Manimals

I took a few steps back,
In the progress of my mind.
I thought it'd be quaint,
to regress, I thought I'd
be kind.

Pity leaves a sour taste,
What's there?  Some lesson,
Some reason, a waste?
A Waste.
It's of no consequence.
I felt a failure at conversing,
My muscles were kicking
And screaming, the sitch was
Tense.

He couldn't tell,
I faked it well.
A piece, the piece that I trapped,
I could feel the drain,
Palpable was the collapse.

The Manimals are coming,
They're already here,
He, Him, They, it,
No matter my rejection,
He is near and he is no fit.

This is all, this is life,
No dress-ups, no resets,
I want the strife.
Between this and nothing,
I choose this;  Yet I am
remiss to trade integrity
for imitation.

Floundering, I knew my act,
I put it on, He ate it up,
I sacrificed my tact,
He couldn't get enough.

His eyes and mine hardly met,
He spoke much and said not,
I want someone to get,
What purposeless time is spent,
Talking much and saying little,
Is a worse fate for me then
Death.

L is for the way...

I watched the band file in and onto the stage.  I noticed that the guitar guy and the cello chick were acting awfully cozy on their stroll up the stairs to their night of cacophonous creative freedom.  Then as the band performed sound-check, an epiphany struck me as bold and soulful as the melodies themselves:

Love is simply the placement of a man and a woman in proximity to one another for an extended period of time.    

Think about that statement and find fault.  It sounds pragmatic and a tad rigid but so full of truth it hurts my heart to admit it.  Would the guitar guy and cello chick have ever found each other otherwise?  They were random musicians, selected for their talent.  They would have never knew the other existed if not for this random placement.  Then on stage, they were saddled in space and time near each other and voila!  Love springs eternal.  Or at least until the band dismembers.  If a man and woman spend enough time together in close quarters...attraction begins and love grows.  Whether that shit lasts is another topic altogether.

I met an interesting man on a bus.  After sharing my findings with him, he brought up the theory of sparks.  You know those things you're suppose to feel when being with another?  I guess it's been a while.  I remember laying on my floor, reading song lyrics with butterflies in my stomach;  Writing poetry and having hope.  Does aging beget a coldness that tends to taint every endeavor?  Perhaps sparks are for the young.  Perhaps I'm using growing up as an excuse to be fearful.  I miss the zeal I use to feel when waking up in the morn and wondering what the day would bring...what forms of love I'd fall in that day.  A deep pervading sadness follow my decisions as of late as I still haven't found what I'm looking for.  Doesn't seem fair really, to be granted this precious time and waste it lost in feeling.

I once thought love was music.  You could be caught up in daily life and then a song comes on that physically moves your bones.  Almost as though an unspeakable depth connects without your conscious awareness and connects you to the present.  Is that the spark, my bus-man was referring to?  I think so.  I long for that back.  I had it once but forgot where I put it.    

In My Day

When people reminisce about their childhood, they often refer to it as "My Day."  I believe this is a result of our most selfish time.  As children we are nothing but leeches on society and our families.  We suckle at our parents feet, whining and taking and giving virtually nothing back to the world until we grow into the roles society has created for us.  We add very little to the world during this time and yet our version of ourselves and the world we create are in fact the most important.  This is the time where we become ourselves.  Some of us become better.  Some of us grow and evolve and give back to others.  Some of us just become taller assholes.

Today I was witness to parenthood failure.  In my day, I was taught to respect people and their things.  People love themselves and their things so, this always made sense to me.  Some parents are not teaching their children this very integral lesson.  I watched as a mother shopped while her three children roamed a very busy aisle freely.  By freely, I mean the mother was so engrossed in her shopping that she ignored the fact that one little brat was removing product from the shelves and throwing it under the shelving, another was stabbing holes in boxes with a ten inch galvanized nail and the smallest of the little twerps was running in circles in the middle of the aisle.  Three kids can be a handful.  Especially with an inattentive mother that either gives no fucks, or is so overwhelmed with her life choices that she can't escape her brain long enough to manage her offspring.  

