Artifacts

I have these artifacts of people that I once knew, or wanted to know. It's hard to say if I ever succeeded in knowing someone. This could be a way of saying I did not succeed in knowing myself, or that I lost myself in the process, the attempt; gave it all away piecemeal in objects and expressions and minute exchanges of feeling. How strange it is to think that we are remnants of the past, coupled with tenuous bonds to the small treasures that litter our lives, keep us tethered to memory.

I've been told it's an ailment to keep such things as gifts, to fill up spare drawers with knick-knacks and notes impressed with faded writing. Stores of memory, rooms of universes hidden away; but it is not an attempt to hide anything. Where else can things be put but somewhere? Somewheres which lapse into invisibility, my sight can't hold it all where it should be always present, always the most important thing in my mind, my life. We rely on order as a method of keeping rather than hiding. Rummaging through, slipping into a state of remembrance–a wilted blue bookmark with the words FATHER printed on it in bold black. Who is this? Who is haunting me?

Was it my uncle who lent me some books, contained in the leaves of which I found that slip of destiny? No. That was later. But look how my mind conjures him! I did use that bookmark to save my place in his volumes, I am sure of that. See how I gave him the title, FATHER, when that's not what he was, or is. That too a possibility my mind has conjured. It is not a lie but a possible reality. See how it elaborates the matrilineage, musters possibility where before were the brute facts of relation; a slippage, a replacement of man by man that disavows the logic of time, consummation, and progeny.

My Father was a man. And, like all men, he pushed away every person who had ever cared about him. His family was what remained.

Normal 2

     Sitting down. I just did some things and now I'm continuing to do things by doing this. [stop] I finally placed a rod in my closet [stop]. My friend lent me a drill because I couldn't find the drill that's usually sitting in a bag with some other tools. It was basically a hack job but as long as the rod can hold the clothes that won't fit in my dresser, that's fine. I previously used a simple tension rod to try and hang some clothes, but after some time the tension rod collapsed under the weight of the clothes. [stop] I tried to hang some heavier stuff on it, including a few jackets, and then it all fell. I just left everything on the floor of the closet until today. I'll have to wash all the clothes that were marinating on the floor.

    The closet came with a wooden rod installed in it. It was painted white and connected to the wall by two "rod holders" I guess. They sort of look like cups. They're concave. I think whoever installed the rod system just used screws to hold the rod holders in place, which is apparently not sufficient when it comes to keeping something fastened to drywall. I can't remember what you need to keep the screws firmly in place, but I think they're plastic and meant to hold the screws. [stop] Anyway, due to the deterioration of the drywall itself or due to the lack of a firm home for the screws, the whole system collapsed out of the wall on the left side. This is what led me to employ the tension rod, and now the more secure rod system using two metal rod holders, into which the metal rod slips and is held. The rod itself is actually comprised of two rods, one thinner than the other, that slide in and out so as to make the whole thing adjustable to lengths between 30 and 42 inches, or something in that range.

    Instead of placing the screws directly into the drywall, an act which would be a repetition of the previous builder's mistake and flawed design, I [stop] decided to screw the rod holders into the bottom pieces of a little shelf that sits on top of the small closet space. The bottom pieces are wooden and also white, and I think they support and level out the shelf itself, which is another flat plank of wood. [stop] I figured by drilling into the wood the whole system would be safer. At first, I tried to drill the screws right into the wood, but this didn't work and the drill started clicking and cracking. So I used another bit to make a hole in the wood first and then drilled the screws into these holes. I forget to mention that before I did any of this I used a tape measure to ensure the relative levelness or flushness of either rod holder with the other. I placed them generally where I thought they should be, then I used a pencil to mark the general space where I thought they should generally be placed. After making the holes, I drilled the screws into their homes. Some of them were a bit shallow, but I didn't feel like removing them and going back through the whole process of making deeper holes. Maybe I'll go back and fix this later, but maybe not since I already hung some clothes on the rod and [stop] it seems secure enough. Here's hoping.

