On seeing something I can't touch
The following is a little something I wrote on a borrowed laptop computer from my friend, Zachary. I mused to myself for an afternoon, struggling with what I will do next in a creative context. It is very very honest because I wrote it to myself (even though I added "dear zachary" to the top).
dear zachary,
this is your computer and i've chosen to write on it because the internet is proving to be nothing but a locked basement with no lights on in which i keep running into the same things and thinking they are something different than the thing that they are. i used to write all the time. in fact during my senior year of high school i decided to save up and buy a laptop solely for the purpose of word processing. it was orange.
i've thought and thought about how to best express myself... sometimes it could come out in the most particular way where you know this is the way and this has always been the way and this is all you gotta do. our mission is clear: be understood; understand others. any variation from this mission causes a skew from the peaceful lifeline of the earth. and the universe for that matter. just understand the intentions of others, stop inventing their feelings like there were no real feelings there to begin with. inventing fantastic and false realities have lead our earth into the bottom of a filthy toilet bowl.
poor poor new orleans, the big dirty toilet bowl. put all the poor people at the bottom as close to the levy as possible and see what happens. when wind starts to blow and rain starts to fall.
the film i am concocting will be titled "thinking out loud: a young woman muses ignorantly on the current state of her environment." i'm not an idiot though. and people might think that from the sound of my intellectual status... but i am NOT an idiot... i can think of several people with more power than me that are idiots... people with more sex appeal, or more energy, or more money, or more energy, or more drive, or more charisma than me. whatever it is, there are some things that i was born with less of... or maybe it was all there and i just failed due to my indecision and snake-eating-own-tail syndrome: something i would never wish upon anyone, unless it is someone who only has cruel intentions for reasons unexplained and unexplainable to the rest of the human race.
i won't talk about my bodily issues anymore. i just remembered today that nobody likes that conversation. everyone is uncomfortable with it and it is very frustrating to see someone complain about the state of their body, while they are doing nothing at all to change it.
any new orders of business kelly?
well there is the fact that i've become completely and utterly unable to come up with a plan... there's this undeniable feeling i have that things will inevitably work out for the "best." where did someone like me get that idea?
attractive people are uncomfortable with being in the public eye... very uncomfy indeed.
is it easier for you to read this now that i've created space to place these things in, created (and when i say created for the second time, i am talking about pressing a button commonly referred to as "return" or "enter." one in the same in my mind but not in the mind of one who often works with PCs. and there it is, my first use of an upper-cased letter!) empty white lines in which you can put your mind at ease and take a little break from whatever it is i'm shoving down your throat?
so you've been reading along and realize no time has passed at all. how does this happen? is this some fantastic new break-through in the information age that allows one to absorb new knowledge without the frustration of actual time passing? here i am, inventing the most amazing thing to ever occur since dr. emmett brown invented the time machine and all i can think about is purchasing a canister in which i can place large kitchen utensils.
is my life going to be this large, vast wasting of time because i have nothing better to do? only a year and a half out of school and i'm already terrified about my lack of direction. no. i've been terrified for quite sometime, but am only now realizing that it may in fact, be a permanent situation. sitting near the sunlight has made me happier though. moving to the big city has made me more confused and has made me feel more pressure towards coming up with something to make the world spin faster and slower at the same time, you know, like smoother is what i think i mean by faster and slower at the same time.
but what will the images be that will accompany this text? will i show the city and all the fantastic things that there are to see here? or will it be me, or my surrounding humans? will it be beagles or big, black dogs, or maybe one of the sixty million pugs residing in the new york city area? pugs are old news kelly. old news indeed. how much is a sound recording device kelly? your thoughts are brilliant, even at their worst and most awkward.
But don’t fear. Microsoft Word of the 2001 persuasion tends to correct your “mistakes� for you! It will not allow me to go on using the lower cased letters whenever I please. Kelly is a word that is misspelled when used in the lower case. It is not a noun or a verb or a what-not, it is your name. And your name must be capitalized at all times. Please try and take less note of what I have been talking about with work and being freaked out about the city and start thinking more about what I can do for you. What can I do for you? Hmm, actually I think a more accurate expression would be, “What can you do for me?� What advice can one offer that will not cause me, the serpent to go on choking and foaming at the mouth on my tail? What action will reverse the pattern that I fear almost more than death itself?
