Gosh darn it, I'm trying hard. I'm trying to let the nights pass as quickly as they can and forget them as soon as they happen, filling them with an amnesiac milk I can't see through. I'm turning on generators in my head to keep the lights on, burning away all but the necessary because I've run out of any real fuel. I'm so deep in the darkness, I can't see people all that much anymore. I can't feel the vacuum trying to suck anything in right now, and that may be a relief. Starless, lightless, heatless. I am cold, dry and pure. I am the long night in Antarctica.

I am running with elastic ribbons taught against my struggling limbs. I refuse to be pulled back. I can fix this. Shadows are shapes. I can work with shapes.

Things you can do to pass the time in heavy traffic:

1. Whistle along to your favourite music.

2. Stare at people in your rearview mirror and in oncoming traffic.

3. Make fish faces.

4. Perform a hand puppet show for the people in the car behind you.

5. Play loud, intense operatic scores while holding the steering wheel with one hand and squinting dramatically.

6. Perform a 'mexican rev' and get as many people to join in as you can without leaving your car.

7. Predict the exact moment a traffic light will change and make a sorcerous hand gesture to it the moment before it does.

8. Fake a cardiac arrest. Make it carry on for as long as possible.

9. Bang your head repeatedly between your headrest and your hooter.

10. Open your window and ask the person in the next lane for financial/romantic advice.

Watching for the Changes

 I go out sometimes. Not for any particular love of music. Not for any particular love of people, either. I guess you could equate it to knowing what you're not missing, and having to see it to believe in it.

My bedroom. I spend give or take five hours here a day, excluding mandatory downtime. It is my office, my lounge and my library. It's a bit much to require of one room. Include the fact that I've been using it for about twelve years, you can imagine how much is clinging here. Not just physical things, but memories and baggage. It's actually pretty neat on the physical side because I throw things out all the time. Those small gifts people give me for Christmas. Figurines and birthday cards. I surreptitiously sneak a few of them into the bin once a week, and I feel a little cleaner.

But the memories stay, piling up everywhere like piles of laundry and dishes. Things I've thought, things I plan to do, mental sticky notes layered on everything until I get paper cuts whenever I move. They are necessary, but they do not comfort me.

So I go out sometimes.

With people crowding around me, all those wandering thoughts are corralled and fenced off inside my head, making room for others' ideas. Eventually their thoughts become just as visible as my cobweb-laundry-murmurs, burbling in hazy streams around every limb and face. For a while, I just enjoy being all on the inside. It helps me concentrate.

I sit in the cafe. There is loud music and smoke and conversation. I am wearing a blue sweater and a fake smile. My facial muscles are the stagehands at an opera, pulling the curtains open at the right moments, changing the set. No-one is singing.

I detest these fake smiles. They make my cheeks hurt. I finish saying “hello” to some people and I go sit alone outside. I concentrate. I relax my leering grin into something small and neutral. Neither sad or happy. Just me. I take out my notepad and I write something clever and overdone. I'm writing forever. Metaphors, that-word-not-this-word, streaming continuity. I reach a conclusion and I pause. I put away my pen and paper. Perceive and react. Reacted. Now perceive.

I move my chair into a nearby group of people I sort-of know. No one responds. I am a 21^st century ninja. I listen to them talking about small things. Brute reality. Who has just bought a beaten-up motorcycle from the impound lot. Who is trying to sleep with whomever else. Blah.

Getting nothing, I shove my chair under a nearby table, lean over the balustrade and take several refreshing gulps of cold air, diluting the second-hand smoke in my lungs. I stare into traffic. I go inside and sit right up front by the band platform, staring at a wall. I write a little more.

The first band comes on. It's a never-ending, freeform instrumentalist piece between a guitarist and a drummer, with a visual feed controlled by foot pedals. These days, it seems that bands are their own roadies, adjusting the stage effects in-between key changes.

I'm not complaining. I can't, really. I sit blank-faced and staring at the wall as clouds and egg yolk and red dots tumble over one another, listening to this stream of noise pouring over and through me. Every vibration hits me like a shock from a defibrillator pressed against a rotten corpse. It tingles, but I feel nothing. My fingers are twitching slowly as the electricity pulls at my tendons.

My neck gets stiff, and I turn my head slightly to look at the band, just enough to watch the drummer beating fury into his kit. I look at his face. His face looks at the guitarist's hand. He's watching for the changes to get the beat right. Every now and then he gets this crazy smile on his face, and moments later dives into a tantrum of beats.

