Rolling rapid waves

Knock knock

2008-05-28T10:49:00.000-07:00

The scratches beneath 505 were deep. Edward stared at them. His weight floated around as his feet shifted on the gelatinous hallway carpet and gave him the sense of being woozily carried along on some tedious voyage out in the middle of a hot ocean, pulled by a mundane current in endless circles around the equator. He wondered if he could have dug those scratches in the solid, dark mahogany. With his fingernails, or with his teeth, or his room key. He wondered if she had made any gouges after he locked her inside of room 505. If she had the strength left. The tall dark receptionist with the big happy face had a trace of concern in his eyes as he called out a greeting in a horrible caricature of sincerity. His name tag said Stewart. Stewart had seemed on the verge of accosting Edward further. But that was probably because of the big purplish blue bruise covering most of the left side of Edward's face and his torn shirt collar. Stewart couldn't have been aware of what happened. The hotel was a happy little microcosm of shoeboxes for him. He didn't worry about what the shoes were doing once he closed the lid. Not for his sorry wages. “Fucking savages in this town, my man. What's an honest fella to do?” Edward had said with a shrug of his shoulders as he walked by. Florescent lights made 4:17 AM repulsively awake as Edward's eyes continued to probe the scratches. He swivelled his head slightly to the left and leaned in. There might have been the sound of shuffling leaking through the scratches. The sound of something limp and broken being dragged painstakingly across a carpet. There might have been the sound of the air conditioner grumbling in quietly dejected tones. Edward knew better than to believe anything was true. Every utterance she ever made had been a lie. What else could he have done. Edward jerked back when a door slammed somewhere overhead. But his eyes stayed fixed. Those scratches reminded him of things. He didn't know whether to fill them in or dig them deeper. He could see her in the ruined state he left her in. His imagination dragged her into that familiar pose, lying on her side with her hands between her thighs. And that smile. A smile that had made him crumble. That made him give it all away. But it had become leering and grotesque. Edward thought he had done the thing finished, but halfway to the next city he realized he had to go back. He had gone in this deep. He had to fix it up right, or break it all the way. It had always been like that. He caught the odor of stale beer which triggered the memory of a scene in a similar depth of night from when he was seventeen, standing in the hallway of his father's home, staring at the folds of flesh in the old man's forehead as he fixed a stare back with his shoulders hunched forward and balding head beat red and vibrating. That time Edward had broken it all the way. And he wasn't sorry. The situation called for it. He wondered why these situations had a way of finding him. The whimper from behind 505 was fleeting but unmistakable. Footsteps began ringing up from the stairwell and down the corridor. Edward had his idea. In one smooth and determined motion he pulled out the key to room 505, opened the door and slipped inside. And finally tore his eyes away from the scratches.

Life is a song

2008-04-17T13:15:00.001-07:00

Empty Devil

You probably mean well
in your own twisted way
Believing it’s all just the game
that everyone plays
Turning me up
with words you don’t mean
Smiling so wide
then losing your steam
It took you a while
to get into my head
And when finally you did
you turned and you fled
In the macabre corners of night
when the noise disappears
When there’s only the ticking
of disconsolate years

I hope red raging devils tear through your thin veins
And bore deep inside of your many glass panes
Rending and tearing till the juices are flowing
And you twist and you moan and your sanity’s going

Since there’s nothing to lose
I’m just gonna say it
You're pathetic and hollow
an assailant, a sadist
You’re much less than human
no you’ll never deserve
A place in that fine company
with your fire interred
They call you an angel
the ones who can’t see
You’re the sweetest on Earth
and nothing beneath
It’s safe on the level
nothing ventured or gained
When you hear these harsh words
my dissecting your name

I hope you become a red devil and show me your rage
And melt all the glass in the heat of your flames
Rending and tearing your walls till they’re dust
Letting everything touch you no matter the cost

It ain’t in you to change
your future’s the same as your past
But I know I have
I know I have

Various thoughts written down over the course of one day of my life

2008-03-05T13:06:00.000-08:00

It’s odd writing down lines that I thought of earlier and decided were necessary to spell out. It’s like I’m cheating any potential readers by making it seem like these thoughts pouring out are spontaneous – living and breathing right now. It’s like I’m cheating myself by scribbling down old rusty thoughts (thoughts take mere moments to decay) instead of letting them become new ones – living and breathing right now.

