"Human, All Too Human..."

What does one have to do to find inspiration where there is none?





All it ever took was one good class. A stimulating conversation. The right mix of herbs. A decision.

There are days when you wake up and you just know it's going to be a good day.
The muses will sing to you. There will be no more of this insipid inanity.
Today, things will fall into place. The endless torpor will be crystallized into a conclusion and placed on the Shelf of Things Learnt.
These days of inspiration are usually cloudy days, or windy nights. I find they provide a better backdrop to exorcising the seething restlessness that simmers just beneath unaffected exteriors.

(This however, is a hot still summer afternoon. Unquestionably the worst time of the day and year.)

But what IS it with my generation and constantly trying to appear unaffected? Bring on the lust and ugliness, the greed and the jealousy, overwhelming love and it's invariable concomitant - pain.
Why bother dressing your wounds and locking away your desires when all you are is exactly what I am?

You poor thing, did no one tell you choice is an illusion?

Speaking of the insidiousness of mass - marketed illusions, I must pause and take a deep bow at the imaginary camera that follows me around. For I am finally free of the Curse of Social Networking.

(---: THUNDEROUS APPLAUSE FROM STUDIO AUDIENCE!:---)

---:Sudden Flashback:---
Girl enters arched gates of the Carnival of Painted Faces / clicks on LOGIN while El Tango de Roxanne blares from the speakers.

The colourful signs scream at her
Social Utility! fun way to communicate! share your memories! find your old classmates and neighbours and all the people you ever fucked over and ADD THEM TO YOUR FRIENDS LIST!


Several of my friends are self confessed Social Networking Addicts, and I have nothing against them and the ways they choose to spend their time. Perhaps they are simply better adjusted, more fulfilled Beings and do not carry the twittering monsters inside their skulls that recite wall posts and news feeds to them long after the screen has been minimized. Maybe they have never experienced that feeling of emptiness and self - loathing that creeps in through your fingertips, as minutes melt into hours and you lose your self in the voyeuristic labyrinth of Someone Else's life.
Slowly but surely, you forget what you're seeing is only a carefully edited and well phrased version of a Real Living Person... who doesn't always spout apt and lyrical quotes, who isn't really adored by everyone who wishes them Happy Birthday and someone who probably doesn't like what they see in the mirror just as often as you do.

The monsters cackle in glee:
he never looked this happy with You!
(I never looked this happy with Him.)
Did you know they were together last night?
(Stars.Exploded.In.My.Head.Last.Night)
Has she wasted as much time as you today?
(Ha. She's deleted her activities for the day.)
she's so much prettier than you!
(Hmmm. true.)
so many more friends!

a better body!

a better life!

will YOU ever be good enough to go to college there?




No, not if I spend all my time on Facebook.




The Girl stabs the monster in it's scaly green flesh and runs out of the arched gates / Clicks Deactivate to the rambunctious Finale...




...into the arms of better days and healthier ways to channel inherently masochistic desires.

Birthday Blues

According to my memory...

(...Which may just as well belong to some other person, whose brain was once dissected into two neat halves, one of which was placed inside me while the other lives on in it's original body. Are this person and I then the same? If all we are is the sum total of our past experiences, this fiction of the Self that we create by stringing together stories collected through the senses, and remembered through photographs - then, yes. Were this person then to meet me and fall in love with my charming physical exterior coupled with their mental being, would this be the ultimate act of narcissism or of self-loathing? But that's enough fantasizing for now.)

So where was I. Oh yes, according to my memory, I've always been the sort of person who starts getting excited about their birthday six months before it actually arrives. I usually subject my mother and anyone else patient enough to put up with this sort of idiocy to a monster countdown...

"FIFTY SIX DAYS TO GO! ARE YOU EXCITED? ARE YOU???"

And the strange thing is, the excitement was never anti-climactic, for me anyway. No matter what I did on past birthdays seemed just perfect. Or rather, it didn't matter what did, because the day just felt so fucking special from the moment I woke up.


Here I am. It's less than forty eight hours away from what I used to herald with as much enthusiasm as the second coming of Christ...and I'm about as thrilled as Immanuel Kant, and roughly as much fun to talk to (i.e. No Fun At All).
The idea that I am perhaps too old, jaded and cynical to manufacture the required amount of adrenaline for my birthday this year keeps seeming dangerously possible.

That can't be it though.
I don't feel that old. I'm still full of plans of world domination and the delights of debauchery like any self respecting Young Adult. Numbers never DID make that much of a difference to me (Stop with the hissing, Pythagoras.)

WHY then, to the chagrin of my friends and The Marquis (purveyor of endorphins and dopamine) am I unable to muster even a wan smile thinking about Tuesday? What is this mysterious miasma that is suffocating my usual birthday cheer?

I feel like asking you to tune in to the same bat-channel at the same bat-time, but the truth is I may never figure out what's going on and be able to offer you a cathartic resolution - of - conflict type post.

Agony Aunt services are welcome. Uncles are a bit creepy, but mustachioed Beatniks will do too.
Ciao.

"Sit back and enjoy the ride. Remember to scream if you want to go faster."

As the eloquent and insightful Therapy caused me to realise, sometimes one must simply live instead of trying to capture life through words.
Sometimes words can do no justice to the simultaneity of exhilaration and pain.


But I finally decided to stop being a lurker on my own blog, and in cyberspace in general. After the silent perusal of at least a gazillion blogs I have come to the conclusion that I love the voyeuristic ones that give you random and intimate glimpses into peoples lives. Of course there are Blogs About Things, and they are especially helpful for the unhampered individual or group perspective they offer...but those aren't the ones I'd choose to spend my time savouring.

Perhaps the only reason we have any concern for the other is that we see the fragility of our own beings reflected in their moments of strength and weakness.I'd rather read about what the priest wrote when he questioned his faith at lunch today, why the mother felt like crying when her three year old made a fish face at her from the window and why you feel like you can never love again.



A smiling boy who's face I wouldn't have missed otherwise, died in a car crash a few weeks ago. Suddenly, he's tinged my thoughts a dull unwashable blue. Every time I'm in a car that picks up speed, a knot tightens in my stomach. I think about that smile, the few conversations we had scattered over the years and the last few moments him and his girlfriend spent together in the car...the image is searing because it's so familiar. Alcohol fumes laughter and your hair flying in the wind. The lights flash by faster and faster but you never once doubt the false sense of security that comes with being young and feeling free.


It still doesn't seem to make sense. Standing at the memorial service of someone I saw every day at school, I found myself clinging to the same strange metaphysical explanations I've heard Adults offer.

"Perhaps he was only meant to be with us for this brief time to teach us something."

I'm not entirely sold on the idea of a Divine Design. But I believe his death has taught me something. That life is precious and whimsical. That it is entirely what you make of it, yet it is frighteningly outside of your control.

Is it a normal reaction to death? This sudden lust for life? Wanting to hold on to every moment of bliss, boredom, thirst and inspiration?
I feel insatiable and unapologetic. I'd rather be brutally honest than speak in well chosen words. I'd rather be ravaged by Nietzsche's carefree, mocking, courageous warrior than mother the tortured existentialist.
Maybe it's because I'm turning twenty two in eight days.


Or maybe it's just spring.