And that strikes me as meaningful. A flash of whimsy passes through me as I see what I've been looking for. I couldn't care less about the music. I'm watching because of what just happened inside the drummer. He's enjoying himself. He loves to make music. I couldn't care less about his music, but I care all the world for his love of it. I watch for the changes; here, frustration as the beat drones on and on; and here, joy at a gunfight of rhythm.

It stops. I get myself a cup of tea. I go out for more air. I go inside and sit at a table that has remained miraculously empty. I muse over the 'Reserved' sign in front of me. These swarms around me are the anarchists and rebels of The City, and they are standing around growing bunions because of a small plastic sign on an empty table.

I write. I finish my tea. I stare at the far wall. I just stare, and feel the rapture echoing blankly within me. I am suddenly concerned I may be on a minor high from all the nicotine swirling through the air, but I dismiss the idea. I am what I make myself, not what the world tries to make me. I have felt the calm acceptance I am feeling now in more isolated conditions, and so it is beyond chemical suggestion.

I stay and listen to the next two singers, my ears pricked for the smallest hint of enjoyment, eyes staring through the crowd hoping for a contortion of feeling, a hand caressing a guitar, anything. There are moments. I don't feel them. I curl my lip a millimetre or two and pretend a little, but it always comes down to the same thing; there's them, and then there's me.

Sometimes, it's enough knowing that they feel. They have love, anger, bliss and sorrow. Knowing these things, seeing them pass in front of me... it strengthens my resolve to maintain the quarantine.

Someone walks into a glass door. Another slurs loudly about how brilliant the last singer was. Thoughts are bubbling around everyone in a haze, not quite visible, but 'there' enough to make the room feel thrice as crowded. I get up and leave, having already cut into my 8 hour downtime. I am a phantom. I don't bother saying goodbye, because I am not leaving you. I am that image lurking in the back of your mind: the stranger with hooded eyes you think you might have imagined but aren't really sure you'll ever truly recall enough to know for certain.

Sigh.

Of all the world I could have identified with, the part most attuned to me had to be Voodoo Cowboy. One day the barrier between us will dissolve completely.

Sunday

I have no day for worship or rest. Reltash is a world in which each day lasts for thirty hours, each week for six days, each month thirty days, and each year ten months. It is scientifically divisible perfection. Sixes and threes and twelves. I would expect nothing less of a world built as the precision point consideration of a finite quantity.

Tash’Rel. One world in a long line; named Restless to distinguish it from others of its kind. Tash’Ar, Tash’Kyn, Tah’Eidoth. This is the space within me, occupied by my mind at any given moment.

If thought could be given physics, what would they be? Would you allow any degree of leniency, or would you demand they be as ironclad as our own universe’s?

I know my answer. Reltash is subject to change according to the principles of its occupants. They are an expression of me. I sometimes muse over those questions so frequently posed to authors: Is the work autobiographical? Are you your protagonist?

And the answer is yes. But I am also my villain. I am all the supporting characters. I am the desert, I am the sea. I am the kismet that permits certain events to unfold. I am the inexcusable tragedy that befalls the characters who die, and yes, I am those dying individuals themselves. I never thought it would be difficult to kill in a book until I murdered Jacinth. I never thought I would question that act so deeply as when it became a viable course of action in all my characters. They do not kill unnecessarily. Know that, and you know that what you are writing means more than empty words.

Sunday makes me think of Reltash more than any other day, because its equivalent does not exist there. By now it would be another week, going on into the next cycle unflinchingly. Thus it is on Sunday that I can really appreciate everything that world is – like falling into the starry space between the universes for a while and seeing them. It isn’t rest. It isn’t worship. But it is a special day set aside to truly look at everything and consider what still needs to be done.

I write a long chain of correspondence letters between two individuals who lived in the early years after the Theological Rift, imagining what the world would be like for each of them at that time. A moment in history. This account is completely worthless here. I know what publishers are looking for by now, and this isn’t it. But does that make it any less important? Does that mean Arwist and Viona should drop their quills and cease all contact with one another?

No. No, Reltash exists in spite of what is demanded or popular, as frustrating as that sometimes seems. I can’t help but consider myself in that way, too.

