my brother in Panama… when I was a child. 

I’m nineteen but I still feel like I’m eight.

I can’t stay home, but I have to. I mean, its my apartment too, I should be able to sleep in it. Hearing the key jiggle inside the lock sends chills down my spine.

Oh no! Oh no!

He is a disease. My hands get clammy, my body starts to sweat… profusely, and—dare I say it—this weird sensation comes over me: shame. I don’t want to look him in the eyes.

He never looks at me anyway.

Day in, day out he just darts to his room and nags me about smoking in his apartment. He forgets, it’s mine too. Maybe if he remembered, he would be a better person. If he remembered, he would be a better person. My heart wouldn’t feel like this.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

He wouldn’t be normal. Normal people forget. He needs to remember. He needs to care. I hate my brother, but I need him. I’m unstable, he needs to help me. I can feel my heart beat in my toes. I just want to scream… not at him, but about him.

He needs to save me. I need to live with fucking Superman!

I am queen of the unorthodox. I’ll never be like my brother, he is average. Normal people are boring. I hate normal people… like my brother.

How do I cope with my problems?

He used to be so great. He would calm me down by giving my back a quick rub whenever my bipolar disorder got the best of me and I went manic. He would dry my tears. He would play with me.

He would love me.

Eventually, like all living things, we grew up. My brother became an adult and felt that meant he must conform. He no longer tolerated yelling in public. Screaming behind closed doors… anything. Suddenly I was “uncouth” as it became obvious I didn’t care really what other people thought, I cared about fixing what I had inside.

I cannot help it.

My support left me. It was devastating. Although, my mind became a little easier to figure out. Everyone needs a helping hand: compassion and mercy are virtues. I am the unorthodox crusader, spending my entire life dedicated to making people feel welcome in their own skin. I am queen of the dorks. I will be what my brother is not; I’ll make sure of it.

Ill be Rosa Parks… giving my seat up to everyone.

People matter. Life matters. The public… that doesn’t matter. I spend so much time just trying to make connections. Just trying to make sure that no one feels lost and that everyone is loved. I help people to find themselves and be themselves without feeling shame. I opened Diogenes’

No one should have to lose a brother- a helping hand. 

I am the support. No one will be left behind any longer. When people think that no one cares, they will find themselves happily mistaken.

I care.

No one should be left behind. Being this person for everyone, I will lose myself. But there is so much more to be saved. I am only one person in a world of many.

I have already lost myself.

I need happiness. I need pleasure, but my life wont bring me that. I need to do this. I have to sacrifice myself… it’s the only way I can be happy. I need to prevent what brought about my sadness from happening to anyone else.

I need to dream.

I need to learn to live.

I need to learn to let people live.

Life needs to be unleashed upon this lifeless world.

I need to be me!

Playing around with rhyme schemes. I wish I could post stories on here. 

I’m falling apart rapidly,

Even though I was never put together happily.

What little hope I may have had,

Now seem like aspirations gone bad.

I’m scared as hell to go,

But I can’t keep feeling this low. 

I’m frightened by the thought of staying, 

In this game of life, I yearn to be done playing.

I can’t live like this.

Where I once wanted to be, 

Is now truly me.

I have become the abyss. 

Sitting, living simply. 

Crying for something secure,

A taste of what is good and pure. 

But everyone that walks that road does so limply. 

I need to attain nothingness. 

Forget my potential, 

For life does not ask for credential. 

I don’t have to fear lowliness. 

Maybe… it will mean oneness. 

Completeness. 

I wish I were taller, 

Instead I get smaller. 

I wish I could pick the time,

For me to be in my prime.

I wish I didn’t always speak

As if I’m rolling and just hit my peak.

I wish I didn’t cry;

I do it just to get by.

I wish I didn’t scream, 

or try to figure out what’s in-between.

I wish I didn’t just sit

As if I’m in a pit,

But then I wish I didn’t go

to places I don’t know.

I wish I could truly see, 

What’s happening to me.

I wish I didn’t fight, 

But I have to use my might.

I wish I didn’t rage 

Every time someone wasn’t on my page. 

I wish I could sleep,

when I was too afraid to leap.

In the end I guess all I wish, 

Is to be fed a different dish. 

Like Walt Whitman, 

I contradict myself. 

I try not to…

working as hard as I can to be logical.

To make every single one of my actions make sense.

But nevertheless, I continue to inquire from within:

Why am I here?

How did I get here?

Where do I go?

Why am I doing the things I am do?

What is this? A cigarette?

Who have I become?

I need to fight emotion with ration. 

My world will make sense, 

I’ll make sure of it…

but I cannot help but ask that one last question,

the one that taunts me day and night—

Can madness turn to order?

know what I want to do with this. I keep changing my mind because I’m not perfect. 

