language

i am surrounded by books. there must be over a million words in the room where i am. i have read most of them at least once, many of them twice or more. i am not extremely well read but i consider myself to have done more reading than many people my age. that really isn't of any consequence, measuring myself against my peers, it's more of a qualification. language fails us, and if we really want to personify it, we fail language.

i am currently reading a text on epistemology. i say i am reading because that is the best word i know of, but what if there is a better word for what i am doing? maybe that is what thinkers mean when they talk of the democratization of letters. there tends to be an agreed meaning about the definition of commonly used words. this being necessary to maintaining open lines of thought and communication. or so we think. often times what we perceive as meaning is really partial meaning and we are left slack tongued at our personal incompetince in matters of the heart and matters of the words. think of some of the times in history where the majority has taken a morally abject point of view? doesn't this show the failure of democracy? and if democracy can fail in matters of justice and civics then isn't it possible the majority can be wrong when it comes to the understood meanings of words?

can a word have a meaning other than that which it is perceived to have? can a duck be a bicycle? and if your first inclination is no it can't i would like to remind that a hog can be a motor bike and a ram can be a truck. and do these names lend themselves to actuality? i suppose the crux of the issue is this: can there be something i would call a "true" name. can there be a name for something that identifies it as what it is and doesn't just take its place in nomenclature as a signifier of what it is. let's try a test shall we? look at the words "stop sign" - obviously the words on the creen are not a stop sign, they are but symbols that conjour up a mental image of your stop sign. for many people it will be a red octagon with "STOP" in large capital letters. for others it will be slightly different. now imagine if you will if i put up a picture of such a stop sign as i have described. once again it wouldn't be an actual stop sign. it would be but a pictoral representation of what the actual thing is. so we have words, we have mental images, we have pictoral images, and of course we have actual stop signs in the world as we perceive them through our sight. let me toss in two other short pieces of the puzzle: 1. say the words out loud, now we have an auditory stop sign. and 2. what does a stop sign look like to someone who has been blind from birth?

i don't ask that question to be an asshole. i ask it because it is integral to our experience of language. for many americans a stop sign is a red octagon of equal sides with large, white, capital letters. but for a blind person, someone who has never seen color they must really on the conceptual notions of what a stop sign is. they have no labeling experience for the words red or white. they rely on basic mathematic concepts to understand a unilateral octagon, and maybe they could perceive the general shape of the letters that comprise the word "Stop" but there isn't a visual of the "real". there is only a mental image - and yet - a stop sign is just as real and just as vital to a blind person as it is to an able seeing person. in fact some could argue that a stop sign is of much more vital importance to a blind person. so here we have the interaction and failure of language in our world. we are grasping at straws still trying to pass aling easy concepts such as "Stop Sign" not too mention the hashing out of concepts that have a complex nature: justice, love, faith, God.

and another turn: if anyone has read this far you have used language and being that you don't think you are an idiot you have probablly had at least one or two thoughts on your own about what you think about the subject of language and/or what point you think i am driving at. and here it is as plain as i can make it: all too often we believe with surety that we understand ourselves, our friends, our famalies, our lives but we use words to do this. we use an imperfect medium (allbeit a necessary medium) to translate our ideas into the real world of actuality. and if we are using an imperfect medium (and maybe if the medium itself is used void of art and skill and is thus abused) what then do we truly believe and know? this is not my attempt at septicism, i can make a much better proof in that regard. this is my indictment of language, and of our use of language.

i do not doubt there is meaning, though i know not what it is. i do not doubt the absence of meaning either as it is so difficult to wrestle it from the dimension of words. if anything what i want is a general regonition that we may misunderstand eachother some, if not most, of the time.

exposure

do you ever feel like you are not allowed to be yourself? where you think others perceptions of you and what you do and will say will be misunderstood so you are trapped into indecision. you think too much about what others think to do anything? to say anything? to write anything. i feel circumstances closing in on me. i feel like the things i really need to write down can't be written, well at least not here. so why do it at all? ego. i am trying to maintain some semblence of self, a picture of the elusive dorian grey. i always had some imagination that countless multitudes of internet unknowns read my blog and took pity and strength from it. that maybe life was tough and it was a good glimpse into that, that struggles are universal, that bad thoughts about good people can exist without them being truly dangerous. that good disent breaths inside the soul everyone. i am finding that to be painfully untrue.

