Calm Blue Ocean!

Sooooo, member earlier when I was all like calm and serene and my inner child had awoke to bring my true self to light and release a lot of pent up past shit?  Well, my Inner Child wants to put down her posies and punch a dude in the face right now...that didn't take long.

I'm at the pharmacy getting my Typhoid vaccination for some upcoming travel when the pharmacist begins to dumb down everything he's saying regarding the dosage and so forth.  I'm like, "Dude, I've done this before...I got this."  He proceeds to painstakingly explain shit to me I already know, even after I assure him that I'm good.  I see that my confidence hasn't swayed the duration of his speech so I keep quiet and allow him the dignity of finishing his speel.  Finally, when the chatter had ceased, I ask him, "So how long does this vaccine last?"

He goes on auto-pilot, "As I previously explained to you, it lasts up to three years but if you're travelling back and forth to the area you may require a booster...and blahblahda-blahblahblah."  I interrupt this time having my patience run dry...

"Dude.  I know.  You said and I've received the vaccine from a travel clinic before.  I want to know how long the vaccine, in the form it is currently in at this moment in space and time is going to last so that the poison I'm about to inject into my body doesn't die before I accomplish this."

"Oh.  One year.  In the fridge."

Either the dude is so use to talking to the elderly or he doesn't know how to listen.  I'd like to think that I don't look like a spacey moron who can't understand simple instructions, so I hope that wasn't the reason behind his relentless descriptions.  Or alternatively, that it wasn't a gender thing and he assumed that my vagina made me unequipped to understand...like every relationship I've ever had. I get that he often has to repeat himself because the general public are useless boobs but his entire purpose in life is to listen to people's queries and respond accordingly.  Instead he had already preordained his responses to my unasked questions and here we are:  For whatever his reasons were, Inner Child needs to punch a dick.

Tears Upon the Yoga Mat

I had a profound experience this morning.  They come so few and far between that I felt compelled to write about it.  As I was performing my day off morning ritual of stretching, I believe you new-ageists refer to it as 'Yoga', followed by a brief guided meditation I became new again.  This is one of my many goals in the limited time I have on this pale blue dot.  I want to be new again.  To see things freshly without all of the baggage and pain that I tend to color experience with.  My brush needs new bristles and my paints have all mellowed.  These rare moments of seeing things freshly and from an original perspective, untainted and untarnished by the torment of others and too often myself, revive my color collection and renew my faded canvass...my brush is still a piece of shit.

I decided the guided meditation I was to partake in this morrow was regarding the topic of the inner child.  I know, I just heard your eye balls rolling violently to the back of your skulls.  But seriously people!  I feel transformed...cue next ball rolling.  I know these moments are so very transitory so I must put it to page before the warm feelings and insight escape me.  The meditation was about seeing yourself in a garden with your 'inner child'.  You frolic with your child while telling them positive and forgiving things.  You tell them that you love and respect them and that you're sorry for all of the pain you've allowed others and yourself to cause them.  Well, it was about this time that I lost it.  Truth be told, when I imagined my little kid self, skipping free and oozing with potential in a garden of my mind...my eyes began to well with salty substance.  My little child, me, who so tiny and fragile and open has been hurt by so much of life.  I as an adult force that little frail one to carry the load of all of my mistakes, regrets, and sacrifices.  Seeing myself as a child it was so easy to forgive and apologize for it all.  I am so often excruciatingly hard on myself but when you look at yourself as though you were a wee one, how could anyone put all of that nonsense on a child?  Why is it okay to do it to myself as an adult?

As I told my inner self that I was sorry the tears were unstoppable at this point and I just let them flow, drenching me and my purple yoga mat through.  My eyes closed tight I felt all of the weight I carry dissipate and my child and I ran around my brain garden laughing and holding hands.  It was a beautiful image of solace and reparation.  I felt so sad of what I've done to myself...the terrible story I regurgitate over and over in my head about who and what I am, where I'm going, where I've been and who I'll be next.  What an exorbitant amount of energy this takes.  I'm drained now but instead of being blinded to lifes artistry I am reawakened to it.  At the end of the meditation, I opened the pools where my eyes once to reflect in this moment shared with an earlier self who feels forgiven and renewed.  I left my child in the garden, knowing that I can visit her whenever I want and that she no longer needs to hold the weight I force upon her.  She is free from care.  She is free from wants and empty, passing desires.  She is free from all of the stress and worry that I impose because I fear.  She is free to be safe because I can protect her now.  She is no longer guarded from living as I won't keep her from life.  She is free now, because she is me.

