Sleep and Bad Poetry; Nevermore.

An Anti-Ode To Insomnia:

Oh Insomnia, how you glorify yourself

in the twinkling midnight hours;

how heavy is your presence,

like a teenage pregnancy.

Oh Insomnia, like a whisper in the night,

gentle yet foreboding.

Oh Insomnia,

Fuck you.

Fuck your shit.

Seriously.

Fuck your mom. Fuck your brothers. Fuck your sister.

Fucking gets stabbed.

Everyone hates you. You piece of fucking shit.

Go die in a hole.

Oh insomnia.

*Bows*

Oh I have such a way with words. Everyone, it’s okay, let your cheeks flush, feel the mighty power of my eloquent words.

It’s 3:32 a.m. And for about the fourteenth day in a row, I’ve gotten less than a few hours of sleep. A phone call woke me from a peaceful slumber on the couch at work, and I stumbled into the office with a cat following on my heels. It followed me as I plopped back on the couch and crawled underneath my legs, never to be seen again, because it didn’t exist. Too bad, I could have used a cat whose purr could lull me to sleep tonight, real or not, I don’t fucking discriminate. In this day and age, in this fucking country (U.S.A), what is the point of discrimination anymore?

Real, Fake, Fat, skinny, black, white, brown, orange, yellow, small dick, big dick, ugly, beautiful, I could care less anymore. Just let me sleep.

Participation Points: NaNoWriMo

Homeostasis has kicked in once more, a terrifying reality, and my mood, once lifted, has again suffocated. I’ve missed two more classes once more, and although I’m adamant with positive thoughts, although I attend therapy regularly, although this medication helps at a minimum level, my energy has depleted once more, my attention as well, and there’s a crack in the universe.

There are feelings which often grip on the soul, and those are the ones neither therapy nor medication has ever seemed to help. I’ve done a lot of work over the years on changing my mindset, and I believe I’ve come a long way. I’m confident in many things. I’m not so confident in a few things, and that’s okay–you can’t be perfect. What baffles me is how terrifyingly relentless my brain is with attacks on itself.

That being said, I got home today and have scrolled through fifty million posts talking about NaNoWriMo. This is number fifty million and one.

If there is one thing that is always there for me, it’s my imagination. Whether it works against me with strange men following me in the dark and putting thoughts in my head, or it graces me with some short stories that have professors with a history of being published bowing at my feet–it’s always been there. It was there when I was five years old, often alone, and listening to the cars out in the parking lot talk among themselves. I would laugh with them and they would have personalities based on the size of their fenders, tires, and their age. The conversations took place in my head, but the enjoyment, the stories, were very real.

So I’ve decided to participate this year in National Novel Writing Month. I decided today, on November first, to participate. I have a pretty vague idea of what I want to construct, and it’s a bit out of my comfort zone but often that results in greatness.

Although I have much homework to catch up on still, I need to do this for myself. It’s a good dissociative technique for me, writing is, that lets me regroup, rethink, and reconstruct myself. If I finish the 50,000 words, which shouldn’t be a problem, then it will prove I can finish a project. I haven’t finished a project in a very, very long time. 

I never even finished the multiple (albeit horrifyingly bad) stories I wrote in elementary school. I was obsessed with several television shows, and would write sequels to them. I made one about a land entirely filled with video game characters and scenes. I even made one based on Harry Potter, the first real book I read as a child. I may have been 6 or so.

Doing things spur of the moment like this, and making a spontaneous commitment can sometimes end up in something extraordinarily grand. I’ve learned that over the years, I suppose. If I create something spectacular, I can look back on this post and say I predicted the future. If I create something ordinarily bland, I can look back on this post and call myself an idiot. Either way, I can look back on this post and have a thought about it. I like thoughts. 

I will say one thing about one of my writing projects in particular, the one I don’t like mentioning at all on my blog: I’m very proud of it. It’s come a long way since the idea first blossomed in my head when I was 12. That’s when I got my first laptop by. It was a MacBook.

Scratch that. It was an Ibook, the predecessor to the MacBook. This:

 

Yeah that piece of overheating, Itunes using, crock of shit. I still have it. It still works. It works like the piece of shit it is.

My father found it behind a NobHill grocery store. He brought it home and I started writing. The ideas were shit, the dialogue was shit, the plot was shit, the story was shit, and I thought I was the next pre-teen J.K Rowling.

Ha, you guys thought my first laptop was an actual expensive MacBook. Like I’d pay 2000 dollars for a computer. My fucking car cost less than that, and at least when it breaks down I don’t have to go and buy a whole new car.

