While he preached, Bevel's eyes followed drowsily the slow circle of two silent birds revolving high in the air. Across the river there was a low red and gold grove of sassafras with hills of dark blue trees behind it and an occasional pine jutting over the skyline. Behind, in the distance, the city rose like a cluster of warts on the side of the mountain. The birds revolved downward and dropped lightly in the top of the highest pine and sat hunch-shouldered as if they were supporting the sky.

I see myself writing the same thing over and over in here. Sorry.

I've got to turn this solipsism into something productive. I feel ill. I'm sweating. Shambles, shame and shadows. Nonsense, common sense, awful scents, pay for your dinner with 99 cents.

Always the moon rises or sets in the ocean. One or the other. From endless seas into endless seas.

Read this. Roll your eyes.

Dysphoria

I've never felt like this before. Not in my recent memory. Disenchanted. Sweaty palms. Empty brain. Inarticulate. A lightness. A weight. Exasperation. Where are all the other people like me? If I were happy, someone like me would piss me off.

-What's with her?
-Why does she have to be so indulgent in her own "sorrow"?
-Stop with those rich kid blues.
-No one cares.
-She's got it alright.
-She needs to shut up.
-She's weird.

But I don't have enough energy to feel pissed off with myself right now, which seems strangely unfortunate.

It's not apathy. It's sadness.

I think I've got a poets heart: poets feel deeply. They're self absorbed, self obsessed, self indulgent and in need of an abundance of solitude. They're dark, and yet awed by the beauty of the world. Despite all their solitude, they're thirsty for love. Or to be loved. This is making poets sound wretched and cliche. Coffee shop assholes with berets. It's not like that though. Where are all the people like me?

I grew up speaking poems, and after I learned to write, I grew up writing poems. My mother said when I was 4 I would sit on the beach and speak poems to the moon. My old journals are filled with poems. I have all my journals from the time I was five onwards. I'd write poems talking of loneliness and persistence, of beauty and pain, of love and longing and loss. I can transcribe some here. Or scan them. As if I need to prove my own authentic "poets heart" to my non existent blog audience.

I still write poems, though not as avidly as I should. It seems like my generation doesn't appreciate poems. Or maybe I'm in the wrong crowd.

But wait, I'm not in any crowd. I'm just fucking lonely.

Longing. Sweaty palms. Empty brain. Frowning in the mirror, I look at my face real close and all I see is scars. What do you see when you look at me?

I call myself The Misfit because I can't make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment.

I have a dear friend with a crippling disability: she is unable to move forward. Like a crab she can move side to side, moving backwards is second nature to her, but to the intrigue of many physical therapists, neuropsychologists, and other professionals who have examined her throughout the years, she cannot move forward. When asked to take a step she falters and invariably steps back, or to the side.

The odd nature of her disease has largely confined her to her mother’s apartment on 6th Avenue, where she maneuvers about easily, and without the distress that being looked at oddly by strangers begets. Her mother has grown so accustomed to her daughter’s odd way of functioning that to her it is nearly imperceptible.

A combination of the comfort of this living situation and my friend’s defeatist nature led her to stop seeking treatment several years ago. She insists the doctors were a superfluous waste of time and expenses; that she can make more progress on her own. She keeps the idea of “making progress on her own” close to her, like a child with their most adored stuffed animal, but it’s a fallacy. She has made no progress. She has only grown more comfortable with her condition, accepting it internally, while claiming outwardly that she is working towards correcting it.

The ailment began when she was a child, slowly festering in the dark recesses of her being, leaving imperceptible but significant marks on the complex inner workings that develop into our adult selves. Still she was a vibrant, bright and spunky kid, seemingly healthy and robust. Being that there was no early cause for alarm, the disease was allowed to grow uninterrupted. It began to express itself only after she embarked on that rite of passage into adulthood: college.

A mind for ever/ Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.

Subway

Katie and I were riding back to Manhattan from a party in Brooklyn on the L train. We had gotten on the train at the Morgan stop and were going to get out at 6th Avenue, so we had a 20 minute ride ahead of us. I shut my eyes and leaned my head back, in drunken tiredness. Katie nudged me and whispered excitedly, "Look, look!"

In the space in between the cars there was a man looking in, watching the passengers.

"Have you ever seen anything like that? What is he doing?" Katie whispered, looking around to see if anyone else in the train noticed the mysterious figure.

I shrugged, shut my eyes again and said "Maybe he's riding up top the train, you know? Or in between the cars? I guess people do that. I've heard of them doing it."

"Oh my God. He just disappeared. He was looking in at us and then he disappeared as if there was another room right next to him to exit into. What was that?" At this point Katie's mind was spinning with what would happen next: he would fall underneath the train and we would run over him; he was planting a bomb; he was living in the subway tunnels and waiting to get out at his home. She kept all of these thoughts to herself, but I could feel them bubbling beneath her eager voice.

