Unstuck

Found another shining example of who I wish to become. Went to coos bay to walk on the beach and explore a few seaside caves. High tide prevented us from seeing much, but what we did see was spectacular. Me, thinking ahead enough to bring leftovers to eat but not enough to bring rain gear. Or a plastic bag to put my phone in, preventing any photography. It poured the entire time, my jacket soaked through and my comfort levels steadily dropped as we made our way to the sand dunes in Florence. Her, continually egging me on, giving me every opportunity to say “I’m soaked, let’s turn back now.”

As if. I’m having the best time I’ve had in months and there’s no way a little rain is going to put a damper on my shine. She lent me the smallest blanket I’ve ever seen and we started heading back to Eugene.

I need more people like this in my life. People who know how to travel in place. How to have an all day adventure without breaking the bank, people who find solace in crashing waves rather than crashing parties or slamming cocktails. Reminders that even though I’m becoming stationary and stable, I’m still fully capable of keeping my wanderlust in tact. That I may never leave my home base in Oregon, but I’ll never be stuck. Stuck is something you feel when you’re desperate, stuck is being tied to a cactus naked in the desert. Stuck is something a hitch hiker feels when they’ve been in the same town accomplishing nothing and making no impact for several weeks. For the first time in a long time, I don’t feel like I’m stuck doing anything.

Up to interpretation

The moment I see you see me
I see in your eyes everything you love and despise on me and in me
A glorified representation of everything you wish to blame for future infractions
Such an interesting interaction when two eyes meet
Solid as concrete the passion and heat between these lost souls careening through space with no plan no direction, nothing in that moment but the moment we’re lost in reflection and if we use the right words and inflection to describe something it can almost be hypnotic… sleep.

Rest weary wanderer, wetter winters ahead, better crops next season. Steadfast past particulate bad decision cocktails, supplement sleep for psychedelics but don’t let your mind get jealous and envelope your ego. We all know where a god complex and too much LSD goes. Was that too personal? Wake up, it’s just a dream.

Hometown Café

Why am I here?
The coffee is sub par, much like the food
The atmosphere only serves to remind me how little I belong here
Everything is so whitewashed
Watered down for suburban moms
Half of the books on the shelf are decorative
They tried for the antique rustic look and fell short
The barista knows I don’t exist
She can tell I prefer it that way
As she brings my turkey honey dijon spinach wrap to the table with an apologetic nod
What is she sorry for?
I prefer it this way
I give a different name every time I place an order here
You should know by now I don’t wish to be familiar
The chatter of middle aged white women buzzes a symphony of gossip and marital discontent
How can I write in this mess of upper-middle class pretension?
Why is the music so low?
Where is the art?
All I see is drab framed photos and strategically placed light fixtures
This was never my cafe
It still isn’t
Why am I still here?
She’s writing
I see bulleted paragraphs and 2 windows of notes
She glances back
Wondering if I sat behind her just to watch from a distance
She’s not wrong, but I find the group of nerdy suburbanites to her right far more interesting to observe
They’re arm-wrestling in a coffee shop, I love kids with no tact.
The man to my left says nothing
He re-reads a text on his phone with a sullen face
Straight ahead on the other side of the room, a cookie-cutter family is eating brunch
The boys look like they just graduated from prep school
The grandparents are discontent over paying for the food and want to leave
The barista knows I don’t exist
I like it that way

Keep calm and conspiracy on

Ego and entitlement are too easy to bring out in people, too easy to point out. I don’t know why but it scares the shit out of people to confront the pointlessness of everything that concerns them. Everything they base their lives around. To think that the worst possible outcome of their lives could be the best possible outcome for the world. That if they stopped caring about the petty bullshit they care about, the world would be a much better place. People cling to the election and hot button topics like the decision between right and wrong in our homes or in our bodies should be governed. We wage wars for something to talk about because at heart we’re all convinced that the state of everything around us is wrong and we’re hopeless to stop it. The hearts and minds of all of us are sick with patriarchal propaganda and the bitter old curmudgeons of the world know how to play both sides. My only goal now is to live outside the world they created where human beings are so easily distraught.

Save yourself before you try to save the planet

I kill my anxiety with fire. Small fires carefully contained at the ends of meticulously hand rolled cigarettes. I kill myself with pine smoke, exhaust fumes and trash fires. I kill my friends with my darkness, I kill my enemies with my light. I slowly digest the planet with my existence, but I can’t possibly kill it. We as a species lack the power to remove it from existence. We don’t destroy the land, it continues existing despite our abuse. We do deprive ourselves of oxygen through deforestation. We don’t destroy the ocean, we pollute our food supply. Mushrooms are adapting to eat plastic and survive in toxic environments, are we? This planet will outlive us, I’m sure of it. So I don’t give a fuck about your idea of saving it for the sake of your narcissistic self preservation. Fuck your unappreciated planet that just so happened to facilitate your survival, you don’t matter. Get over it. Nature will suffer, the planet will continue to be a ball of rock hurdling through space until it collides with an asteroid. If science finds a way to destroy that asteroid in the next… couple billion years, that would be cool. But the sun will die eventually and life somewhere else will start. Such is the structure of everything around us and I as the man I am, am powerless to stop it. So I choose not to sulk over the planet. This doesn’t mean don’t take care of nature. Of course, we should. It’s our life.