Remember, you can still afford a doctor if you buy a PC.

Because the ideas started when I was around ten or so, the story has grown with me and learned with me. I’ve spent many years just learning lessons and incorporating them into the theme I’ve settled on in this potential novel. I stopped writing or tinkering with it for a while because I realized I needed more life experiences to make it how I wanted it to be. I wrote little fairy tale stories for competitions locally as a teenager, and won, and I knew in my heart of hearts that if I tried hard enough I could probably be one of those elementary school or teen authors who wrote the kids book or “young adult” book that captivated the state, or the nation, or whatever.

Could’ve Been Me

But I didn’t want to be that kid. I had, and still have, a very specific purpose for my writing. I’ve never just written to write. I’ve never just written to inform. I write to communicate. I write to hold mirrors to myself and to others. As a child I knew this. So I kept myself in the shadows and let others take the spotlight. Fifteen minutes of fame is nice. But something someone can read and put on their bookshelf and never touch again isn’t literature to me. It’s a story.

Stories are nice, don’t get me wrong. They’re very . . . cute.

Literature feeds the soul, continuously. For those of us struggling to understand life, for those of us seeing others struggling to understand life, literature is a way for us to reach out and say–hey, I don’t get it either, but here’s my interpretation of you, of me, and of everything.

I bow gracefully to National Novel Writing Month and whisper:

Let the games begin.

A Reason For Everything

I came here and ranted about the psych hospital but didn’t really explain how I got there. As much as I hate making posts all about “me, me, me”, I think my revelation on my walk today can also be beneficial for others. That’s usually the goal of my posts anyway.

The day before the police were called on me, I went into the forest. I also made a post about that, but not about my thought processes behind all of it.

Prepare Yourself

I’m very aware that I have a connection with the universe. I’m very aware that it knows my thoughts without giving me the benefit of know it’s thoughts. I don’t know what direction it’s guiding me or why, but I know that it guides me towards specific goals at specific times for specific reasons. I know this because of the feeling I get when I enter certain establishments, certain classrooms, talk to certain people–you just know that you’re where you’re meant to be.

I was lead to that forest for a very specific reason. It was by complete chance, to my limited human brain, that I came across the national park on the internet. I’ve looked at different national parks around this area on the internet millions of times and I’ve never seen this particular one–which is odd given how close it is to my proximity.

The first thing I noticed was the silence and the trees and the leaves. The leaves were like a neon green . . . but the day was dark and cloud cover completely encased the town in grey. There were only certain trees along our path with these colors. If I still had my Photoshop subscription, I’d manipulate a photo to show what the world looked like through my eyes.

There were lots of little gnats and moths and the trees were very loud. Not with words, but just with presence and enormity. I liked crawling in between them and sitting with them and letting them tell me it would be okay. The birds too. I tried to climb one, but being 50-60 pounds over my ideal weight and having been lazy the last two years of my life, I couldn’t really get far off the ground. That’s probably the other reason my blood pressure was a little high.

Which is partly why I’m walking more and changing my diet once again.

Anyway, none of that is the point. Don’t get me on another tangent. I’ve been on a lot of those lately. 

Now, after exiting that forest I felt like the universe really had my back. It was watching out for me. It could hear me screaming out mentally and it understood. When I returned that feeling had vanished. It was too hot, even under the cover of the trees, and that warmth I felt with the animals and vegetation had left. The only thing left was the three hawks circling right above me like I was a dead carcass–or about to be. Which I was.

It felt like I’d lost my reason to be here on Earth.

All my life I’ve been doing things with the universe on my side, even when I was a toddler I knew I had that connection. And now I felt like it has severed all contact with me. On top of that, my life is chaotic, unstructured, stressful, and I have no release. All of that lead up to why the police was called.

Something pushed me to go for another walk today. Also because I need exercise.

The moment I saw the monarch I understood everything.

By now you all know that I’m someone who strongly advocates for the spiritual and fantasy worlds. People call it irrational, but what I think is irrational is the idea that any one human being could understand all there is to understand about Earth, The universe, or even themselves. That’s irrational.

So I’m caught in a crossfire.

The Monarch isn’t just a butterfly, or a symbol of delicacy (for those bunches of you that like metaphors and similes and analysis), I see them as remnants of ancestors, of good spirits, of watchers. I don’t know where the thought came from, it just happened the instant I saw that first monarch.