I read. Vox goes on forever. I cannot claim to be a quick reader, or any more attentive than others, but it is important for me to keep my slow pace. In this way I consider things I may have otherwise have missed – like the fact that stone sickness removes the standard ‘hot rocks rise, cool rocks sink’ phenomenon from the vegetation of the Stone Gardens, and that it is therefore likely that an external symbiote possesses these qualities rather than the rock itself, or more obscurely that the glisters brought in from open air are perhaps fused into the rock to promote flight in a temperature = emotion = gravitational subjectivity equation, but after the Mother Storm hit Riverrise the fresh glisters brought into The Edge were corrupted by the prevalent emotions of sedition in Old Undertown and ceased to function effectively. This could explain why the crews of sky pirate ships acted as such effective carriers once serving beside a contaminated flight rock, because it would mean their fear of passing on the sickness was the sickness itself. Glister hypersensitivity may also explain why many new species form in the Rook Trilogy, from snickets to logworms to muglumps. Their emotional instability could cause structural instability in standard genetic codes.

Or something.

I pay attention to the linguistic defects too, as is my curse. One of the problems I share with Paul Stewart is that when reaching for a word I unconsciously grasp at ones I have used on the lines directly above the ones I am writing, which can cause common instances of repetition as seen in ‘next to... to next’, and using the inconsequential ‘began to’ seven or eight times a page. Becoming aware of these problems is a starting point, and by paying attention to how they affect others’ books, I hope to understand how they will affect my own.

I watch a couple of movies. I stretch my stiffened muscles. I repeatedly send my mind into conscious ‘bump’ cycles to wake myself up. Super-sanity is way better than caffeine, and I should still be able to donate a kidney at some point without inadvertently dooming anyone to early kidney failure.

I, psychonaut.

Saturday

IF

Mind equates to matter then the streaming reams of thought that assail me are nothing more or less than thought given material form to become comprehendible to my living brain. The disconnection from physical reality that is harboured in a sleep-state is a precluding factor in the heightened presence of structural delusions inside the mind itself.

Put a universe in your brain and tell me it doesn’t hurt.

By nature of inverse action one must come to accept that while physical reality is entropic and promotes a decrease in energy with motion the mental demesne is not governed by said and aforementioned laws, but rather by the laws to which its animating element actively applies to it. We know this to be true because of the perpetrations inflicted upon physical laws within the sub-realm known as Imagination, wherein gravity can be counteracted by direct manipulation under willpower, and such devices as spontaneous combustion and temporal displacement are commonplace.

THEN

One must come to accept that any application of scientific law within the mind is a result of its animating element, either through awareness of this application or the lack thereof. It is therefore suggested that the animating element can by its own awareness of the limited effect of reality within its quarter defy universal entropy and gain energy through the motion of thought.

And through the thought of motion.

You either let life break you down, or you let it build you up. In both instances, you let it. Enough with this ‘prey’ mentality. Life isn’t happening to me, I’m happening to life, and it better be damn well prepared because I’m not going to sit quietly and deal with all these asinine afflictions. I’m tired of making my little solstice rituals to keep the world turning, only to have the world turn on me and demand more, ever and always more, just so I can keep the little I have. I’m not angry. I’m not frustrated or annoyed or pissed off because I gave those things away – yeah, you heard me: they weren’t taken but given. I’m just demanding my fair trade. I’ll start taking back what you own me; the restless nights, the restless days, those hours you kept back when you owed me more. Everything needs to equate. Balance. It’s my mortal right to have that.

So if you won’t give it to me, I’ll fight you for it. You can bet that every minute I’ll be gaining on you, because you’ve pushed me too damn far.

I let you.

And now I’ll let you retreat.

Back, demon. You have no more business being here.

Friday

I closed my eyes. I opened them. Rinse, and repeat. I’m not going anywhere. I think things. I open up to the well of words and moments that made up Thursday, and try to make sense of all of them, scrawl them out into one flowing line, watching it break apart again as it moves up and down. The thoughts grow more rampant and less controllable, until it enters that single freeform spin-cycle without space or punctuation or intention or design but merely the chaotic upheaval and manual defragmentation of damaged files which I have to watch and nod and say okay to as they rush by so fast I can’t see them and they smash into one another like blocks in a cargo bay and I’m standing and then I’m falling

One.

I re-enter the world with my head thumping, my lungs breathing heavily. I hear the noises of the house and the surrounding neighbourhood with an acuteness born out of misplacement. I have never slept here before. I am all alone in this tiny house with no alarm system in a part of town where I’m pretty sure all its slope-jawed, thick-browed inhabitants have the same great-grandfather. Every bump, every contracting beam, every electronic hum, animal bark, distant shout – they are magnified excruciatingly loud. I do my best to ignore them. I close my eyes. I open them. Rinse, and repeat.