The chaos went on for some time until I had had enough of the one little bastard, gouging holes in things.  Politely yet sternly I said, "Please stop doing that."  It was crisp but by no means rude.  In my brain I thought, 'There.  I just helped out that poor overwhelmed mom deal with her shitty kids doing shitty things.'  

I was mistaken.

She comes barreling over to me and says, "You need to work on your people skills.  You. Have. Upset. My. Son." 

"He should be upset.  I caught him doing something he shouldn't have been and he got in trouble."  I said matter-of-factly.  Clearly her 'Son', was not accustom to being told no.  She decided to take this simple exchange way too far as she screeched up and down the aisle about how upset her son was and how she was going to the manager...you know, the nonsensical emotional stylings of someone clearly in the wrong but unwilling to sacrifice their ego for a moment to admit it.  She started to get all puffy and red in the face.  Another woman came up and attempted to ask me a question while the rant went on when the unstable lady started in on the other guest!  Then the two customers began a screaming match at one another, about nothing, for some time.  It was nuts.  The lady with the now traumatized children...although, I bet they see this shit once a week, stormed off.  Later I found out she found a manager and bawled like a petulant child, demanding an apology.  

So apart from the truly psycho people who decide to procreate, I feel very strongly that the majority of people are waiting to be offended.  Like, they are hanging on every word, every crooked look, hoping for the opportunity to pounce on someone and spread their vitriol like peanut butter on bread.  So quick to anger we all seem to be.  So quick to defense.  So quick to emotion.  If my mom ever caught me doing what those kids were up to, discipline would have come my way.  Not unnecessary scolding, but I would have learned right then and there that wrecking someone else's stuff was not cool.  This woman was teaching her kids that if you kick and scream and cry enough, you'll get...I don't know, something?  I don't know if she was having a bad day, needed some validation, or knew deep down that she was a shitty mother raising shitty kids and doing a shitty job.  Furthermore, I shouldn't have been the one who saw her childs actions as going to far and put a stop to it.  That was her fucking job and she failed.  Now her shitty kids will grow up to be shitty adults and commit the same act of cruelty on their own shitty brood.  The circle of shitty life.

Conversations of the Disillusioned and Empty

I am looking for my pod.  I've been told by people much smarter than I, that this will never come to pass.  My pod will be a few random loners I manage to piece together through a painstaking vetting process of pain and passing of time.  I attempt to punch through my comfort wall and do things foreign and scary to me.  That's life, right?  Tonight I went to a 'Graffiti Collective.'  'Twas a mishmash of artists, musicians, drugged out dopes.  I am drawn to the artistic.  Knowing what I know about artists, for I once was one, I should know better than to enter my energy into such outings.  I can't help myself.

Convo #1:

"I could do acid everyday and forever," says half in the bag corn-rowed chick, "Like, seriously...every fucking day."

"You could micro-dose," says random dude slowly being eaten by couch.

"I know, but then the micro would quickly turn into a full and then I would just be fucked."

This went on for some time.  I feel my IQ dipping so I won't continue further.

Where are my people?  Are all of the thirty-somethings married off, having babies and boring?  Needless to say I left fucking early after chugging two pity beers and feeling sorry for the state of the world.  Expanding your brain can come from more that saturating your body with chemicals.  It can come from within.  If you let it.  We are obsessed with the now, that nothing of gravity is given its due time.  I fear I will always be the one looking in from out, with greasy hands, tainted glass, and a sadness that permeates it all.

People In Cars Going Places

Something strange happens when human beings climb into their motorized boxes and start on down the road...they become themselves.  Not just themselves, but the truest part of themselves.  This is where the rage, impatience, jealousy, hostility and seemingly lack of consequence are at their most potent.  For some reason people feel safe in their driving cubes to become the worst parts of humanity.  All at once!