But that wasn’t the train of thought I scrolled down this Word document I was working on here at the office to write down. That was a new one. What has been on my mind this morning is that yet again I’ve let any kind of my own personal writing slip when I’ve been shown over and over that I need it to stay balanced. Why is it so fucking easy to forget? This here, just letting my fingers string thoughts in disarray into solid words, is not a chore. It’s cathartic. And it always helps. And when I’m pacing across my floor, pulling my hair, aching for some release, I always forget it is an option. I wish I had it in me to be an addict.

Already I’ve wandered away from the computer, feeling better with things, and lost the drive to keep writing. Even though I most definitely know that there are muddled things in my brain that need an out, and need this place where I’m free to let them loose. Talking it out with folks is great, but restricted in many ways. And as I delete the line I really wanted to write because it was too open, because it made myself too vulnerable to any eyes straying this way, the restrictions of this space become evident. Words can only do so much, anyway. Coax it along...

Fuck me my neck is tense today. I woke up feeling as though things were lighter, but my body seems to still be drawing inwards. Maybe it’s just a sort of stress hangover. But the truth is more obvious: I just slept on it funny, it doesn’t mean anything. I’m thinking too hard again. Fuck Occam and his stupid fucking razor. I want my irrational justification today.

Much of the day has passed. My neck feels better. But the stress bubbles are returning. The project I'm working on is frustrating. Thinking about too many parts at once, can’t seem to get focused down onto one thing. But this is what I get paid for, to create something good out of difficult circumstances, within a small box. It would help if I had more confidence. Maybe this isn’t the smartest career path for someone so sensitive, so self-critical, so incapable of selling himself. Oh well, back to it go I.

I should really do this stream-of-consciousness thing every day. It calms me. Helps me with perspective. Makes me less insane. What does it matter if anyone finds this worth reading. It had fallen by the wayside anyway.

(paragraph deleted - search private vaults for missing excerpt)

Night’s fallen, feeling worn out. Like I’ve been through a great deal, climbed a mountain or two. Weird body I have. Or brain I suppose, whichever bit controls tiredness. Guess I do have more confronting me than usual, it does wear on a bloke. But good things are happening. Just need to crawl through some more rubbish and I’ll move on to a whole new shift in my life, I know it’s coming now. It keeps coming. Overhauled over and over again has my life been the last year. It’s been a long year. My longest perhaps, with a plethora of landmarks of all shapes and sizes. Landmarks show the passing of time, time drifts by seamlessly when the landscape flattens out and you drive along at the speed limit. Some people may want that. I want valleys and mountains and plunges and hair-raising leaps through empty air. Even if it leaves me inexplicably exhausted.

God my writing is rubbish right now. Until next time then, dear readers. Whatever next time brings.

Bursting and raving

2008-02-02T07:45:00.001-08:00

The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark, now glittering, now reflecting gloom
Now lending splendor, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters-with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume
In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap forever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.

An old, awkward, frazzled bird flinging its soul at the darkness ahead

2007-12-31T11:48:00.000-08:00

I am nervous as the new year approaches. The year behind me has taught me only one thing: I have no idea what is going to happen next. For better or worse.

But I am also eager for it, because I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Those of us that tend to be a wee bit reflective go into reflectivity hyperdrive today. To help break my reflections into bite-size chunks for the sake of your digestive system, I’ve asked Thomas Hardy and his poem on the end of a year (erhm, well, the end of the 19th century, but still) titled: "The Darkling Thrush" for their help.

I’ve gotten a lot of help this year.

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

A great ending began the year. She was gone, and all the trappings that follow. The apartment, the family, most of the mutual friends, comfort, security, support…vanished. An epoch of my life gone as suddenly as it came. The decision to come to Sweden in the first place thrown into question: had it all been a waste of time? And the major decision that was to set all of the events of this past year into motion: to stay or go? A major question to set up a year of perpetual major questions and decisions.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

And so I chose to stay. Mostly because the feeling of walking away was too hard to bear, that thought of throwing away everything I had spent a year scraping together. Two friends down south took me in for a little while to give me time to make this decision (which I am deeply grateful for), and two friends in town gave me a place to stay until I could get myself together (which was more influential for my life than they’ll ever know). But this was, perhaps, the most awful period of my life. I finally reached out and started the internship with the company whose name had been in the back of my mind since before I moved to Sweden, and started the weekend-job-which-must-not-be-named on top of it. A lot of work. Not a lot of money. Alone. Far from home. No place of my own. And when I found a room to rent, it only got worse.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