The grammarless spiral into havoc word-form. This equates to that equates to the other. Calibrate the noises. Calibrate the silence. I am one of those chalkboards with their complex algorithms filling every corner staring at every inch and not understanding any of it except as that entity that runs through my head demanding to be seen and felt and taken apart and then I’m falling

Two.

How long will this continue?

The answer is Six. It’s always Six.

I fall Six times in the space of God-knows, and then it changes. I stop falling. I start shifting. I feel like every five minutes my body hoists itself up and rolls over, seeking some way to feel less and be less. Every now and then I reach the end of the bed and I almost fall for real, but I’m so on edge about the first six times I don’t let myself. It fills my mind completely, this rolling and falling. It goes on for hours and hours, and I’m aware of every damn second of it.

7:00 AM. You have arrived.

Thwack the alarm. I urinate. I pace through the house and look at it through unbelieving eyes. I’m so tired.

Paintings. Paintings of houses and the ocean. A painting of that same colonial shack on the beach that I see everywhere. A painting of those two dilapidated farm houses I see everywhere. A drain smell. Religious texts sitting up against Jeffery Archer.

I take out a bag of Otees. I open and close the same cupboards over and over looking for a bowl. The best I can find is a glass oven dish. Cereal. Milk. Crunch crunch. Eating these things is like eating fibreglass and sugar. By the time I’m done there are small sores all over my mouth. That which does not kill me makes me stronger. Nietzsche.

I write this.

I defecate. There are mirrors everywhere. I shower. The geyser is turned off. I turn it on. The water pressure is so low only a lonely dribble splurts out over my head. Standing here with twelve or so reflections watching me, I feel like I’m bathing in a public fountain somewhere, while tourists are laughing and taking pictures. The water stains on the glass cage of the shower are a landscape of coniferous mushroom stalks. I wonder where exactly I am.

I look at my reflection. The dark marks under my eyes are streaks of warpaint; a revenant of my nightly battle. I walk away.

Clothes. Black pants and a long sleeve navy blue shirt.

I meditate. I sit in a comfortable chair with my feet up and my arms resting beside me, and I stare at the ceiling, some point above eye level.

Let this become your world. Everything else isn’t as important right now. It’s just you and the pale whitewash of the ceiling. The temperature is neither hot not nor cold. Not a single muscle in your body is tensed. There is nothing but you and the whitewash and your heavy, heavy eyelids.

My eyelids flutter, and close.

That’s good, now just remember it’s you and the whitewash and nothing else. Picture it in front of you. You are floating towards it. Just you and the whitewash. It’s three metres away. It’s two metres away. It’s one metre away. You collide with it and fall through it into a deeper, quieter place. Everything is blank and pearly. It’s okay, you can relax now.

The voice keeps talking after I surrender control to it, murmuring about whitewash and loose muscles and how calm and relaxing everything is. This is a deeper kind of consciousness, where my body is less... present.

Yet despite this, I’m still falling.

Twice I feel myself clutching desperately at the armrest, and the action disrupts the whole flavour of the trance. Nothing is different anymore. Self-hypnosis used to work. It used to let me sleep. It used to rejuvenate me.

Now, I return to the world feeling wearied, cheated, and only marginally more focused.

I need to find a way to make this better. Less drifting. Less babbling overdraught of words. More calm, hospitable Void.

Zoom Time. I’m running late (which means I’m running exactly on time) so I make use of every chance to overtake cars and hit the change between red and green lights in second gear. I arrive two minutes early. Fetch a midget, drive slower. I turn on the air conditioning because I don’t need it but other people do. Drop a midget. Air-con goes off, windows open to dispel the oven-baked air.

I stop by at home. I make transcripts of everything on Facebook. I, librarian. One day I’ll want to read this again. There are very few things that should be forgotten absolutely.

Mass Effect. My sniping skills are returning to me. I save a colony from an organ-harvesting hivemind. I break a convict out of a maximum security prison. I do this in stylish black commando armour with blue stripes. Customisation is important. I have written a whole background for Commander Nova Shepard; service & school records, medals, opinions on aliens and their culture. If you devote hours of your life to something, you don’t do it in half-measure. Anything less than devotion is a waste of time.

I drive back to xxxxxx. I feed the dogs. I check to make sure there’s nothing on television tonight.