there are good people who don't care about being the villan, they don't hear the ominous knock on the door that makes me want to own WMD's. people exist without pressing paranoia about the future, they are content to follow dreams, to want natural things, they aren't deviants. there are some but few like me. and that is ego. for a long while i thought i could cry my voice into the wilderness in hopes that those like minded would come, would congregate under the tree of mutation and love life with a relish. i had always hoped God would show up there. but i keep writing to it, praying to it, hoping to it, and more often than not there is silence. but i doubt that is the absence of gods effects but more like my dull senses.

where are you heart? have you gone to a corner i can not see? is there places you can travel where my mind can not go, and do you remember that you left me hear. voiceless, senseless, starving for food i can't eat.

if god knows your name but you can't hear it when it is spoken do you have a name? do you have to recoginze yourself to exist, and if the answer is yes then who the fuck am i?

i've been waiting

when was the last time you waited? i am not talking about the last time you waited for the waitress to bring you your coffee or for the bus to come or for the game to come on, when did you wait last? when you were the subject? when was the last time you stood outside instead of waiting in the warmth or dryness? think about your memories until you come up with when it was. now that you have figured out the last time you really waited i need you to think about why you decided to wait.

see i normally think about it like this, i wait because i need it. normally in situations where i choose to wait i have other options. waiting teaches us more than just delayed gratification, it involves patience, discipline, and hopefully kindness. yeah i could walk, and sometimes i do, sometimes the walk is the wait, but sometimes it is just as important to sit at the bus stop and trust that the bus is going to eventually show up. so what made you wait? what makes any of us do anything? meaning, the juice in the joints of the motion of life.

a good friend of mine recently died and i haven't really cried about it yet. that is not my normal style, my modus operandi is tears. i don't know if i can pick out why or what i am waiting for. i guess it is some fool's hope that someone will be shaking me awake in a few minutes to say it's all been a bad dream. some sick joke where the world doesn't seem to have balance, my stomach is always upset and my friend is gone. i don't think anyone is going to wake me. and so i keep trying to come to grips with the awful reality that all these things are true. there was a car wreck, a lot of my friends were hurt and one of them didn't live through it.

i have fought hard to not ask the questions that are always on the tip of my tongue. i love knowing the why and the what of things. why did this happen, what could have been different. the burden of free thoughts, tims were i find myself alone. i know i need it though, that wait in silence. it seems like i havee't been able to just sit and focus on the reality, the gravity, of the situation. i haven't slept the way i need to, i am guessing i won't for a while. you know that profound emotion that sucks away your breath in a wordless situation? that seems to be the emotion of our group of friends. that stunned silence. denial, sure, but not really, more like anticipation, a wishing, a desire that will go unfulfilled.

so waiting, and in this case all of that wonderful emotion of waiting is just building up inside me. and unlike the bus, the coffee, a phone call, or whatever i normally wait for, my friend isn't going to come walking through any door, he's not going to call, the release i need is now trapped with all those other things that seem to hang unanswered.

i don't know what to do. if the bus is late i walk, if the coffee is late i drink water, somehow i know the sun is going to come up tomorrow, that this big planet of ours keeps turning and until we die we do our best to keep living. i wish i had something more to give but i am woefully empty handed. things that normally don't bother me are causing me to got into fits, i am easily annoyed, not sleeping, not eating right, and i am somewhere in between unable and not wanting.

but i know what to do. my friend would want me to be as sad as i needed to be, for as long as i needed to be, but after that he would want me to live. to grab ahold of each day and do more than just survive. and he would want me to hold all of those others around me as close as i can stand and let them know that they are loved.he would want me to go to the concerts where we would have gone together and cheer loud enough for both of us. he would want life to happen, what any of us would want he would want for us.

so for now i am one foot forward and one foot back but not forever. right now is a time for stillness, a time to gather, a time for reflection. soon it will not be this way, and this time will go where all others go, into memories and histories. ai think what hits hard is that someday it will be me, someday i will have finished the race and all that will be left is what i gave to others. nothing collected will last except the hearts of friendship.

Toil

i think i fancy myself as some sort of pop psychologist. bullshit. well, basically, that's what it is, i try to get a better handle on me by having handles on every one else. it never works, i am still a deviant and while they (you) may be just like me, with your own hidden agendas and short comings, i am still only myself and i am at times a sad excuse for a good man. which i think is a round about way of saying sometimes i am a bad man. i just am bad at accepting the truth about my condition.

the more i think on religion the more i find them all driving towards that one crucial point, why are we a damn mess? and more pointedly, why am i such a damn mess? so i try to think it through and figure it out, spitting into the wind ya know? can't i see the intentional fallacy? how could someone with a whack jobbed brain draw conclusions on the human condition to the point of judgement. how can i even judge myself if i don't trust what i think is true north?

so i am back to this really awkward place where i know i should shut my mouth more, do better to and for others, and live a better life but my intentions should be purer than that i be cleaner so i can see how others are dirtier. and i don't believe in that good for goods sake jambalaya. does god love good things because they are good or are things good because god loves them?

and there is too much of me wanting to feel good about myself, maybe that's the biggest lie of all.

