Seaport Afternoon

i feel like i am getting nothing done.

when i picture my blog i feel like there is something ultimately 'out of focus' to my entire approach. 

there is a nervous feeling when i am aware that people are reading my writing.

i do not feel like i am ready for people to read my writing but i want to remain constantly available for the duration of my life. 

the only times i would like to remain closed off to someone is if there is a persistent awkwardness, or negativity between that person and myself. or if a person is using or taking advantage of me for an exclusively personal gain.  

i feel less anxious when my writing enters someone i do not know's life. yet this feels like a form of laziness or something, though not bad, not entirely desirable. i am confident that if my writing is read by people 'close' to me and 'accepted' by them in an honest or sarcastic yet positive way, that will develop my cognitive manifestation of thoughts. i feel that cognitive manifestation of thoughts helps a writer, career-wise. i am not sure about this though. i just want to be more like i am in real life and in real life i want to be more like someone who is interesting to other people. i feel like i am coming to terms with my ego, or my self-consciousness. 

i need to increase references to my self-consciousness and my self-awareness in a way that will make me definitively ironic, an ultimate parody of a self-interested yet humble - a compassionate person with a sense for cuteness, passion, and pity. bravery - maybe. 

i keep leading myself to uncertain thoughts.

i just thought about deleting this whole post, or disqualifying it in some way. i imagined myself in the MLB and my pitching coach telling me a lot of what i do is unnecessary and that i will not become more threatening to batters unless i eliminate my ineffective pitches.  

i had thoughts about not blogging anymore, even deleting a significant amount of incapable posts.

maybe i should become more of a shrewd and canny person. i feel like being a mild mannered person detracts from my ability to make objective observations. i am confident that this is an assumption and that i feel like i simply want to become more of an objective thinker and observer. 

a lot of times when i am thinking about writing i repress anxious feelings towards having to recall observations that i told myself were interesting after i experienced them. i hope i am not depending on spirits to infuse my writing with concrete material. 

ultimately i want to write something that reflects my life and my personal brand. sometimes i feel like my writing is 'blurred' by how i am living, which i also perceive as to be 'blurry', as if my life does not have a personal brand for my writing to reflect. these things are inversely negating, as is maybe some larger universal duality. 

i want practice writing in a way that will produce results, as in a personal satisfaction. 

i feel like i have achieved a level of thinking that i would like to manifest and then develop into a career arc sort of thing. 

this would maybe maximize my personal experience maybe or improve the objective nature of my life. 

i hear a person singing outside. i think this person might be drunk. the language is spanish.

i feel unsure how any of these thoughts can improve a person's writing. i feel self-conscious of what people might deduce my emotional state to be, or my level of self-confidence to be gaged at. 

i feel satisfaction in a helpless existential retreat. my level of depression and uncertainty are combining to produce yearning phases of bipolar behavior. adjectives and adverbs are out of control. 

my life feels calm. i feel patience is easy to practice. 

the other night i let a small amount of fear, brought on by arbitrary thoughts before sleep, a la bipolar-ness (see above), stay in me. i thought, i know this is fear, and i know i can make it leave, but it should stay for longer and grow a little, a little longer. 

i forget what happened next. 

i feel as though i can finish this post without using a rhetorical statement, though i have felt urges to use rhetorical statements throughout and conscientiously abstained. 

*edited* 5 / 24 / 09 *edited*

1,2, ---- you

i have made a playlist for writing poetry.

it is called 'poetry writing mix.'

the mp3s accumulate play counts - sometimes i am not writing 'poetry' -

and the songs creep into the top 25 most played list.

it seems that i can only act like i know what life is really about in spurts. 

it feels like i am changing every day, but still feel the same on the inside

i imagined my thoughts were the noodles i was eating.

this was strange, believing it sarcastically. each noodle was a separate thought and together they were one thing.

seems far away and okay, a la 'golden years'

every time i read a story that is set in some sort of asylum i think of 'Girl Interrupted.'

sometimes i think that the writers of 'Girl Interrupted' must have read this story

and then deduced the screenplay accordingly.

i have been having apprehensive feelings about initiating conversations with people or ay, caramba!

there is a grammar book that i like. “the sea horses, you see, were lassoed, broken, taken to the rodeo, and, at last, after all these degradations, put in a tank on Fisherman’s Wharf[…]” is a sentence in a paragraph about voice.