I take a moment to read. It’s just me sitting here, reading Vox aloud. Honing my voice. Practising talking, because I don’t do it enough and it really is something you lose if you don’t keep your senses sharp. I get tangled in numerous Freudian slips and hit vocal bumps frequently. It’s like exercising your muscles in zero gravity. The process feels oddly detached from worldly necessity, but you know you have to do it because when you furlough anywhere groundside – when you exit decontamination and enter a conversation – you need those muscles to work as best they can.

I write this. My throat is sore. I drink some water. Rinse, and repeat.

Reading ancient transcripts. This is amazing – did I really think like this, or was it my standard syntax-to-result style? If not, then so much has leaked out of me it’s difficult to comprehend. I guess it all started to weigh down on me after a while. The situations I had to live through, the insomnia, the biting whispers... where did my sunny optimism go?

Burnt away. Burnt away by too much caring.

$#!7 got real.

I got surreal in return.

I read an old favourite, The Masque of the Red Death, by Poe. I think I was slightly delirious when I read it the first time, because the zany images were much more forthcoming. I still enjoy it. Its meaning is just as indiscernible.

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

The perfect blend of prettiness and yuck.

I check the internet. Nothing. Slightly relieved. I need a while to replenish myself.

Frozen stuff defrosted, lukewarm sludge eaten. If I never eat another chicken breast it’ll be too soon.

I’m reading Hexaemeron, but I have this overwhelming urge to sleep. I lie down. I tell myself that things have to be different. I need to break the cycle.

I slow down every thought. I punctuate with painful slowness. But at some point, these definable quantities escape me and the spinning, dancing stream of words is hurling just as chaotically through my tormented mind. I sit up and see something amazing; a web formed from right angles, made of shadow-stuff and the orange-brown gleam behind a pane of glass. It all fits together so perfectly, I just sit and watch for a while.

I fall back down. Screaming variables and numeric foreplay. I sit back up. That amazing light play.

Rinse, and repeat. I lose count of how many times this happens. It makes me give up. I am awake and it is midnight, and I will not go back to sleep.

The interplay of amber cobwebs are everywhere now, as I sit alone in the darkness.

Thursday

The whirring of machines. I check on Nexus. Slow progress. I let out the dogs. Cocopops. I watch a couple of episodes of Vandread. Two species finding one another and conjoining in the dark reaches of space. I put the cats in a carrier. xxxxx. Leukaemia vaccines. Blood tests. Why do they take so much blood? The test just needs a speck.

Sparx has AIDS. Okay. Medication. Hmm. My debit card.

yyyyyyy. Everything is so quiet today. Everything is wrapped in shadows. Something is dying inside, so very quietly. I hear the electrical gurgling of Darth Nihilus murmuring behind everything. Words I cannot understand.

I replace Nexus with Hexidecimal. I have another go at getting the Mass Effect DLC to work. I succeed. Thank you, god of turn-it-off-and-on-again.

I shower. Hair, skin, teeth. I am completely numb. Somehow, after years of trial and error, I have killed off the sexual drive which emanated from my limbic system. No more distractions from that quarter. I smile.

I, space cowboy. Prospecting. Meeting new and interesting aliens. Trudging around a crash site on a frozen world. I have done this before, but I don’t mind. Look at the past three days. I have done this all before, but I don’t mind. At least the things I do in computer games are things I want to do. And they have meaning, because I give them meaning.

Games are always more fun when you stake your soul on them.

Dry cocopops. Two cups of tea. A litter of rusks. I wonder what my insides look like? Starchy, I’d imagine.

I set my alarm for the single midget run today.

Cool air, curtains drawn. Everything is muted blue. I adore blue.

More space travel. Swoosh. Swish. Bang, bang. Dreamscapes; satellites peeking up from a jungle under twin moons. A city with night traffic racing through the air above my head.

This goes on for hours. The main opponents of escapism are the jailers.

~ C. S. Lewis.

Fetch a midget. Drop a midget. I cling on to the silence of the morning. No music, aside from the gramophone whine in my head. Tinny echoes.

Space! Space. Volcanic worlds, slowly consumed by fire as I escape them in a hovercraft. Eezo mining and thresher maws and Citadel Station’s gaping arms. I enjoy this place. It is Anywhere But Here.

The time has come (the walrus said) to pack up many things. My laptop, Archeus. Clothes. Books. A crate of food. Frozen, indescribable things that were once living and are now frozen and indescribable.

