Cyclical Hunches

What are your beginning, middle, and end? This is how you unfortunately structure each blog and blah, blah, bl - oh hey guys. You snuck up on me! I was hoping you were some big corporation coming to swoop in on my blog and pay me millions to continue writing as these priceless memoirs can’t write themselves, but I guess not. Do you guys even remember me? Probably not, nonetheless, excuse the first sentence as I am trying to recall basic first steps to writing – you know, in order to keep my readers interested (ha!)

“Spill out everything onto the page,” they say. “Go for the jugular,” they say. Well, I’ve been missing in action for a while so here I go:

Today is a crappy day and I have a hard time focusing. I mean hard. I normally, no matter what, can just snap back into focus (especially if I am at work because I’m stone cold like that), but nope not today. A young lady named Sandra Bland is the topic or hash tag if you will. There is information about her coming in all at once. She was 28 from Chicago trying to move to Texas for a job. She’s dead now. Hearing this news led me to write. A lot of emotions are surging through me at rapid speeds after realizing she is dead and herein lies the thick of my anguish: I couldn’t catch her. Me - I couldn’t stop whatever happened to her. I would have had something amazing to say to stop the fate of a stranger, but I wasn’t there.

This was a journal entry from a while back that still rings poignant to me because it reminds me of why I fight for life and freedom so much. Machiavelli said it best when he wrote,“What am I here to reproduce at this time? I am only a figment of what has been to bring to the world something it has already seen just not in this particular timeline. What O’Lord am I to recreate that you so desperately need the world to see again? To remind us of what again? Please whisper loud enough for me to hear.” 

I’m unsure of the remarkable words that would have surfaced that day but trust me incredible was coming out. A trail of genius tends to slip out of my mind sometimes and what I want to say is too much to write down. Again, it probably would have been the most amazing crap I’ve ever thought but just too much to remember. A snapshot would be, “Look, like we’re all fucked anyway,” or something along those lines. “Capitalism is rotting this country. Black people don’t belong here, but we’ve been trying to belong for quite some time now. We’re all going to die,” yada, yada, yada – stuff like that. Maybe, “Read and utilize the past in order to shape, and understand the present.” Okay that isn’t me it’s Machiavelli, but seriously the advice would have been A1.

I hope to overly stress that in order to identify with yourself more you must identify with others. Try to stay alive, healthy, and sane in the process of identification, and in every situation give thanks. In every situation remember the situation before. Remember at one point you never really knew how the situation could or would change or when. Remember that it eventually did. Something happened one day, things shifted, and you slowly progressed into another part of your life.

Today I chose to identify with Sandra and let it be known that we’ve been stripped of our core ingredients (love, compassion, empathy, patience, forgiveness) for the all mighty dollar. I have to keep saying that until people start or realizing it. Being gone for so long has taught me how to stop correcting my intuition – not even slightly.

Basic Diagram of Vulnerability

As I hunch in this lumpy chair, weary of any work I've gotten done today, and typing my brains out like some mad scientist, I of all things have the desire to write about love. Great, I mention the word love and my shoulders instantly tense up. See! I can't do this...*takes a deep breath*. Okay, hopefully I can explore this physical manifestation before I hyperventilate and realize how much I despise talking or writing about this topic publicly.

Nevertheless, it’s like this: BE ALL YOU CAN BE TODAY. You know, Carpe Diem and shit – do that until the wheels fall off because one day you’ll wake up and love will be painfully staring at you with its fucked up eye. I mean staring you right-smack-dab in the middle of your face (I say painfully for a lack of a better more horrifying word.) When I think of love I stress out. I think of agony when I think of love. I think of worrying. No matter who is in this love with me there is a guaranteed heavy dose of stress, agony, and worrying. There are these super highs and super lows. There are these walk on egg shells days. These, "Don’t puke while I puke but you still puke any way days (oh great now we have to clean up the freaking puke!)", and there are these wonderful debate days about anything minus oblivion (okay, no, yup it’s now plus oblivion that was just confirmed.) It really beats the hell out of me sometimes. 

There are these, "I’m this close to leaving your ass days," and then something really funny happens and I don’t. There are these, "I’m literally so very tired and so very sick of you days." There are some, "What would I do without you days," (those tend to be my favorite), and some, "I just want to stick to you like white on rice days." There are even these days where we agree on the same thing we disagreed on a couple of days back (huh?) 

When I think of love I think of fake car chases and running to the Toyota quick because “they’re out to get us” – whoever “they” are, “Mash the gas! Let’s go baby! Hurry!” (ahh yes, invisible bad guys – jealous?) Love makes me think of scrounging for pennies just to make sure we make it to the place we always eat at (when we clearly don’t have enough money at the time and could easily downgrade or go somewhere else.) There are these days I dunk my head underneath a tub of hot water so that my entire body is immersed and I just float there lifeless wondering what the hell love is. 