Legacy isn’t just what you leave behind

I don’t miss the person I tried to be. The slew of lies I told myself to excuse me from my actual self. The character I created to blend with its surroundings. It was only a matter of time before the self shattered that barrier of denial. Now every correspondence with my past takes me further from I, me, the core of what I am nestled inside branches of social necessity. Still too intertwined with vines and leaves to clearly see the undefined definition of me. A blurry, pixelated glob of plans and ambitions. When people ask where I’m from, I feel like I’m lying when I say Massachusetts. That’s just the place I left my old self. The me who was content with complacency. Content with stagnant living. Content with getting stoned and jacking off to staged misrepresentations of enjoyable sex. Two cans of monster and a hard drive filled with video games and anime. Weekends spent in the bar scene pretending I didn’t despise the girl that compared me to Mackelmore and “just wants to dance”. One very lousy paycheck a week, just enough to underpay my father for rent, buy pot, get drunk twice and laid once if luck would have it. Looking back at that shell of a human, I can’t help but think working retail was more toxic than any of my exes. At least I can reflect on them and be frustrated with someone besides myself.

Rebirth time paradox

Consume yourself in the work
Even if the work is just being destitute, find a way to punish yourself, find the conflict that makes you feel alive. Find your slow death in life as you vanquish time with a steady pattern of hobbies and adrenaline. Find joy in work, love in life and let it kill you. Anything to distract you from the inherent guilt we harbor as conscious consumers. Crochet, learn an instrument, get lost in a fantasy world while yours burns. One more day, one more slow paycheck to hold you over until the next dilemma. Buy a gun to keep your priceless pieces of plastic and polished rocks safe. Blow your brains out to find answers to the question of reincarnation. Wake up thirty years ago with the memory of every life before this one. Wonder if this cycle will ever end before losing every memory of your last attempt at the “simple” act of happiness. Cradled in your mother’s arms, you know nothing.

Words.

Sometimes they can’t wait. Other times they stick to the back of your throat like peanut butter after a bong rip. There’s so many unasked questions. No matter how many words I regret saying, I never regret asking. I’m going to start asking more and saying less. I’m going to avoid the drab how are you’s and tell me about your music taste’s. I’m going to dive so deep that you can’t help but bathe me in insight. I’m going to shower you in little moments of self reflection until you know yourself as well as I do. When you reach the apex of loving yourself as much as you love me, I’ll push you over the edge with spite and malice. I’ll drive you away. I’ll make you hate me, for you. I’ll make sure there’s no one on this planet you love more than yourself because that’s what you deserve.

Untitled

I’m a quarter life crisis textbook alcoholic with a stomach that can’t even handle root beer. I’m a hitch hiking maniac riding around the country on a rainbow painted bus feeding hippies for free in national forests. Coming soon to Walmart parking lots near you, the hippie culture you spent your retirement fund trying to forget. We’re back to smoke your pot and push free love on your daughters like hepatitis is going out of style. Men, women, children of all ages, come witness the spectacle we put on specifically to attract your attention. Admire our filth and live vicariously through your idea of what exactly it is we do. Do you really think I’ll remember your face a year from now because you gave me twenty dollars? You’re selling yourself short when you hand money to me and walk away. I’ve fallen in and out of love, damned the very idea of it, been to the depths of rock bottom and left a crater the size of my face upon landing. Lived through the kindness of others, killed parts of myself that were killing me, traveled across the country twice in search of nothing. I’ve spent months living completely off the grid with hundreds, sometimes thousands of people. I’ve stood on the edge of a cliff and implored myself not to jump, all so I could stand here. Saying this. Living this. Experiencing, breathing, absorbing and regurgitating this mental picture of me. I can only hope it was worth it.

Daily affirmation

Never start an affirmation with a question
Question yourself daily
Question contradictions
Contradict questions
Ask yourself nothing at least once daily
Use cyclical phrasing to be as redundant as possible
Use redundant phrasing to be as cyclical as possible
Lose your mind on drugs
Lose your drugs on a bender
Bend the will of the world around you
Give purpose to everything that felt so meaningless before you finally got bent
Find it. Find it in the moment before the plane takes off
As she’s lining herself up on the runway and you can feel the nervous tension of everyone around you. The silences, the rocking back and forth. The little things said just loud enough that you hope the person next to you didn’t hear them. The magical moment when the wheels straighten out and start gaining speed, the revolutionary moment when they first left the ground. It’s beautiful and engineered far past my capabilities and such a sight to simply marvel… and I’m still slightly tense. I’m certainly not comfortable, but what is comfort? I thrive on discomfort and in knowing I’m not the only one who feels that way. Without discomfort, comfort wouldn’t be gratifying. A lack of discomfort in your daily life leads to complacency, boredom, and eventually depression. Sometimes the healthiest thing you can do for yourself is sleep in the dirt and suffer.