Baboon! Baboon! BabOOOOOON!

I was given some advice by my supervisor the other day.  I have felt unsettled about it since until now.  It struck an old and deep chord with me.  Something she said brought me back to my childhood.  On the playground we are taught to play nice.  We are taught to take turns, respect the other...to play well with others.  We are told that to be liked is the ultimate goal.  This is the advice my boss bestowed upon me.  It's total crap.

I believe we must learn to be independent of being liked.  I believe we must not concern ourselves with the good or bad opinions of others.  No one is beneath me albeit and I am beneath no one.  I won't purposefully hurt another, that's very un-dude.  But I will certainly stand up for what is right.  If that includes putting someone in their place who so sorely requires it, so be it.  I had to do that to a colleague.  She had overstepped her bounds in an odd way and her mistake was rectified by yours truly.  I was professional and calm and corrected the injustice immediately.  Normally, I would have stewed.  I would have taken it home.  I would have slit my wrists and bled out for this person all to make them more comfortable.  All to make her feel safe.  Well all of that shit be overrated.  Safety is an illusion.  I can control my reaction to things and that is all.  Comfort is a story we tell ourselves to feel safe.  Which in itself is also an illusion.

The colleague apologized to me and all has been forgiven.  However, my supervisor felt the need to interject her own personal spin on things.  She probably thought I needed to be comforted.  Fool.  So I listened quietly as she wove a tale of how the best way to get what you want from the environment we mutually find ourselves in(our stupid job surrounded by ego driven incompetent boobs), is to be liked.  Not liked, but loved.  She told me how she manipulates people around her into loving her.  How she makes people love her to avoid conflict I had previously faced.  Therefore she never feels uncomfortable and always feel safe.  Obviously she didn't say these words but that was their meaning.  What's wrong with a little conflict?  How else do you truly know the other?  Just like in school.  Follow along.  Keep quiet.  Don't make a scene.  Play nice.  Fuck that.  Fuck her.  I am not going to waste my precious time stirring the ego pot of fear and emotion to get what I want.  I'm going to use my words, like a big girl!  I'll use logic, reason and an intense root system of justice that I feel grows within me the more I use it...like I think that's called my gut brain.  I will draw on this energy to resolve conflict.  That shit is real.  Waffling and kissing ass are no way to live.  It takes a great deal of strength to realize this and even more backbone to put it into action.  We should be more interested in doing what is right and not what feels happy in our whittle tummies.  Guess what?  That shit is transitory.  Fleeting is the feeling of consuming someones opinion about you and attempting to change it to your favor.  People pretending to love you is the nihility of love.

Feelings cannot hurt you.  They are temporary bits of code that can be rewritten at the flick of an eyelash.  So let us not degrade one another to our child selves.  Let us not consume one another in a tepid sea of fake and apologetic smiles  Let's not exist perpetually where everyone is afraid of each other and themselves.  Let us be fucking real for a change and get some fucking work done.

Poetry for the Ages

Sometimes I like to drink
 a half bottle of Shiraz
 before ten pm
on a Friday night
while watching rom-com's
and eating chocolate.
I try and hit
the garbage can
from my bed
with the wrappers.
 I'm 0 for 3.
Thought you should know.

That Guy

I was standing in the line at Chipotle the other day for I was craving some bean induced diarrhea, when I was confronted with a social experiment.  I am often confronted by these and I usually remain silent to save the juicy details for the written word.  I could not stay silent on this one.

