so... i've been back and forth the past couple weeks about shutting this down.

i don't know.

perhaps we never really learn to give up on the dream of a world that notices, a world that cares.  about celebrated sentimentality.  self-serving preoccupations...

it seems like something should be written/studied about the ways, these days, that all these sorts of online outlets, social interaction forums and such, change the way we deal with things.  change the form of the cornerstones we erect to delineate the meaningful epochs of our lives.  shutting down a blog?  moving on to a new identity?  cutting ties with old social circles and breaking out new and unknown and fresh.  no longer requires moving to some strange city.  just a public declaration of a break -- a disowning of a past skin of sorts.

that we leave behind.  to languish frozen in cyber space.  the shed serpent skins that cling to rocks and weeds.  keeping the form of what was.  holding up some sort of shape, some sort of meaning.  but ultimately just there waiting, to fragment and blow away.

something about the growing pains of the mid-twenties.  periodic pangs of feeling like you ought to peel off your own skin.  feeling like you need to grow, need to change -- no matter if it's all psychosomatic.  no matter if it's ultimately maladaptive.

it's strangely vaguely embarassing.  going through these machinations, agonizing over nothing, misplacing all meaning on the meaningless.  while everyone can sort of see.  can sort of sense the weakness.  the raw pink skin of a newly molted crab...

well, anyway, i suppose there's really nothing to be done than to just endure.  try and learn and know how to let go of those shells and skins.  treat them with all the proper detachment.  don't worry too excessively much, about what happens to the remains, what happens to the trail you leave, what happens because of what others have seen.

you've just got to move on.  hope for the best.  try and not be so cynical, so prophetic, so disillusioned or jaded or hardened or any of those horrible aging related sorts of developments.

but i spend far too much time reminding myself to not be so many things, i think, to actually avoid all of them at once.  none of it is quite practiced enough yet or something, nothing quite natural.

people have these sorts of "accumulation" blogs where they gather and sort and choose things that are pleasing, interesting, beautiful, true... to show to the rest of the world.  like little display windows, or china cabinets... facebooks and myspaces and topical blogs.... learning to specialize and focus attentions on one particular joy, one particular interest.  food.  or design.  or technology.  or neuroscience.  or international health.  or clothes.  or music... it still gets to mean something i guess, if we can manage to elevate it to some sort of higher level.  of quality.  we expect that we're supposed to have gotten better.  at everything.  with time.  something has to have changed in order for it all to still make sense.

and you learn to abandon the crude, the immature, the clumsy attempts at honesty.  at feeling.  for a product that's somewhat more polished.  somewhat more refined, selective, useful, insightful.  we're all trying to stretch and polish ourselves into these knives to slice and filet the world to reveal its secrets in some new and remarkably brilliant way.  no one interested so much in pointing or touching or pressing anymore. 

and it pushes everything and everyone just that much further away.  personal boundaries, territories, unspoken comfort spaces.  pleating and sectioning ourselves into tighter and neater and less divisible corners -- that don't feel wrong.  don't feel wrong while you're still busy digging, carving, path blazing.  don't feel wrong until you pause to rest, until your knife has dulled beyond repair, until a thought of something past makes you look around.  look back.  and you find that you too long ago lost any sense of directions, lost track of whatever you counted on as a way out of the maze.

and the first step is this "coupling off" of everyone?  cliched as the concept may seem.  is this the point where you've got to stop?  urgent need for preventitive measures time, tie a lifeline, leave a breadcrumb trail.  blunting of the pencil tip.  deliberate dulling of your samurai sword... it seems so silly now.  more frivolous imaginings, more mental wheel spinning.  but perhaps what is sad is that it will continue to seem silly until it's already too late.

ensemble riff

redacted...

you know, it's sort of like people that have a hard time believing their vegetative state loved ones are really not there despite eye movements, eye contact, somehow extremely meaningful and nuanced grunts. 

you're always so painfully ready to believe.  the remains of hope never really getting combed out of the tangle.

and it's not really about the holding onto of old dreams or old visions of the future.  it's, surprisingly, not about that at all.  it's just the echoes of voices you seem to recognize, backs of heads and faces in the crowd that you think you recognize.

in a more positive light it's supposed to be nostalgia, right?  the adaptiveness of learning to be grateful for everything that has happened as it has happened in your life.  another stage of post-processing, further digestion.  less after-market modifications.

... i really hope OSU doesn't lose.  sitting here watching this game is just fueling the slow burn of uneasy introspection...

why is it...

that with some people, you will always always forgive them, always understand, always care, always come running right back, baring your vulnerabilities -- like some ridiculously foolish dog, rolling over to have their bellys scratched as soon as you come home -- no trace or memory of any number of hurts, injustices, abandonment inflicted on them earlier.  what is it.. with dogs, with kids, with (me) that puts them in this position, of asker, of waiter, of needer.. just wanting to be loved.  living in this state of cavitation.  carrying around a hole, an empty begger's cup, a cardboard box waiting for something to fill it, devouring even the smallest contributions.  eye contact, pity, a response to the relinquishing of all dignity and self-respect.  ignorance?  lack of self-preservation instincts?  no matter how much they've hurt you, no matter how clearly they've devalued you, no matter how much time has gone by that's supposed to make things "things can never be the same." 

things can always be the same.

in some plane of your mind where you know how you felt, know how you feel.  control, intent, will is lost -- you can't help it, can't deal with it, don't want to deal with it, have only just managed to shelve it away so that it doesn't clutter your mind as much.  knew it ought to have been more carefully dealt with, thoroughly thrown out, dismembered, disarmed.  everything that it takes.  accidental(?)  preservation.  of things you really ought not keep around.  preservation precisely where you lack self-preservation.