I have to remind myself that suicide is not an option…

I have been having a hard time separating dream from reality lately. I suppose that should be a good thing, that my dreams are so believable. It just scares me that I can’t figure it out. Its as if I’m regressing.

The other day I was baffled by the fact that I have subconscious thoughts. I mean think about it, isn’t it amazing that your brain is able to think things that you don’t even know that it is thinking about.

I guess all I am trying to say through all of this is that I’m confused. Normal everyday things have started to confuse me. Why is everything the way that it is? Why is it never acceptable to be different? I have spent hours contemplating the idea of time. I just don’t get it. I know there has to be a common time so that people can have schedules and carry out the activities of their days, but what is time?

“Why won’t they let a year die without bringing in a new one on the instant, can’t they use birth control on time? I want an interregnum. The stupid years patter on with unrelenting feet, never stopping - rising to little monotonous peaks in our imaginations at festivals like New Year’s and Easter and Christmas - But, goodness, why need they do it?”

~John Dos Passos, 1917

I have edited this post about five times now trying to make the perfect post. Maybe that is what this is all about, making this one post perfect. Instead of deleting what I put before, I am just going to add on and see what I get. The quote I have up there isn’t even the first one I thought of to represent time. I first I had this:

“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” - Albert Einstein

That quote seemed a good fit to me at first, then it just seemed redundant with what I had just wrote above it. I know a bunch of quotes about time though, or at least keywords that enable me to look up the full quote. I know a lot of things about my obsessions. Time is something I became obsessed with. I am obsessed with many things; showers for example. I love showers and I always have, but my obsession has changed. You see before, I didn’t value the shower at all, I valued being clean. Now, it is the actual shower that I love. The feeling of the water hitting my skin hypnotizes me; I am fascinated by the idea of being wet. Hair dripping onto the floor, water beading up into little dots and sliding down my skin. My shower time is always the happiest time of my day: pure and innocent.

I still don’t like anything that I have written here. I am still trying to make the perfect post. Although the desire to delete everything in this post and even my entire tumblr is strong, I am going to leave everything here. There is some thought in the back of my mind that is telling me to leave it. The perfect post just may be the combination of different, random streams of conscious thought.

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Ok, so it has been awhile since I wrote in this post, and over a year since I have really done anything on tumblr before a few days ago and I read over everything on my page and cleaned it up the other day. When I came across the first post, I instantaneously became infatuated with the idea introduced directly above about stream of conscious thought. Simultaneously, I was ashamed that I did not follow through with my claim-I wrote nothing more than the little I wrote that day on the post. It remained unfinished.

“It’s better late than never” - Unknown

I dont actually know if the creator of said quote is truly unknown, but the person is unknown to me as I befriended the phrase while hearing it used colloquially. With that philosophy, I will begin now.

Instead of simply deleting everything I posted a couple days ago, I will comment on them in this post and include them here. This one post will be my tumblr. My thoughts and commentary on everything. So at first, I will display everything here from before, but with more… I will now include some portion of the why I suppose. …I am starting to think this post will allow me to comprehend myself on a level that far surpasses my current understanding.

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I walk down the street,

I stop, go back.

I walk down the street,

I stop, go back.

Watch tv, stop, turn it off.

Press power once more and keep watching.

I laugh. I smile.

I stop laughing.

I still smile… maybe frown.

I grasp the edge of intelligence,

Struggling to be an intellectual.

I loosen my grip and rightfully let go only to return to my mediocre world.

I write. Often. Is there something I am trying to prove?

I walk down the street. Stop. Go back.

It is programmed into me.

“You have to start a story from the end and work backwards.” said Lewis.

What am I trying to prove?

I cross the street.

Before that, I walked…

down the street. stopped. and went back.

Then, after a second of contemplation,

I stopped, frozen in time.

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I can hear the clock ticking. As I count the days until I leave, excitement transforms into anxiousness while running away becomes holding on.

My thoughts are evolving; I’m scared shitless.

Take me back to the life I once had with the people that I once loved. I wish I could just sit in a room filled with my life, every aspect. It would be this topless box filled with everything that I know and once knew.

I wish I could live in that box and never come out.

I close my eyes and concentrate. The ticking of the clock is no longer heard, but my heart continues to beat. I have done it; I have stopped time!! Quickly I create my box, storing away every conceivable noun: person, place, or thing. I struggle to enter my box, hoping to begin my life of living without experiencing.

My eyes burst open. This idea is too preposterous for my imagination to let it grow. Time always continued, I merely neglected the tick of the clock.

Only if it were possible to undo years of neglect, would I be able to decipher how I ended up here.

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Some people in this world are so beautiful as buds, that other’s jealousy causes them to prevent the beauty from flowering and reaching is full potential.

“Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.” - Josephine Hart

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22827.) I don’t want to go to college. I want to travel the world and work a shitty job so I can feed myself and travel some more, fall in love, meet people I will never forget, say fuck it and just live. But I’m going to go to college and get a decent job and buy a pretty little house and get married and everyone will be proud. I’ll be miserable.

When will this world let people live for themselves? Im not saying everyone should be free to be selfish because many people will always consider others above themselves, but this is all about self image. Let people be free to travel their own paths— to choose there own destiny. Even Neo got to pick between the red or the blue pill.

I mean, take this picture for example.

Its supposed to be funny, but I feel it is just sad. How come people cannot be like this? People that don’t seek monetary goals are looked at so strangely in contemporary times. A person unveils the pipe dream he/she is trying to attain knowing the response to follow. Its the same from nearly everyone: “Ok.. but what are you going to do to make money?”

If only a world arose in which people could be free. In which humans could live out their lives as animals. As conscious beings with inhibition. I wish people really could govern their own lives.

“Civilization”, as we know it, has deprived humans the ability to practice free will.

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I have just started reading Gil Scott-Heron’s memoir entitled The Last Holiday. In the prologue he says something interesting. He writes:

“I believe in ‘The Spirits’. Sometimes when I explain to people that I have been blessed, and that the Spirits have watched over me and guided my life, I suppose I sound like some sort of quasi-evangelist for a new religion. I am not and do not have a personal church to promote. I believe, however, to paraphrase Duke Ellington, that at almost every corner of my life there has been someone or something there to show me the way. These landmarks, these signals, are provided by the Spirits. This is not a subject I offer up for purposes of debate. Whatever you call the intangible influences that help direct you in your life is not the point. My connection is that your blessings derive from your positive contributions. But they must come from the heart. Not because of what you expect in return. Otherwise what you contributed was a loan, not a gift.”

Lately, I have been feeling this way too. I feel so connected with certain. I feel like there is something people are meant to do. Someone people are meant to be. Something, in which the universe will show you the way. It will help you. Maybe luck doesn’t exist at all, maybe it is all fate. I mean, an occurrence is usually deemed luck when someone simply acted without thinking and came into some good fortune. Maybe people inherently follow their destiny- never truly acting on free will but the characteristic is still present.

What is going on in this world? Life views are constantly changing. What I think is going on in reality always takes a nose dives and spins around, landing on something completely different. Will I ever know? Does it even matter. I mean, I have no idea what is going on here. Can’t I hide myself in one of my dreams— one of my delusions?

I wish I could get here. I wish I could achieve this. I just want one moment with a clear head. Just one moment of clarity. To be content with what I know. What am i searching for? Can any of this even be substantiated. What are we all doing?

life is a constant struggle. Heraclitus was right. everything breaks down to the tension between it and its opposite. The realm lies between the extremes.

Im off to shower now. I’m thinking about writing a story to explain how I feel at the moment. Maybe that will be my next installment.

So, I am a writer/philosopher mix and as all people in my field tend to do irregardless of one’s employment status, I write. With a respectful bow to the American Beat Nik writer’s, the great dog philosopher of Ancient Athens dubbed Diogenes of Sinope, many of the Romantics, the empowered transcendentalists, the ludicrous absurdists, as well as the connotatively apathetic existentialists, I dabble in the realm of stream of conscious evaluation. These streams of cognition tend to involve both heavy introspection and its direct converse: evaluation of the outside world as opposed to the world existing only within.

Therefore, I decided to strip my tumblr of everything but this post and the very first one that I dictated I would make “the perfect post” a little over a year ago. To articulate where my observations came from and what they led to. One post that would successfully represent my perception of reality. As I said almost a year and half ago, “The perfect post just may be the combination of different, random streams of conscious thought.”

Reality is a canvas, the mind being its only brush. Thought acts as color, displayed on a pallet so arbitrarily so that one dares to understand the method of the colors. To do so, the brush strokes at the canvas with color and works to stay inside the invisible lines that symbolize logic. Thoughts, much like colors, exist in the realm of the infinite. Parallel to the color wheel, thoughts combine with other thoughts to produce new thoughts. The picture the mind strokes and lashes onto the canvas is one’s reality. However, the lines are invisible and the conscious continuously alters where it believes the lines exist causing the picture of reality to unravel as chaos. 

This down below is my world. Of all the realms present within the realm of possibilities that constitutes reality, this is the realm I choose to dwell in. There will be lines inserted between each stream and the occasional inclusion of a creative writing piece-whether it be short story writing, poetry writing, or abstract writing- I feel belongs here. I don’t know why you should read this and I have nothing I can think to say to persuade you into doing so, but I guess I am doing this more for me; therapeutically as a means of providing an outlet for my self-expression. Nonetheless, if you are interesting in seeing the inner-workings of an ambiguous young mind portraying both an emotionally unstable and emotionally stable visage, I welcome you to my outlook on every aspect of the universe my conscious mind considers.