April Showers

There's dark clouds creeping over the city right now. Everything is turning gray, but for some reason it doesn't depress me like it did. It has been maybe two weeks, but these same clouds two weeks ago would have driven me up the stairs and to the bottom of many cans. Packs of cigarettes would tremble in my presence, aware of their inevitable immolation. The gray would have its way with me.
But, having survived yet another winter of discontent, having weathered the storm, having survived the part of me that wants myself destroyed, I see can finally see that the other colors aren't really getting grayed out. The green of grass and trees and the yellow strip of a no parking area along the curb become if anything more vibrant. There's nothing visually appealing about concrete and asphalt, but these creeping clouds turn the sunlight silver and it saturates these fields of suburban sprawl and I find them...tolerable.

Gotta go to work, work all day
It keeps me busy, prevents me from spending terribly too much money, and I'm finally get back in shape. The weather does affect (effect?) my mood quite a bit, but the horrible truth of the matter is that money does so too, and probably even more. When I'm poor, I can hardly find the motivation to do anything. Just..sit here a bit more, should I try to go hang out, find out if the roommates are home, clean myself? No. I'll just..sit here a bit more.
I'm telling myself that working outdoors is whats improving my spirits and I know that it's partially true. But the horrible, awful, depressing in itself truth is that money has such a strangle-hold on my emotions that I revert to thirteen every time I'm running short on money. Text-book depression.

Gotta go to work indeed, time to make the coffee.

Oh to be the life of the party
The big cheese, cock of the walk
Listen to my stories
Speaking skills impecable

Oh to be extroverted
Crazy and flirtatious
Listen to my voice
So loud you can't help it

Oh to be sweet
A dear, a doll
Listen to me
I'll swoon you in a heartbeat

Oh to be confident
Sincere, honest
Listen to what I say
Because it comes from the heart


I know I fucked it up. I had my fair chance. But every time I tried to come clean to you, the words stuck in my throat and resulted in an uncomfortable coughing fit. A sidelong glance at you, caught in the act, resulting in a careful investigation of my shoes. My knees point toward you, hands yearn to move just a few...more...inches. It always ends in paralysis. I would tell you how I feel, but my tongue would turn to stone; my hand would finally grasp yours, but its tendons become taught; my legs would span those last few inches and touch yours if those last few inches weren't so fucking far. Yes, we are friends. Great friends. And it's great having you for a friend. I'm perfectly...content. But to be content is to settle for less than say: happy, marvelous, fantastic.
I've settled for content for so long, and now I know its secret. Contention is the opiate of the masses. We settle for being content and tell ourselves it's good enough. Sure, things aren't great but we get by. We're content. It's just good enough. But I want to be ecstatic. Like when my day has been shit and we sit and talk until six in the morning. It's ecstasy to me. I love your intelligence, your less than perfect past, your ability to make do, your love of books, your smile, your eyes, your style, and as a result..or rather as a culmination of this and more..I love being with you.

I hate that I fumble my words around you. I hate it when I mistake actors in front of you and when I can't think of the book I want you to know about. I hate knowing that I'm not an idiot and knowing I make an ass of myself in front of you constantly. I hate how fucking self-conscious you make me. I hate that I can't picture myself ever having your confidence. I hate myself for writing these things I'll never say to you.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it

It's common knowledge that traditional Japanese houses were a fairly simple construction using wooden frames and rice paper partitions between rooms. They were easily destroyed by the tsunamis and torrential rains, and fire too on the elemental flipside, but equally easily rebuilt. A caveat of these rice-paper walls that one does not initially consider is the utter lack of sound barrier from one room to the next. Because of the obvious drawbacks of this arrangement, the Japanese cultivated the “thousand paper screen” barrier in their mind: an intentional blocking of audio from adjacent rooms because one could not or wished not to hear it.

There are 1,000 paper screens between my head and my heart, and 10,000 between heart and mouth. As many barricade head and mouth, and we will suffice to say that there are an astronomically large number of pure wooden barriers dispersed between the passages of the the three. My mouth is a gash in a paper bag, and my tongue origami paper steeped in beer for weeks. To try this soaked origami tongue of mine for folding into dialogue is a futile effort, with each fold further bringing me further away from my desired product.

My spine is papermache, and a caricature of its bona fide vertebrae and meninges composed counterpart. It was crafted with enough skill to be recognizable and visually convincing from a far enough distance, but when pressure is applied it falls apart. Take two: it's not so much that it falls apart, or crumbles, and although the word collapse comes close it's still just not right. No, it's more like they compress. I picture a tree being felled in the woods by two lumberjacks with a pit saw. It falls forward, the base having lost the structural support to maintain all that weight, and the sound rings true to me: the creaking and cracking followed by fiber ripped, and I mean fucking torn asunder, from fiber by that awesome downward momentum. But even though I have felt that sound inside of me, the physics of it just don't match up.

