Get a life.

Why is it that I feel bad about staying in to watch TV and chill Friday night? I have been feeling severe pressure from invisible sources to stop hanging out at home on Friday nights. And it's pissing me off.

To be clear, I have never liked Friday nights. In high school, I avoided my friends and generally went to Ann Arbor with my dad or just hung out at home, often watching a video with my parents and then getting to bed after reading books or going for a hike. I did not like the pressure associated with it, and I still don't like the habits people think it requires.

Friday night. Let's go to the bar and talk a lot about the same things as always. Then, if people want to do stuff, be all crotchety and just keep b.s.-ing until it gets too late to do anything but laugh at stupid shit cuz you're so pissed-drunk. Or alternatively, go to a party and talk to people about nothing until a similar condition arises. It's like we all just want to run from reality, killing brain cells or silencing them long enough for the world around us to blur into our emotions and desire. That way, it's less painful.

But, "even in the darkness, all the colors can be found." All emotions are important, not just feeling good. I have spent a good share of Fridays just brooding over shit in cafes or in nature parks, letting my mind relax and restore itself in nature. I've also watched buckets of TV because it helps me excercise the fiction side of my mind. No bullshit, no feeling awkward in a large room full of people I don't even care enough to see through, no pretending that the alcohol blurs anything but chemicals in my mind.

I'd honestly rather be hiking in nature or reading a story than hanging out in bars/restuarants/clubs/etc. most nights, though from time to time, it is good to let reality blur. I guess the conclusion that I come to is this: everything in its own measure. Watch TV or read stories, go for hikes and enjoy nature, go to bars or parties and talk to friends, get shoe-gazey with yerself, but do it all in a balanced way. Or it gets out of balance and you're no longer connected to the world as it is, only as one might wish it were. So it's pissing me off that I cannot balance my own life without feeling bad about it, without thinking that I am uncool, without feeling as though I am making someone unhappy by not doing what they want.

Which just comes back to me needing not to try to make everyone happy. Duh. Knew that. Also, though, doing something different every chance you get to unwind is also essential to staying sane and connected with the flows of our vast ecosystem called Earth.



"I'm an animal. You're an animal, too."

A Poem

You Can Take Me Anywhere

When I hold you in my mind, you are
in travel. Looking straight ahead, sometimes
fidgeting: two fingers squeezed round one nose, eyebrows
risen then not. Once or twice, you
turn to me, laugh and squint, like my words
cut through some silent barrier. The smell
of honeysuckle in spring time, sweet, seductive,
malevolent. Wind from in between
the underneath and above, or at least that space
not so far from one's heart. The skeleton
of interstate travel outside whatever window
we sit beside, I am calm. I could hold my
breath and lock my eyes shut, still walk down any street
without shouting, without Fall.

Yet the slumbering moments in my mind hold a dark temptation,
to fall into a night-time in-between
of losing and never lessened, of bones and
ribs and veins made of metal, of knowing, somehow
that tomorrow we will wake, and that today
will never come. With so many steps still past this tunnel
I think, in this lucid memory,
you are an exotic invasive to this self-system.
What blooms when the seeds of not-despair have spread?

I re-watched the film "The Invisible Circus" and it was good. This girl had a sister who died in Europe by jumping off a cliff. She was a beautiful, charismatic activist, so her sister goes to chase her down 7 years later (when she turns 19) and ends up falling for her ex. In the process, she gets to know herself and recognize that her sister was just a girl, lost and trying to find her way in the world. We are all just people trying to make things work.

And I asked myself, "who am I kidding?" Because not only am I just a guy trying to understand this world and make it better, like Robert Frost said, "having a lover's quarrel with the world" but I'm constantly supposed to make it look like that's not what I am. All these papers and classes and such are illusions, and the reality is that I'm terrified of falling off the bike that is living in this world, that one day I'll wake up in a coma (hah!) or lose everything in one go. I don't know why I'm studying India and I don't want to go there really, not that I wouldn't mind going somewhere (even anywhere), I don't really get this whole folklore thing, and academe, like most social structures, just creeps/pisses me off. I wish there were still ways to circumvent the system, like becoming a watchmaker or a baker's assistant or a tailor or something. Something where I could use my hands to create actual things, which, even if it didn't change the world, would help the world make much more sense for me. To have something to hold, to touch, to change, would just make more sense; I am very tactile and texture-focused.

So who am I fooling? Not me.




Everything we love fades away, yes, but when do we fight back?