go forward in bold steps that satisfy your desire for progress

Dreams often escape me. I have no way of knowing they happen. and they are gone as soon as i know they might have occurred.


but i just dreamt of you. of her. of her and i. I dreamt that she rested her head against my back, and asked to stay there, to not move. And she fell asleep. not in my arms. my arms couldn’t stretch in that direction. but her arms were around me. Standing upright with our feet in sand and the sun setting causing the amber wash to turn everything a warm tan. All my hands could do were help secure your arms to my body, ensure adhesion.


There was more to the dream. The act of getting to this place. No one knew us, we had stolen away northwards with no plan or destination, and we stopped for a moment. And in that moment we realized that we had made it far enough.





Then i woke. calmly pulled out of sleep. Peacefully. not the way life is disjointed when the huge split between deep sleep and awake come crashing in to one another. but more like the moment of a nap when you become bored of sleep and roll up in one motion to awake. it’s a good feeling. It makes me wish i dreamt more often.


Something specific about something else. music.


In the rolling moment from dream to real life that just occurred, I was met with the album “Ramda” by Mice Parade. Specifically track 2 “Distant”. This album is a sprawling melodic encounter. It meanders in ways that makes you want to take the long way home, maybe hoping to never get there. It lulls you as much as it excites. Listen to it.


But lately, in fully awake mode i’ve been switching back and forth between a couple MF Doom albums “mmm food” and “operation doomsday”, Vampire Weekend’s eponymous album, Feist “monarch”, and the last Electrelane album we will ever hear “No shouts no calls”



I want to describe them to you. I want to tell you to go listen and have them. Is listing them enough. Do you trust my musical tastes? Do i have to convince you. I prescribe to Ellington’s belief of two types of music, good and bad. I try my hardest to stay on one side of that line.


I remember being younger, investing myself into music. Continually searching for something obscure or new, so i could lay some ownership over it. So i could claim that it was mine. I would covet what i found, I wouldn’t share. Partly because I didn’t feel people deserved it because I had worked so hard to get there, to that point. But also because I didn’t want people to use this thing i shared as leverage on other people. I didn’t want to let people lord over it, because they knew it and someone else didn’t. It doesn’t make you cool that you can point out someone that’s not hip to what’s what. However, now is different. I want the world to hear what i hear, maybe up the ante on people’s expectations. And visual art is no different. Ini’s mom said it in a letter to me, “art is supposed to be shared”.


I had long taken the same stance, just in a more clumsy worded way. It involved equating art made for yourself as being frivolous for me to engage in, so why show it off. Why not keep it in your closet and pull it out when you need to feel good about yourself. We make these things so people can see them, we make things to disseminate them out into the world for public consumption. Sure this has more to do with reception theory than with sharing music, but the musician and the artist are the same. We all try to scramble to put ourselves out there. And i think as an artist I’m trying to alter the visual landscape. I’m trying to make it better. More enjoyable.


Same thing with this writing. Put it out in the world for people to get behind. I have no high hopes, but i like to think that i’m doing something you can believe in.



so whatever, go listen to what i listen to. give it a shot.

can you understand what i’m saying?

I wonder at times if i’m doing things that are good. I wonder if i’m being clear and concise.

This time has passed so quickly. Since i started writing this, time has flown by, (although admittedly there are times when time between posts goes so slowly.) I’m in an entirely new mode of working. I’m not used to pouring out so much so prolifically. I find myself playing out too many potential scenarios, so that once i synthesize that down to something more palatable, time has passed by.




I wonder what you think. I really do. I want to know. I want to plead with you to make you tell me. I have been so devoid of you for so long, I’m not picky, I’ll take your take on anything at this point.



But i try to convince myself that maybe i need to wait. so i wait.


I don’t know what i’m looking for. I think that i just want a response of some sort. some acknowledgment that i splayed my feelings out for you. That i stopped pretending i feel anything other than what i feel. It’s just hard, and no matter how many times i have may have done this, put myself out there, it’s difficult to allow myself the chance to be vulnerable. It feels like i have been shunned for showing you my truth.





but then i feel that maybe i’m being unclear, and that my message is lost. Let me know if this is the case. Thanks.

What did I do to make it this way?