This collapse, or rather this compression, starts at the top. Where my seven-times folded paper skull nods on imitation C1 vertebrae, and fails to swivel on its poorly pasted together mockery of the C2. That almost impossibly thickly folded skull gets water-logged in stormy weather and becomes the right hand of a sadistic accordion player gifted with retard strength. He crushes, and the paper mache compresses straight down to my tail bone, clearly making no attempt to resist. I can promise you this though: no light-hearted polka music is created in these instances. My papermache spine becomes an accordion shrieking one tune of destruction while producing no (noticeable) long term damage. When the weather clears, the paper uncrumbles, uncompresses, and some how its shape and more or less integrity are preserved. When the opportunity arises it can and will return to its original paper-masquerade.

The art of discovering the composition of your own anatomy is tricky, and perilous. Do you really want to know what it is you're made of? However, when I began to realize the flexibility (this was the same time I began to understand the risks of my combustible nature also) of this thing that is my wooden byproduct self that I came across a wonderful discovery.

With nothing more than a two foot by three inch piece of yellow construction paper, a common household staple gun, and the patience to fray this paper length wise hundreds of times, I was able to provide myself with a tail. I've always envied and hated that ultimate heart-on-their sleeve quality of animals with tails. The tail acts very much independent from an animal's conscious mind. It keeps an animals balance without being told to do so. A dog does not choose to wag its tail any more than it chooses to tuck its tail between its legs. My realization of this made me hesitant to procede with the “operation,” but what better way to see past all the bullshit excuses and false fronts we put on for others without realizing it?

The tail is there though now. It's most certainly there. It hangs down to slightly above the back of my knees, tucked in my left pant leg. That's it. It pretty much just hangs there. Not once have I felt it wag, and sometimes this concerns me. Because it's not that it doesn't move at all, but from time to time I find it sliding further along the birch tree bark of my legs, moving to my inside thigh, attempting to tuck it self between my peeling paled wooden legs, were it not confined to a single pant leg. So there I'll be, my paper bag face gashed in a crecent moon smile to expose my yellowing shredded pulp novel fragment teeth, showing the world just how fucking happy I am, but I can feel the dry grating of construction paper on birch, it scrapes off the dying white bark with a faint rustling like leaves sound and I have to hide the bark pieces falling from my pant leg. It makes me nervous, because if my tail were to continue this revolution around my leg, from back to inside thigh, and make its way any more forward, anymore around the circumference of my leg, an onlooker would probably mistake this involuntary and unwanted belying of my poor mental condition for...to put it very politely something else entirely. To put it less politely, a raging hard-on running half the length of my leg.

I have a confession to make concerning this whole tail business: part of me wants an amputation. Staple remover: check. Paper shredder: check. But I just cannot bring myself to do it. Maybe this construction paper tail that refuses to play along in my daily game of charades (sounds like...happy?) is refusing me the ability to do so. Sure, maybe. Or maybe I'm just not confident enough to admit that I need it. As much as this paper tail needs the spit ball synaptic messages rocketed through a hole burned into the bottom of this seven-times folded skull, down this papermache spine of mine, and into it to know how to tell its truth, my truth, I need it to tell the truth. And to tell the truth, I really think I need it.

Opinion Letter

I was up at the coffee-shop today smoking a cigarette when I made the poor choice of opening up the Kansas City Star's opinion section to the letters from readers section. Between the caffeine, nicotine, and sheer anger I felt after reading an article refering to pro-choice believers as being pro-death, I felt it necessary to write this up. It was longer (and better I think) before I tried and failed to get it down to 150 words or less, but it's been almost 7 months since I made a post...or wrote anything for that matter, so I figured I'd put it up on here:

Pro-death? I stand firmly in my belief that death is the best thing since sliced bread. Everyone should try it at least once. Or how about you call me pro-abortion; I think everyone should have at least one. At this point, the pro-life use of ideal-twisting slanderously misleading names for the pro-choice faction has become an appallingly accepted fact of life in Kansas.

The fact is pro-choice has nothing to do with death-wishes, murder, or even the acceptance of abortion. It is the recognition that no matter what your beliefs, backed by Biblical excerpts “proving” the creation of life at the moment of conception, they are a mute point. If you are horrified by abortion, don't do it. Tell your friends and relatives not to do it. Write a letter to your local paper's opinion section saying you don't agree with it. But do not think that your non-acceptance of abortion gives you the right to pass judgment on others. We are pro-choice, no more and no less. We will continue to defend womens' rights to make their own decisions concerning pregnancy and abortion.

I do not refer to pro-lifers as being anti-choice, anti-women, or anti-freedom. To do so would be admittance of my own inability to articulately oppose them. If the pro-life movement ever chooses to drop the petty name calling, they may one day have to explain what it is about choice that scares them so much.

Oh and by the way, I'm 21 now!

"You know you've found the right school when that paper gets you an A"

WRONG!
You know you've found the right school when that paper gets you an A, and it's not because your cynical comparison of Maharishi to a Unicorn was taken as genuine praise.
It's decided. Live with life in Fairfield until May of next year and then get the hell out Dodge (...Fairfield). Up until two weeks ago I was enrolled in "Foundations of Physics and Consciousness."