The couple in line ahead of me were making up some delightful looking meat laced burritos when the dude asks for the green peppers and onions option.  The counter dude proceeds to do precisely as he's asked and loads up both meals with the selection.  Then the customer dude asks the counter dude to remove all of the onions from both wraps.  Uh...huh?  So the poor counter dude stands there for a good four minutes, which is an eternity when you have an ever increasing line-up of ravenous people growing up and out the door to the establishment and picks through the several spoonfuls of peppers and onions to remove the requested item.  The counter dude seems satisfied with his efforts to remove the onions from the fucking onion and green pepper duo and passes the wraps to the next link in the chain of gas generating choices.  The customer dude who we will now refer to as 'That Guy', intercepts the pass and says, "Yo bro, I can still see onions on my food."

Yup.  So That Guy with his girlfriend, who oddly was not put off by any of this behavior and actually seemed in total support of her man, had the poor under-paid and exploited sixteen year old Chipotle employee pick off the fucking onions for a second time.  At this point the line was growing quite impatient.  I could feel eyes rolling, huffs being taken and iphones being checked, for who has the time to be uncomfortable in wait without pocket entertainment?

Come on dude?  Seriously?  If you're so adverse to onions, don't get that option.  How badly did you require green peppers that day?  Did your father a few moments earlier get trapped by six feet of snow in a tragic ski accident and before he was smothered by the depths of winter bliss, his last wish was for you to be rude to people serving you, take liberties with other peoples time, and reject onions in all their glorious forms for the rest of your miserable malcontent life?  I hate you, you fuck.  Everyone else in the restaurant hates you.  Is that the legacy you want to leave behind?  People hating you cuz you were That Guy?  How this Guy has found a woman as equally as myopic and self-obsessed with dietary needs, is beyond me.  It couldn't have been an allergy, cuz onions be transferring their onion DNA to those peppers, bro.  Also, have you cooked with onions before, bro?  They flavor everything they come into contact with like...onions!  Your meal tastes like onions but perish the idea there should be any actual onions in your dish.  Do you know what a priority is, bra?

So after having an ample amount of time to think through what was going down, when it was finally my turn to order a meal that should only take two minutes to complete, I was asked if I wanted brown or black beans.  I said brown but added, "Could you pick out all of the beans that are larger than the tip of your pinky...please?"  The poor kid!  He looked into my bowl of beanly demise and took a big long sigh.  He couldn't even look at me, and than honest to god, started to pick through my meal.  I stopped him immediately of course with a "Dude!  I'm totally kidding."  He looked up at me with these big puppy eyes and not quite a smirk because he didn't know if he could trust me.  Once the realization set in that I was just fucking with him, the humor became evident and he relaxed.  The chick behind me said with a laugh, "I was going to walk if you were serious."  As fate would have it, That Guy and his chick didn't catch on.  I don't think it was fate really.  I think when you're that into your own needs, nothing else phases you.  And so with this tiny example I'd like to pose a plea to the world at large:  Please people, don't be That Guy.

Dear Millennials...Part Deux

Ugh...where do i even begin?!?

"Rhandi, this is Latisha...she's recently single."

"Hey."

"Yeah, like...it was totally recent the single thing.  I just really need to do Me right now.  Ya know?  Like I just need to do me."

Oh?  And what exactly are you doing to you that is so revelatory/engrossing/beneficial?  Are you doing you and curing cancer?  Are you doing you while solving the energy/water/food/pick one crisis?  Are you adding anything to society while basking in your simultaneous pursuit of soul searching? Have you determined how many fists can fit into your vagina so we can move on now?  I remove myself from this generation whole-fucking-heartedly.  I want nothing, NOTHING to do with you assholes.  I keep hearing this common theme amongst ya'll...you need to do you.  YOLO.  Whatever.  I hate all of you.  You care not for one another.  You care not for the world at large.  You care for your next high, your next blow job and your next text.  I can't count how many times I've been told by people of a certain age to forget everyone and everything and 'just do you'.  It's like a terrible, antisocial NIKE ad gone horrifically wrong.

I had to keep three millennials entertained for the evening after that initial ridiculous and inane conversation and it was, to say the least, taxing.