With this mysterious subway man, riding between the cars, there must be a story, an incident, a hidden world.

"Weird," I mumbled. We were silent for the next few stops as I was drifting in and out of consciousness, rocking with the familiar movements of the train, not listening to anything as the ambient humming noise of the train wheels against the track lulled into me sleep. The last thing I heard before falling completely asleep was Katie saying "Like, did he just step into another dimension?"

The train stopped at 14th street with a jolt. I looked up. The mysterious man was back, but now he was stepping inside our train car. I glanced at Katie, who was already watching.

As he opened the door to our train car, we saw his orange gloves, his dirty navy jumpsuit, his protective glasses. He was an MTA employee.

When he stepped into our car, we caught a glance of that space between the cars where he had been dwelling, where he had been magically appearing and disappearing from. It was a small room, with a floor, lights and other doors. A place for train technicians I'd assume, yet it is an addition to the newer train cars that we were unfamiliar with.

"Damnit," she said. We both started chuckling. It's funny how imagination has the ability to obscure the obvious. Yet, how much more vibrant the world looks through imaginative eyes.

Wedding Parable

So a little more than a year ago my brother and Mara had a joint birthday party. They were doing Karioke downtown on 2nd avenue where they had rented out a private room. I came by with a friend to watch my brother, Mara, and all their friends drunkenly sing. I even sung some songs. It was fun, everyone was jovial and drunk, just as birthdays should be. But when the song "Single Ladies" by Beyonce came on Sam, who had previously been singing, laughing and being especially silly, suddenly sat down. His expression changed to one of defeat and a tinge of sadness (perhaps this is the kind of thing only sisters really notice). I came and sat down next to him, I also needed a breather. When the refrain came on ("If ya liked it then ya would've put a ring on it") he turned to me and said in a hushed way, "I hate this song. It's terrible. It's so... angry." Now, I'd never really thought of "Single Ladies" as an angry song; most people can't deny that it's actually pretty catchy and good. I just looked at Sam and nodded. Within a minute or less though he was up dancing and singing again, having fully recovered from his momentary withdrawal.

Jump forward a year to my brothers wedding. All the younger folk are at the after party. The ceremony is done with, all the tears of happiness have been dried, and everyone is getting drunk in a basement where there is a bar set up and a pool table, a ping pong table and a mini dance floor. My brother, taking a break from dancing, is standing next to me watching me play pool against his old college roommate. He is glowing that kind of post wedding glow that brides and grooms have, you know, when they're ecstatic, filled with love and adrenaline, happily running from friend to friend, sweating and dancing. The song "Single Ladies" comes on. My brother starts laughing, holds out his hand and starts doing the "Single Ladies" dance, waving his hand, flashing his ring. Then he says: "Look she put a ring on it! Chris, Soph, look! Where's Mara? I have to find her! We put rings on it! Mara!" He runs off to the dance floor and starts laughing and dancing with his bride. Later I see his Facebook status is a picture of his hand, adorned with the gold wedding ring. The caption is "She put a ring on it... And I'm so happy." I smiled. Needless to say, he no longer hates the song.

Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit

And that's it. An entire childhood memorialized in four nearly irrelevant photographs. He grows sombre. "The worst of it, " he says, "is that I can hardly remember what my mother looks like any more. I can see her in my mind, but it's fleeting. As soon as I try to have a good look at her, she fades. It's the same with her voice. If I saw her again in the street, it would all come back. But that's not likely to happen. It's very sad not to remember what your mother looks like." He closes the book.

Ni magnum nisi bonum. No greatness without goodness.

I can well imagine an atheist's last words: "White, white! L-L-Love! My God!" - and the deathbed leap of faith. Whereas the agnostic, if he stays true to his reasonable self, if he stays beholden to dry, yeastless factuality, might try to explain the warm light bathing him by saying, "Possibly a f-f-failing oxygenation of the b-b-brain," an, to the very end, lack imagination and miss the better story.

Words of divine consciousness: moral exaltation; lasting feelings of elevation, elation, joy; a quickening of the moral sense, which strikes one as more important than an intellectual understanding of things; an alignment of the universe along moral lines, not intellectual ones; a realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably.

Because we cannot deal with the complexity of the present, we often over-ride it and live in a simplified dream of the future. Because we cannot solve our own problems right here at home, we talk about problems out there in the world. An escape process goes on from the intolerable burden we have placed upon ourselves. But can one really feel deeply for an abstraction called the mass? Can one make the future a substitute for the present? And what guarantee have we that the future will be any better if we neglect the present?