I've barely touched the surface on how terrible people become behind the wheel and I feel like I've seen the worst the ego can do.  Everything from swearing, screaming tantrum fits to near collisions because someone felt wronged and someone else was in a hurry.  Why do we adopt this behavior immediately upon entering our vehicles?  I can see you flipping me off through this thing called a 'windshield.'  Is it because the consequences of our actions are easily sped away from any sort of recourse?  I wouldn't dream of swearing in someones face on the sidewalk cuz they stepped in front of me.  I wouldn't dare run up behind someone as fast as I could, step directly in front of them and then walk so slowly they had to lurch to a halt, causing them to shake their head in bewilderment and dismay.  I would never bi-pass three parallel lines of people waiting for, let's say food, scream my order at the poor server and bottleneck the line.  Then learn that by me butting ahead, I caused everyone else's food to be held up and delivered cold and that we all got the food at the exact same time anyway!  How ridiculous the world would be if that's how we behaved when we left our homes and went out into the world.  So why do we accept this behavior at speeds that cause more death than any other means?

We act as though we have entered an impenetrable force-field where no harm will come to us no matter how terrible we act.  I can be witness to an asshole but I can't catch him so it's ok that he's an asshole and nearly ran me off the road?  On a side-note, women drivers are just as big as assholes as our male counterparts.

Driving stresses me out.  That's inaccurate.  Drivers, stress me out.  I can't trust that the other people around me aren't going to go mental and do something that severely injures or kills me.  Failing that, I find such exorbitant amounts of tension arise from maneuvering around angry drivers, unskilled drivers, distracted drivers.  A man this afternoon attempted to pass me on a one lane bridge while texting and speeding.  If I hadn't of been paying attention to his recklessness, I could have been smushed.  Or if I had taken some kind of offense to his ridiculous and harmful behavior and sped up to prevent him from overtaking me, I would have been smushed undoubtedly.  I don't want to be smushed.  No one wants to be smushed.  No one wants to be honked at, tail-gated, or forced into a near miss with some entitled dick who thinks his car space is more integral than yours.  Perhaps that's the ticket.  We feel that owning our car means we own the space around the car.  When our car bubble space is interfered with, we lose our minds.  It's like personal space but at break-neck speeds and with a thousand pounds of metal and fiberglass at our fingertips.

I also think that driving has been made so easy, we quickly forget the dire consequences if bubbles collide.  We forget that speed directly affects live or death.  How irresponsible we've become with such a wonderful and efficient gift.  All awareness and compassion for others lost.  Only selfish need to get somewhere on time remains.  I for one am going to do my best not to let the ease of my travel means affect how I treat the rest of the world.  I'm already part of the problem, why exacerbate it so?  We're all in this together people and your car cannot forever shield you from the eventuality of cause and effect.

The Day the Awareness Died

I get paid by way of retail.  I see the worst in people when they don't get what they have come for.

Standing in the aisle, minding my own, a man approaches on a mission.

"Do you have anymore of theeeeze?"  He impatiently shoves an empty bin under my nose.

"Sorry.  They're on order."  I say with a sigh as I don't actually work at this location.  I merely provide the consistently tardy product.

He scoffs in my face and storms off.  I feel relieved as this was a relatively innocuous exchange.  Back to the doldrums and daydream I head.  Blissful in my thoughts of the beach, he returns with an actual employee and shoves the bin under his nose.  The employee looks to me for aid and I side-step over to assist, stating once more that the product desired, is on order.  Perhaps my previous answer was not clear.  Perhaps the man thought I had no idea what I was on about.  Perhaps the man is a total twat.

"Well!  You have been out of theeeeze...for three days!"  He, clearly not concerned with escalating a perfectly inoffensive exchange, begins to grow red in his already bloated and useless face.

He once more stomps away, defeated and seething.  I'm not sure what goes on in that twats day.  I don't think I want to know.  I do feel curious only because when I pontificate on what others can go through in three days and not only survive, but not bitch about it, it really puts things into perspective.  I felt my sanity wane as I thought about those that haven't had food in three days, or clean drinking water.  People who suffer grave injustice at the hands of others.  People who are bombed, raped, tortured, starved, beaten...I'm not sure they would see the merit in the things most of us take for granted and then complain about.  We are all children throwing tantrums until we are granted what we want.  It sickens me.