More monarchs followed me along my path and that made me feel good because it lets me know I was wrong; the universe isn’t leaving me alone.

But something isn’t right. There’s a disconnect somewhere, a war. I mean, Trump is running for president. Come on.

Then I saw the ripped in half tail of a squirrel and it all made sense again. Those portions of the spiritual world that I feel watch me, that follow me, are at war with the portion that’s been guiding me. Both follow me along my path: a ripped bird wing lay in the middle of the walk way, along the path the monarchs followed me.

I wished I could speak the language of the Monarchs and understand more about what’s going on. I asked them to speak with me, but didn’t get an answer (is that a good thing?). I know these spirits embody every living thing on earth, including people, and I met a benevolent one in the form of an old man pacing back and forth on the grass of an apartment complex. He paused just to stare at me and smiled and I felt like a part of his spirit was related to the monarchs.

The problem I see with this is how can you tell the malevolent from the benevolent? Those “evil” ones, the ones that follow me and haunt me and rustle noises outside when I’m at Second Story at night, are tricky. They can play so many different forms.

Like I said, I’m caught in a crossfire. I’m in the middle of a war and maybe that’s why I’m here. Maybe I need to exist for that war to exist and maybe that war needs to exist because I exist and maybe without me and the war, life itself wouldn’t exist.

This is what I thought of while I walked and picked out sign after sign of the war. There are many.

And as I walked, one of my other thoughts was “how could I turn this into a story?”. 

And that’s when it hit me.

I’m aware that how I see things isn’t how everyone sees things. To me it’s truth, to everyone else it’s nothing. I’m not incompetent, much to the hospital’s dismay. I’m also aware that sometimes people get a little turned off and confused when people say things like what I’ve said above. But when it’s turned into a fictional piece, when it’s suddenly labeled “fantasy”, that’s when we get to call things symbolism. That’s when we regard it as a deep piece of literature.

And maybe that can help those of us who think differently and can turn our experiences into a piece of history rather than our own personal nightmare. Maybe it can help us show others that there’s nothing to be scared of. Maybe it can help us show ourselves that there’s nothing in our mind to be scared of.

Writing isn’t just a form of therapy. It’s a way to communicate.

The monarchs, by the way, followed me home. 

 

What’s Your Story?

That’s essentially my take on life at this point.

As I write this, I sit with a scratchy throat of which I will throw miniature tantrums over until it is gone.

Thank you all for the 400 followers, that’s more than I could have hoped for in the beginning of this blog. For the new comers, welcome, you don’t know what you signed up for but thanks for signing up.

Anyway, this semester I’m taking a creative writing course. We cover fiction, drama, and poetry  and it’s been an interesting experience thus far.

I know the blog-sphere is full of published writers, non-published writers, want-to-be published writers, want-to-not-be-published writers, writers who are a million times better than I could hope to be, and beginners. So periodically I’d like to share some of the different outlines we use to spark creativity, and I’ll probably share excerpts of my own until people get annoyed with my shitty . . . shit.

My vocabulary is astounding.

This week, the first week of classes, she had us describe our life in six words. Then, as a twist after we came up with the stupidest things we could have thought of, she decided to let us go home with an assignment of “develop a 250 word ‘Story of your life’, all centered around the six sloppily thrown together words you came up with”.

Everyone else came up with things like “Born and raised in California, Baby” or used words to describe their life like “shy girl, no friends, something, something” (I can’t remember what everyone fucking said).

Me? No, my brain is a magnet for the abstract, so my phrase was “Fire, water, and some more fire”.

Here is the 250 rough draft I slapped together over these last few minutes:

In the beginning, there was fire.

Fire foretold more fire, but in a foreign language and therefore was incomprehensible. I came into the world with little fight and a naïve sense of security that the fire would soon target, lock, and destroy.  The flame first licked my skin in infancy when my cries of confusion were met only with a discontented “girl, you better shut up!”. The flame encased the house at the discovery of alcohol and narcotics, and scorched my skin with the disadvantages of poverty and eviction. Although the number one antagonist, the flame and I danced our way through life side by side, lost without each other and lonely without the misery of one another.All that flew from my mouth was fire, all that perspired from my pores was lava, and all that my emotions could emulate was the reaction of cesium in water.

Education enticed the flame larger. Written word was my only true form of communication, spoken word a mystery but required nonetheless. Barked phrases of “speak up!” Or “you’re too quiet” haunted my nightmares and I, verbally inept, silenced myself to avoid the struggle of fighting for words in my own mind.