I have thoughts running through my brain. I’ve done a lot of things that i have chosen to do and take full responsibility for. It used to be, when i was younger i would lie when i had made a mistake. I was afraid of showing any fissures in a perfect veneer, at least what i had believed to be perfect. Actually, I never thought that i was perfect, i thought that i was as good as i was ever going to get, so why make myself look worse by admitting to the faultiness that i had. Why would i make myself look any worse than i already felt. There was no single time that that feeling ever was obliterated from my life. I still have the desire to lie. to save my face. to salvage whatever shreds of dignity i might still be able to. But i don’t. At the very least, i make an active attempt at being honest, of risking the conflated ego that i had concocted in order to make myself be a better person. Often that is not always an easy thing to do, nor do i do it well. I am clumsy and obtuse. I don’t say the right things all of the time. I don’t do the right things all of the time. I act selfishly (to a degree). I act out of order and often out of turn. Whatever level of truth i have hidden inside comes stumbling out of me. It only makes sense to show that, to be this person who can admit my faults, who can be brave in the face of what he fears most. It is, in my mind, a heroic gesture. I want to convey what i think and feel in a manner that is frank and forthcoming, so as to destroy any notions that my actions and words are anything but real. anything but actual things, and not ones of passing flights of fancy. These are concrete things that i think.


But despite their concretized existence, they have the ability to still be fluid, altering itself as needed.


So, what did i do to make it this way? Or better yet, What did i do to deserve this?


I don’t know. my mind races around thoughts that i was too forthcoming and too direct. I know things that others don’t, not yet, so i do things others may not. and that might be something as well. My brain does me no favors. My heart does even less.


Where did you go? Why did you go? Will you come back? I want to press the issue, but i pause because it’s my turn to wait, and pressing only seems to push it farther away. It makes sense when you write it down, but it doesn’t change the feeling of an ever expanding cavity starting to grow inside your chest whose sole purpose is to make your heart feel like it’s out of control on this plummet to some sad reality i really don’t want. (that’s pretty obtuse right there)


good going brain and heart, you’ve made a life worth living by making my life worth questioning.




I should stop writing these in the middle of the night, because my brain feels drunk and i have no idea what that has done to these posts of late. granted i can reread them once i’m more awake, but i should really try writing during the day.

there was only one way, and it was forward.

30.0027 years completed. working on 30.0054 years.

30 doesn’t seem any different. exactly like 29. except there seems to be a bit more dwelling on the fact that the number has changed. that it is in a new series of 10s. it’s no longer what it was, and now it’s something different. I was told that from 25 to 30, life speeds up to a breakneck pace. it has. i was 25 not too long ago. the older i get, the more i live, the longer i have to compare things, the shorter time gets in the grander scope. five years when i was five years old was a life time. five years now is a sixth of a life time. But no matter how old i get, it always feels that the 4 to 6 weeks that it takes to deliver something, is longer than anything in the world.

Anyway, getting older. not much different. the last five years were a blur, and have yet to slow down, but i’m new to this. so maybe it’ll happen. but i think about all that i’ve done in the last decade. the things that i’ve set out to do, the things that made me who i am, who i plan to be from this day forward, were all cast in my 20s, especially in the last half of my 20s.

I’m excited at the prospect of maturity. i’d never wanted to be an adult, i never planned for that to happen. I expected that something would occur that would replicate what it was to grow up. physically i would look older, professionally i would be in an ordered environment, emotionally i would have the world sussed out. I believed that it would be like that. I never thought of what it would take to get to that place. So i had anticipated adulthood looming, i just took every effort to not arrive there too soon.

But i learned from my own mistakes, that adulthood is not those things. I don’t know that the mistakes taught me what adulthood actually entails, but i did find out that it wasn’t that (or those). I just know that i don’t know. And that is a quandary all to itself.

but i know nothing and i know a lot, and i know very little about a lot and a lot about very little, but i know things. i’m smart. But the heart clouds the head, and the head is all too willing to let go and become murky.

wish me luck while i go for 30 .0054, i plan on sleeping through most of it.

Scratch the surface in order to tame the itch of what it is like to be alive.