Yes, love is patient, yes, love is kind, and yes love is unconditional. I love to love. I get that that’s love. I do. No one ever mentions the “other side” of it on the other hand. There is definitely another side. There’s the stress, the agony, and the worry – that tense feeling you know. As gut wrenching as that sounds it’s there too. Nonetheless, going through those feelings can be rewarding; nights are warmer, days are more promising, and the companionship is priceless because the love has gotten a chance to go through every crevice of your mind and heart; every peak and every valley. You’re all in this thing and you can feel every tick–tock of it so much so that you’re affected emotionally, spiritually, and physically. 

I’d say love is an investment; it’s abundant yet expensive. There’s a work ethic to love that I believe I can only pseudo master because I haven’t a clue how to really get in there and truly understand or figure it out (maybe there’s nothing to figure out.) There are some days where silence is appreciated, where certain looks are understood, and where a good, deep, long, and tight hug is really all the words you need. 

Wisdom is on love’s coattail and that dynamic appreciates with time. Love is falling in love over and over again. It’s not giving up on each other that day as to spare you another 24 hours to try and get it right again. I accept everything that comes with love as I mature in love (I say that now but don’t quote me on that) as long as I (as Stephen King put it), “…keep talking, arguing, making love, dancing…,” and courageously loving, it will be.

“We came from similar working-class backgrounds, we both ate meat…Yet what ties us most strongly are the words, the language, and the work of our lives.” – Stephen King

Something, Something...Burgers and Bikes

Judgments and comfort zones - who needs em'.

Have you ever sat down at a restaurant that has outside seating and you choose a table outside, order all this great stuff, and your waiter comes and serves you a table full of awesome, juicy, hot, tantalizing food? I mean, well of course I have to consider the fact that you may have an entirely different perspective of what awesome food really is. But so, you know whatever. I don’t know what your “awesome” food is but I’m talking about the burgers, the fries, the ribs, the steaks, the wings, the potatoes, and all the etceteras. You sit there at the table eating what you like the most in the most grotesque, primal, dog eat dog way and a swarm of cyclist in their little cycle club I guess rides up to you only to stop at the light that happens to be right at the corner where you are; the corner that happens to be right next to where you are currently happily stuffing your face. Two of the cyclists stare (glare really) at you while grabbing their thirst quenching, sparkling water jugs that happen to be hooked to their coordinating fanny packs; fanny packs that are strategically wrapped around strong, chiseled abdomens. You for some reason decide to put your head down, eat smaller bites, and chew slower at this point. They finally get a green light and the whole platoon takes off in a synchronized stride while you pan the landscape of the food on the table in front of you and realize you’re so glad you ordered extra cheese. Oh no? So that’s never happened to you?

Or what about the “Craigslist meet up”. You know, that awkward exchange of emails/comments/texts/calls phase before you actually meet up with them because they have something for dirt cheap that you are dying to have and too lazy to get it any other way. You guys try to meet at a central location and the person tells you what they are wearing and what they look like but you’re still like, “What?” You get there and there are 4 people who are dressed like the description your now stranger/friend said so you stop each and every one of them hoping, no, praying it is the person with your crap so you can get this over with. You grab each look alike by the shoulder or tap them gently and they turn around and say, “No, sorry you have the wrong person lady,” or they give you the side eye like, “Did she just touch me?” You give up. You call the stranger/friend on your phone while still at the central location frustrated and a little nervous and ask, “Hey, so are you here?” They say, “Yay! I’m looking right at you!” And you see them waving their hand and smiling in the darkest corner the place has with a full glass of wine and one empty glass right next to it. You smile, wave back in a truly thankful manner, run over and say, “Hi!” You proceed to make small talk, inspect the product, exchange money from there, and leave quickly. Oh no? So that’s never happened to you?

Whew! Well it hasn’t happened to me either and I hope it stays that way! I will say this though, you have to live. Put yourself in uncomfortable places and see how you react. Get to know yourself. Be in that moment and really get to know yourself. Observe, engage, and live. Peel out of that weird shell that doesn’t fit you good anymore anyway. Start shedding it – or don’t shed it, I don’t know. It’s hard to even decipher my own madness and by madness I mean my writing. As I type I think I know exactly what I am talking about and it makes total freaking sense to me, but to my dismay it does not to everyone else; to my dismay it never will let me tell ya’. I’m thinking quite possibly I’ll be incoherent forever, and that’s okay because no one reads this shit anyway. I’ve been reading and running across passages like, “You can’t afford to doubt yourself” and – oh my favorite, “If you can’t even take 20 minutes out of your day to write then give it up clown.” Yes, that’s definitely one of my all time favorites. Ha, it's funny, as soon as you get the nerve to do anything you start building up your confidence. It gets to be the type of confidence you will need to do what people will judge you for or to do what you didn’t think you could.

Maybe a burger next week doesn’t sound so bad after all and downloading that Craigslist app should be fun.