It is this pattern that has overtaken loved ones and famous assholes alike, this pattern of unproductivity. Apparently, unproductivity is not a word, but it is a real thing, an idea that makes perfect sense in my own 2006 brains.
I wrote this on the train yesterday:
“I couldn’t stop looking at her. I felt wrong about it. Imposing, but I couldn’t stop. I felt like she might get self-conscious, me looking at her like that. But she never let on. I suddenly realized that more than anything I wanted her to hold me and let me cry into her chest. I’d cry about dying and I’d cry about the plant that I thought about throwing into the train tracks to rot, I’d cry for loneliness and my lost God and for a little girl in the middle of a big, dirty city. Instead, I’m swallowing as hard as I can, all the tears. Instead, she left the train without me and I’ll never see her again. Instead, I’m on a bumpy ride back home. Eric might dream a highway back to me though, someday.�
The sorrow that engulfed my spirit last night was overwhelming. My personality went ape-shit after cheering myself up with several old reruns of the Ben Stiller Show. I went into my bedroom and began recording video on my cellular phone of myself in my bedroom, playing different characters, saying different things that seemed to be the most fucked up things to say at the time. One included me lying listlessly on a pillow and saying, “Well all I can say is, I’m pretty tired…. Okay?�
dear zachary,
this is your computer and i've chosen to write on it because the internet is proving to be nothing but a locked basement with no lights on in which i keep running into the same things and thinking they are something different than the thing that they are. i used to write all the time. in fact during my senior year of high school i decided to save up and buy a laptop solely for the purpose of word processing. it was orange.
i've thought and thought about how to best express myself... sometimes it could come out in the most particular way where you know this is the way and this has always been the way and this is all you gotta do. our mission is clear: be understood; understand others. any variation from this mission causes a skew from the peaceful lifeline of the earth. and the universe for that matter. just understand the intentions of others, stop inventing their feelings like there were no real feelings there to begin with. inventing fantastic and false realities have lead our earth into the bottom of a filthy toilet bowl.
poor poor new orleans, the big dirty toilet bowl. put all the poor people at the bottom as close to the levy as possible and see what happens. when wind starts to blow and rain starts to fall.
the film i am concocting will be titled "thinking out loud: a young woman muses ignorantly on the current state of her environment." i'm not an idiot though. and people might think that from the sound of my intellectual status... but i am NOT an idiot... i can think of several people with more power than me that are idiots... people with more sex appeal, or more energy, or more money, or more energy, or more drive, or more charisma than me. whatever it is, there are some things that i was born with less of... or maybe it was all there and i just failed due to my indecision and snake-eating-own-tail syndrome: something i would never wish upon anyone, unless it is someone who only has cruel intentions for reasons unexplained and unexplainable to the rest of the human race.
i won't talk about my bodily issues anymore. i just remembered today that nobody likes that conversation. everyone is uncomfortable with it and it is very frustrating to see someone complain about the state of their body, while they are doing nothing at all to change it.
any new orders of business kelly?
well there is the fact that i've become completely and utterly unable to come up with a plan... there's this undeniable feeling i have that things will inevitably work out for the "best." where did someone like me get that idea?
attractive people are uncomfortable with being in the public eye... very uncomfy indeed.
is it easier for you to read this now that i've created space to place these things in, created (and when i say created for the second time, i am talking about pressing a button commonly referred to as "return" or "enter." one in the same in my mind but not in the mind of one who often works with PCs. and there it is, my first use of an upper-cased letter!) empty white lines in which you can put your mind at ease and take a little break from whatever it is i'm shoving down your throat?
so you've been reading along and realize no time has passed at all. how does this happen? is this some fantastic new break-through in the information age that allows one to absorb new knowledge without the frustration of actual time passing? here i am, inventing the most amazing thing to ever occur since dr. emmett brown invented the time machine and all i can think about is purchasing a canister in which i can place large kitchen utensils.
is my life going to be this large, vast wasting of time because i have nothing better to do? only a year and a half out of school and i'm already terrified about my lack of direction. no. i've been terrified for quite sometime, but am only now realizing that it may in fact, be a permanent situation. sitting near the sunlight has made me happier though. moving to the big city has made me more confused and has made me feel more pressure towards coming up with something to make the world spin faster and slower at the same time, you know, like smoother is what i think i mean by faster and slower at the same time.
but what will the images be that will accompany this text? will i show the city and all the fantastic things that there are to see here? or will it be me, or my surrounding humans? will it be beagles or big, black dogs, or maybe one of the sixty million pugs residing in the new york city area? pugs are old news kelly. old news indeed. how much is a sound recording device kelly? your thoughts are brilliant, even at their worst and most awkward.