I ponder if it was his emotional state that drove him to the over-reaction?  Why did he allow himself to become so riled up by something so inexplicably harmless?  Why was the product not being there when he demanded it, such an affront to his mental and emotional state?  Did that product have some kind of special meaning to him?  Had he been told No, everyday of his life for the last forty years and today was the day he couldn't take it anymore?  Why does awareness go out the window when we don't get what we want, or think we need?  The employee even tried to sooth the life-sucker by offering him another similar product that would have done the job just fine.  The man chortled some lame excuse for the substitute failing and dug himself even deeper into his self-made pit of loathing and despair.

This experience today may seem trivial to write about.  But, I believe this to be a microcosm for the way the world is currently progressing.  People have become so terrible, entitled, selfish, and unaware.  We all have bad days.  Alas, before vomiting our vitriol on one another, please take a moment to think about what others are capable of going through in the span of three days!... and how our time here, doesn't need to be as stressful as we structure it.

Sense and Cell Phone Use

I just witnessed, aghast, as a woman's dog ripped a mother duck in half.

I had just climbed a small hill to sit at my favorite reading spot near a duck pond, replete with waterfall and ancient cedars, when I hear this cacophony of sound coupled by a flurry of motion in my periphery.  I see the baby duck with new feathers gradually replacing his down since the last time I saw him, frantically struggling to gain lift as his mother adeptly maneuvered the brush and began to achieve flight, striving in the opposite direction of her offspring.  Alas, it was too late.  The blackened beast untamed and un-fucking-leashed, unaware of the stakes or my horror, paused only momentarily as I bellowed in my best 'I mean goddamn business' voice, then pounced.  He clipped the momma mallard and knocked her off her frantic and desperate course.  She struggled to get airborne once more but to no avail.  I screamed once more with all of my might, seemingly the only witness to this massacre as the homeless mutt chomped down on her helpless yet still struggling body.  He wrenched the bird in his jaws a couple times and shook with the vigor of a pioneer championing his kill.  That was that.  The dog ran off as quickly as he came.  The anger began to replace my shock and dismay when I realized, this dog had an owner.  He was not a homeless waif, roaming various duck ponds on a murderous nightly spree.  He was loved and cared for by a fucking ridiculous woman standing 30 yards away...on her motherfucking cell phone.  She was calmly chatting, not paying a lick of attention to her untrained animal who had just killed a bird for sport and left its child to roam the pond, weeping for its loss and now forced to fend for itself.

I stood in brief shock.  How had this happened?  How had this woman just stood idly by while her mutt committed such acts and done nothing?  Less than nothing!  She witnessed the event and remained on her cell phone!  Clearly that was more important than protecting the wildlife or her pet who was being mercilessly screamed at with such vitriol my throat became hoarse.  When seeing that I was also witness to this ridiculous and unnecessary atrocity, strode quickly in the opposite direction.  Very quickly.  Dog, happy as a clam, in tow.  I chased that stupid bitch down.  She played dumb, remained on her cell phone, leashed her dog and practically ran away from me.  I tried to maintain myself as I confronted her...it was not easy.  Through the entirety of the experience, I was more shocked by her nonchalance than the event I had just witnessed.  Is this what our cell phone culture is creating?  Apathy for even death?  There was no responsibility taken.  There was no apology.  There was no concern.  What if that had been a human being?  We have become so obsessed with being seen as "busy" or "important" that we are distracted when major things in our lives occur.  We are obsessed with being "connected" that we forget about the moment.  Every moment is a moment to connect and I wanted nothing more than to connect my fist with her stupid face and watch her cell phone smash to smithereens.  I don't want to be violent.  I want the world to be more accountable.  I want technology to be used as a tool and not abused as a means to avoid or cause conflict.  I want people to understand that real life happens when you're glued to the shit that is suppose to free you so that you can spend it living, enjoying and embracing.  I don't blame the dog.  He was merely living in the moment.  If people had any sense, they'd do the same...hopefully with less bloodshed.