    Now I just need to clean the clothes and see how many I can hang up with the space and hangers at my disposal. I might have to purchase more. I also noticed that I have to angle the hangers sort of awkwardly to have them slip onto the rod. That doesn't bother me all that much, so I think it's fine. I did google some different types of hangers that might help to avoid this whole awkward maneuvering process, but I'll look into this more later. All I could find were smaller "hangers" that you can connect to the already hanging clothes, clothes hanging from an actual hanger, and vertically hang more clothes from the smaller sub-hangers. This seems useful for saving space, so maybe I'll invest in some of these and see how they do. [stop]

    I keep getting those guilt trip notifications from Duolingo. I like the app just fine, and I think it's a good introduction to language learning. I'll try to pick up the Cyrillic alphabet along with my efforts to improve my Spanish, I think. I got through a few of the unfamiliar letters in the past week or so. [stop]

    Sometimes I think about throwing my phone into a large body of water because it distracts me so much on a daily basis. On the other hand, it's useful for obvious reasons. I'm starting to receive emails related to academic/professional duties or whatever and I find it hard to reply to them. Usually I just forget about them by some method of procrastination or executive dysfunction, although I'm not sure if I can rightly call it that.  It feels like that, anyway, which is why it's important to sit down and do something like this so I can be deliberate or focused or whatever, which can sometimes lead to being more deliberate or focused when doing other things that require more of that behavior. [stop] There's a trash bag sitting on the floor to my right, so I'll take that out soon. I wonder what's in it because it doesn't seem very full. Maybe it's not trash. I'll look through the little cinched hole in the top of the bag before I officially decide to take it out. [stop]

    Took out some recycling earlier. I was feeling productive and I guess I try to use that energy when I have it. "Deliberate and focused" energy. They say that recycling doesn't actually do as much good as we would like, but it's better than straight-up landfill shit at the end of the day, I should think. [stop] Are there certain phrases that automatically evoke a feeling of inferiority or lack of knowledge? The difference between saying "I should think" and "I do think"– two phrases that really have the same linguistic function. [stop] When I think about recycling I always think about a conveyor belt of recyclable garbage getting picked through by a bunch of waste management employees wearing hard hats. I wonder if this is the case or if they have some automatic technology that sorts this stuff now. I saw a movie in which the main characters go to a recycling plant and somebody working there talks about an explosion and a fire that took place on account of a misplaced aerosol can or something. Seems dangerous and I can't remember the film that I saw all of this in. It stuck with me though. [stop]

    I wrote some stuff in pen in a moleskin notebook yesterday. I was waiting for some friends to meet me. [stop] I don't need a natural stopping point for this. A story ends whenever it ends, doesn't it? If you're still curious about something in the story, then that's the story as well. The story can live with you that way. As long as it's "deliberate and focused," which is just a way of saying that the creator felt like doing something and they did.

    

Normal

     It smells like cat shit in the office room. Might sound weird to put it that way, but I can't say "my office" because it's not mine alone and it's also a room in a rented house. And maybe an office isn't a thing I want to have, but a place I want to be in. For practical reasons. Like I don't have a job that requires an office. I don't commute to an office for work, and if I ever have to do that I'll kill myself in a body of water or something. Everything I do in the office room is made up.

    I saw a quote from somebody that said "art is sex for the mind" or "art is the sex of the mind." Something like that. I think the quote was from a reputable thinker, or I at least recognized the name. But that's hilarious. Sex of the mind. I just don't understand the sentiment. I guess the quote-person was speaking in terms of pleasure or hedons or something. But really I don't know what it means. And I had to look at the comments because I always have to. I'm wasting my life and I'm the greatest at it. A lot of the comments were from bot accounts, which I usually just call "robots" because I guess it's funny, and they said some stuff about direct messaging an account and making a bunch of money with bitcoin or stocks or something. Some of the comments were praising the quote for being insightful and true. I wondered if the real people in the comments understood the quote in a way that I didn't, or if they just wanted to comment something so the other people who read the comments would know that they existed and recognize them, even if that recognition involved a feeling of scorn or ignominy.