My Hands They Shake, My Head, It Spins

i am centimeters close to becoming a vegetarian. i know all about humans being omnivores, how our evolution has given us teeth for cutting and teeth for chewing, and how our stomachs handle animal protein better than plant protein. i know all of this - shit, i like eating meat, i like the way it tastes, i like the occulant fat dribbling down my chin, yellowed animal grease soaking into a good bun. i love it. so why the thoughts of change? the easiest to explain is ecological. not only are our currents mass method meat/poultry/fish production unsustainable they are dangerously close to overthrowing a balanced scale that won't tolerate much more of us. but there's a sub text here, something deeper that moves me close to the decision.

i haven't killed anything in some time. i know i can because i have but i am not sure if i am willing right now. last night a family pet unintentionally harmed a newborn rabbit - probably harmed beyond repair. i can't help but to ask questions deeper than biology, chemistry and the mind. is there a spark of life, something different that lives in and drives the minds of animals, the minds of men? as i held the little bunny in my hands, knowing what i could and could not do, feeling shallower and more fragile by the minute, i was confronted with myself. i am wrecked and i might not make it, and to be fair i will not make it. so as i consigned myself to doing the best thing which was putting the bunny back in the burrow, hopefully to a willing and able mother, i could only hope there was a god of rabbits somewhere that had resurection power better than mine. i am afraid there is no corpreal god to save us. so we hope but trust and faith are hard to have. and that's why i don't know if i can keep on the way i have. i can't help but to have hope in the god of bunnies and if their god is my god then there deaths are my deaths, same with dogs, cows, mice and men. conversely, their triumphs are also mine. so where ever there is life i revel in it and where there is death i mourn. so now i am having to answer the querry, why can i kill humans easier than i can kill animals? is there something about the need to protect the unaware, is this what enlightenment, what consciousness buys me?

my heart goes out to you, what else can i do?

Promise Me

i never seem to have the words for which i truly need. the complex language of the soul evades me, the words with tears for letters, i know them but i can not write them. where, why, how, who? what can be done, if anything at all? i somehow know but not know the deepest things, that when the knife is at my throat the world begins to make sense but when it is lowered my vision goes. i want to give you my vision, i want you to know what i know and not have it be bad, but it can never be that way. the heart is a mysterious thing. are you ever afraid that you aren't what you should have been? i'm not even talking about regrets, everyone has something, even a little something they would change, but that's not what i am talking about. the little changes that we worry about can build but they are still small. i am thinking something deeper, that maybe there is a place deeper, an understanding deeper that was there and is now gone, that longing for the old wells, the places where you knew the water was good. and now in a land of many wells none of the water seems to taste as sweet as the water from your memories. god, i want so bad for the water of right now to taste as good as my imagination, i want so bad to let go of whatever things i am clinging to so that i could remember the goodness of now.

i need a promise from people i can not ask. i need a love for which i can not experience, only remember, only imagine, only believe in. it eludes me so, and now i know it will elude me forever. i find i am writing the fina chapters before i am writing the meat of the story. that the end is so awarely near that i spend more time remembering how it all stops instead of focusing on getting it started. i try to paint it out of me, try to write it out of me, try to sing and play it out of me but yet it remains, more and more i realize the wounds we carry, the wounds we all carry are much deeper than we typically care to imagine. we are all fighting to make it but make it where? and even more than where how will we have done when we arrive? i am still confounded by it all, so as i said i need a promise from those who can not make them.

i need words to make better sense than they have the past 26 years, i need it, i need them, i need you. but there i go again with substitutions instead of the actual. why can't i trust? why can't i go to the darkest place believing they will come through? what am i afraid of? i like to tell pople i am not afraid of anything but that isn't entirely true. it may be true i have very little fear for what people could actually do to me but i am really terrified of trusting people, truly terrified of trusting god. i thought at one point i was trusting god but who really knows what that means, where does belief come from?where does fait come from? if you can lose it then you must be able to find it.