For ten months there was no place I felt comfortable. Beyond the life-altering decisions I was faced with and emotional strain of adjusting to being alone in a foreign land, there was an apartment and roommate waiting that I simply avoided as much as possible. I spent a lot of time wandering those days. Again, my saving grace was my friends. An old one that happened to live next door, and new ones found along the way. Still, things slid down and down. And as the resentment of my life and of this country built to an intolerable pitch, just as I decided it was time to cut my losses and get the fuck out of Dodge because I had no idea anymore why I was struggling to make a life in this place that I had lost all hope for, the breaks came. My own place. No more weekend job. And then I slowly began remembering why I decided to stay at the beginning of the year and give this life a chance. I never realized how long it would take for things to come together (if my hours in Sweden were a förening, that would be their motto), but they were finally getting there.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

Which isn’t to say the year ended on a resoundingly positive note, or that there isn’t a long way yet to go. Certain seedy things happened as 2007 drew to a close that put a damper on any progress, and the question of where I really want to be in this world still burns inside me. But in retrospect, it is nice to at least not feel as utterly crippled and desperate as I did at the turn of 2006. Despite having lost my hair and feeling as though I’ve aged a great deal.

On reflection, I am struck by how this most difficult of years has been neatly framed, with a clear beginning, middle and end. Maybe I am predisposed to see things in that context. Maybe we all are.

But I am inherently distrustful of arbitrary turning points, so herein I lay down no resolutions. I have too many that never sleep already. One in particular is very angry with me. I hope I can appease it in the coming year. But as I’ve learned, simply hoping for things is an utterly masturbatory affair. I’m too old for that now. Time to put up. Or shut up.

Yet somehow hope is the most important thing of all. It kept me here. And when it went away I was ready to go with it. And when it came back things changed all over again. So I leave the final thought of 2007 a hopeful one to help brace ourselves for the trials lurking ahead.

From "In Memoriam" by Lord Tennyson

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,

The flying cloud, the frosty light:

The year is dying in the night;

Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,

Ring, happy bells, across the snow:

The year is going, let him go;

Ring out the false, ring in the true.

A giant in my hometown

2007-12-24T11:26:00.000-08:00

"Have a merry Christmas or I'll chop your fucking head off."

So my hometown has a 30 foot tall fiberglass Paul Bunyan statue with very shiny pants. Oh and a Santa hat. 'That's like wicked festive guy,' you can almost hear the townies say.

And I can hear myself starting to change the way I talk, and not for the better.

I never thought I would längtar efter going back to Sverige so mycket. Hey, if my English is going to get messed up it's better that it's with Swedish than with Maineish. At least I find my språkblandning funny.

Travelling is great, but home is better, they say. A couple weeks ago I think I would have had a different answer as to which is which, but now I realize Sweden feels most like home. But I never wholly bought into the idea of home. Everything shifts so much, is always so temporary, so arbitrary. Iallafall, I walked through town today and felt like a tourist.

I also discovered that Rumford, Maine is within 100 miles of every country in the world.

I really wonder what some of these people were thinking when they named their towns. 'Hey, we've gotten 364 people in this town! That's almost a whole country! Let's call our town Sweden!' That is the actual population of Sweden, Maine, by the way.

But, in the spirit of holiday cheer, I shall cease whining and leave you with a list of the Top Ten Redeeming Aspects of Jason's Trip To Maine Thus Far.

1. Spending time with family and old friends

2. Being reminded of the reality of America

3. Two Swedish pen-pals

4. Experiencing winter in the foothills again

5. Driving my old car

6. Picking up my new computer which is bara jävla skönt

7. Not having to cook or clean for 3 weeks

8. Dunkin Donuts and American pizza joints

9. Watching Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett play together

10. Really seeing for the first time that my hometown is kind of beautiful

Damn, what was I complaining about . . .

Again with the brillo pad

2007-12-19T10:20:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the stream of my consciousness. I've been back in the US for a few days now, and having an unexpected though utterly predictable reaction. Good luck staying afloat in these words. They twist and turn without restraint...

Where does one begin...deep down. Facing it is the key to getting through it, they say. Conrad says. A man much greater than me. Not even a native English speaker but wrote a narrative that makes me shudder in utter inferiority.

And some people say learning other languages destroys your ability to write well.

I need to start writing again. I feel too awful when I don't, and everything gets fucked from there. Vicious cycle and all that.

But this shouldn't be so hard, being home, even though it doesn't feel at all like home and never really did. I had forgotten that. It's poison when things get Romantisized with distance.

Distance makes the heart grow fonder and familiarity breeds contempt.

And blending cliches does not a great writer make. Why does this place make me feel like such a failure? Make me feel like a naive child, even after everything...Why don't I have anyone to say these things to in this place but resort to telling them here, to no one, black and white on the screen which is a terrible thing because out loud they have color. On this sheet they just sit there, pretending to be true. Nothing that sits unchanging and unchallenged can ever be true. How unamerican of me to say that, with all of our great, fundamental truths.

