Category: Rants

How do you finish telling a story when you can only think fifteen seconds at a time? How do you create a narrative when three minutes of contemplation is exhausting? These are rhetorical questions when I’m lucky. Writers write, right? But what if writing, what if every thought, is embroiled? I have no third act, and I don’t know if I ever will. I can’t get past the conflict. The conflict defines how I live; it defines who I am right now, who I’ve been for a while. The conflict or nothing is how I feel.

I saw an old friend last night and he was in chains over how he felt about a relationship he was in. I felt like I was in a zoo, watching something that had no personal resonance. I told him I was the same way for a while, after the last time, but after what happened, I decided to turn it off, and so I did. With me, it’s always been all or nothing. And for six years now, I have chosen nothing. I have broken the alternative so many times that it might not be an option to go back. I can tell the story, but I can’t live it anymore. Too many things get broken.

There are four horsemen of the apocalypse: Famine, Pestilence, War, and Death. Do you know what pestilence means? Hideous infectious disease. Pestilence was first called Conquest. I don’t know the philosophical implications of that, but I think it’s funny.

You would think Death would get the black horse, and you would be wrong. That belongs to Famine. Death rides the pale horse. Pestilence on white and War on red makes way more sense. I love to read things I don’t believe and know them better than people who do. Cherubs aren’t fat little babies, they’re three-headed monsters with heads of a lion, eagle, and human. Angels don’t have wings. And the only time the devil manifests in the world as a tangible creature is as a serpent to Eve in Genesis. No horns, no red suit, no pitchfork. Usually just a disembodied voice. #smallpoxblanket #dismemberinglahui #alohabetrayed

Life doesn’t just happen. We choose our own realities. How we act and what we believe are ultimately choices. There are a million ways life can happen. We don’t just make one choice to be a hero or an asshole. We make little choices every second of every day. And a few years of those million little million choices make you an asshole or a hero. Most of us are c students and we fall in between. Heroes that are sometimes assholes. More often we’re assholes that are sometimes heroes.

I never thought there’d come a day when 25 would seem so irritatingly young. I remember being on the school bus when I was eight or nine and we’d go from lower campus at Kamehameha to pick up the kids in high school on upper campus. They seemed so old. Now I look at ninth-graders and they seem so tiny. The same transformation has happened with twentysomethings. When you are one? You rule the world. You know every answer. And your way is the right way.

It takes hindsight, I guess, to recalculate and add up all the stupid fucking decisions and the risky behavior that when bulletproof seemed like manifest destiny, but in reality, is mostly the luck of the draw. If I met the me from ages 25 – 35, I would tell him to quit being such an asshole. Think of those that love you. And can you please try to step out of yourself for one second?

My new theory is that it’s evolutionary. We need that bravado and sluttiness to propagate our genes. But at what cost? I’m not that old, really. But I see more clearly things in other people that I don’t like. And what you hate the most in others? Is really what you hate most about yourself.

The meaning of life comes to me sporadically. I wish I could hold it. I guess it’s value comes in being unholdable. Who am I really? I don’t really matter. I’m not being dramatic. I smashed an ant today. It wasn’t on purpose. I like everything to live as long as it can. And then I saw that I am that ant. Fragile and lost. Walking among the many, but probably scared. And actually alone.

I was blind because I was deaf. I was both to everyone that looked or listened. I was chasing numb. I won the race. Numb is so slow it looks stupid when you grab it. It’s so easy to buy, it’s so easy to ask for. It’s almost like something wants it to happen.

I do remember that night. We were on the patio, so you existed in half light. Coffee. SoCo. Late-night Austin. So beautiful and sad you were. You knew what your part was. I asked who you stayed with when you went home to Beaumont. “I don’t want to talk about that.” The internet churns. I already knew. I saw the picture. I swallowed my tongue and we laughed at Greg Giraldo. Most of the time? Sex usually doesn’t mean anything except how it feels. But it always turns the dial.