so can you do me a favor? and this is it: i need your promise, i need yuto understand as best you can things that you will never fully grasp, i need you to be okay with all of the things i need to say, i need you to understand i am deeply complex and deeply devoted and deeply afraid. afraid i have given up things that can not be regained, that the well from my memories is now only a memory that the love i knew is gone, that the faith i had is gone, that i need new love and new faith. so what now? are you still with me? still reading? still there? god i think most of the time i am writing to myself, that somehow those who i really need to say these things to don't even know and there i am expecting ducks to be helmets again. wanting things to be so completely different than they are able to be. what will i do without the dirt under my toes? what will i do when i am gone? can i do when i am gone or will all the lights in the house simply be turned off, that here light, my light, will only become memories, fading as do mine. aren't we all memories of something, memories of someone. everytime i read philosophers i get it more and more, shoot everytime i contact or connect with another human or art form the more i realize we all have the same needs, and we all have the same troubles as we try to answer the big questions.

i used to know some answers but if i remember they weren't that good. in fact most of the answers to the biggest questions aren't that good. the best answers don't do anything to help with understanding, they only help to make it easier to cope. everything we do is geared to be a coping mechanism agains the big bad wolves in our world. when all we really need is to be. i have finally figured it out - i am and i am not the great i am. and the great i am is both me and not me, and you and not you. and so we are all constantly in flux, all of us struggling and needy. all of us doing or damned best to make it to where ever it is we are going. i am sorry i ramble on and on so much, things are making me think of you. you are too close right now and i need you to get closer. please make the promise to me. help me to understand this, i need you and i haven't needed you in sometime. and there i am again mixing up words, blender tongue making those letters mean things they don't. tears never translate well.

Days

Days saunter by like restless amigos, waiting for their chance to take shape. i don't speak the language of the days. they keep turning and turning, like shuffling cards, their meaning getting lost. i can't keep up with these days. i listen to music too loud or that is the conception. i feel like a six finger glove. unsettled is maybe the best word for my current state. everything inside me screams unsettled while everything outside screams status quo. i can't break the cycle of repeat offense. i am institutionalized in a world where my crime was existance.

i got soul.

so this is how i am seeing thigns right now, it is morning, i am in debt, i have a tragic addiction, i have limited skills, but i got a whole lot of heart. and if you can't hold on, hold on. there isn't enough volume for my radio right now, i want the songs to blast my memories into the sweet grooves of some watts stax blues. nothing is changing unless something is changing. straws, everywhere i look there are straws.

it's friday, i feel like grabbing something big, i have always been a big dreamer. i am exactly what my mom feared - i am most like my dad. yet i become more like waxen wings everyday, flying higher, diving lower. so at this point i am ready to at least ask for help, i can't dance alone but if i keep stepping on toes i might have to and i know i don't want to. god i just want to give back, i want to give what is in me, the good, the glorious, the beautiful.

how does someone stoke the fire in their soul? H.D.T. said we should cultivate the tree which we have found to bare fruit in our souls. Okay i can buy that - what now? I feel like i am pissing all over my garden and i don't know how to turn the latrene into roses. but it can be, and fuck all i don't need another hedge maze. i need goodness and a bit of fun. so turn that shit up. if i can get one message across it is i know that unless you are at max volume right now then there is space for you to turn it up and you need to. you don't need to go up to 11 but one more notch ain't gonna kill you. so pick a song, something with some thump, then put your fingers on the knob, shut your eyes, and then with the first bump of the kick drum give it another boost. your next orders? jam the fuck out.

baby i'ma lost cause

i don't really believe that. it's just a good title for today and for the confusion i can't seem to discard. i keep trying to figure out what happiness is to me or what sort of goals i am supposed to have, or maybe there are goals that i have that i don't know i have. what happens when you don't want anything in the middle term? in the short term (what i would consider the next 5 to 20 minutes) i want to feel good - essentially pure hedonism, and the ultra longterm (anything over the forseeable future so maybe sometime before death and after everything else) i just want to know the clockwork of the world. i want surety (sp?) again. i want to know something again, i seem to know less and less, less about myself except that there is more instability than i thought. less about purpose and psychology, i have a strong aversion to answers too. i really could care less what other people think about the situation, what i really want is true understanding, now if someone has that then i suppose that is different, but if some pretentious fuck comes up and tries to explain the meaning of life to me the are likely to get the cold ambivilance of the head nod. i want answers, i feel like i am seeking but not finding so that means either i am a liar or it is a liar or we are speaking a language foreign to on another. either way how in the hell does anything get done. how are others not crippled into inaction at this point? isn't nothingness the appropriate response? shouldn't "nothing" be done?