Draft me now. Straighten me out. Simplify my language.

Take away the stress of the unknown and self-scouring.

I never accomplished anything worth writing home about until I left. And being here makes me feel like those things that happened far away from here weren't real. So I feel like a failure who just keeps getting older.

I jokingly said to someone before I left that I would go home only to be met with all the reasons I left in the first place. I don't know why I thought it was funny at the time.

And I wonder who will read this, and wonder if it isn't going to cross the eyes of certain people I'd rather it not. But sometimes these things just need an out. Even if there is no response. Even if I still feel alone in the end. Even just to see how absurd my thoughts are.

Especially that last one.

Sure there are lots of details of this and that which has happened over the last days. If you feel so inclined, ask away. I find those details too fucking boring to put down in writing right now.

Just breathe, man. You've stopped breathing...

Tacksamhet

2007-11-22T12:57:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving is drawing to a close, and I'm wondering if I feel thankful for anything.

I really don't.

Which makes me something of a bastard. I've had some good luck the last weeks. Things could have gone considerably worse. And on this most thankfulilicious day of all days, I just feel let down.

I guess it's been a stressful day. A 'hey you do this then do that and while you're at do this too' kind of day. Even going to a party with Timbuk didn't cheer me up much. Because it was such a jävla Möllan party. Fuck fucking Möllan. Winge winge fucking winge.

Challenge is great. I want to be challenged. I don't want things to be easy. It just wears me out that everything has been a challenge the last year. Everything. With no affection of any kind. I've been making strides forward, but these last days I feel like I've been launched years backwards. I know everything can change in an instant. I've had several of those instants the past couple months. I wasn't even looking for them. Now I'm aching for one.

In my last post I claimed that I didn't put myself out there just to complain, and here I am wasting this space away with my inane ramblings. But it's the one day a year when it's allowed.

Big ups to Squanto.

Life's little mysteries

2007-11-12T12:38:00.000-08:00

I don't understand me.

The last two weeks many things have changed. I haven't handled it particularly well. Which is odd, since things have all been changing for the better: breathtakingly better living situation, finally getting established at my real job and getting rid of the unspeakable one. Yet somehow I've managed to feel even more stressed and lost than usual. I've avoided writing in this green space because it would have been nothing but inane rambling and complaining, and I don't like to put myself out there if it's only to winge with nothing insightful to add.

But amongst the many footfalls back and forth across this shiny wooden floor, I think I figured out what has been mind-fucking me.

Adversity is simple. You have a problem. You work to change it. The unknown is complicated. You have an open-ended situation. You don't know what you're working toward. You go batshit insane.

I knew what I had to do before. I had to fix the very apparent problems at hand. Now they are (mostly) fixed. Or at least significantly eased. Now the epoch of my life where it was simply a struggle to get by, to get my life together, to put my head down and just get through it has passed. Now I have no focus, and have suddenly realized how lonely life can be here, and have to deal in a new, real way with the long term future. I can't be sure, but I think this is what has been tossing my insides around these weeks. It seems like an obvious conclusion now, but I just couldn't understand why I felt the way I did. Why when things got better I felt worse. I shall visualize this feeling with a singularity, a place where all the rules everything you have ever known are based on cease to exist, and you have no idea what the fuck is going on inside:

I'm sure I'll adjust to this new mode of life at some point. I've already simmered down a good deal. But damn, is this ever stressing me out and wearing my nerves thin. It's times like these where I really feel the lack of any close contact. When I'm painfully reminded that all those people are far away. Nothing for it. Just have to face it. See what's in there. I can only admit that I have no idea what is coming next.

Am I weak? Am I strong? Those words seem utterly meaningless right now...

Drop in and say hi

2007-11-01T15:45:00.000-07:00

It's been a full night. I got out of work early today, because the one friend I have with a car who could help me move only had two particular hours free. On his way over some guy drove into him and broke his rear taillight. Nothing major, no one hurt, cest la vie.

The moving went smoothly thereafter, didn't even have to see the roomie a last time as he was mysteriously absent. I had a bit of tea with my helper friend before he scurried off to the airport to pick up a friend. And about 20 minutes later the TV license man rings the doorbell to ask if I have a TV. "Why no, I most certainly do not. I'm new to this land, what on Earth is a TV, anyway? Where I'm from all we do is read books, pick potatoes and hunt lobster." I've been here nigh two years and never gotten a visit from the TV license people, and then I get one 1 hour after moving into the new place.

