Perspective of Past Pedanticlessness

I still remember the first time I bought cigarettes. I was in Georgia at my parent's house and I was going through minor alcohol withdrawal. I walked, at one A.M. to a convenience store down the street and purchased a little, plastic-wrapped package of Bugler lights. They were the kind that are referred to as "rollies" since you have to roll them yourself. I remember thinking, as I sat down with my back to the wall of a carpet factory at the end of the road my parents lived on, that this was not what I wanted. I rolled the cigarette anyhow and poorly at that. There was too much of the wet, brown crap in the paper and it wound up looking like a mummy's finger and smoked like trying to suck the sap from a maple branch. But I smoked the whole thing. My lungs filled up and reflexively hacked the blue smoke back the way it had come in with gusto. My eyes watered, my nose petulantly spewed all of its contents out onto the sidewalk in front of me and I, of course, called Allison.

Now, six years later, I am still boggled at my inability to cope without this crutch. I can go, as I have proven, months on end without smoking, only to be called back to the habit and its inevitable smelly fingers like an easy chick to a good lay. Whenever I am stressed, irritable, drunk, over-tired, hungry, feeling fat, lonely or bored, I want a cigarette. Alcoholics Anonymous says it takes ten years to get past the psychological needs I have associated with my addiction but, even then, it will remain at the back of my mind until I die as a viable escape plan.

One packet of crappy tobacco and 25 rolling papers at one in the morning will forever be as much a part of me as the woman on the other end of the telephone that night.

Cast your roses, boy, and be off.

Cajoling the Archetypes

This is another day. This is your brain on empty. This is your body begging for a vacation. This is your conscious self saying "no". This is the day that rain makes heavier. This is the day your inner Icarus is vanquished by vanity. This is the day that your moratorium on wishing goes into effect. This is the second time you've told yourself this. This is the re-run of the pantheon of failure in your mind. This is the finger and that is the knife. This is the blood oath: run, baby. Run.

The Artist's Misaligned Priorities

The delirium has passed and been replaced with mismanaged idealism and a hope for a career as something I'll have to try hard at. Now that clearer and, dare I say, prettier heads prevail in the land of Ego and Id the combination of vanity and desire snuggle close once more and beg me to pursue the course ended with a red couch and addiction. Once a month these feelings surface and I never act on them. I never book a show, restring my guitar, write a new song or even consider taking a chance. This breaks my heart. Once a month my heart is broken. The mistakes recorded replay and it always strikes me that that part of me might only be on life-support but still has big lungs. Rembrandt reclining. Graham grousing. Folds folding. Jim jittering.

Friendshiftlessly

Without surprise, maybe, I've become accustomed to the fact that those people I once counted as my best friends are now, in fact, more like acquaintances. They are people you call when you're in town to catch up or drunkenly text at 3 a.m. when your girlfriend is sleeping and doesn't want to be bothered. These are not the people you hang out with because they live in other cities. These are not the people you talk to because they dislike talking on the telephone. These are not the people you email or Facebook message because you feel that that is an even sadder transmission of emotion. These are the people, however, that you have in your wedding party. Why? Because no one else has even come that close to making you feel loved in that way before or since and you need their acceptance of your marriage whether they like it or not. No nostalgia monster here... just a final realization that my circle of friends needs to grow outside of those who once loved me fervently in the hopes that I can get around to learning to love again.

Instinctaphobiac

And just around the bend form this particular stretch of mediocre highway is the happy open ground of brilliant success. And where is the light? Where is the light? Show the ocean to be where it is! Blend all of your realities into one phantasmagorical lust-fest. Give me the heartache, the joy, the unrelenting sting of failure's breath. Give life to heavy emotions. Employ whatever potions must be used to give weight to experience. I am an un-illuminated iron-barred vessel to hold the soul in. Seek we the cracks. Hold hands and slip through. Hold hands and transcend.

Juxtapomorphosis

The time traveler set his heels down again, this time in the Bay Area, attracting what may amount to some modicum of success. His feet dirtied by thousands of miles wandered, mostly in aimless circles and always with an antipathy toward the ideals of his forebears; namely the idea of settlement, offspring, creationism and keeping one's imbibing at a minimum. The coolness of ice in a glass not withstanding, some of the former parental partialities have crept into his frontal bit of gray matter. Is it aging, or merely a hormonal imbalance of some sort that leads the structurally disinclined to roots? The wanderer blames time, blames the inevitability and desperation of approaching death, despite its surprising distance from the present. I think it might be all of those chemicals in our drinking water and wonder how to go about contacting the EPA. Industrial waste is causing maturity.