    I don't want to do anything. I don't want to see anyone. I just want to stare at my laptop and think about what I would write if I wanted to write it. Just for now, maybe. Or maybe I'll feel this way for the rest of my life. That's also fine. If your reaction to this is that I should go to therapy, then you should go to therapy.

    Here's what I'll do. For transparency, every time I stop writing fluidly and continually, I'll put a little [stop] in the text. Just like that, in brackets. This will maybe encourage a more candid style. Just keep writing and it doesn't matter what it's all about. I started writing a story on the typewriter a couple weeks ago about two sexually deviant morgue workers. In the next piece of the story a man is going to go home and watch tv, and a woman is going to go home and also watch tv [stop]. That's neither here nor there, just something I wanted to mention. I drank a bunch of coffee today and read two books written by my friend. He's very talented and he also makes me laugh. It's interesting to read the writing of someone who you've spoken to regularly, like you can hear it in their voice and you might also pick up on tonal [stop] things that you wouldn't have picked up on otherwise. For example, some things can sound or be serious and hilarious at the same time. Or something might seem serious and just be hilarious. Vice versa. [stop]

    I wish I had an orange or some piece of citrus fruit right now. If I had a pineapple I probably wouldn't want to prepare and eat it. I'd want to eat it but I wouldn't want to prepare it. I will probably do nothing today and I will now accept the fact that I will do nothing. I think I'll turn one of these longer short stories into a novella or a novel. Start working on that this week. [stop] It can be about more things and include more details. Then maybe I can edit it and then see if somebody wants to read it. Or I can just read it and nobody else will. Then I can write something else. [stop]

    A few weeks ago I bought some plants from a plant nursery with my friend. I can't remember the names of the plants. I bought some mint and many people told me that it is impossible to kill mint, so I made it my goal to kill mint and it worked! The mint is now dead in its little plastic faux-pot thing. There's a pun in there. What is it? [stop] Faux Pas. I typed several variations of that phrase and then googled the exact spelling and definition. But I killed the mint. I didn't really consciously intend to kill it. Another plant, with purple and green leaves, I also killed. It was a beautiful plant. I have a little succulent that a friend gave to me as a housewarming gift and another cactus outside in another faux-pot that probably won't die no matter how badly I neglect it. Somebody told me not to plant it in the ground. I've been thinking about growing some hanging tomatoes. [stop]

    I was thinking about James Wright. One of my friend's books started with an epigraph, if that's the right word, written by James Wright. Something about hell and poetry; I liked it. I also like James Wright. I think he died from cancer in his tongue, something like this. The death seemed very sad, but he spoke well with his last words. I imagine that many people don't get last words, either because they cannot speak or because they aren't consciously thinking about the finality of the thing. I imagine it would help to have the finality in mind when you're speaking for the final time. But I don't know. I remember my grandfather's final words being a guttural "I love you" to everyone in the room. Those are good last words too. My grandmother collapsed on his bed with her hands like she was praying and she cried, saying "I love you. You were the best husband." I listened to a Green Day song on my ipod nano after I saw my grandfather die because I thought that was the music people would listen to when they were sad or when somebody died. Or maybe it was just the music I listened to because I was sad that somebody had died, somebody I loved. I shouldn't degrade the past like that. I just wanted to listen to some music and I was so sad. I remember just as he died I turned to face my father, who was standing near the door or just out in the hallway, and I fell into him and cried into his shirt, and he looked like he was about to cry too although I didn't see him cry, or if he was crying I didn't see him cry very hard. It was sad for everyone and my grandmother lived for less than a year after that. She fell down one day on her kitchen floor. I was a child then and I'm still a child now, I reckon. I love going to my grandmother's old house, which is my uncle's house now. I love my uncle, too. It still smells the same as it did. The fig tree in the backyard still grows. My grandmother's cat is getting old and wiry. The city water still has the strong flavor of my childhood. I used to cry a few times about not getting a toy or something. Everyone probably thought that was fine because I was a little kid. I wish I could've stopped doing those things sooner and maybe I would've seen or understood more things.