And after nigh 6 months of living at that place-which-must-not-be-named without having one single friend over, I have two over my first night at the new place. Shortly after my governmental check-up, I was on my way out to IKEA to get some things which I was in want of. Then a friend calls and we end up going to furniture Nirvana together and then he and his special lady friend came over for dinner, and we just hang out for a very relaxed evening. Which was really fantastic, just having a nice little place of my own to have the people I care about come and spend a nice night. To not feel stressed and trapped and uncomfortable all the time. There's always time for unpacking tomorrow. Or whenever.

Right now I really love that I can have people over without a second thought. So come one, come all while the feeling lasts. I will greet you with a smile at the door and offer you my couch to sleep on. It will be lovely.

Warbled

2007-10-27T01:17:00.000-07:00

I woke up today dreaming old dreams. I dreamt of a formerly good friend who I fell out with shortly before I came here. I got into his car, and the old animosity just melted away. It wasn't like old times. It was like new times, as the new people we've become. He had gotten a new job installing floors. But he still wasn't very happy with his life. Then we almost crashed, but he bumped the stationary jeep sitting in the road out of the way. It rolled off the pavement, into the woods. Then the perspective flew backwards, upwards, and the scene warbled away.

I dreamt of kissing a girl that I hardly knew, and haven't thought of for years. She was around a lot while I was in university, but I never got to know her because I didn't think much of her. I was sitting on a cliff, looking down at the water hundreds of feet below, and she came up behind me and started kissing me. And I panicked because I was slipping off the edge, but I forced her away and the dream moved elsewhere.

It's unsettling when dreams explicitly reflect the things you've been thinking about. They get an eerie, heavy, ultra-vivid atmosphere that the reality generally doesn't merit. Making universes out of molehills. I prefer when dreams stick to the purely imaginative and nonsensical. I hate it when they turn mundane things into monsters. With their subtlety, their authoritarian control over atmosphere. Never liked dreams much.

When I bought my ticket home I was just relieved that I was finally going. Now, I've been remembering more and more what life was there. Remembering faces, situations, years. The first dream echoed how life was in the couple of years just before I came here. The second went further back. Made me remember some of what I was then. Made it something else of its own.

Gotta shake it. Gotta get out of this room now.

My desk has descended into madness...

2007-10-25T14:52:00.000-07:00

The good news: working on a really cool project for a really cool client.

The bad news: Duck army has declared war on Dog army. And I suspect the ultra-sophisticated fez-wearing flag-waving Equipo A is behind the whole thing....

I will eat your soul, his bottomless black eyes seem to say

Maine's forgotten son returns

2007-10-22T11:09:00.000-07:00

After a tragi-comically long absence that has gone on for far, far longer than I ever imagined it ever would, on the 15th of December I am visiting the motherland.

Fuck. Yes.

And it will be for longer than expected, after I was told the office is pretty much shut down the first week of January. So no point in coming back until after. So finally, I get to go back to the States, remember why I left in the first place, get really annoyed with it, and feel much better about my living situation here. I've started Romanticizing America in my mind, when my feelings about it while living there were mixed at best, and flat out hostile at worst.

I hope it snows while I'm there. A lot. Feet (fuck the metric system) of the stuff.

God I love Maine. It's in my bones. Here I come...

For those in need of strength today.

2007-10-16T00:07:00.001-07:00

And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.

-Emerson

A done deal & a new idea

2007-10-15T12:23:00.000-07:00

It is official folks, Clyde is escaping his personal nightmare and landing in a very very nice place. I move on the 1st of November. I kept thinking I was due for a break without ever believing it would come. Not only did it show up, it came in an eerily perfect package. Lordie how strange things go sometimes, how random success and failure, happiness and misery are. I think I'll stop with all that for a while and just be pleased with how things have turned out.

On to things my readers are more interested in. I've thought up an idea for doing something creative with this here blog, and want to know if anyone cares to see it happen/even reads this at all. So shout as loud as you can if you care. Here is the idea as I wrote it out earlier:

As I was sitting in a very Möllan café having lunch with a friend and some new people, finding it difficult to concentrate due to being extraordinarily tired after working all those silly weekdays and a Friday all-nighter on top of it, and having a hard time following their Swedish, my mind floated around creating bizarre little stories of its own accord. And I thought, how interesting it is that there is this completely unrelated scene unfolding in my head as they look at me here, just seeing me, here. And I came up with the idea to write a series based on moments where I’m amongst people, or wherever, and living out a life in a different world. Making them tight little self-contained stories that build on each other. Showing you what is actually going on in my head and spilling out what I actually think of what is going on around me. It would be terrifyingly honest. This could be that creative project for the blog that I was looking for. It could start in the café as I float around and discover the idea, with the objective perhaps being that I don’t want to dream away life when I have great opportunities right in front of me, like the genuinely lovely new people sitting right beside me and the chance to really learn to speak this new language. And go on to times when the mental wanderings make very good things happen. And maybe in the end Mr. Narrator learns to open his mouth and talk about them, and then real life starts to become fantastically bizarre. And things lean more and more towards fiction. But it would have to be very energetic/funny/surreal to work, to be something people want to read. The explicit honesty required is also going to be difficult. I think I can manage. It would be touchingly warm and repulsively dark. But, this will take a lot out of me, and I’d really like to know if anyone cares.

Here is a nice quote from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by TS Elliot to set the tone:

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown

And suddenly everything changed.

2007-10-11T12:21:00.002-07:00

Maybe I should change my fake username to Nostradamus. The day after I finish a post with the words "Come Hell highwater or flaming tarnation, things have gotta change. Soon," things changed. Or seem very close to it. This very lovely person who has suddenly bounced into my life even more suddenly offered me a solution to my retardedly horrible living situation. Here follows an excerpt from that particular MSN conversation as I currently remember it and translated from Swedish and with certain flourishes a writer is duly allowed:

Clyde: ...so, in short, out of desperation I was forced to take the first place that I was offered, which happened to be in the worst part of town with an unemployed guy who stays home drinking and farting all day in this dank hole which smells like the 5th or 6th circle of Hell marinated in raw sewage. Oh, and his kids show up on the weekends and wake me up with their savage screaming a couple hours after I have fallen asleep after working at my soul-sliming weekend job. But I try not to complain..."
Lisa: My sister is renting her place out soon. There was a couple people interested, but just today they pulled out, out of nowhere. So if you say yes now, it's yours. Interested?
Clyde: I dunno, my whole situation is more than a little complicated right now. (Clyde takes a look around him) On second thought, fuck yeah. FUCK. YEAH.

But listen, dear readers, the coincidences only pile up. I had been thinking about moving outta this country for a long time, and only a few days earlier actually told my boss this in brief. The whole living situation thing was a giant part of the reason why I've come to be completely sick of life here. I was pretty much done writing an email to my boss, detailing and reiterating my intentions of leaving the country, when I put it aside for a second to chat with Lisa, and 2 minutes later I had no intention of sending said email. 2 minutes later I had (well, probably, not set in stone yet) a nice place of my own in a better part of town, not to mention this new person who I seem to be on the same wavelength with, which is another coincidence because I've been on the look-out for such people since I came here and it wasn't until nearly two years had gone by and I decided I want to fuck right off out of here that one bumps into me at the virtual check out line. Hmp. Just at that moment, right before I sent the mail, after all the things building up to it, after all the patience and persevering and giving it more and more time, at this fairly arbitrary breaking point the break comes that could put my life in this place back on track. And then I spent a really good night with afformentioned person and a genuinely stirring film. The name of the film? Tarnation. Another part of the closing line of that post come to pass. Anyway, it's actually quite bizarre after the shape my life has been in the past 10 months or so to have multiple good things roll in at once. Even little things.

And the coinky dinks continue into day two. I had my best day at work in ages. Bosses out of office so things are more relaxed. The ring toe on my right foot has hurt for almost a week now. For no apparent reason. Anyway, this led me to go most of the day without my shoes on, going about in my mismatched socks, feeling the cold floor against the sole of my left foot through the holes in my sock. That was nice. And I got tons done. Which always leaves a fella feelin good. Just very relaxed and extremely productive. Why can’t everyday be like that? Well, if all days were good, if there were no down to remind us what up even means, would we even feel that good moment tingling against our skin? I think I’m overdue for some tingling, at any rate. Tingles or no, I've come to realize I owe it to myself and everyone here who cares about me to not let temporary difficulties make me flee with my tail between my legs before I give this place, this life, a real shot. Out come the six-shooters. How do you think my aim is?

Crazy Indians made even crazier...

2007-10-11T12:21:00.001-07:00

Shukhriya to my bhura bhaae Asif for showing me one of the funniest videos. Ever. Kolla.

Tarnation at large

2007-10-09T12:03:00.000-07:00

I've spent a good chunk of time this night making a mix CD (as though I would disobey my new boss) and, apart from making the very most awesome compilation ever, rediscovered a song that I lost track of for a while. It's funny how a song you liked in a mild way years ago can suddenly blow you away with its new relevance when you realize it describes pretty accurately how your life has gone the past few years. This one is a song about wandering from place to place, never finding what you're looking for...