the book uses clever sentences, they 'make you think'. the examples usually cover a lot of possibilities. the style seems like a 'writerly' style. not like a cover letter or office style.

there is also a story woven throughout the book.

at one time or another, i took sentence examples as sort a framework for sentences to start poems with or to like insert into my poems a la the 'bad poems' on this blog like here.

i feel pity for the people at the public library who have to wait to use the computers while people use their allotted time to check their myspaces. this seems frustrating for them.

i feel like i am in some sort of mood where i can keep writing a lot, where i feel like i need to write.

i think i might be in the gym later yearning over ideas i want to write down thought i will not be able because the gym is not a environment conducive to a writing.

i am going to go to the gym though.

that is the 'life i have chosen'. i sort of wrote this down before i typed it. i sort of feel like i should type things exactly as they are written but while applying rules like 'expand contractions', 'add subjects like I'

i feel confused by the things i know i will never understand. the things that are happening that i would feel better if they did not are persistently happening. i am dying. at the end of the day i am alone. at the end of it all we are alone.

i am more excited about going to the gym than not going to the gym. i pay to go to the gym and if i go tonight then i can 'not go tomorrow' and spend time on writing. [before edit: more excited about adding the gym in there than not going]

i am back from the gym.

i feel like the period of my life when i waste money to do things that i feel are fun is over. i feel like if i were paying to go to college again i would not waste the money by drinking instead of studying and when i have money in my bank account i do not feel like spending it all until i black out drunk. that life not only seemed unlivable but also it seemed.

in the book i was walking about before, there is a drawing or print of a person in a little chariot with bird wings and he he or she is holding the reigns which are really just strings tethered to a bunch of birds. there are skeletons and stuff too. i like these things in the book. there are some exposed breasts in the pictures, some bats, frogs, horses, vampires, duh.

i think i will use the internet for grammatical help if i feel [illegible] worried about grammar.

i feel pressure from my spellcheck to capitalize 'gothic' and 'internet'.

e

i use expository sentences to enhance thoughts of stubbing my toe and my sandal filling with blood and of a rusty roofing nail poking into the skin of my palm.

i ride my skateboard to the garden supply store to buy a clay planter and topsoil.

i sip from a pitcher of ice water on the bar and the bouncers remove me from the venue.

i feel that this is a 'big deal' and you should know.

i decide against buying a clay planter and topsoil and instead practice 'front-side' 180 degree ollies with my skateboard.

i drink coffee and eat cake i bought from the library cafe.

i work on a short story i have been working on, 'off and on,' for 10 months.

i feel an ominous form of depression in the morning. 

it exists outside of me, like an atmosphere clouding the 2-3 hour time period which i consider to be the 'present.'

i am not sure why i am 'writing' like this, am i being non-directive. 

i hope things change soon or am i just being impatient or should i be working harder




it is my second or third night in a row where i have been kneeling at my bed and typing on my laptop.

it sort of feels like i have been praying, like i am very desperate for something to happen in respects to me understanding what i need to do to end up in preferable situations, like so i am not in a subway station at 2am hating myself and my bank account and my job and my thoughts, when i want to be at home or hiking or reading or something. so i don't keep looking back on when i was first writing things and giving them to teachers and them saying things to me so that i could build my confidence and, but now, have to feel that nothing has changed since that time. what do i need to do so that i am not looking for things that other writers do to be in my own writing.

what do i need to do to convert my feelings of aimlessness, anxiousness, and boredom into motivation to sit down and write. when will my focus shift from not being able to concentrate and feel confident, uncompromising, and excited.

will it hurt me to be as reckless as i am in the beginning, is it still the beginning. will i improve.

i wrote ideas down for this blog post earlier in a notebook. i feel that if i can't re-think these ideas without the notebook then they are not substantial or my brain is just fucked and i should get started at a manual labor career.

i am listening to choking victim. i just downloaded seven albums by them via one torrent.

i saw tyson earlier. some parts of it were interesting. i felt things that i heard and saw affecting the way i think of my own life. it was funny to be within tyson's world for ninety minutes, it felt real or something. i think i thought 'damn, this is someones life. this is life. a life.' the young tyson, approximately 84' - 91' was inspiring. he moved very fast. must have trained very hard, intensely.