    But I think James Wright had cancer on his tongue and he was a wonderful poet. [stop] But I drank a lot of coffee and all of this is so disorganized and nonsensical. Maybe there's something here, but I can't see it. [stop] It smells like cat shit in the office room because there's a litter box in there, which is fine with me. The fan is on and I'm going to drink more coffee and try to be more deliberate with all of this.

    

    

Roddy Ricch 2019 Paradigm Shift

    Something is wrong. Something's terribly wrong. 

    Everyone felt it but they didn't know how to explain it. I also didn't know how to explain it, because I am a part of everyone. A dark cloud came over everything, but there was no dark cloud. And nothing came over anything. There were only normal clouds and a normal sun in a normal sky; sometimes there were no clouds at all, only the suspicion that there might be clouds and the assumption that those clouds would be dark, or light, but ultimately normal. But we didn't know.

    Because normal is abnormal, and because we didn't know, we assumed a lot of things. I drank a whole bunch of whiskey in the basement of what was once my home. I drank the whiskey with a dear friend. We pissed in the yard or inside, in a room with a toilet or in a room without a toilet. We walked around at night and stared at the stars and talked about things, cried about them, and laughed about them. All that time nothing incredible happened to upset the deeper assumption that everything was credible. Nothing made proper sense and I relished in it.

    Things started to make sense. Little things. I understood that a plant grows if you water it sometimes. If you're late to work too often people will look at you funny. I understood that my father was telling the truth when he told me that the friends I had then would not be my friends later on. I understood things but I did not believe or grasp them. When you face your fears, something good might happen. When you face your fears, something bad might happen. I said "I don't know" and I meant it, and it was my favorite phrase.

    We were given unintelligible scraps of reality for food and we ate them. We pretended to be full. We insisted and we lied because it tasted like shit. It tasted like shit because we had never tasted such things before. It was ridiculous and we continued not knowing. We convinced ourselves that all of this was fake and we proceeded to do other made-up stuff. Everything changed but we couldn't tell because everyone kept dying and everyone spoke a different language after they had died.

    I broke my hands trying to punch through a wall.

Raking

     I helped a friend of mine with some landscaping work. We drove over to the yard where my friend was working; it was covered in leaves and scraps from a bush that he had destroyed, all consolidated into mountains of green and brown in the middle of the property. It was a nice yard, and I told the owner of the yard that it was a nice yard. Tools were littered throughout the yard. My friend showed me the handsaw that he had intended to use to chop down the massive bush, which actually turned out to be four different bushes that had grown together against the fence. Four different roots. He ended up using a chainsaw instead, which made his labor more efficient. He showed me his recently purchased felling axe, which he had used in an attempt to destroy a treestump: it was broken at the neck. The axe-head was on the ground next to the handle, separated cleanly. The head weighed four pounds. Fortunately it was purchased with a warranty.

    My friend lent me a pair of working gloves and we began hauling black bag after black bag of yard scraps from the yard to the perimeter of the yard, leaning each one against a chain-link fence. Some of the bags were light enough to throw over the fence, others we walked through the gate and gradually piled. I underestimated the weight of one bag and spilled some leaves and splintered branches onto the ground. I picked them up and shoved them back into the open top of the back, leaning over the fence. Other splintered branches were folded up and packed tightly into the back. I missed some of the leaves, and later on they got cleaned up by the couple who own the property.

    The mountains of scrap diminished, became smaller hills as a result of our laborious hauling. When the piles became small enough, I bent closer to the earth and dragged my hands through the grass. I dragged delicately, trying not to tear up the grass that was alive, mitigating collateral damage in my attempt to hold only the decapitated leaves and branches. My friend came over with a rake, a rake with black tines. He swept the rake across the lawn, combining smaller hills into amalgamated mini-mountains again. When he had finished raking the scraps into relatively larger piles, I grabbed the pieces with my hands, making the piles smaller until I again resorted to dragging my hands across the grass, combing the lawn for the smaller hidden pieces of brown and green. We're doing the same thing, I thought. My hands are tiny rakes. The rake, in its invention, is a natural extension of the body. I thought about how many tools were like this: natural extensions of the body for maximum utility and convenience. The tools we make and use are a reflection of our lives. The rake made combing the yard easier, bigger, faster. My hands, smaller by comparison, made the labor of combing slow and arduous. But the rake was the older brother of my hands. An evolution of my body.