I drive to xxxxxx. I get an e-mail. ‘yay’, I think. One minute later I get an e-mail. ‘Yay’, I think. One minute later I get an e-mail. ‘Yay?’ I think?

Four minutes and four more e-mails later I briefly consider turning around to get back on my computer and see what the heck is going on. I restrain myself. This is the age of cellular technology. I can fix things once I arrive wherever I’m going. 7 E-mails later, I’m panicking. This is not usual. This is a completely different Modus Operandi. Anything I can say, I will say. Just don’t let this be one final conflagration of glory.

Damn you, tiny keys! Damn you, you damned damnable cellular technology!

I hijack the internet connection where I’m staying. I’m allowed to do this, but my inner minimalist is throwing chopsticks at me. I make sure everything is okay. It is, this time.

My afternoon is gone in a blaze of words. Speaking to people. Typing this. Explaining things to others, and to myself. It is late now. The dogs are fed, my stomach is full, the silence is deafening. Fifteen minutes just vanished in the space of three.

I dread the thought of lying down. My head is swimming. My limbs ache.

I will not sleep.

Wednesday in Hysteria

 I' m trying to hold on to the memory of that feeling: the universe flatlining. It's not the same. It's a copy of a copy. I'm just lying here, wasting time.

I wake up late. Bumble. Dig in the freezer. Heat up a roll. Margarine was originally made from the stomach juices of pigs. I use it anyway. Munch munch. Thank you.

Smile at the wall. On with Hexidecimal. Check the internet. Nothing is happening. Blow my nose. There is shattered glass in the bathtub. Get some oats. They are smiling at me. Eat me, they say. Okay. If you insist.

It is the last day of the month, which means I need to invoice people and try to resurrect Nexus, my 'sinful downloading and game storage' computer. The last time I used it it froze and the input/output devices wouldn't turn on when it restarted. I pray to the gods of 'turn it off and on again', and hope it just needed a little break. Damn viruses.

Invoices. Numbers. Distances. What does 'Res south' mean? No idea. 'Ignore'.

Calculations. This times this plus that.

Huh? The spreadsheet is lopsided. It's actually skew inside the screen.

Meh.

All done.

I need to be elsewhere. I plug in my CD drive and start Mass Effect 2. I, space cowboy. I prospect for minerals. I display my snipey prowess. I finish one of the earlier missions, and fail to rescue a krogan warlord named Okeer. Man, I love this series. It's like witnessing Star Wars from the instant a galactic community was formed, where everything is fresh and new and still being improved upon. There are so many ideas, so many cultures and histories to explore...

And so many pretty colours when you get a headshot.

Okay. I could do this all day. I may actually do this for most of the day, discounting lifts and driving and so forth, but right now I need to see if Nexus is dead or not.

Shutting down...

Unplug. Hoist. Replug. Buttons.

Sweet Krishna, it’s actually working.

I rejoice in the recovery of my files. Music, games, anime – hours and hours of things I thought I’d lost. I listen to an album I haven’t heard yet and unsuccessfully attempt to finish another level of Supaplex. I ogle at my files. Happeee.

Excel Saga!

ACROSS(su) versus a bowling revolution league in an attempt to take over the single most applicable form of communication known to man – sport. Ha ha. Agony.

That isn’t love

Love isn’t that

I am in love, but I am not loved

Definitely isn’t love

Derriere isn’t love

I want to be loved, but I never seek it out

I offer myself and throw my life away

Looking neither left or right, I will just earnestly

Cheat, wheedle, interfere

And trample down and kick strangers

And we get the hell out!

And we get the hell out!

And we get the hell out!

And we get the hell out!

And we get the hell out!

And we get the hell out!

Even if I slip on a banana peel

It is all for his sake anyway

If anything, that is probably

A kind of loyalty called love.

I like Japanese people.

Pay the locksmith. Test the locks. Everything works. Yay.

Converting Oggs to MP3s. Test the MP3s. Everything works. Yay.

Fresh shirt. Blue, plain, short-sleeve.

More music. I finish one level of Supaplex. I grow bored. I listen to several files to make sure they have converted correctly.

Today is impossible. There is a puncture somewhere in the world, and all the time is seeping out. Samoosas. Sorry, lifeforms. One in another in another. Seeeeeeping.

Rearranging files. Old things, new things, things that could be smaller, things that could be classified better. Nothing has meaning until you give it meaning. What is a meaningful conversation, anyway? A conversation to which one prescribes meaning. One could have a meaningful conversation about rabbits or sock drawers, if they so wished.

