yin yang mentality

So there's this sexual pathology called sacrificial ethos, where you engage in something terrible and ominous like sadomasochism or unprotected sex with an HIV positive person, in order to serve yourself up like a lamb for slaughter, chasing pain for pain, negativity for negativity, and death for death.

Maybe they're walking the line between living and dying, I say. Maybe they only desire it for the foreclosed (but still remembered) possibility of pleasure. Without contrast, there is no meaning, I insist.

There doesn't have to be meaning, you say. No need for meaning for wanting pain. They want it to want it, no need to ground it, no rhyme to it, and no reason for it. You rattle this off like a rap song that rattles the conservatives in Alabama.

There is no shadow if there is no light! I shout inside my head as the rattle enters deeper layers of my gray matter. Because we are rational creatures tethered to animal passions, so we are doomed for imperfection, and will always fall from grace, and always have dark and light, and will always try to understand that which we cannot. So we need paradoxes of meaning and meaninglessness, so shadow alone is not an option, so your nihilism will never come to be. Retreat, with your serpent and its clinking tail! Your rattles will not get to me.

**

inception

I just came from a slam poetry reading for the first time. It evoked far more than I imagined it could, and now I can feel the last wisps of creativity leaving me as I desperately try to weave that aura into something that can live. Poetry has never been my thing. It was always someone else's thing, someone else's thing I stole for a while and put back on the nightstand. I wish I could write lines like those that were uttered tonight, and I wish I could instill the images somehow so that I can regurgitate them back to silent applause, but I'd always know that they were stolen, so I don't lay my greedy fingers on them in the first place. But if I could come up with those images on my own I'd share them a thousand times over. Someone wanted to ask if these poets get tired of reading the same thing over and over, but as long as the image is comprehensible and imagination and understanding are in play like Kant promised then everything would be just as alive as when the ink first bled to the other side of the page, maybe they could become even more so when they tumble out of the dark hollows of the mouths that first whispered them to sisters lying on old comforters, and still more when they are first shouted to the unblinking eyes of strangers sitting on wooden chairs while unintelligible salty drops form inside the under folds of their eyelids. And maybe I can steal that fire like Prometheus did even if just for a pirated copy's worth before it degrades into the next cliché of my ever ever growing list of things I've loved to death, each buried under the crinkling pages and pages that never see light.

**

pit stop

So this is the first week I've had to adjust to a new schedule...with vast amounts of free time. I guess I've been lucky enough to come across a few events that filled it up better. However, I can't help but feel like this newfound euphoria of unfilled slots will wear off soon. Like the second month of summer, a lack of structure has always bored, frustrated, and slightly terrified me. There is, of course, work that has been neglected, work I almost can't bear to face because of how abandoned I've left them.

That's the thing--when you're racing along a road threatening to reach a million forks, it's okay if a few projects bounce out of the back trunk. But now that some forks have closed, and I'm forced to step out and examine a flat tire, all I can see are the empty spaces where my baggage used to be, the barely visible dots of my belongings that litter the road I've conquered, and the long, stretching, gray snake of a line beyond me. As I stand under a dry, heated sun, I begin to fear the last hundreds of miles might not have counted at all.

**

fight after flight

I am about to be at the breaking point. This week just keeps getting bigger and bigger. The difference between life's previous swift punches and today's--is that in the former case I had felt helpless and passive, and I had saved myself only by licking my wounds after the fact with people who were there for me (suffice to say I'm so very grateful for this). However, in today's dealings, I've decided to take a decidedly more active approach. This injustice I will fight for. I'm so sick of the same people sensing passivity on my part and drawing whatever damn implications they want and forming underhanded moves from it. The things is, the consequences might pan out the same way as if I had done nothing at all. However, I've tasted the thrill of standing my ground when it comes to territory I thought I've already won, and defending it tonight felt maddening, but also empowering, and, dare I say it? Enlivening. Agency feels just as good as another's soothing caresses and well intentioned words. Better I've found it now, I suppose, before dust can settle, than finding myself in some post-war situation, where pieces flutter and litter all around, while the camera pans towards me, sitting on the ground, not having bothered to stand up at all.

**

writing wrongs

I could write a song a hundred miles long, that's where you belong and you belong with me.

-Coldplay

Some things just belong on pages, can only breathe in between sheets of wrinkling paper. Mr. Darcy, first glances, the American Dream, do they really exist? If there were even half so much magnificence in this dimension, the world's seams would burst as dramatically as the evangelicals predict. So men try to fit them neatly on lines and lines instead. People, commitments, hurt, all neatly compartmentalized into rows of 26 symbols, that's where these things all belong. And they can neither leap out of the pages nor can they bother you again once you transfer them to these white spaces. Right? Write?

**

humbert humbert

So here's why I love and despise Humbert Humbert from Lolita. The same reason why we love and despise anything: because they reflect aspects of ourselves. And these love-hate relationships are more uncommon than you'd think: it's not the one with a romantic partner, because it's unsustainable, it's not someone you're jealous of, because you don't love them, it's not anyone you love and hate, but for different reasons. No. This is a relation of a singular focus.

Humbert Humbert and I, for example, share one thing, obsessive narcissism, in the form of post-facto analysis. We believe firmly that every occurrence defines not only the present, but re-defines everything that preceded it. Think how exponentially complex this becomes by pure mathematical reasoning alone! It's too much to think about. You know what's not too much to think about? How every thought currently produced by our minds transforms who we are. As we speak, that transformation's already done and filed away, only to be retrieved in the following second, still sticky and glued to the one before it. HH's ability to take a still scene, infinitesimally discountable in time, and write pieces and pieces of gorgeousness about, at, from, and beyond it, such that every composed sentence reveals beauty but also the fact that it's carefully doctored, it's such a profound waste of time, yet the only way we (and by "we" I mean only HH and I, and half of us is fictional) can truly tell if something warrants the term 'meaningful'.

**

underneath the pond

So yesterday I read this great sentence: "Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live." The entire article is about how silence is misconstrued as powerlessness, when really, speech, discourse, and analysis can make us even more entangled in a past that need not exist into the present.

Maybe silence is sometimes the best option available to us. What is so interesting about ordinary days, ordinary thoughts, and ordinary people? What is so significant about them that merits so so so many words in proliferating memoirs, reality shows, blogs? Wasn't speech invented for bridging a gap between I and the other? When did it become a tool for making an insignificant, self-important distinction (and thus, barrier) between me and the next? Has it really become so perverse that it now completely serves an opposite purpose to its original one? Have words now, spearheaded by an obsession with Freud's id, Madonna's self-exhibition, and the overuse of terms like "special snowflake", become the chosen tool of an egocentric generation, sharpened into a shiny, colorless point?

Its edges are so sharply defined, its reflective surface so smooth and vacant, its stabs at the defenseless air so persistent and never-ending, its sound(lessness) and fury signifying nothing nothing nothing at all. Is this what words have been reduced to and imploded into? Where has the silence gone? If it's indeed a "drowned" thing, does it still "live"? What would it mean to live underneath such a pond? It's been unthinkably long since I bathed in silence with another. For all I know, the world of communicated silence could have evolved into literal firework shows between two sets of widened eyes, and I would have no idea, because I choose to wade in uncommunicated noise instead.

**