I've always been a fan of sleeping with the lights on. Morally, I never do because I'm not the only person paying the electrical bill. It is reasonably agreeable that doing so is wasteful, though personally I would not go as far to say that. Something about being surrounded by modestly bright light has been known to keep me productive. It has something to do with the idea that I can ignore that the night gets darker the later the hour. In my younger days I remember it being a much simpler process to stay up and pick my brain until dawn or into the next day. I must be getting old because it has gotten more and more difficult to keep a lightness in my eyelids, even with hundred watt bulbs glowing from above. I'm usually decent about following a nightly regimen of which consists of brushing my teeth, washing my face, getting into comfortable sleepware that compliments the chill, and finally hitting the bedroom light. But on the occasions where I do fall asleep with lights on, it usually means that I'm still in the jeans and t-shirt I wore at work all day, with my head on my right arm extended. Sometimes I might fall asleep mid sentence during something I was typing, and wake up to morning light creeping in, to a much more frigid room temperature, and maybe I would finish the sentence I had set down when I dozed off. Waking up that way is considerably different than waking another way. When the bedroom lights are drowned by the morning, the thoughts I fell asleep on the night before linger into my waking outlook. My mornings are rarely ever pleasant, to say the least. But I don't stop wondering about a version of myself that one day can find warmth in the process of getting out of bed. I think I'm going to keep the lights on tonight.

I think that I’ve lived a lot of my hours in a whirlwind of madness. Most matters have meant little to nothing for me, and everything that meant something to me brought a passion that only revealed itself to be fascination and craze. I will no longer stand for it, and it won’t last!


"Portrait of a Rich White Guy"

Maybe I’m the clown. Maybe I’m the one who’s so foolish that he doesn’t immediately get that. I think I am. I guess there’s no way we should be treated in these lifetimes. I gather we just have to ignore a lot of the things, that is, if we can’t just see it as ‘not so bad after all.’ Life is kind of bullshit if you’d ask me. I’m really wondering what I’m going to think of when I look back on this time in mine. All of us hoping to find truth and all things real can just go suck a fat d. Waiting is wasting, passion is exhaustion, detachment is boredom, beauty is phantasm, observation is unreliable, loneliness is default, reason is flawed, memory is romance, and romance is only a dream. So what do we have? Which outcome can we sit with most comfortably. I’m not trying to bum us all out, but if I did have that power, believe me I would. I’ve seen the good things in life, but the problem is that I feel I’m mocking the whole payment. I get it, I get it. We have to be laughings alone before any tight shit goes down. I got that. I just feel stuck, and I’d be laughing at myself if I didn’t think that fault was my own. But which ones of us are actually content right now anyway. I look around but don’t discover much. I’ll admit a thousand times that I’m thinking too much, and that I’m simply just too hard on myself. But if that ever got me anywhere, I’d have a dime for every penny. Taking the next step is always tricky. Stairs are hard to climb and I’ve never been much of a walker. I believe that in every way a kid grows up is imperative. The truth is rough, and I think we have to be eased into the detail. Mothers and fathers had better be watching their offspring with a close eye. People can’t grow into themselves if there was never room to begin.

"That's just the way it's gotta be, I should never have to worry myself none."
I think I'll feel better after this today.

So when I finally fix my camera, I really want to follow up on a phat road trip to the Grand Canyon. Who’s in? Ha, kidding. It’s not an open invitation. Also, we got a new little cat. Her names are up in the air still. Among the mix are Flannel, Cardigan, Ukulele, Falafel, and Zooey. So far we’ve just been calling her all of the above, which I imagine would be dreadfully confusing.

The hardest part has yet to come

I guess my philosophy up till now has been "indulge," but all it has done is build this towering monument of falsities that I couldn't begin to take apart. My vacation ended up being "just what I needed." That which I wanted to figure and sort out didn't hit me the way I had pictured it of course, but only when I started to feel sick after making a family serving of pasta for one in the CZ kitchen, was when the calmness came flowing through. By my last hours in Berkeley, I felt like an open book, to myself more than anyone. Shout out to Ben Lehman though. My coughing, sniffling, and phlegm has carried on for over a spry week, but so has a hint of satisfaction in myself. Yesterday... yesterday was a really decent day. Nothing special took place in the least, but while sitting inside my new found lunch break spot, I arrived to a point in which I might have realized that the most I can do for myself is what I'm capable of to maintain a shy level of stimulation, and not necessarily heavy thought or over thinking it. It's true what they say: it's the little things that count. The 'big' moments, though necessary at points for a full life, just become memories we hold onto for much longer than our outlooks can handle or understand. If I'm ever happy again, I think it's had to come to me being it on my own. Because I'm not happy. "Happy" is, like all other of mankind's emotions and feelings, fleeting. I think that I'm so jaded from trying to find a way to save my life that the word happiness now only reminds me of the words "short-lived" or "unreasonable." I've come to wonder if I'm so spent on trying and trying to feel good that I'm incredulous and too burnt out to believe that I couldn't be cynical among all of this, as redundant as that may be. I like content because, to me, there is little expectation to it. I don't really know what that means, but even if I do, I'm too tired to make it any clearer.

“Life is full of endless absurdities which do not even have to appear plausible, since they are true.”
-Luigi Pirandello & Maxwell and/or Mariel