I give meaning to filing things. Therefore it is not a waste of time.

I drop a hard drive in my lap.

Ow! My xxxxx

The first chance I have, I’m getting that removed.

Yay! Blogs. I read. Hello, person. I approach her difficulties with all the hallmarks of my trade; Logic, Memory, Initiative, Focus. Every reader its book, every book its reader. In this case it’s a song. Finding it is like finding a quote, what words (Instruments), what message (Chords), what tone (Tempo)?

Zoom Time. A downpour of midgets and rain. xxxx. xxxx. Watching roses being watered. Okay, I get it. Wednesday and Sunday. I have a hard enough time eating, I’m not about to kill your plants.

The song I’m looking for comes to me. Jack Wall. Yeesha’s Joyride. The touch of desert winds, dry and solitary. A rapid flight into an oasis. What oasis? That’s up to the listener. The tune is short and leaves its listeners begging for more. It is thirst, and a drop of water.

Thereafter, I am glad to retreat into silence, for a time – a difficult thing, but so necessary. Now, I am listening to Tulla by Ben Houge. Voyage and destination.

I thrill among the bookshelves.

More fiddling. More silence. What was it Ti’ana said? I take her book down from my shelf and scan the pages, realising at once that I have misremembered this. I had thought, ‘Sand and Dust and Ashes’, but it’s ‘Stone and dust and ashes’. But it is still beautiful.

~

“That much remained of him, at least. The memories, the words, and the great wisdom of the man.

She wiped the wetness from her cheeks and smiled. He was in there now, in her head, until she, too, was dust and ashes.

What do you see, Anna?

As she climbed the narrow slope that led out of the valley, she answered him, her voice clear in the desert’s stillness.

‘I see endless desert, and before me the desert moon, rising in the last light of the dusk. And I see you there, everywhere I look. I see you there.’”

~

Before I close the book, I stumble upon another of my favourite passages:

~

‘Gifts, she recalled him saying, aren’t frivolous things, they’re very necessary. They’re demonstrations of love and affection, and their “excess” makes life more than mere drudgery. You can do without many things, Anna, but not gifts, however small and insignificant they might seem.’

~

I remember a small metal pulley. I remember stolen flowers. I remember books I have given, and books I have received. The gift of poetry. We spill words into one another, and give that meaning. Effort, thought, direction. Sometimes I forget why that is so necessary.

I think of Anne Frank in her Secret Annex, where even right at the end they observed one anothers’ birthdays and offered gifts. These small things.

Back on my shelf. Good book. Don’t worry, I’ll complete you one day, even if I have to steal from the local library to do it.

More words spoken, and more words needed. Gifts. Understanding. You are alone, because we are all alone; but that need not be everything you are.

It has just occurred to me that there very well may have been a severed head sitting on the bar counter at Cool Runnings and I’ll never know, because I never thought to ask if anyone else could see it too.

Okay. Reading. My soul flutters closer to the wall. Is this... pity? It may very well be. This is something I haven’t fully investigated.

I do not fear. To fear you have to have something to lose. I am Void. I am nothing, and I have nothing. If my hard drive didn’t start this morning, that would be just one more thing I don’t have and do without. I’m not even sure having it is that much of a salvation.

Empathy. Use the Force! When in your life have you ever been scared?

Oh, that’s low. You know I can’t share that.

How about that time that guy tried to break your thumb in the school library? Who was more scared there; me, with my tendons tight and trembling, or him, wondering if he’d actually have to go through with it?

What about that lonely winter morning you were picking up litter in the park at 4 am, black hood, black coat, leaning over a trashcan when someone walked around the path? No I wasn’t scared then. I was gone by then, deeper into the oceanic trenches than ever before. I recall that moment because for a minute or more we stood there staring at one another’s living shadows, neither moving nor speaking. I wondered what he would do then.

He ran, down the hill and away into the night. I heard his gasping breaths from thirty metres, as I stood musing on fear. I am your monster, and you are mine.

But still, I struggle to define this thing.

I think of hysteria. I think how I laugh at the absurdity of each day, as it spins and curves and rushes on so furiously, how I hear things, how I see things, how I read things, inside and out, and I can’t tell what it all actually is because it is there and not here. I laugh at them. I laugh and make jokes and quake at the freaking absurdity of it all. Hysteria. Laughter by any physical description is pain.

Haha.

