dinosaurs, the kind that I once thought existed

There is one feeling
that I will always come back to.
One sensation that
h a u n t s

and when I start to feel it I know
that the next few minutes,
hours,
days even,
are a thing I must prepare for,
knowing well
there is no time
to prepare.

syntax is better than sex

Sometimes words mean too much to me for my own good.  Have you ever loved somebody (solely) based upon their words?  Do you believe in love at first recite?

I wish I could figure out how to love words properly.  I don’t know what to do when I love the way someone has arranged them.  Read them over and over?  Tell the person?  How?  When you tell someone you love their words, what do they think?  They wouldn’t understand.  If someone told me they loved my words I wouldn’t know how to react.  You can’t have a conversation about them, really.  You can’t show them how and why they mean a lot to you.  Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could plug the person in to your past and they would see a slideshow of photos or maybe even movie snipets of why a particular line has come to mean a lot to you?  I’m not sure what that would accomplish.  I want to tell people how much their words mean to me, but they’ve probably already heard it a thousand times over from everyone else.  I am always too late.
I wish I could figure out how to make love to a brain.  I wish I could speak as well as I can type. 

I wish I didn’t feel like I’m on an antidepressant.  I wish I could think.
I wish it was the moment before I force myself to go to bed.  That’s when my brain is working the hardest.  That’s when my brain is full of things to say.  That’s when I don’t say any of them because I am going to bed.  That’s when I lose parts of myself.  Or I lose the ability to explain parts of myself. 

I wish it was the moment I sit down on the toilet.  That’s the only time during the day when all of the things I try not to think about are thought about.  When I’m alone in there.  When all of my distractions are muffled.  When you are not near me.  I am most myself in the bathroom.  How unfortunate.

I wish I was driving.  That’s when I think things that I can’t write down right then and there, and when I don’t write them down I lose them forever.  Even if I can remember later what I wanted to write about, I can’t remember the order the words are supposed to go and it ends up not sounding as brilliant as I remembered.  Nothing I write or think is brilliant though.

pang

This morning is cold and quiet.  Every morning is cold and quiet though, so I guess I only said that for effect.

I turned the tv off because I can’t stand the Los Angeles news, and I didn’t feel like looking for something else, and I could use a little silence.
I’ve realized this about myself: I can’t stare into darkness for more than like three seconds.  I have never been able to do this.  I am not scared of ghosts, either.  I just can’t do it.  What if I see something?  What if I see something even though I don’t believe in that something the way everybody else believes in it?

When I was really young I used to sleep with my head under the covers.  With a cave-like opening for my mouth.   A peephole, except I didn’t use it to see, I used it to breathe.  I only recently remembered this about myself.

The nighttime is hard for too many reasons.

When the lights are out and it is dark it’s like your brain becomes a different person.  It’s like your brain becomes the person that was hiding from the overly revealing light.  I don’t like the person I am at night because I think too much.  During the day I think a lot, too, but at night I cannot see what’s around me and therefore cannot distract myself with such thoughts as, “That picture is crooked” or “The computer desk is dusty” or “I really loved that book” or even “That is red.”  In the dark I cannot form opinions about matter.  Not really, anyway.  I can think about things I’ve seen before, but I usually don’t. 

At night I think about everything I’ve been avoiding all day.  Because I can’t hide from it anymore.  Some nights I really scare myself.  The dark really is quite revealing.  You can’t hide from the night like you can hide in the night. 

At night, when Sylvia is sleeping and the dogs are sleeping, and I am awake because I can never just fall asleep like she can, I feel too alone for not being alone.  And being left alone with my thoughts at night is like leaving a child alone with a plastic bag or matches or a lighter or a gun.  I should have a warning label.

"I want to see the world and I want to write down everything."

Sometimes I can’t handle the fact that there are six billion plus people doing six billion different things.  Sometimes it’s too overwhelming that wildlife is being wildlife and water is being water at every single moment that I’m doing whatever I do.  That there is snow and lightning and lava and fog.  That there are cars and airplanes and trails and libraries.  That I can’t even work up enough energy to comprehend everything, or even anything, that’s happening every second of every day on Earth, let alone the entire universe.

I’m watching/listening to Sunrise Earth and I don’t want to be where I am.  I have this unsatisfied need to be really cold.  Not cold in a house or cold at 5 am in the city, but cold in the snow.  Cold in the mountains.  Not uncomfortably cold, just refreshingly cold.  I need some purity wherever there is a drop left, if there is even a drop left.

It’s painful that I feel like I need to step into my house for a breath of fresh air.

I could use a swim, but just please not in a chlorine-filled swimming pool.  Not even one of those salt water ones.  I need the Mokelumne.  I don’t even want to test it first.  I almost always test it first even though I know it will be as cold as it always is.  Just to see, I guess.  Even on the hottest days of summer it is almost unbearably cold.  When I am submerged in water I am raw and pure and charged.  That is such an easy statement because everybody in the world must feel the same way, right?  They just must.  Because water is old.  REALLY old.  Nevermind about dinosaur bones and mummies and broken pots and stone weapons.  Forget buried cities and sunken treasures.  I mean, as amazing as those things are, as amazing as it is that, wow, humans have been around for a whlie and people actually used to do stuff and build stuff, it doesn’t compare to how ancient our water is.  Water has really been around.  Water means that Rome might as well have been built yesterday.  And in one day.  If you really want to get in touch with our past just take a swim.  Seriously, just go jump into a river or the ocean.  Why water is more gratifying than, say, a mountain is because you can be in it and not just look at it or walk on it or roll around on it.  Water is just more rewarding.  When I look at a mountain I am not completely satisfied because I get an overwhelming feeling that I want to be in it and I want to be spread over the entire thing, and I’m pretty sure that in my lifetime those things will remain impossible.  I can’t express my feelings to a mountain, at least not in the way I would like.  I can express my feelings to water because I can become enveloped in it.  I can touch it with every single inch of my external body.  It’s something I can really, truly sink into.

I love the feeling of being in my hometown and I love the feeling of swimming in cold, cold rivers and I’m pretty sure that’s part of what being human should feel like.  If being human should even feel like anything.

wow