And have we not also been awakened to a new sense of the dignity of the individual because of the threats and temptations to him, in our time, to surrender his individuality to the mass- whether it be industry or war or standardization of thought and action? We are now ready for a true appreciation of the value of the here and the now and the individual.

"When two creatures meet, the one that is able to intimidate its opponent is recognized as socially superior, so that a social decision does not always depend on a fight; an encounter in some circumstances may be enough.

Socially inferior animals are the ones that make the most strenuous, resourceful efforts to get to know their keepers. They prove to be the ones most faithful to them, most in need of their company, least likely to challenge them or be difficult. The phenomenon has been observed with big cats, bison, deer, wild sheep, monkeys and many other animals."

I just made the best list with Mark! Seriously. Makes it so easy.

New Years Eve Always Terrifies Me, Life Knows Nothing of Years.

A New Year. A time of resolutions, realignment, restarting, reviving, re-re-re... reflecting and remembering before releasing. In the weeks before the New Year we remember, and as the clock ticks down to midnight we forget. We forget through drunkenness and celebration, like some sort of cathartic ritual meant to set our sight forward. After the ball drops, and the couples kiss, and the confetti is thrown, the past is meant to be shed like a cicadas skin.

I spent this New Years in Brooklyn at my brothers apartment with Katie. Their apartment was decorated with many clear balloons and they served pigs in blankets and spinicopeta, along with punch and cocktails. Earlier this year my brother got married, and this was their first New Year together as a married couple. Soon they will move to Paris together and really shed their past life in Brooklyn, if only for a couple years. New year, new life, new city. It's very romantic. I am really going to miss my brother though and thinking of him moving a continent away makes me a little emotional.

New Years resolution: stop being so emotional.

Earlier at my house Katie said to me in a wide eyed way, "Imagine what it's like to be married." I shook my head and said "Soon people we know will start getting married. Could you imagine me married?" She said she could. But the first thing I thought of after her affirmation was: well, there are no guarantees in this life. Bleak, yes. I guess my recent romantic escapades, which have been far and few, have also been consistently disappointing. The kind of interactions that leave you feeling more lonely than you were in the first place. Gosh that sounds awful.

But now it's a New Year, and it's time for a reawakening. I'm not looking for love like that, I'm not looking for intimacy. I'm looking for passion. Passion in my work, in my writing. You know, the love in this labor. I know that if I reawaken my passion for living, for art, for creating, for writing other things will fall into place. That's how life works, isn't it?

So yea, that brings me to my New Years resolutions: to work out a few times a week, to read my book everyday, and to write everyday. Simple and attainable. I mean, those are things I already do. I just want to make them habits. Healthy habits.

I've got to start working on a project. A writing project. I must become inspired. I must stop dragging my feet and instead put the petal to the metal and brainstorm. That's what'll bring me fulfillment, and I know it. Gosh this all sound so elementary, so basic, so obvious, but it's true. If you deny a "calling", some art you can truly lose yourself in, you will become physically sick. That's what my yoga teacher said during the downward dog pose and it stuck with me. Denying yourself your creative expression, your passion, your ability to get lost outside of this tangible world, will make you physically sick. True that.

I can't shake this existential dread. It's this feeling like something is looming, but nothing is happening. Like my life is lacking in some meaningfulness that should be there. Like my world is as substantial as a flake of dirt and at any moment it could blow away. It's this feeling of emptiness. That's what I keep on drunkenly repeating to my friends: the void, the chaos, the abyss, the meaninglessness of it all. Oh! How do we create our own meanings in this mess?

How annoying it is to type out. How cliche. How quarter life crisis. Just a girl, out of college, looking for identity in the big city.

People have this itch, it's not uncommon. This post-college dread itch.

Maybe if I stopped judging my thoughts, my actions, my life, it would bring greater peacefulness. Maybe if I stopped being anxious about tomorrow, stopped evaluating today based on some contrived ideal, stopped thinking about yesterday as some gilded dusk or conversely some gloomy night world, then my present moment would be more fulfilling. I don't know what has got me down. It's this feeling of stagnancy that I just want to shake. This feeling of paralyzation that's quite unique to this particular moment in my life.

It's repeat, rewind, repeat, rewind. I guess I'm becoming jaded.

I need to move forward. I need to start a project. I need to, I need to, I need to. Maybe what I need to do is just... Just stop. Or start.

For it is only framed in space that beauty blooms. Only in space are events and objects and people unique and significant - and therefore beautiful. A tree has significance if one sees it against the empty face of the sky. A note in music gains significance from the silences on either side. A candle flowers in the space of night. Even small and casual things take on significance if they are washed in space, like a few autumn grasses in one corner of an Oriental painting, the rest of the page bare.