9/4/07

Web of help

The things that get to me are creepy-crawling out from under the dressers, through the vents, seeping up from the floorboards into me.

The things that wrack me are mounting – they’re aggregate like that, like barnacles. They come in bunches.

I've got a lovely bunch of barnacles, de del e de. They're all stuck to me.

I’m having some problems with anxiety.

My insomnia is bad.

I hate insomnia.

I hate sleep.

I’m one of those motherfuckers too smart for his own good, but not smart enough to be good. Sometimes I can’t turn my brain off at night.

I get scared a lot.

You know how nobody can save you? But people still try to save each other? I love that. I love that people help each other.

It makes this crazy-complex web of help. Nobody I know is ever out of the web of help, man. Somebody's always there for you. Somebody's got to be there for you. They might need you to be there for them, or they might love you, or they might just have that maternal instinct. They might just need to help. Sometimes people just need to help.

But sometimes you feel impervious to it all. You feel unhelpable. That's what I don't like.

I don't like feeling like I can't be helped, any more than I like the feeling that there's nobody around willing to help, to try to help. Because that's never really true. It's a wonderful life and that. I can't imagine seeing relationships, seeing the way relationships would look if you could isolate the relationship-ness of them, as anything but complex compounds that go on forever, and every node is a person, or a part of a person, or a part of a part of a person, met an unlimited number of times by other nodes and atoms and elements.

That's what I think it looks like.

Sometimes, though, it feels like this.

i
ii
iii
iiii
iiiii
iiiiii
iiiiiii
iiiiiiii

Sometimes you feel like the lonely i, the tops, the angel on the Christmas tree. And the thing about the angel on the Christmas tree -- the base of a Christmas tree is misnamed. The base of a Christmas tree is really the angel. Even though it's up in the air, by itself, everything weighs on the angel. The angel is not on the Christmas tree. The Christmas tree is on the angel, driving like an upside-down nail into the angel and they both just get stuck there against the hammer of the ground.

Sometimes you feel like the angel on the Christmas tree.

Everything flows, radiates from the angel on the Christmas tree. The heavenly glow that makes the spirit of the season in that tiny low-watt bulb. It's symbolic as much as anything, and it's so late at night.

Somebody should unplug that bitch.

I can't sleep, though. I get all wound up. I get all wound up, and I get fidgety, because my body is trying to burn off all this extra energy so I can fall asleep, except it doesn't seem like I ever get to the bottom of the energy. I just keep getting stretched, until finally I feel stringy. Like the kind of thing you wouldn't want to eat. And then the strings start to break a few at a time and the strings that are holding on start holding on really tight.

Everything starts to move so fast, but it doesn't move any faster exactly. If you tried to walk, but you spun yourself in a circle every time you took a step. If you were holding on by your fingers and you thought you were going to fall and all the sudden someone grabbed your ankles and then you knew you were going to fall but you still didn't fall. You start to crackle. You start to fizz. Bottle Caps. Pop Rocks.

All shook up.

The best thing.

That's the worst part.

The best thing that could possibly happen, in the whole scope of your future, it turns into just falling asleep. Moments are jumpy. You're always deferred to the future, you're not quite here so you're always in a way asleep already because that's the only thing that you can think of that matters, like how when you're in love you're never exactly yourself because you're always a little bit the person you love. And the best thing about the future is sleep. But you hate sleep. You hate sleep because it won't come and it's the best thing. It's the only good thing left. It's waving at you and it looks just like you and you don't know if it's saying hello or goodbye.

I get jittery, and I lose my train of thought. I don't lose it exactly, but it's a different train. It's a snake train slithering side-to-side and everything's getting all shook up. It's a train without the elbow-macaroni gears that make the wheels move. The wheels are the body but they're the fat underbelly of a motating snake. And it can only move by twisting, like a corkscrew into the Andes.

Pop.

Fizz.

A-well bless my soul,
What's wrong with me?
I'm itching like a man on a fuzzy tree.
My friends say I'm acting wild as a bug.
I'm in love.

I have so much work left to do, but I can't do it because I can't see it. I can see it, but I can't see it and feel it at the same time. I can't touch the thing that I see with my brain. You see, pennies dropped in the well of the eyes, but the well freezes and the pennies bounce and settle. They're right on the cusp, on the white frozen gnarl, on the hoar, but they don't drop. They just pile up until you turn upside down and shake them all out.

I tried to eat today but it didn't work. But you know what's funny? How irreplaceable dental floss is. When you need dental floss, there's really no substitute for dental floss. I dug between my teeth with all manner of things -- a Q-Tip whittled into a point with a knife. You ever notice that, on the back of a box of Q-Tips, they have to advertise themselves as being "the best cotton swabs" instead of "the best Q-Tips"? That shit is fucked up.

Guitar picks. Elastic bands. Postcards. Envelopes. The dentist told me once that I have "tight little teeth." I had a piece of chip stuck in between my teeth. Finally, what worked was, I cut a section out of the chip bag, the the very same polyurethane that's killing our wildlife and making our oceans into tar pits. And I wedged it in between my teeth, but it caught on the piece of chip -- the bag was like a net thrown over some poor castaway -- and it wedged the piece of chip down further and it cut my gum and I started bleeding, and I started sawing at my gum with the chip bag to get the piece of chip out. It came out, but I really had to saw with that chip bag. I really have to buy some dental floss.

Motherfucker.

I'm feeling very homesick tonight and there's a tightness in my chest. Something has generated a certain sadness in me tonight and I'm not sure what it is. It just won't stop, the whole of it, the whole of creation. And I can't tell if I'm overwhelmed, or if I only feel astonished that I'm not overwhelmed by the sheer scope of it, the totality of things. There are so many things.

So many things to do.

So many things to try.

So many things to learn and try and do and find and lose and find again and finally lose.

I don't know how to do this stuff. I don't know how to live on my own in a city. And it's not like it's Christmas or anything. That's when it really gets to you, I guess. Because that's when people are supposed to be with their own. The angel's always a little bit with God.

But it gets to me tonight. I am the center of my own universe, and I encompass my own totality. There is nothing outside of me that I can get to that I also know. I am both of a married pair, each impotent or barren and blaming the other for the lack of children. They sure would spruce a place up. There is no tree driving into my undercarriage.

A body can't get no rest. The rest can't find no piece.

Peace.

2 comments:

SenorStephenUrkelDaedalus said...

"Only in solitude do we find ourselves; and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude."

Miguel de Unamuno

You know me-- always good for an appropriate quote.

I'll give you a call tonight.

Anonymous said...

i had to wait like, days, till i had enough time to sit and actually really read through this because i knew i wanted to actually read it. and i'm glad that i did. glad. its good. especially the tree-nail thing. (-doo)