Corporatocratization

Today the Federal Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled in favor of Comcast in a suit against their restriction of bandwidth for specific websites in breach of a widely-held belief among internet users of "net neutrality". The NY Times reported that the Appellate Court found that the FCC had no legal recourse to restrict internet provider's own restrictions of their networks. Users of BitTorrent sites, YouTube and Hulu can expect slower download times in their future and, once the Comcast takeover of NBC is complete, the inevitable slowing of content downloaded from competing network's websites. The real bitch of it is that such an action on the part of Comcast would be completely within the scope of the legal precedent set by the Appellate Court's ruling. Net Neutrality takes a nose-dive. Next stop, paying more for a "high-download" account! Go fuck yourself, Comcast.

Sophistique

Recently there has been a preponderance of evidence heaped at my door that clearly shows that I am, in fact, nowhere near as young as I once was. This may come as a shock to some, but I am god-damned near to 30 years old. Despite this fact, until recently, I viewed myself in the same physical light as when I was 20. This was a period in my life when I was running five miles a day, a vegetarian, a teetotaler and a non-smoker. I somehow did not notice the gravity of time having rendered my lovely figure into something more becoming a 45-year-old man. I think I may be developing bitch-tits and my love handles have become more like love overhangs. My lack of physical prowess has become most evident in the way my lungs handle stairs these days. When I was younger, taking the stairs when the escalator was out of service on the T back home was no big deal; a minor inconvenience at worst. These days, I find myself trudging up the stairs in the SF underground like an octogenarian on a treadmill. The worst part is that I recently gave up smoking for the fifth time in my life and no longer have their carcinogenic toxins to blame for my muscular fallibilities. I would that I had some other thing to blame than myself and the increasingly sedentary lifestyle I've become accustomed to, which is why I am blaming my aging and not laziness. I suppose this reflection has helped me clarify some things to myself but probably has given no sort of edification to anyone reading this. But there are 75-year-old marathoners and someone's got to get something out of this ambling passage and it might as well be me.

Marshalling Waltzes

Lately, affinities for albums have completely consumed me. I have become unable to listen to single tracks from discs, instead indulging my senses in a thorough drenching of some artist and producer's vision. It's become a compulsion, actually. This can get annoying when I have shit to do. And it also has other pitfalls, not the least of which is that most artists are incapable of an excellent front-to-back album. Many have throwaway songs strewn throughout the whole thing and those flakes of crappy pepper seem to sometimes ruin the dish. Call me an elitist, but "Blond Over Blue" is a steaming pile in the middle of what otherwise is a decently solid album, Mr. Joel. This predilection narrows my available list of listenable albums to about 20. Hopefully my fixations and compulsions will undergo a sea-change in the near future and I can, once again, listen to my iPod on shuffle.

The Hypocrisy of Now.

Each hour of the day brings with it another completion of a cycle that began fifty-nine minutes earlier and with it comes new perspective. Time to stand up from the computer and stretch, see things differently than the hours past; fewer minutes until quitting time; fewer days until the weekend; fewer weeks until vacation. We pour our hearts into the moments that come next like our jobs were to be ewers for the soul-collectors and our time immortal. Our atoms will leave us as quickly as they came and without remorse. We should follow the flood plains of ions and dam our mouths to thwart time. And while we're out we should, perhaps, see the world.

Propheteering.

While at first blush it may seem like a good idea to predict what will happen in one's future, I am finding more and more that accuracy in such adumbration is god-damned near impossible. That said, I have been dreading the reception of an acceptance or denial letter from UC Berkeley that is to arrive in the next several weeks. These feelings are supposed to be over and done with by the time one is 19. I have the lucky exception to be experiencing this at the tender age of 28. So, the prognosticating part of my psyche is up to his old tricks and is raking my inner child across the proverbial coals; telling him that his proposed failure to gain acceptance to the University is not only inevitable but a further example of his inability to succeed at anything he tries. My psyche is a bastard. How could it possibly know what the outcome of this event will be? Psyche not psychic. This is the same part of my brain that said I would never own a house or quit smoking. It also predicated that John Kerry would somehow overcome his insatiable thirst for boring people into comas to get elected. Obviously I shouldn't listen, but the voices can get loud.

The Default Position

The mornings lately all seem melded, actually somehow regenerating nightly into the same amalgamated mess of bran muffins, bananas and a race for the shower, train and priority seating. Gather strength for the battle of brain-robbery. The suck-out of all will to press on wrapped up in the too-tightly bound pants I swore fit last week. Fluctuations of weight, ego and facial hair. Where is the supposition come from that I'm to do fine? What message does it send to the rest of the mind when the cortex can't keep us standing... Medulla Oblongata makes a stand in the evening hours before dreams end; wake to muffin-tipped tongue.