i don't know what i am asking. because i know that something should be done but that doesn't give me too much solice when i don't know what that something is. i have skills and talents for which there aren't occupations and, horribly so, nothing lights my heart like my non-jobs. i think i am converting to sociopathism. morality is becoming more and more ambiguous(sp?). how does anyone know anything? my discontent is burning me up while the majority accept the shit being sold. i don't have any answers though, and i am not sure i should. maybe we need to stop answering questions. maybe our societal discontent is what does the most harm. god what we could do with just a little peace, peace without understanding.

i don't think things anymore, i wish. but then i don't, this is weirdly fulfilling but it is completely narcissitic(sp?) i constantly feel like everything done in this day and age is personal stroking and stoking done to make us feel better? why help people? not because they need it but because we feel bad if we don't. guilt, shame, redemption. fuck living forever. fuck heaven, fuck hell, i don't want either of them. but that's not right either - i don't want what those words have become. who knows what they are anyways? i know i don't want to just disappear. so give one more point to consciousness, it wins everytime. this game is getting old but i don't know if i care enough to quit.

Lightning Strikes Twice

i don't know where to begin. everything is out of place in my mind. the most frustrating thing is that there isn't anywhere to turn. silence and emotion surround me, they are walls that keep me internalizing, keep me from being better. i am not sure i can lose anything else. all of my life i had a voice, a way to say what i needed to say, a way to be who i needed to be, and now, confronted with me as i am, and not me as i want to be, i am sickened. i am not lucky, i am not graceful, i am not even able to say what i need to say because i am tethered to a debate in my head about how the way things are and how they should be. i feel as though i am constantly dreaming, losing touch more and more with the world around me. i may not even be awake right now, this could all be psychosis or dream. either way i don't feel like i am maintaining connections the way i need to. imagine riding a roller coaster without the safety bar holding you in, that's how i feel. i feel out of control, desperately in need and completely fucked. and on top of that i feel like i am failing because i am this way. like there is something i could do or could have done to prevent this. so this compounds my failure. shame. compulsion. pain. shame.

sentience is the gift i would give back, self awareness is dragging through me like trollers scraping the ocean floor. there is very little me left and what is me doesn't seem to be recognizable as me - so is this thing i am today me? or am i who i think i should be just short of those aspirations? am i who i chose to be? am i created and molded by DNA or History or Economics? What makes me who i am? And how do i reconcile that to making it through the whole of my life? i don't know. but not caring seems to just rush it more to the surface, as i get calm and quiet these nagging questions remain. when i am loud it feels like i am doing so just to force these issues deeper into submission but they will not submit. my mind is a sieve, everything flows through it, nothing remains.

i need something and i don't know what it is. right now it is as if i am in limbo, like i have wound my way up in a corpreal purgatory. give me hell or heaven, just please don't leave me here.

yes blackburn, life is hard.

it is 2:04am and i should be sleeping. that's a cliche in my life, too much typing when i should be sleeping.

it has been a long time since i have written here, i know why that is and i am not sure it has been entirely sorted out. i hope the response to this blog is with words. maybe i am a fool to believe words have as much as a real power as actions - maybe even more so. it is so difficult to live in a world that so easily throws away the intangible things. in a really strange way i hope i don't get any birthday or christmas presents this year. what i think i would prefer is on my birthday for my firends who are away to give me a call and those who are close to me to give me a hug and a kiss and enojy some food with me. for Christmas i want everyone who dares to celebrate the birth of a radical jewish nationalist who believed he was the only pathway to salvation, who dare to come together in remembrance of a man whose flesh and spirit were crushed in the garden and upon a cross - i want those who do this to know the man they celebrate. just tell me one thing about him, just one. and if they can admit to not knowing that much about him, maybe not even knowing one solid thing (like me) i want them to admit to one thing they have faith in about him. i guess what i want or what i am trying to say that i want, is for those around me during the christmas holiday to at least remember who the fuck it's named after.

so why am i here tonight? that is the question now isn't it. who am i? where have i been? where am i? where am i going? 4 questions and i don't know the answer to any of them. how did i wind up 26 and lost? how many of me are there out there? am i the leader of an army? did it happen already, are my general stars already pinned on my chest? if time doesn't exist, which it may or may or may not depending on how eternity is understood, then everything i am, everything i will be is done, i can not escape that which i will do even though i will choose to do it.

no one lets me fight.
no one lets me fight.
no one lets me fight.
no one lets me fight.
no one lets me fight.

don't they see, five times, five words, say it out loud, accent each word. who restrains you? your children? your obligations? your better judgements? what is right? hell for me is no sleep.

maye more later or earlier, the words don't matter. fuck it all.