The days get shorter and the nights get cold
I like the autumn but this place is getting old
I pack up my belongings and I head for the coast
It might not be a lot but I feel like I'm making the most
The days get longer and the nights smell green
I guess it's not surprising but it's spring and I should leave

I like songs about drifters - books about the same
They both seem to make me feel a little less insane
Walked on off to another spot
I still haven't gotten anywhere that I want
Did I want love? Did I need to know?

I know that starting over is not what life's about
But my thoughts were so loud I couldn't hear my mouth
My thoughts were so loud I couldn't hear my mouth
My thoughts were so loud.
– Modest Mouse, 'World at Large'

...and getting that urge to head out the door again, to God knows where and to who knows what end. Maybe I'll find that something here that keeps me rooted in a place, but I won't let things drag out like they are much longer. Come Hell highwater or flaming tarnation, things have gotta change. Soon.

Colors of home

2007-10-07T06:01:00.000-07:00

The polls are closed and the tash is gone. For now.

It is a fine autumn day here in Sweden, but fine Autumn days always make me long for home. New England feels more like home to me in the Autumn than any other time. It makes me wonder why I don't pack up and go. This place just can't compete, in some ways.

This fine day also happens to be a dear freunds birthday. And in her honor, I wrote a poem (oh the humanity!) about being born in the Fall.

Born in Autumn
Born in the autumn while everything else dies.
Born in the imagination of specters gusting down windy roads
Thrown from the cliffs into the sea in tempest
Thrown into the eyes of howling monsters and humble heroes
Lost in sentience under a blanket of orange yellow brown and a little green
Lost in heart-drunk-wonder as the plump apples fall to the earth around you
Singing with the gnats and bees as they mourn for the end of the world
Singing for a bear to slumber through the coming winter with
Dreaming of the music of Spring and white sands in the South
Dreaming away the slow hours while the ripe chestnuts knock against your feet
Awake to the terrible imagination of this season
Awake to a sense of things changing and building to some conclusion
Fly into a tornado of music in swirling crisp leaves and small laughing voices
Fly into the terrible mirror of the sky and weep for what you find
Born in the surging oceanic mists rotating around the globe
Born in the autumn while everything else holds its breath.

And just to make sure due justice is done and homage paid to this most wonderful of seasons, I will let John Keats say it better than I ever could.

To Autumn
1. SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,	5
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,	10
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

2. Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;	15
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;	20
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

3. Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,	25
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;	30
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

To 'tash or not to 'tash, that is the question

2007-10-06T03:32:00.000-07:00

I have a humble query for my precious readership: should it stay, or should it go? Cast your vote below and determine the fate of one man's facial landscape.

Choose carefully, dear readers...

Una dia con mi amigo

2007-10-04T13:21:00.000-07:00

Why am I doing this again?

2007-10-02T16:33:00.000-07:00

I’ve just realized that the reason writing is so important to me may be that it’s the only place where I’m strong. It’s the only place where I have the courage to assert myself and be what I want to be. And that’s pretty sad.

How time goes when the clock is running. I’ve spent a last night with a good friend before she leaves the country. Bittersweet, of course. Long conversation, which left me sad that she’s leaving, but also reawakened an old frustration with how people perceive me, and how different that is than I perceive myself. I often seem to strike people as safe and innocent. And I fucking hate that. Maybe I used to be. Maybe the shadow of it is still on me sometimes. But it isn’t real, and it’s not the life I’ve led. Somehow I seem to fail to get this across to people. Or some people. Or maybe I’m just annoyed and over generalizing.

As I sat here thinking over whether or not I had anything rolling around the old noggin worth writing down, it occurred to me that I was compelled to write something out just to get a solid, strong statement out there in a space where I couldn’t be contradicted, where I could set the tone and the beginning and the end myself, and to shout in my voice.

Is my voice this, right now, what you’re hearing in your head?

Unexpectedly inspired and kicked in the gut

2007-10-01T08:45:00.000-07:00

Filling the space between my ears, essentially filling the universe as I know it, Sufjan Stevens changed the course of my day. It’s amazing how much the small gesture of sharing music can effect someone, well, someone open to “gusty emotions on wet roads on autumn nights” to quote another Stevens, this time Wallace, in one of my absolute favorite poems “Sunday Morning.” To return the favor of sharing something moving, I share this: http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/2017.html It’s one of the most thought provoking things I’ve ever read (the #1 in that category has to go to Paradise Lost, despite my love/hate relationship with it).