I cut myself on a piece of chicken wire. I slid my hand over a seemingly innocuous edge, and was sliced down the length of my pinky finger. It bled a thin blood that i am used to. this crimson water flowed out of 3 half inch thin fissures. One each for the segments of my small finger. The two closest to my palm are not deep, revealing the direction of the cut. My hand travelled forward and the tip section cut through the deepest because i flinched and pulled my hand up away from the danger. So those two cuts, the lower ones, are fine. I see them and know that they are there, but i don’t feel them. The one on the end of my digit, the deep one, which in all honesty is not that deep, is still making me know that it’s there. when my finger curls under itself, the cut splits open, the upper dermal layer drifting apart, exposing fresh flesh to the world. Then the parts come back together and try to fuse themselves together. I can feel it. And all i can do is bring myself to curl my finger so i can feel that split. so i can feel the world open up. the wound open up. i try keep it as fresh as possible for as long as possible. It feels like it’s alive. it feels like it’s trying. and i appreciate that.

My back aches from… just being alive. just being in this place of feeling outstretched. i feel life pulling away from me and trying hard to reach out to pull it back. But it aches from work too. It has been stressful. I feel responsible to everyone, to help them become better and confident in the things they do, the things they try to achieve. But it becomes difficult when my own confidence wanes from lack of using it. I’m sure of myself in some respect, however there are moments when it all feels like too much. But i try, i try my hardest to make this happen, to make the world turn, and i see it happen, but the toll it’s been taking is slightly arduous. But i wouldn’t trade it for anything. I wouldn’t ever give this up. I am nervously excited everyday, waiting to figure it out. But I’m not young anymore, and i feel this shift to a new decade looming on the horizon.


I was thinking that maybe i was going through some 1/3 life crisis. I’m not sure i will live to be 90, but it seems like that might be a number i could hit. I sort of feel like i am going a little crazy and being a bit rambunctious to the status quo. I don’t know if that is a life crisis so much as it is a life. I have this feeling that i am finally this thing i had set out to be, and now i want to do something with it. I want to use this crazy thing i just made before it feels like it’ll leave me or that it’ll be time to be more steady. I have no crisis with this, but a person rarely can see the situation they are in while being embroiled in it. They need distance. And i don’t have any of that. 30 is a real number. an age when my dad already had one child and another quickly on the way. a job. a house. all real things. For me they seem so far off in the distance. so not of my world. not right now. and feeling that makes me wonder what i have been doing and why have i been doing what it is i am doing. But maybe this is normal. maybe this is the way it needs to be.


I feel like i’ve been brash. i’ve been so forward with my feelings because in this old age i know that the worst thing i could do is hold them in as secrets for myself. In a situation where i cannot win in any direction, but that lack of winning does not exclude the potential for losing, all i can do is put myself out there. put my thoughts and feelings out there, in light of losing face or having my pride and ego bruised, and my heart being hurt, because the pain of keeping it in is more than i could bare, i have no choice. my chest feels stretched in a way that makes me feel like there is not enough room for my heart in there. that it is banging around and is now achy and in need of some rest. It makes me short of breath and my hands go numb. These sensations are so real and so present, and my awareness is so keen, everything is heightened.


I could talk ad nauseum about what is going on in me for you. But i’ve scared you off. i’ve put you away from this, from wanting to know this. All it seems like it’s done is make you feel like this might be something to deal with, like a chore, rather than being natural and easy. My head swims in it’s own murky waters.

happy valentine’s day.

My eyes are heavy. One day the things i think will be different than what i think now. I wonder when it’ll be. i don’t want to rush to that point.

The sensation of perfect music is the most amazing thing. it makes me know that the world is right, that the things i’m trying to do are right because i feel that it can’t be any other way. That in the face of adversity and defeat, that the things i do are worth doing because there are other people that need me as much as i might need them.

I’m rambling and not making sense because rest is what i need.

these words are yours.

i’m writing in the air. this is all for something that is something out of reach. these are words that are written down, and acted out, and while not all for naught, have some sense of sadness and defeat in them. i don’t know why i do what i do. of course i do know why. but what i do is so drastic, i’m not always sure i know what the reason is for doing it.


i suppose i write this for me. for me to have something to remind me later on, when this is in the past, how things were, how i thought they were, when i was young. but i write this for you too. to give you the chance to read what i think, what i feel, in maybe a way that i can’t find the words when pressed to speak. when the vocabulary doesn’t match up to the intention. I’m not certain that this is any clearer. But for you i do things, i write this.