i feel like my life is heading in an unknown direction. i look at other people's lives and i wish my own life seemed as simple as theirs. sometimes i just sort of stare off at inanimate things and feel that i don't understand any of it but at the same time like i am growing very accustomed to what i am seeing. i feel anxious but sort of oblivious to the fact that i am older than i want to be while feeling this way, like when a washer machine or dryer at a laundromat is making loud noises and no one is acknowledging it and if you're the one using it you feel guilty for some reason.

i feel like a small event can alter my situation in a major way. i also feel like i want to go to the gym and do crunches while attempting to exert more effort than i have in my three months as a member there. i want to work really hard and manage my time effectively, so that not only am i going to be a player in the game, i am going to sort of impress people. i want to view the back of my head or my side profile in a home video of myself and my friends and get a like a cool feeling of relief.

i feel like my ability to work hard at things is decreasing. i am more easily distracted every day. i gambled two days in a row, ate fast food two days in a row, saw a movie, and went to three bars this weekend.

my thoughts are consistently about working on things. i feel like i keep trying to cover up that i want to write with things like gambling, playing stocks, doing laundry, eating food, and downloading music illegally. i feel myself inside of my body recoiling, as if my body is gross, un-showered, and heavy handed and hormonal.

i just want a ten-foot, red haired barbarian to do barrel rolls down my street, crushing the pavement.

i want the internet to fail for the entire world except for maybe in iceland and there be a mad rush for all of humanity to inhabit that country before they build a giant wall to keep out the desperate, infected, doomed humans.

i want to just survive on physical skills alone, that or simply money savvies and professionalism, have in-demand labor skills. i want to go to everyone's house and fix something they would be appreciate having fixed and willing to pay like 30 bucks for me to fix and be done in like an hour and half and do that like 6 times per day, go home, work out, shower, and then work on lacquering and finishing the hull of a boat i plan to ride down the mississippi river.

can't i just drink myself to death or get on probation. have i missed my opportunity to get women drunk and take advantage of them, contract an std, and lose count and then become sick of women and then learn an instrument or a rare dance and then be inspired to travel the country.

i just want to at least write about something other than not being able to write, in a form that can be consistent enough for myself to merge with prior selves so that i might have a more enjoyable insanity.

this country is ------ right. as balanced as we are with our risk and return, our love and our hate, i mean we still have to do it until we die. i mean i just feel like i am going to die before things really change.

i just feel like either i need to have something happen or i am going to miss out on something. like what is going on right now are things happening that i am going to hear about later, how will they affect me.

i am not understanding who i was in the past so much. it feels like i am trying to be more in the future but i am sort of just existing in the past more. the air feels like the same air as when i was ten or two or eighteen.

i just want a decent metaphor for the present. i feel sort of lost in the present. i think i went and reached for my checkbook on my desk the other day and i was thinking like 'who the am i. why am i reaching for this thing. why are these things in my room. why did i get up and walk around.'

I Walked Around After Work

i walked from work to chrystie street, below delancey street on chrystie street. 

i got home an hour later than usual. 

i thought about a lot of the people i have known.

sometimes there were big blue signs. sometimes there was the smell of marijuana being smoked. i saw the joint in a man's hand on houston and first avenue. a lot of the time you could see into the bars, see that they were filled with people who were sitting down, eating, talking and drinking i guess. one bar had live music. it was loud, a lot of drums. 

i walked through the greenwich village, the village, and the east village, little italy, soho, and some of chinatown. everything was closed except for bars, restaurants and bodegas. 

i looked at a lot of people, felt sure of things, mistakes, of negative feelings - a little unsure of my own negative feelings.

 

a woman came out of a bar wearing a tight shirt and make-up. she was walking with her breasts pointing, arched out, her face expressionless. i had been in that bar before. i think i was forced to dance. what happened? i used to like to dance. i don't like to feel like i have to dance. i didn't like that bar i think.