But don’t fear. Microsoft Word of the 2001 persuasion tends to correct your “mistakes� for you! It will not allow me to go on using the lower cased letters whenever I please. Kelly is a word that is misspelled when used in the lower case. It is not a noun or a verb or a what-not, it is your name. And your name must be capitalized at all times. Please try and take less note of what I have been talking about with work and being freaked out about the city and start thinking more about what I can do for you. What can I do for you? Hmm, actually I think a more accurate expression would be, “What can you do for me?� What advice can one offer that will not cause me, the serpent to go on choking and foaming at the mouth on my tail? What action will reverse the pattern that I fear almost more than death itself?
It is this pattern that has overtaken loved ones and famous assholes alike, this pattern of unproductivity. Apparently, unproductivity is not a word, but it is a real thing, an idea that makes perfect sense in my own 2006 brains.
I wrote this on the train yesterday:
“I couldn’t stop looking at her. I felt wrong about it. Imposing, but I couldn’t stop. I felt like she might get self-conscious, me looking at her like that. But she never let on. I suddenly realized that more than anything I wanted her to hold me and let me cry into her chest. I’d cry about dying and I’d cry about the plant that I thought about throwing into the train tracks to rot, I’d cry for loneliness and my lost God and for a little girl in the middle of a big, dirty city. Instead, I’m swallowing as hard as I can, all the tears. Instead, she left the train without me and I’ll never see her again. Instead, I’m on a bumpy ride back home. Eric might dream a highway back to me though, someday.�
The sorrow that engulfed my spirit last night was overwhelming. My personality went ape-shit after cheering myself up with several old reruns of the Ben Stiller Show. I went into my bedroom and began recording video on my cellular phone of myself in my bedroom, playing different characters, saying different things that seemed to be the most fucked up things to say at the time. One included me lying listlessly on a pillow and saying, “Well all I can say is, I’m pretty tired…. Okay?�
posted by Kelly Q E at 6:00 PM
4 Comments:
hudson.
is novemeber cold in ny ?
nbd
perhaps you have already realized the shocking truth of adulthood: we are ineffectual, bumbling fools that trick ourselves into thinking that we have singular importance. many of us spend our lives trying desperately to create importance for ourselves, to make a little tiny dent on the space time continuum(sp?) that we deem large enough; convinced that if we plan things perfectly, we will have a sufficiently significant effect on the history of humanity. but for those who face the cold fact that we are pitiful and useless beings, a beautiful awareness is available. an awareness of the great freedom that we afford when we let go of our singular importance and simply look for our own small niche in every moment of every day, in every interaction or encounter, in every great idea that passes through our small mind to gain the strength to keep on living and evolving in other minds, in every oppurtunity to help and serve and love. and this niche is so easy to fill when we are not focused on our own singular importance. the illusion of choice reveals itself to be upon the epiphany of the insignificance of the decision. so, in other words, it will have such a small effect in the grand history of humanity if we decide to seize our destiny, so why not just go ahead and do it? what the fuck else do we have to do?
yeah, november is cold in NYC. and grey.
there is nothing wrong with going in a full circle. if we never caught up with ourselves, our tails, that is when all chaos would break lose. "The Ouroboros often represents self-reflexivity or cyclicality, especially in the sense of something constantly re-creating itself, the eternal return, and other things perceived as cycles that begin anew as soon as they end." the ouroboros is an ancient symbol for a reason, and has stuck with us, because its mythical presence in itself needs to shake its ugly face in every lifetime... remember that an alchemical presence in your life may be frighting, but at least you can assure yourself that things are changing.
i sure hope that wasnt my plant that you wanted to smash in the train tracks?
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