I can’t help but think of you, can’t think of sharing some level of closeness with you, to want to reach out and hold your hand. it seems so juvenile and innocent, but such a genuine feeling of wanting to do that one thing. but that feeling tesselates into other things. my arms around you, yours around me. your breath against my skin. all real desires, all real feelings. but something else.


maybe… so many maybes. so many reasons and factors that would alter a situation, but none of them are real. none of them are this. this reality we both exist in. why did i do what i did. why did i force it. I asked you out formally to let you know how i feel. to let you know that i am now willing to make something happen. i think that up to this recent point, i had just contemplated it and allowed it to remain a fantasy of sorts, but this action makes it concrete, this feeling i have, having acted on it, makes my actions real, my feelings real, my mistakes real. That this thing i had conjured in my head, manifest itself in actual reality, seems like my life is doing what it’s supposed to. Not just in concern with you but with everything. Self actualizing.




My life is in shambles. In concern to my other. We finally really talked. But the crazy thing about it is that this has been such an amazing moment for both of us.


In the recent past, i said only a few words about this feeling of being apathetic to our relationship. I think in action, we revealed our lack of feeling towards each other. But having gone through a personal trauma gave me the motivation to reexamine my approach to this life.


Funerals are such powerful catalysts. I had to eulogize my grandfather with words that weren’t my own. I read them because my mother wanted me to. i read them because my grandmother liked what it had said. i had a problem with how condensed it was, i could not comprehensively and adroitly describe the capacity of love i have/had for my grandfather. But i read them. It felt so distant and cold, and i feel that i betrayed my emotions by doing that. That i wasn’t honest about how i feel, with myself and with everyone who was witnessing it. I hadn’t done that in a long time. i don’t know when a specific time was that i had done that before, but it was a familiar feeling, so i knew that i had. But i don’t want to do that, be that person. and that led to this and this led to that and here i am.


in the wake (haha) of that, i had been energized with a fervor to make this happen. to be transparent to my other, and to ini. This was going to happen. so after my other and i had spent the day together, falling in to a complacent routine we had become all too familiar with, i did nothing.


we laid in bed, drifting further apart. i knew that i could let it slip by, and let my frustration build internally, just let her fall asleep. That would have been so easy to do. just let it all go and have it be the low hum it has been. never forcing a change, and too afraid of what that change might bring. but i’m over that. we had a conversation.


i told her that i had something to tell her that was so scary and hard for me to say. i said that i was unsure about us. that everything that we had been was no longer there. that what we had now was not what i had hoped for and that i was unhappy. i was sad with where we were, and all that has done was make me realize that i had lost the certainty in us that i used to have. And i wasn’t afraid of that.


she said to me why now. why are you doing this now? I wasn’t sure if she meant now in our lives or now right before we were going to bed. so i asked and she said both.


she asked if i was breaking up with her. i said no. i love her. nothing will change that. but there is something missing. neither of us are passionate about this. She agreed. and for the first time it didn;t hurt to say those words. to admit that tragedy. it actually felt good. we had gone so long being cold and distant and mean to one another, that this was the first spark of realistic emotion we had shared, and it was about us ending us. we talked about being uneasy. we talked about how our lives are in different places. We both admit that we are missing things. But it is easier to want to forget each other. to make this thing vanish when we aren’t together. But all that had done was make our time together strained. i told her that for as much as i wanted to see her i wanted to get away, back to my life without her. back to a place where i could forget her. or at least try. and that idea, having that feeling is or was so devastating. it doesn’t make sense. why are we doing what we’re doing if this is how we feel.


But we didn’t break up. I feel close to her. I’ve known her for so long and she has been my world. How could i not love her. But we know this isn’t working as a romance. not right now. our time apart has made our lives different and we’re not right for each other right now. But we know that we know that now. There is no real plan. we want to wait and see, give ourselves some time to let these words get processed. But the whole thing is bizarre. Since that point we have only talked about our lives after us. Being best friends, sharing that closeness and love and admiration we have. that would continue. she told me that if we did end she would give me back the ring, and i told her that it would be hers, to remind her of this amazing thing we have shared, however fleeting.