it's extraordinarily upsetting.  realizing the mistakes you make in your thinking in your actions before they are committed before they are even thought.  realizing how this is not the way you want to be, this is not the way you want to feel.  but *letting* yourself feel that way anyway.  if only you had a little more willpower and discipline and such you'd be able to quash it.  disarm the detonator. 

why can feelings be called up so readily.  why were they so loosely bound, shallowly buried.  why *let* yourself get so destabilized, so unnerved.  by a few words, by a certain tone, by the smallest flash of caring. 

you know better.

you had a plan.

you learned that lesson.  right?  all those promises to yourself?  resolutions?

resolute.  is such a pansy word.  ready before it is even uttered, to be repeated, and repeated and repeated.  like a shy boy reaching out to hold hands.  turned away by the slightest deterrant, a momentarily cross look, a pulling ever so slightly away.  it's supposed to evince this sense of purpose -- level of conviction.  but really, embarrasingly, aimed somewhere lower, with the meager, less than lofty aspriations of keeping up appearances, touching up the concealer, keeping the system greased.  what other people expect of you, what normal, understandable, lacking of obvious pathology.  new years resolutions, weight loss resolutions, vice quitting resolutions... meant to be flimsy from the very start.  expected to be breached, to have gaps and moments of weakness.  always on the verge of structural collapse.

it's like the loss you had to go through, the time spent pining and hoping and longing for them to care as much as you care, to come back to you, to be haunted by you... to show what you expect them to show, to be human and weak and vulnerable and all the things that you feel like you *need* to see, so you can feel a little bit like you're not completely alone, lost trudging through the sludge of your excessive emotionality.  you spend too much time -- stuck feeling like that.  stuck wanting.  stuck glorifying and ruminating the same set of events frozen there, freeze frame diorama careful put together with the bonding glue of dissapointment.  and given enough time, to mutate, to adapt, to generate malignancy, maliciousness, invasiveness, power, robustness.  translating into something embedded, seeping into the gray matter like just another motor memory.

so you respond to the gesture, the flick of the wrist, the (still provoked) responsiveness.  and much responding, stirring up of emotions, exaggerated reflexes later, the only response i have left is disgust.  with myself.  with my lack of will.  lack of conviction.  not that it even comes close to having any direct expression in the real world.  nothing visible.  just a minor internal apocalypse.

just enough to remind you how not ok you really are.

Currently Reading Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression By Nell Casey see related

has this been happening all along or is it some sort of new response to the hurtling speeds of techn

http://specials.washingtonpost.com/onbeing/#archives.3

another foray into archiving -- people.  in video form.  with the typial "whimsy" of diversity of subjects.  age, race, background, etc.  but what happens to a person when you sit them down in front of a camera and get them to talk... and keep talking... for just long enough that they can't sustain a front or an image for that long, long enough for the distilled "essence" to come through or something.  the sense of something pure.  something true.  something really accurately viewed. 

real people.  i guess i'm kind of fascinated with real people.  people and their stories, people and their desires and drives and motivations, guilts, regrets, fears, prides, ambitions, priorities, obsessions, pathologies... things that haunt them, things they want to hold onto, memories and their very specific, very definitiive values.  what holds meaning from someone's perspective on the world, and how easily can that change, meld, evolve into the meanings and values of another random person.

tv shows... i've always somehow preferred reality.  even though people make fun of it, even though it's supposed to be horribly inconsequential, time wasting, vacuous, fluff.  i don't care if the reality is insipid or narcissism gone wild, groundbreaking, inspiring, or commonplace.  as long as there is a mind and an emotional live feed running along behind the action, it doesn't matter if the action is staged, if the worlds are immaterial.  it's more the act of watching the other -- navigate events and obstacles and interactions with other others.

but it's not just the voyuer thing really.  the affinity is still quite discerning.  tastes for the bachelor, for tila tequila, blind date, for things where "relationships" and "heartbreak" are at stake.  and others, shows where people are growing, are dealing, are confronting flaws and imperfections -- loss of idealism or fighting and succeeding to hold onto that idealism just a little longer.  even acted out "life" ordeals, journeys, etc.  law and order, gilmore girls, gossip girl.  nothing with a "frame" for the events though.  like survivor or any of those TLC shows about babies and weddings and whatnot.  anything where people are given some task to overcome, or new puzzle to solve, that deals solely with here and now, likely never to be encountered again.  tells nothing about personality, no read outs on patterns.... but why the preoccupation with detecting people's patterns?  is the tv land stuff satisfying some sort of internal drive to practice reading people, discerning the patterns, dealing with people's lives going on alongside your own.  learning to not get all motion sick from the rushing, all the blurs of light and sound around you.

it's kind of telling, kind of important, what ends of speaking loudest to you.  what gets picked up out of the noise.  the mold and filter of your mind that manipulates, digests, the signal from the noise, selectivity that shows you who-you-are.  what-you-are-composed-of .  your bits and pieces and what really is rigid, lasting, or important

anyway, i'm just trying to write myself to sleep.  and it's not really working so well.  maybe because i'm not actually writing.  not putting the effort or attention enough into completing sentences.  or thoughts.

they should let you input more than one book/cd at a time.  we all multitask.  why not let these electronic time capsules keep more accurate track... i think i'll choose the one i feel most guilty pleasure about.  the one i think of the i shouldn't be trying to add fuel to the fire comment every time i pick it up.  i kind of don't like that i can't seem to just commit to one book at a time, one alternate world at a time?  it all sort of fits though... with the tv trash, the blog reading, the learning about and keeping track of other lives in a way much more faithful and effortful and investing of time and consistency than most of my real world interactions.... but let's not get into that tonight.