January 5, 2020
It’s the start of a new decade and this is apt.
I’ve been meaning to write on self-discipline and will later, hence the hyperlink. Been littering these blue tickets around the site. They’re essays-to-be. You’ll click some and find another hour’s thoughts or an unkept promise. Literary lottery.
This one’s about self improvement. Getting better. Going nowhere certain until the ultimate certainty. Certainly insane, you might ascertain.
Two Rooms
To feel free in some sense, I need to constantly check my two rooms. My physical room and mental room. Two sequestered spaces I should have complete control over, else flicker out. The rooms are connected inextricably. Only when some segment of my mind and living quarters are clean can I move on with whatever it is that must be moved onto.
To exercise control over these realms, I end up deleting a lot. Keeping only: what’s small and linked to a specific memory (e.g. an art exhibit entrance ticket), what I’ll need to reference in the immediate future (info about upcoming taxes), what’s the best designed version (a Muji mug), what can be left behind without care (an up-cycled ice cream pint plant vase).
List of Fate
Things by Cultured Code is the best task managing software the world will ever know. It’s where I store my immortal ordinal mandate, my List of Fate. Anything on the list must and will get done. It’s never empty and never full. It’s ribboned onto the propellor affixed to my coccyx, fluttering aft.
I want to share a part of it with you. It’s raw, titled Health: Ideals and hypotheses for self-growth, divided into two sections, and alphabetized.
More
Cardio (for heart health)
Fasting (intermittent, for muscle toning)
Flossing (for dental hygiene)
Reading (for inspiration and introspection)
Sleep (for more daily energy)
Writing (to balance consumption)
Less
Caffeine (for more natural energy)
Masturbation (for genuine fulfillment)
Picking (for healthier skin)
Pornography (for greater sensitivity)
Social Media (for analog joy)
Sugar (for more acute taste)
The list is simple, personal, unimposing, measurably achievable. And I’m not sharing it to influence you in any way. It’s a sincere sequence I thought I’d test out and observe the results of after various readings and conversations.
I’ve stuck to all of them, more or less, shaping this current version of me. They’re basic on purpose, because goals that are broader are easier to hit and there’s little sense in creating a nuanced goal you’ll feel poorly about aborting or missing the mark. After molding to meet the broader goals it will be more intuitive to experiment with nuance and results will hopefully be more apparent.
The more and less lists interweave. I like the idea of being open to new interests, so try to maintain a lean and agile bodily form. Talking about this makes me feel like an incredible tool. It’s as much for me as it is for you, this spreading out. Actually walking the line is quite vexing, and as much as I’d like to go on about my observations in self-improvement, I’d also like to keep your honest interest—sincere communication between me and you—not some half-mock, quarter-spite perusal. A follow-up post is in order should interest be shown, otherwise the cards stay face-down.
Low Light
I’m no model and have no regimen, having introduced small consistencies to my life that have proven well over time in an effort to more efficiently navigate all of this. There’s a tasseled lamp letting a low yellow light onto the table on which I type and it feels warm now but I can only imagine reading this later more clinically and wishing I weren’t the type of person to share such topical detail. Up to you to resonate or ricochet.
Small consistencies. This yellow light. Emit just a bit but enough.
January 4, 2020
Scoff at the pretension of opening a piece with a Whitman quote, then do it anyway as applicable.
Whitman said that we contain multitudes. What’s more, what we wear contains multitudes of multitudes. That exponential stuff that accumulates when we walk around and do life.
It’s simple to imagine we’re all the same and simpler yet to suppose we’re all individually complex. Look to different religious scripture and see how we’re all one soul or kinship or cut of flesh from some cosmic cloth. A wry observation is that we’re all uniquely similar and similarly different. I’m guarded and yet post unabashedly publicly, confident that whoever cares to read me will share some salt-shake of sentiment. You may say you have no secrets, all the while conveniently omitting this or that facet of your infinite personality. This is to say, as I must say for lack of care to say without saying, that we do contain multitudes, but that we only contain them.
What universes are within us are wrapped up within us, within that wrapping paper cosmic flesh cloth from which we’re cut.
But our clothes are exposed. They’re the artificial skin that skims the world we float through. The dust-collectors. Shoes more literally, but have you ever thought about the shit that gets on your sweater. It’s great. It’s a great big filter what whacks at the wind you part with the bow of your bodice. You’re a grand ship careening messily through a mass of air. And that air ain’t clean. Not in a pollution sense, not chiefly, anyway, but in the way that it’s indifferent to what else weasels through it. Spit, shit, and all matter of all else. The world’s toward you and you’re a sprung racket whizzing toward it. Particle collision of the most mundane sense. Super small sensually insignificant smashings together. Molecular sex.