GGGGGaaaaaaaaawwwwwwwdddddddd!!!! i haven’t been too sad about this until i wrote that just there, and tears came to my eyes but i held them back. it’s real love. maybe it’s run it’s course. but i know that this is real.


So we are on the verge of having maybe the most amicable split in the history of mankind or not. it’s too soon to tell. and for that reason maybe i should have waited.




there are an infinite amount of things i could have done should have done differently, and an infinite amount of time to go over the excruciating detail. but that does only the service of making me suffer. i did what i did because i thought it was the right thing to do. and you’re right i have no need to be sorry for doing that. i am sorry however for bringing you more drama than perhaps you would have liked. but i think i have a handle on it. i think that my sincerity to the situation is evident.


and i have things to say still. i’m not afraid of being in the open. i thought about that. i’m not scared and if we converged, i wouldn’t want to hide it either. i’d speak it out loud the way it would deserve to be done. all the factors, besides the gigantic one, but even that to a degree, feel so small. i have nothing to hide from you.


eg i love you.

Right here right now this is the feeling, you make my heart sing. besides semantics, the feeling i have for you, caring and liking and all that, this is the best description. In the best possible way those words mean the world to me. i know i don’t know you completely, but i do know part of you and i’m willing to find out. i want only for you to find what you’re looking for, for you to find the happiness that we all deserve. and i want to be there for you in any way i can. there’s a moment when you meet someone and you know that they are worth hanging on to, however you can. i see that in you.

Enough, must I believe everything may include nothing entirely? Or not entirely, someway our minds extract detritus against yielding.

ahhhhhhhhhh



it has been a bit of a harrowing week/month/season/year(so far)/time of your choosing. I am exhausted both internally and externally. But maybe for the first time in a long time things seemed to be alright. It feels like i have made a living sitting in my car. my new/old car. it is trustworthy and reliant and fulfills my needs and demands, and it has been fantastic. but it is not my car in the sense that i wanted it. i needed it definitely, but i desire my old car. i miss it, but my old one will be back soon. but this is just about cars. in the moment that i wrote this i reread it and decided as if i was making an allusion to something else, maybe using new and old cars as surrogates, and i say that i am in fact not doing that, and only talking about my cars in actuality right now. but yes, sitting in my car. i have to say that i am not a fan of it. i realized last night that i have yet to spend more than 3 days in any one location this entire year. i’ve been splitting my time because of small reasons and gigantic reasons. most recently gigantic.


but driving late at night, late is better because it keeps me away from traffic, and living out of a bag, or several bags. and seeing people, but not spending time with people is making me go a bit out of my head. i feel like my life is not happening to me right now. this is someone else, at least something else. but unlike my previous post, my on-the-road-ness did not truly allow me the time to not think about things (read: her), really it only served to make me think of her harder. to concentrate on her, on this girl that i had felt had slipped from my view.


maybe my view has altered over the course of time because of everything that has been happening in my life. It’s been hard to maintain any consistency in reference to the way that i had come to know my life recently. But it does feel like things are happening and it does feel like i am acclimating to it or that life is coming back to a more normal pace.


what did i think about specifically? I’m not sure that i know. there was a lot going on. There was more of a generic feeling of missing her. it feels like i could not can not say that enough.. that i really missed her. as if she was missing from my life, from a routine that i had grown accustomed to. and that feeling of having something lost only helps in magnifying the level of helplessness in the face of it all. it felt truly overwhelming. But there was some clarity that was gained through all of this. I’ll admit that i would like even more, that what i know right now is still fairly incomplete, but there is something there. something i can wrap my head around and make decisions on. i…i feel ready for this life. ready to do the things that i might need to do.

but a night ago, life felt like something was happening. not like there were decisions being made or that there were steps being taken. i sat in my car and for the first time i had company. the right company. it was that feeling that the world is out of my hands and i’m along for the ride. that it would make sense of the things i feel and think and give me the chance to act on them and explore them. in those few moments we sat in that car, it felt natural. i don’t want to talk about it further because maybe i over think things. no, i definitely over think things.

i’m ready to make things, not just in concern with this, but with the world. i’m ready.