I don’t fear any omnipresent evil force. Rape, assault, murder – this is The City. Expecting those things to appear at any given moment is natural. l know people who have been raped, held at gunpoint, beaten up, whatever. I also know that none of that has ever happened to me – not physically – and that my extraordinary luck in such matters won’t last forever.

And when the evil does find me, I’ll be laughing.

Oddly, I’m not particularly tired tonight. The half-wakefulness is still there, but I don’t mind so much.

Downloads are running in the background. The lights are off because I don’t like to see the walls, and here’s me, still thinking about fear.

The only official diagnosis I have ever been given is hyper-anxiety. This, as far as I understand it, is all about fear, and reaction to it: the reptilian brain. fight or flight. At any crucial point of decision-making I can’t actually settle on any specific course of action. These moments haunt me, and I can’t ever let any of them go. I dwell over every mistake, and because they are always on my mind I can only rarely recall instances of success. A great deal of the time this fuels an overwhelming drive to do things better, to change, to transform into something quick-thinking and certain – the quintessential reactor. At other times it acts as a core inhibitor, and forces me to shut down and do nothing but laugh and smile.

And this, perhaps, is where fear manifests into action. I get stuck at that point of decision-making and refuse to fight or flee until I am backed into a corner, and I am given a choice between two deaths: physical death, whereby I end myself, or mental death, whereby I break out of my inhibitor state and change who I am completely. This rarely occurs, but it has happened.

Hyper-anxiety is such a small thing, but I believe it was the drop in the ocean that tipped over my world and splashed its contents into the wondrous void of space. Without it, I would have behaved very differently in each situation I was presented with. I may not have started compartmentalising everything into little files and folders, separating the physical from the emotional and tossing together a barrier to prevent any leakage between the two. But leakages do happen, and I think that’s when everything starts shaking and peeling and smearing into one big colourful mess. I refuse to recognise emotions for their ability to affect reality, so my mind tries to present them to me as physical quantities, because physical things are a reality, and you have to deal with them.

If I have any other actual mental disorders, I don’t know what they are. Except, perhaps, a chronic mistrust of psychologists and medicine. Whatever broke inside of me, those pieces weren’t torn apart by physical things, so I can’t see how chemicals can put them back together. All it would do is add another problem to the batch and make it harder to concentrate on keeping away from the wall and firmly centering myself in the Void. Psychologists are just something I can’t naturally approach because I have trust issues, and I have never known a psychologist to respect any confidentiality or to see that compartmentalisation is not necessarily a bad thing.

I enjoy madness. I mean, if fear can become laughter, then why can’t emptiness become joy? It’s all in the mind, or so I have led myself to believe.

All this thinking has wearied me. I need to meditate.

I enter the ‘lotus hit by a garbage truck’ position, and think a few thoughts. I’ve been missing things out. That’s the hyper-anxiety. I’ve become so involved in certain problems and trying to solve things already past that I haven’t stopped to consider why exactly I’ve been reacting to others in certain ways. That’s illogical – and a good librarian is anything but illogical.

Root form Hexaemer: one of the twelve basic dimensions of structured reality is Meaning. Meaning is then separated into two Attributive Laws: Purpose and Effect. These two entities have a direct relationship: when Purpose and Effect are equal, a state of Purity exists between the two entities. When Purpose and Effect are unequal, a state of Corruption exists between the two entities.

Sometimes, Corruption is as simple as missing what’s already there, or putting in extra details that don’t belong. Sometimes, harbouring Purity is as difficult as identifying all the variables in an equation you haven’t ever seen.

I have an early morning tomorrow. These downloads can run throughout the night. More anime, to console my aching cranium. I’m not awake. I’m not asleep. I don’t think I’ve been either for a very, very long time.

Love Hina.

On the roof, looking at the sky, the sun’s light is warm and gentle

When I look at the sky I can feel the energy building up inside

THAT’S SO WONDERFUL!

I am living!

I can’t quit, I can’t give up!

Good bye to the bewildered yesterday,

My feelings are springing up inside

You've got to nurture those flowers so they can bloom over and over.

Memories are sweet hiding places

But you’ve got to Live to see another day

One day a blessing will come, stretch out your hands!

Good bye to the bewildered yesterday

My feelings are springing up

I can bring them up many times, let a flower blossom

Memories are sweet hiding places

Live to see another day

One day a blessing will come,

Stretch out your hands!

All my hopes for the world, and the things I’ll never know.

~