 

the train is not coming now, they said it wasn't coming, people are acting like it's not coming. being forced to dance. i think there was an explosion underground. 

i looked in peoples cars when i was walking around and thought about what it would be like to be in the cars with those people. the people were either all girls, or like two guys. the girls were smoking cigarettes. they were going places quickly.

some restaurants had a lot of people and some were empty, patron wise. one restaurant which had a lot of space and was open to the street, had a suited man sitting at a table on the sidewalk. he told a mexican worker to do something and the mexican asked him a question and the man looked away and put his cigar in his mouth. he looked disgruntled or frustrated.

people are drinking from flasks on the subway.

a man outside a 'packed' restaurant, just down the block from the other restaurant, held a menu and looked worried. that was little italy, mulberry street.

on some blocks i was alone except for a person a few feet in front or behind me. at one point, on chrystie and something, near the manhattan bridge, i turned around. 

i went in one station and it had no train service. i had to walk to broadway lafayette and go north and get a different train to brooklyn. 

i am not sure why i walked around after work instead of going straight to my apartment. i wanted to feel like i experienced things outside of myself and my routines i think.

i had been to all the places before. some were new, like one or two blocks over from where i have walked before on the same types of excursion.

 

i thought about what i might say to some of the people. i thought about what i would say to people i know if they were with me. when you see different people you feel different. overall, i maintained a constant feeling of dissatisfaction, unrest, disinterest. i felt like i was forcing or willing myself to observe things, to not think in words, to try and forget words.

 

i felt feelings of unrequited-ness, coming from different sources, coming from my locations, situations. each person i saw seemed like far away. sometimes i looked at them a long time until they acknowledged me.

a man is reading 'political theology'. a man is sleeping. a woman eating cheetos or something. people are drinking from flasks, small water bottles. why do the subways always strand me.

how long have they been this bad?

is this because the economy?

should i be writing about these things? should i be writing about more advanced things, ideas. likes as if i know and understand everything perfectly, as if i can predict feelings, the economy, individual people's actions. if so i feel like everything would be a metaphor for my more perfect understanding of those things and the complete-understanding of them via my mental superiority to life, to my worldview and other's. 

a man is selling dvds and announcing them.

where is my own, unique voice. did i need to say 'my own' - is just unique enough.

why is there train traffic now if it took the train ten minutes to arrive while i was at the platform. 

i think i just thought of nothing, but cannot be sure.

nothing feels like a sheet of metal, looks like the surface of metal pushing outwards.

i want dunkin donuts. i see a bag from there.

i want coffee.

the air was foggy. manhattan felt like it was floating through nova scotia in the summer at night, the hudson bay. the night was mild in terms of how people collectively felt or acted i felt. 

people sped off in their shiny air conditioned sedans, searching.

i stared at a toys-R-us bag and thought about how i might be dwelling on sadness and negativity.

if i bring up negativity or bad feelings or even think bad feelings you will act pissed and make a noise. i have heard those stressed noises. i don't know why you make those noises. you will make a distressed face too. you will turn and walk away.

 

i feel like i am forcing my ideas out. this is unproductive. 

Confusion @ W 4th Street Subway Station Tonight

a man was playing saxophone in a cacophonous style.

a voice came on at the station and said because of an ongoing investigation the F train would be stopping at the express track between 23rd street and W 4th street. 

a girl across tracks said the train was coming on the other side, like the northbound side. she said "hurry" loudly. 

saw a person with an eraser-shaped hair cut that had a blond streak in it. the girl was mostly talking to this person. the girl pointed to the other side. she pointed in the garbage train that was going by slowly, between them. i was on the side with the eraser-shaped-hair person. the girl pretended to jump in the garbage train.

the guy playing the saxophone played a lot of notes very fast with no harmonious rhythm, just fast repetitions and loud, up and down, quick scales. i turned my ipod volume all the way down.

 

the voice came on the p-a again and said what the F train was doing.

things were confusing, a little, especially with saxophone playing like that. people gave him money.

a girl with long multi-colored dreads stood next to me. she turned her head and i noticed she was white. i thought she was someone i dated from the internet. she was obese. she asked a woman about the F train. a man with shiny, brown shoes, 'good' clothes and 'good' hair had furrowed brows. my ipod earphones were still in and i concentrated on the saxopohone noises. a woman kind of smiled at me. i thought i would never talk to a stranger though.

i looked at some hipsters. i liked them. i liked the person with the streak in their hair and the girl who wanted to jump into the garbage train.

i don't hate anyone. 

life can be hard because people leave from it, they have their own locations. life can be hard because people get violent and angry. life can be hard because people don't solve problems by looking at them objectively. 