    We continued combing and raking and packing the scraps into black bags until the married couple who owned the property signalled– that's enough. Some leaves and young branches were still burrowed in the lawn; the man of the couple said that it would all get broken up when he mowed the lawn. Lawnmower, scythe, pulling weeds out of the ground with one's fingers, letting the world grow and doing nothing about it... The woman of the couple handed us some beers in the plastic shopping bag: "beers to go." I accepted the bag from her and held it, carried tools back to my friend's vehicle. I fished in the bag to ascertain the quality of beer we had been gifted. Natty Bo. Cold brew beer. The couple had gone digging through their fridge: "which beers do we not want?" Those are the beers that I want. Freewheeling beer.

    Later on we went to Target and bought a TV. I thought about strapping it to my head and walking around with it playing all the time, to see another world while living in this one.

Sometimes I hear a song, or a part of a song, or a movement within a piece of music, and my scalp goes numb. That day there was no music.

Calling

     When I get very busy I cease to be a real person. By a real person, I mean the kind of person that seems real to other people; interacts, socializes, smiles, keeps up appearances, etc. I always try to keep busy because when I'm busy I feel more real to myself, which is a kind of being real in contradistinction to being real to other people, supposedly. Every phone call I make ends with a solemn comment akin to "don't be a stranger!" Something to remind me that I've been a terrible performer, socially speaking. Insufficiently friendly or familial. This seems fair to me. When something isn't there, it's just not there. Like object permanence except with people. I am the object in question. But it's more complicated than that, which is why it's fair.

    I suppose I could keep tabs on and maintain appearances with everyone in my life. If there were eight days in a week I could spend most of the eighth day calling everyone and letting them know how I'm doing and asking them about the same thing. The response one usually receives for that sort of question is generic, so I would ask further questions to determine exactly how and what the person is doing, and perhaps why, if it's not overbearing. Eighthday would be a day for chatting and vibing. As it stands, in a calendar system that contains only seven days in a given week, none of which are reserved for calling people, my ability to make phone calls is severely limited. Either way, it's a matter of choice. No, it's not. Yes, it is. That's why it's fair. Sure.

    So I emerge from an era of business (that's busy-ness, being especially busy) like a newborn, starting from square one, from scratch. A scratched square. I re-emerge into the social dimension like an alien, probably looking and acting differently (heyyyyyyyyyy; met with blank stares, maybe). Begin easily. Don't push yourself too hard. Pick one person who passively resents you for not calling as often as you should and give them a call. Talk about anything and keep talking until one or both of the two parties has something else to tend to. Call someone who has a relatively small number of things to tend to and talk for as long as you can. See what's going on. Listen to their voice.

    I called my grandfather sometime last week and sometime yesterday afternoon. He's an interesting man and he's full of practical sage advice that I assume he doesn't often have the opportunity to share. It's weird that some people talk to older folks and babies with the same cadence. I think we should avoid doing that, in most cases. Both when we talk to babies and to older folks. I'd be alarmed and probably bothered to discover that people were just putting on a voice to appease me (or, in the case of being an older person, to infantilize me? Again?); also, the cutoff and reintroduction ages for baby-voice employment are apparently arbitrary. It's probably easier for everyone to use a regular (not to say disaffected, but natural-seeming) voice while speaking to another human of any age group.