I kept them centered on themselves, their own experiences and off their cellphones...which was a fucking feat.  I deserve a medal, or more beer at the very least.  I introduced a drinking game that quickly grew to be very dirty, very rapidly.  I would have rather been alone having an orgasm than to have faked my way through this evening of posturing.  So boring.  And we were talking about sex!  How sex could be so boring and empty I do not know, but it really was.  They were grossly entertained and involved.  I was half asleep.

However!  I call the evening a victory because each and every one of these self-obsessed philistines were completely engrossed in the conversation.  Yes I had to steep to below brow levels but the fuckers stopped checking their phones.  They made fucking eye contact!  They listened to what the other was saying and responded in kind and on fucking topic.  I never knew how bad shit had gotten until this very night.  Shit is bad people.  Shit is very bad.  These kids were so grateful to have an actual conversation with real, live human beings that I got hugs at the end of it all.  HUGS!  It was kind of amazing.  I felt like i shone a light into their brains, if only for a brief and sexy moment and gave them all a glimpse of the way things use to be or might of been or could be still.  It was illuminating and infuriating and immensely rewarding.  Goddamn.  What has happened?  I don't wonder now why we are so aptly called the "saddest generation".  We are in desperate need of one another and we choose to find connection through our technology.  Our technology should aid in our ability to connect not impede and than inevitably destroy it.  If anything, the axiom should be stated thusly: "Do everyone else until you reach bliss at the inevitable extinction of the self."  It's kinda long but I think it could catch on.  One could also call it Nirvana.  Let us strive to put all others before our own preoccupation with ourselves.  Let us feast on the delight that comes from placing another persons needs before our own.  Let's do each other (yup, ya heard me) until there's nothing left but a single celled organism with the capacity of inter-dimensional travel and spontaneous creation.  Let us all remove our eyeballs from our pocket computers long enough to hold eye contact with a fellow human over beers and whore talk!

That's what finally got them going.  Enough beer to choke a horse...and sex.  It's a start I suppose.  Perhaps, if I can stomach a next time, we'll broach current events or *gasp*, music.  Are we so removed from one another that there is no going back to a time of awkward silences and uncomfortable space?  I am too sad to elaborate on that thought...Happy Valentines Day.

Sleepy Time Dream Town

I use to have dreams about being chased.  I could fly, usually only briefly while attempting to flee some horrible and overbearing force.  My dreams were exciting and full of peril.  Now my dreams are about stuff.  I dream of having too much product to price and not having enough time to do it.  I dream about disappointing my employer, alienating coworkers and the enjoyment that washes over me whenever I am rude to guests.  I woke this morning in a panic that the new shipment of plastic saucers and plant caddies were not priced.  Seriously subconscious?  Even my brain is bored of the things I force it to do during the day.

I didn't get in to school.  I failed the assessment test to be a journalist.  Now looking at the news of late, I see layoffs, cutbacks and media outlet closures are making headlines in a big way.  Perhaps I dodged the proverbial bullet.  Perhaps the Universe had my back and said, 'Uh-uh...Uni no like.'  I wasn't really passionate about the news.  Writing maybe but not sensationalizing real life to sell shit to people to keep them in fear and maintain the shudder-some status quo.  So now that my 'dream' of being a news reporter is quashed, I'm keeping my ears to the ground for what's next.

I feel like I've been failing a lot lately.  At my current job as merchandiser/sales associate/hawker of wares in a beautiful and healing garden store, I have been passed up for the last two promotions I've applied for.  My previous job at a fashion retailer warehouse also followed similar suit.  Am I failing or does the cosmic powers that be know that my heart isn't really in it and putting the kaibash on the whole process before it really begins.  I've learned if money is the goal in any endeavor, failure is quick to ensue.  I suppose I've just answered my own flawed view about failure and why I perceive it so.  Therein lies another question though:  Why do I perceive the grander message to be botched effort on my part?  Like I am losing at life because I didn't get some bullshit promotion of more work for not nearly enough moola at a job I have no interest in with people I don't really care about?  Well, I care about some of them...some of them are pretty righteous.