Sticky
I’ll bet the last thing you cleaned off your material likeness was sticky. Some amount of something got stuck on your somewhere and you had to up and wipe it off. Maybe that made the wiping instrument leave bits of itself where it tried to remove bits of the other and you ended up with less of one thing but more things than one.
I’m traveling on holiday and traveling light. That means one sweater. It avoids direct sweat as a proud outer layer. It’s brown and big and built of synthetics. Found in a pile at a place of piles peaked with sale signs at the last stop of the metro on the left bank. If time is money, it cost a sneeze.
It’s said that sundries from that market should be washed thrice with salt to oust the demons who crept in while the various garments withered there in heaps. Sulking, separated socks; sleepy, slapped ass of the past stockings; burnt, blood-clot bent-back brandy-stained blouses; crust caps; grave-digger dirt-nail dog-chewed gloves. My sweater is from such a place. It’s been washed and iodized. Exorcised. It’s okay now.
Collect fresh
When’s the last time you got your clothes off and got off. Maybe you were with someone. Maybe they smiled between writhes and then it was done and you sat twisted flush and fresh. Happened to me recently. Except the clothes hadn’t been entirely removed and had taken artillery fire.
I found a corner of hell to write in on this holiday and I don’t smoke but they do here, illegally, and I’m fine with it. Means generally calm people and the absence of small children. Trading transitive lung hits for peace. The walls are peeled, lights are low, liquor is liquor and there are two holes in the wall to sap energy into my keyboard. My brown breastplate can’t shield the windpipes ’neath but breathes a bit of tobacco for the both of us.
I love curry. It’s so goddamn good. Nothing has flavor compared to curry. It’s potent, tastes like tiger fur and ocean current. Can’t dodge the smell and stain and don’t want to. I’m a clean man and it still gets around. Pour me a bowl and paint me a grin. Satisfied boy.
Sweat. Capillarity works its scientific wonder and it breaches cloth. Time’s the accomplice.
Sickness. Like the Passover plagues, name it next. There was a bug in the bag on this trip and it drained me dry. Count some cough on the fabric because it’s there cozied up ’cross from the rest. Fluid lineup. Residual residence.
Bean juice and hare hair. Coffee’s decent but I hate the word. This century’s done with the stuff, least I am, yet my throat ain’t. And she bought me a new winter hat quiff with rabbit coat. Don’t eat meat and feel a bit for the bun that bade farewell to footsteps to keep my forehead aflame. It’s on me now. It all is.
A mural made for no one
Got distracted, forgot how this should end. It doesn’t, really. Should wash that fucking sweater.
January 3, 2020
Whenever you should be experiencing something is when it’s the absolute worst time to experience it. I’m somewhere I ought to be relaxing in an even more specific place I ought to be writing in and it is the most excruciatingly uncomfortable place precisely because it is not at all meant to be.
It’s a curse to require such a specific environment to create. Anywhere but that refuge, writing feels like bloodletting. Language is meant to transport you to the mind of the writer or wherever they’re able to conjure, but I can assure you you do not want to be here with me. I’m slouched in a chair with crumbs and crippling music and non-music making sour sound stew, auditory shrapnel shooting pins into head cotton.
Nothing is worse than a quote and the wall across is built by them. Brittle word bricks.
How does it feel to be a Whitman in a realm rendered by all things poets’ words were written to hide us from? When the mundane to the grotesque become celebrated cerebral text, the real world is left to prove it’s capable of overcoming the protection of the mind. And that leaves us in leaves of ass. Woodland waste tissue. Biodegradable biomass, biologically abominable bile. Unpleasant.
What’s fit to publish
I’m embarrassed to promulgate the publication of a mind’s every whim. It’s 80% ugly. But, quizzically, the rest is trash. I myself am tired of what’s touted as readable these days. There must be balance between what’s worthy of your time and what’s inseminated with the truth that makes you question the time spent on anything you’ve just exchanged it for.
Anything you think you want to read is because it’s easy. Because you and I are lazy. But that’s nothing new. Nothing is.
In defense of zero structure whatsoever. Anyone who calls themself a writer is a dick. Me included. The pen is a phallic extension of the mind.
I’m a lazy writer. I don’t make much effort to understand parts of speech or narrative structure or anything that makes written communication coherent. When I do I feel foolish.
You end up struggling through essays like these, trying to understand what message I’m trying to impart, in part because you believe in meaning. I’m elated to let you know, dearest you, that I cannot provide any assurance that anything created by anyone meant any more than that which was created for the sake of its creation. And I’m elated because now you understand that I am as lost as you are. It’s just that at some point I decided to snip off a squiggle and at some other point you decided to reel in the eel. Let’s meet up again when we can both make a little more sense.
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April Littrell