Water doused the edge of the flames at 18 when I saw through the smoke screen that the fire and I were never friends,but parasitic leeches upon one another. Water brought the gentle and fierce understanding fire would always exist, but that the heat could always be lessened.

Now.

First of all, excuse any mistakes, this is a rough draft. A very rough draft.

That is also a very accurate description of my life, however abstract. I wanted to have people read it first before I give my theory on where all of that came from.

From it I gather I’ve described the “fire” part of my life, the unpredictable yet somehow almost predestined drama and anger and pain and stupidity that accompanied me from infancy, the part which I regarded as my best friend, my loyal friend, as a parasite.

I didn’t learn how parasitic until the water came. I represent maturity and growth and self realization with water because water knows when it needs to rage downstream or across mountain ridges. It knows when it needs to make itself known. It knows when to remain calm and still and let life carry on around it. It allows us to drink from it and suffer the consequences when we get too greedy. There’s an ancient wisdom about water, I think. It doesn’t flow against any force, not unless that’s what life requires, but it does flow with force, just enough to get it from point A to B.

A fire scorches everything it touches, whether the intention to do so is there or not. A small fire is still a fire; the only difference between a small one and a large one is that a large one covers more ground. There’s always an element of loss of control around a fire. It’s not about whether a fire will soak into the carpet or just dry on the wall and evaporate: it will spread wherever it pleases, swallowing everything in its path and leaves only charred remnants behind. That, I attribute, to my volatile attitude of my child-self, of the attitudes around me, of the unfortunate events that always seemed to surround me, and, at one confused point in time, to my mental health status.

I didn’t learn any of those metaphors until I finished writing. That’s the amazing thing about writing: one minute you have nothing and the next minute you have something.

I think this exercise is good for someone struggling to really put the pieces of their life together. I’m really anal about following instructions (you can count if you want, that excerpt is exactly 250 words), but it’s not necessary. I’m personally someone who needs to work on condensing my ideas.

At any rate, like I said, it’s good for anyone who would like to learn more about themselves, or bring together past events that were otherwise difficult to think about. Representing them abstractly seems to have helped me process some things, to show me that what I experienced is also something nature experiences, something we all experience, even animals. For whatever reason, that brings a bit of peace to my mind.

Fun With A Camera

As some of you know, one of my hobbies is photography.

I’ve never thought of pursuing anything professionally ( in terms of taking classes, studying my heart out, and making a career out of this) but I do enjoy learning what I can about contrast, about lighting, about angles, about context and all other aspects of the art.

I probably know nothing. But I like to think I do.

My mother made a suggestion that I make a calendar with photographs specific to each month because I shot this on Christmas:

I could probably get rid of that candy cane off to the side. It’s a give or take in my eyes.

I would like to get into shooting more abstract things, and portraits. I’d like to do some good cityscapes too. I enjoyed doing this on the roadway:

I just like messing around. I think the effects are cool.

This bird says hello. I made him a little more . . . artistic and aesthetically pleasing to my eyes, as you can probably tell:

But nature has it’s own beauty and when I went out to the cliffs this evening to do some homework away from this chaotic household, I stopped halfway up the driveway and ran back into the house for my camera case and camera. I figured if I caught the sunset, I could get some cool shots. Here are a few:

Luckily the roar of the ocean on the sands edge below drowned out the screeching Superbowl fans from the houses across the street.

At the end of the day only me and one smoker guy were left admiring the skyline and sinking cement boat off in the distance.

Once again: cement boat. Not one of humanity’s greatest inventions. 

Whether I’m horrendous at shots or generally “alright” for an amateur, photography is like a meditation to me. My head zones out and I focus only on what I need to focus on; I see the patterns and the shapes and the opportunities and for a chunk of time I think of nothing else lest that something else have an importance towards my original focus. I emerge from the experience refreshed, at one with myself, with my camera and with whatever random event or object I’ve etched into a digital file.

Photos to me snap more than a quick moment in time, they hold within them a quick moment of myself, a moment of my thoughts, and I see that reflection in them.

It’s much like writing a fiction piece or manuscript; your characters will always have a sliver (or more) of you in them and you will notice that reflection whether you intended for it to be or not.

If I don’t see myself in the art I create, I feel no attachment and often scrap it. Art is for the self as much as it is for the enjoyment of others. I think that’s what makes it often so undeniably momentous.

Always Be Careful When Exposing Yourself To Entities

This time it only took nineteen minutes to load the page. That’s a new record, I think.

Whatever.