life can be confusing because people don't understand what objects are, maybe. i was thinking the train was something more than just a train. i wanted it to get there.

i feel like i want to tell people what they are doing wrong sometimes, when i feel like i am unsure of everything.

i am not sure if i should do that because it might make them feel bad. the people who are mean but sort of don't realize they are. or people who are negative. maybe they aren't negative and i just perceive them that way because of the type of person i am, like do people just not mix.

do jews and christians just not mix. i don't know how to end this post.

i am remembering the people who were around me as the F train did it's regular things and brought me home.

i smoked a cigar tonight. i ate angel hair pasta. the first bite was hot. the pasta burned all the way past my rib cage in my esophagus. 

wish i could complete / finish / be successful via a story:


Driving to the Adirondacks Jack and Chet eat Doritos and some sort of spicy, smoked peanuts. When they take the exit off of the highway, they stop and take pictures of the moon and then spend approximately forty-dollars at a Grand Union. They are weary of the money they spend because they spent most of their savings on alcoholic beverages in college, two years ago, and haven't made much money since then. Before going to the campsite, they buy two bundles of fire wood at a gas station. They open two beer bottles as soon as they get to the camp site.They use a lighter and the cement edge of the fire pit. 'The beer is good,' Jack says. When they set up their tents it is dark. They use headlamps. They eat hot dogs and put their feet on the cement hearth of the fire pit. They put the hot dogs into folded slices of wheat bread and put ketchup on them. Jack takes a picture of the cooler of beer, of the moon which comes out squiggly, and a close up of the fire. Before they fall asleep they finish three beers each and a package of eight hot dogs.

sort of wrote sentences while on the train tonight:

my grandfather hears whispering and misunderstands shouting.

two hikers stay away from the waterfall and wait - a third almost slips into the pool.

at the dinner table i can notice my developing thoughts.

my young uncle on my dad's side rides up to the lake house in the car with my grandmother on my mom's side. when they stop at the diner, they both worry about the cat they have in the car.

when i touch my earlobe a spider falls onto my green jersey.
i squish her with my pointer finger.

i think i should write down my thoughts about our four wheel vehicles.

when i attempt to write about a new layer of thoughts,
i only remember the thoughts about the four wheel vehicles,

which still cannot be explained well.

that act of writing thoughts, like the act of watching a video of a monkey pulling a dog's tale,
begets layers of non-sequiturs.

i think gay marriage is 'okay'.

i want to add 'beer bottle opening' to the story i am currently revising.
while i am working on one story, i get ideas for another story.

i am working on neither story, and feel like my ideas are for a different type of story altogether or no story altogether, and i am perpetually working on stories that i never finish.

... from something:

On their first break, at the damn where a few trails converge, where a woman with buggy-blue eyes and pale skin cooks on a tiny stove while looking up at small brown birds circuiting from a tree out and over a lake, Jack eats a Chewy Low Fat S'mores Bar and an apple. Chet also eats a Chewy Low Fat S'mores Bar. He leans on a metal railing which hikers used to hang bear bags on before bears became too smart and hoisted them up. Then humans became smarter and invented bear canisters and mandated them. The woman with buggy-blue eyes sat on her bear canister. Jack checks his map. A man hiker approaches and asks Chet if they are from Brooklyn. The man hiker lives near Jack in Brooklyn. The man hiker talks about some stuff he did yesterday in the Adirondacks with his wife, whom stayed at the rented cabin while the man hiker 'bags' Algonquin Mountain. Chet says, "Biked sixty miles my ass," later when they are discussing the man hiker. They laugh at the idea of the man hiker, his highway enthusiasm, his middle-aged 'man on the move' groove. At the next fork, after Marcy Damn, they take another break, for water this time and the man hiker comes down the right prong of the fork, backtracking, looking lost, touching his sweaty red bandanna and furrowing his brow. Jack reassures him of the correct direction. The man hiker tells them about a hard to find trail to a lookout you can find descending Marcy from the south going north. Then he goes down the trail with his large calve muscles dimpling like a stupid chicken, one that feathered itself and ripped its own wings off before signing up for slaughter. Later, when Jack and Chet are hiking a steep rocky trail for the first time in the trip, they joke that the man hiker is about to fall, tumbling from the wooded hill to their left and onto the trail, brush himself off and ask to hike with them, presumptuously and doofus-ly.