    So I called my grandfather yesterday and spoke to him in my natural, non-baby inflection, and we talked about events and phenomena. He told me that I'm at a point in my life full of potential and possibility–nothing is set in stone or absolute, most things and plans are changing and interacting with other plans and ideas for the future, etc. He talked about how there's only so much you can do to change most people or to influence them into seeing you in a particular way that you might intend or not intend. You can do your best to put your honest self into the world, and the consequences of that are usually unforeseen, or at any rate out of your control. By extension, everyone is totally different and unique. He told me that sometimes he sees people who are totally fucked up, and he thinks "what the hell happened to this person to make them this way?" This is a relevant and sophisticated question, I thought. Something about how everyone in this world is so fucked up that it's inconceivable, almost unreal. I think that's beautiful.

    The conversation continued and he offered further pieces of practical wisdom, informed by so many experiences and thoughts across a lifetime that, as of now, is longer than mine by multiples. We started talking about guns: owning them. He told me, "you don't think you need one until someone is beating down your door."

I will call my grandfather again soon. I'll call other people too.

Special Pen

     Years ago my father gave me a pen. It was a metal pen. When I clicked the push button, a ballpoint tip did not thrust from the pen's barrel; it was a small flashlight where the push button should have been, or where it usually was on a normal, plastic pen. A small flashlight the size of the push button, like one you'd see on a novelty keychain with someone's name on it (or everyone's name, when they're all organized together alphabetically on a rack, flashing out of sync with colorful letters, powered by little solar batteries, maybe. There's always a name missing. There are some names you can never find flashing on the novelty name rack). Instead of a push button, the pen twisted to thrust out the ballpoint tip. It was surprising. If you'd never seen a pen like that, with a little needlepoint flashlight instead of a push button proper and a spinning mechanism instead of a spring mechanism, you wouldn't expect it. Sometimes now I see a pen with an orbicular push-button-area, and I suspect that it might be a very nice metal pen with a little useful flashlight secreted in its design (the bright beautiful head), but it never is. Let me know if you find a pen like this, because usually I find that it's one of those touchscreen styluses disguised as a flashlight push button, disguised as a normal push button. I find this pattern of disingenuous push button posturing a little disturbing.

    I made a joke about the pen. Something like, "hey dad imagine if someone needed to borrow a pen and you gave them this pen and they clicked the top part of the pen thinking that this would make the pen click but it really shined them in their eyes." I often used to imagine childish scenarios like this one, in which somebody who was rude or bullyish would have their life marginally inconvenienced by some intervention of fate or roundabout cleverness. I probably thought that these little inconveniences exclusively happened to those who were assholes or sinners because I didn't really know how else the world leveled out between the assholes and the good people. It's pretty funny to imagine sinfulness as just being sort of an asshole or a rude person sometimes. That was my takeaway from church. Just kidding. When I was a child I was never embarrassed by the things I said, so I would talk about the imagined scenarios. Now I do not do that.

    After I made this joke that was not funny to anyone, although I wanted it to be, which is why I told it (I also probably didn't think it was funny but I would have laughed if other people did), my father told me sternly that this was a special pen, an expensive pen, a pen from his work, and that I would not be taking it to school ever and I would not be sharing it with anyone ever. I think I shut my mouth then because he seemed awfully serious, like he had known and I had not known or even been capable of knowing the importance of this pen. I agreed that I would only use the pen in the ways that he allowed me to use it–purposefully, silently, where nobody else could see it or ask about it.

    I think the pen had blue ink inside. I didn't use it very much because I did most of my writing at school, where I mostly used pencils anyway. I wouldn't appreciate the permanence offered by a ball-point pen until later in life. When you use an eraser to obliterate pencil jottings, you can still see the indentation left by the pencil tip. It's challenging to completely erase the markings. I would always use shitty erasers too, so it would smear the graphite all over the page and make a mess. Eraser shavings and graphite marks would stick to my hands; the words would be printed on the heel of my palm like when you press silly putty onto a sentence written in pencil. Then you squish and fold the putty up and the words stretch into oblivion.

    Anyway, I think the pen is still sitting around here somewhere. Hidden in a footlocker or elsewhere. I wonder if the little secret flashlight still works. I bet it does.