I'm trying to relax now;  To let the great energies that created it all to guide me to my ever so short purpose on this planet.  I'm also trying to really believe in the fact that all the shit in the previous sentence is not a lie I'm telling myself so that I don't take a long walk off a short pier.  I work with this mystical man who believes with all of his might that the Universe has a greater plan for us all.  He's very convincing and not preachy or condescending.  I trust in his trust but not quite in my own.  I tend to take a more nihilistic view of things.  Sometimes it feels good and right and just and other times it makes me so sad I am rendered immobile.  I believe that having beliefs is a weakness of mankind and that it has greatly held us back as a species.  But if this pisses you off giant cosmic energy in the ethos...sorrysorrysorrysorrysorry.  I take it back!  Now please provide my silent witness with the insight it needs to lead an exciting, prosperous, financially fluent, and sexy hell-damn-ass existence Oh Great One.  Also, if you would like to be called something else, something more relative to your omniscience, give me no sign...thy will be done Oh Purple Monkey Dishwasher.  

I Shit My Pants Today

Just a little bit.  Well, it was enough to require that my pantaloons meet their maker in the garbage.  Funny things our bodies are.  Thirty-four years on this planet with the same intestines and anus...well sphincter ruling the anus show...and I couldn't tell the difference between a fart and poop-town.  A metaphor for life really. You never really know if it's going to be vapor or vast amounts of excrement...so bring an extra pair of underpants.

PS. What's super weird is that it happened at home and no one would have been the wiser, 'cept for this super public and worldwide thing called the internet I force myself to participate in, and I was still embarrassed.  So much disgrace surrounding our bodily functions that I couldn't even poop my own pants, in my own home and not feel abased by it.  Well, until now.  Everybody poops!

To the Man in my Life who is no Longer

I tried to try.  I really did on this one.  This was me at my most effort and still the resolution is the same.  I think you were right in things once said.  I'm not ready either.  I thought I could be and I really wanted to.  I like my space.  I love my time.  It's the only thing that matters most.  I won't force you to stay and I won't ask you to wait...even if I want both of those.  I'm simply not ready to be the person you needed me to be.

We bickered often about things we were passionate about.  I knew a different tongue than you and things got so complicated so fast.  We remained because our connection was so strong but life has other plans for you and for me.

Je t'aime

I believe that anything I have ever written has been for one person.  The suffering has to amount to something and if that means I can weave a web of entertaining or touching or melancholic words, than I suppose it's all been worth it.  No matter the cost I am compelled to write my story.  The heartbreak.  The loneliness.  The suffocation of my own existence.  I believe myself to be too unstructured to write in the conventional sense.  There is no place for feeling in our contemporary times.  Sensationalism is far too seductive a technique.  I mean not to sensationalize;  If only to tell my truth and to have the world bend its ear in my general direction.  How fabulous to be recognized in one's own time.  Perhaps I blow my own horn a tad too hard.  I have been known to be of the dramatic.

All histrionics aside, I want to abide by a life of creativity and passion.  Far too often the passion escapes me as the sadness settles in but we all must learn to press on.  I have loved.  A great and mysterious and unsuspecting love.  My eyes met his and that was it for me.  To this day I don't think he truly realizes the extent.  I don't really either.  I know that the majority of my major life's decisions have been based on that love.  It's so difficult for me to write when I'm happy.  I wonder if my words will ever be worth the price I've paid for them.

I remember you everyday.

The notion of impermanence has risen in my thoughts as of late.  I'm reading about several great thinkers in history who walked their own original path, often against the societal conflict they faced.  Could I ever be so courageous?  Could I ever grow so weary of these expectations to, as Stevie Nicks so eloquently puts it, go my own way?  The grace and inevitability of change is not lost on me.  I just wonder at what cost to my heart these changes must progress.  I suppose I need to adopt the concept that just because something is in memory, does not automatically diminish its worth.  How do I go on living a life in which I know parts of it have gone unlived?  I have not lived through the great love I thought I could have because life in all of its intricacies got in the way.  Life sometimes moves too fast for love and now I must accept that you have moved on, to have great love with another.  I have followed you to the edges of my sanity and now I must face this emptiness alone.