To come back to the story of this morning, I woke up with the sense that I had nothing to look forward to, just a hazy mass of time at my feet. That and my dentist appointment (which went fine). With my headphones drooping from my ears Sufjan breathed new life into me, fitting eerily well with a gusty autumn morning. It’s so easy to get into someone’s head, fill it with something new, change the course of a day, alter the whole story. But when I got to work the bad news came, reigniting my urge to get out of this place. In short, the bad news was that all the work we did the last few weeks was for nothing and it will still be a while before I get a real salary, and everything will be repulsively stuck in place. Or so it seems right now.

I’m getting more tired of the ‘land of lagom’ as the days pass, wondering if there isn’t a more fulfilling place for me if only I can break through the complacency. It seems more and more the only reason for me to stay here is because circumstances have dropped me here. I didn’t choose the place, I chose the girl. Now the girl is gone, and all I have is the place, which I’m not in love with. The place is ok. The job is ok. The friends I’ve made are better than ok, and are the only compelling argument to be made for staying. But that argument begins to wear thin. There are too many ok’s, and ok is not good enough. I do not have the Swedish mentality. I never believed I shared any part of the American consciousness, but I’ve come to realize that was only part of a youthful angst. I’m glad to have thrown that off, and be able to see now how much good there is in being American, and to understand so much better how this giant place I come from has affected who I am. Whatever this mess is that I am, wherever this mess of a life is leading. What is one more setback after all of this, anyway?

And so emerges yet another hill to climb. I wonder what I will see when I finally reach the top.

Is it gibberish? Or brilliant? Or brilliant gibberish?

2007-09-29T13:15:00.000-07:00

Greetings, dear readers.

At the risk of alienating folks at this tender early juncture and turning you away from this place, I submit one of my more experimental bits of writing. I don't know if it is worth pursuing for real, but it is certainly fun to take the pieces of my life and mix them up, give them a wild energy they can't sustain in logical progression. I whole heartedly recommend giving it a try.

Illogical progression
I'm walking down an open ended road. What does that mean? What do I mean? Here are my words but where are the things I see. My story careens by me, jostling me out of the way. Making room for its drama – its space.

All of this. What are words, compared to this.

I'm nearing some conclusion. No, continuance. It just goes on, you know.

I like the shape of this thing. I never thought it would be me in here. Narcissist.

The story wants to come out. But it's picky about format. It won't let me be lazy. It sticks its nose in the air at the thought. Calls me a lazy hack. It's probably right.

It isn't raining. But it's wet in the air. The panic is coming, through the ooze that Clyde's head is swirling in as he walks through the parking lot, buzzing like an army of sludgy bees.

He waves his plastic wand in front of a door and he's in the office.

But there's no story in here in this present tense worth the telling.

There is a boy meets girl story worth telling, round an ancient wooden table to stumpy legged, hook handed booze hounds. Because it ends in pain, and that's what you pay to see. Pain and triumph. Yes sir. So back we go, whiting out the years that have passed, making them disappear for the noblest of causes: a better story.

It was raining when they met, Clyde and her, as it often does in that part of the world. It doesn't rain that much where either of them come from. Clyde thought she was elfin looking, in a bad way. She just enjoyed talking to new people. Not so judgmental as old Clyde. The music was too loud, Clyde wasn't capable of raising his voice so much. No training for it. So after a while they turned to the person next to them on their side of the table.

Boy oh boy, what had Clyde gotten himself into. The years of social disappointment that contained most of his previous life rode him around like a conflagrosaur. I just made that up. Feel free to visualize as you will. And here he was thinking that flying far far away from the physical place it had occurred would be enough to change everything – his very being and his path through the stars – and send him hurtling into reality.

Well. It was. Lucky bastard.

Breaking on your shore

2007-09-29T12:49:00.000-07:00

Here begins my humble offering to the ocean of electronic words. I hope to use this to get my thoughts and ideas focused as writing for an audience, even a hypothetical one, forces one to put all those impressions and thoughts tumbling through the mind into some sort of understandable context and focused framework. And hopefully something gets out there amongst all you electronic fishes which inspires, comforts or amuses. It’s also an ambition of mine (which I just this instant realized) to write the occasional short story or poem to fill out my little corner of the ocean. Well, I’m horrid at poetry, so I might just share a line or two from real poets that move me.

On that note, I should mention the title of this blog is inspired by the first lines of a PB Shelley poem called Mont Blanc:

“The everlasting universe of things
flows through the mind,
and rolls its rapid waves”

I find it fitting. Can you see why?