As the instructor, John Hagelin, describes it this physics class is "An introduction to cutting-edge knowledge of quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, superstring theory, astronomy, and big bang inflationary cosmology and their relation to human consciousness."

As the dropped-out student, Sam Klinkenborg, describes it this physics class is "A physics class that picks and chooses interesting points from the aforementioned topics, describes them in scrupulous and yet somehow vague ways without any kind of math to be seen and asking students to regurgitate Hagelin's analysis of how these points related to Maharishi Vedic Science."
I cannot tell a lie. I can tell a lie, but right now I have no need to. After missing the first 3 days of the class, I spent some time catching up while ignoring my teacher's insistence that it would be nigh impossible to make up my missed work and still stay on the same page as the rest of class. Quite frankly, I've been into (into in the hobbyist sense of the word) quantum mechanics and superstring theory for a while now and was at least somewhat enjoying the class. So, I did indeed catch up, and did pretty damn well at it too, and only then did I sit back for a minute to review what I had just "learned". I'm not going to go into too many details though, because really all that had been happening is summed up in my earlier post about "jacking off transcendental meditation". For example, my physics class's first night of homework was "Cite evidence, from scientific research and personal experience, that the practical application of the unified field- Total Natural Law- through Transcendental Meditation produces holistic positive benefits, free from negative side-effects." My homework was to back up a statement the teacher had made during his lectures on the first day concerning the product (TM) of the school he works for.

Longer story shorter, I dropped the class on the last day dropping with a "withdrawn" grade was possible and vowed to work my ass off to make holiday money before I return to KC on the 19th of this month. I've been opening the coffee-shop I'm working at up here, which entails waking up at 5:45, working at 6:15, and then spending the last hour before my shift is done trying to curb my urge to disembowel every fucking customer. WOW! I didn't even realize how much ire I held for the customers here til that came out. I'm gonna have to save my description of the customers, most of whom are Ru's, which is a demographic that deserves its own post.

That's pretty much the current situation in nut-shell. I dropped my class, I'm working alot, and I'll be back on the 19th. Actually, I guess that's my current situation in a nut-shell. For one reason or another, I much prefer blogging about the things up here that piss me off than the things I enjoy. So I'll finish once again with the addition of the fact that I actually thoroughly enjoy many things about this town (cold weather and copiuos snow fall aside), there are quite a few cool people to spend my time with, and I've yet to become horribly addicted to World of Warcraft which means that even if I don't consciously realize it there are plenty of things to keep me busy up here.

Remember Spawn?
That shit fuckin ruled!

Lil Edit: I didn't realize it's been almost 2 months since I made a post on here. Reading oldest to newest, it's pretty clear that my initial optimism about MUM has been slowly but surely replaced with brutal resentment which I credit to my mental laundry-list of bull-shit I've had to put up with at this school already. These blogs really don't even scratch the surface and maybe some day I'll actually take the time to write it all out...actually I was supposed to do that about a week ago for some people getting petitions together trying to make some changes to the rules and required classes here.

Is Enlightenment Attainable?

The short answer is yes. Luckily for me, the long answer is yes followed by 2-3 paragraphs backing it up in a truly A+ fashion. Cosmic Consciousness, according to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, is the birthright of every person. Over the past millenia we have forgotten our birhtright, our deserved state of consciousness, and as such have built a world that runs in seemingly deliberate opposition to it. As they says it is always darkest before dawn. As hundreds of years of night finally break over a world ruled by money, corruption, and expansion, we have seen the first rays of light radiating over the horizon in the form of a meditation technique allowing an effortless state of transcendence brining a new brightness to the life.
And look! Off on the horizon. See it? You can just make out the silhouette of a magnificant horse. But wait a second, look again. Look closer now. Why, that's no ordinary horse! It's a Unicorn! And as you stand pondering the glorious image of a unicorn standing off in the horizon at dawn in your mind's eye, you realize the whole thing was actually just a beautiful analogy.
The unicorn was Maharishi gallantly galloping toward you bearing a message of Transcendental Meditation so you too may bask in its warmth. Like Helios, drawing the sun through the sky behind his chariot, Maharishi Mahesh Unicorn has carried an effortless path to Cosmic Consciousness to our seemingly eternally nocturnal planet. And indeed, as the Sun shines on all objects the same, Transcendental Meditation makes us all equally capable of attaining Cosmic Consciousness, so long as we have purified ourselves. As pure as snow, as pure as Penta Water, as pure as...say, a unicorn on the horizon at daybreak.



You know you've found the right school when that paper gets you an A.

Kaliyuga- The Age of Chaos

Not having a laptop means I'm virtually never in front of a computer when I want to blog. I'm going to get an EEG scan of my brain in 15 minutes so I must be brief:
Here's a youtube link for our final from my first class, "Kaliyuga." and also Part Two.

I have much to transcribe and no time to do it at the moment.
If you ever feel like you're stuck in your place, just remind yourself that the universe is comprised of nine plus one (time) dimensions and no matter where you are or who you meet, it/they are nothing more than viberating loops of string.