Anyway, just because I love writing–as I’ve stated many, many times before–does not mean I don’t get annoyed by essays. They’re honestly a pain in the ass. It’s worse knowing that I can pull it off in a day because I seem to have an insatiable urge to test myself; you know, I’ll wait until the last minute and bust out seven pages and then laugh when I get told it’s the best thing I’ve ever written. As of right now, with my essay due on Thursday and absolutely no theme in mind, I’m giving myself the ultimate test–by default and procrastination.

So instead of mapping out my essay I’m sitting here blogging.

In high school those I knew who were undergraduates and often asked me for help editing always wanted tips on how to plan out essays and they suddenly doubted my skill when I gave them the look of a deer in headlights.

Hmm.

Two things:

1. Don’t expect me to explain something verbally with coherence, that’s literally the bane of my existence.
2. My map of an essay is more like an inexperienced serial killer opening their first victim.

I’ll leave it at that.

I don’t think I’ll ever know how to answer that question. I see people with these neat little structures and labels and dates on their notes that look like they’d been edited and perfected for the last five years of their life rather than the last five minutes and I see them print words on their paper all carefully as if the break of their pencil tip is the destruction of the Earth.

I’m over here murdering pens, cussing out the ink, talking to myself until the student next to me slowly inches his desk away, and slapping words across the paper like it’s a Jackson Pollock. By the time I’m finished with my “outline” my paper looks like a bloody crime scene. My pen tips are singed. My ideas are little word bubbles across the tops, sides, bottoms, and backs of my pages and when I’m finished with my essay it looks like fifty different people wrote it on account of my ambiguous handwriting.

So to those people who structure their notes like their parents probably structured their entire life: how do you do it? How can you be so neat? How is your brain so organized? How can you think amid the absence of chaos?

Weird.

Thoughts fly the speed of light behind my eyes and if I’m lucky enough to catch one they tend to be pretty solid. You would think I would complain that I’m always distracted (I am) and that I think too much (I do), but I couldn’t see myself dotting my I’s with little hearts and neatly underlining main points and then going paragraph by paragraph. That just goes to show how your mind’s been sculpted. I prefer my Pollock to a Michaelangelo any day.

The good thing about thinking a mile a minute is you never run out of ideas. If there’s a timer, you’re sure to beat it. You might put too many words on the page and ideas might clash, but because you’ve finished a half an hour ahead of everyone else you can sit comfortably in your chair and proofread. Why get frustrated over something that has it’s advantages?

Maybe people get frustrated at it because they can’t see the advantages.

I saw one of my classmates in my literature class with Cornell notes from another class. If you don’t know what Cornell notes are, they’re this very strict method of note taking where, generally speaking, you split your paper in half and write your notes on the left side and questions on the right, ones that are meant to be answered by your notes. Or some shit. Whatever; high school tried getting me into it. I refused. Blatantly. I accepted my loss of points for non-compliance proudly.

This is the same high school that, year after year, handed me papers in Spanish to take home to my parents. If you’re not going to respect me than don’t expect me to be a little zombie for you.

Not only did they try to tell me what to think, they also tried to tell me how I’m supposed to take notes about what they want me to think about. So . . . where’s my brain come in again?

Cornell notes work for some people. Not me. Too structured, too organized, and much too standardized.

Is it a coincidence that the classmate with the Cornell notes also happens to be that one who always blurts textbook knowledge and falls flat on his face when he attempts to connect with writing pieces emotionally that I’ve mentioned several times? Hmmm.

Perhaps.

Or perhaps not.

Then you have the people who are so stressed about sounding “professional” rather than discovering their own voice, they slap their face in a thesaurus and bob for words. I love those people.

My senior year in high school I helped a friend edit his papers for his literature class (he apparently had one of the “hardest professors”) and although the essay was meant to be personal, a sort of introduction for the professor to learn more about the student and assess skill, he veered off into the dark abyss of “words that sound smart”. Suddenly he was in a “vacuous playground of no consequences” and “exposing himself to entities.”

I have no idea what the fuck kind of metaphor, I . . . what . . . exposing himself?

Words are a dangerous game, my friend; they can make you and they can break you.

***blows smoke from end of word gun, spins around fingers, slips weapon back into holster and flies into space***

He’s transferred to a university now, and hopefully isn’t exposing himself to anyone or anything.

Lesson? Sometimes the less you think, the better you sound. Your brain thinks in words all the time, it doesn’t need you busting a vein over it.

I think I’ve spent enough time procrastinating.

Here are some of my latest photos: