Insomnia

Sleep. Who needs it, really? We all do, I suppose, but it's always been in the timing, or off-timing, for me.

I haven't written anything here since March. Since then, I went skiing in the Alps, started a new job, and I have been planning the wedding to/with/for John, the one person above all else who keeps me sane, in spite of things like insomnia.

And my nervousness about the wedding as an event that we are both planning from afar, this is one of the things keeping me up at all hours. That and sleeping too much during the day, forgetting to taper off the caffeine earlier in the afternoon, and my own brain, which seems to kick into high gear when much of the world is sleeping. Maybe my sleeping takes the form of awakening, not dissimilar from the protagonist in Brazil, one of my all-time favorite films, which I stayed up to watch late last night.

Alienation from the self is the theme I contemplated on this viewing. It's one of those brilliant pieces of art that has layers of resonance, a kind of cinematic gold leaf that you can peel back, view from different vantage points, and still make new discoveries each time.

So as I followed the now familiar (20 is the estimated number of times I've watched Brazil) story of Sam Lowry and his misadventures in love, anti-terrorism, and the struggle to find, or possibly misplace himself in a dystopic world, I see the parallel lines. On the personal level, you never see Sam asleep in the normal venue of a bed. Instead, he wakes up suddenly from the intricate dreams in which he battles several onslaughts of fear-mongering humanoids, and it is usually a place like his puny office or on the elevated tram that he realizes he has slept. Or has he?

The interwoven story lines, the false endings, and the final ending where we see him surrendering utterly to a kind of drooling delirium where he has slipped the bonds of reality, all cause the viewer to question what was real, what was dream, nightmare, farce, satire, fantasy, self-delusion, memory, flashback, or "final ending" before the credits roll.

And the disconnectedness of that questioning is the point I think. The world is a mad place in which connections between people can be dangerous. The ducts that are supposed to keep Sam comfortable in his own home, the pneumatic tubes Sam clogs up when he cannot keep up with the arrivals of memos, these are external manifestations of patches between man and machine, man and his fellow man, and between his sane self, and the mask he must wear to survive in a dangerously chaotic, class-rigid, totalitarian society. These connections, like arteries, veins, nerves, relationships, once severed, are difficult to replace.

Even more difficult is the lack of an omniscient narrator, whose point of view would at least allow us the comfortable luxury of choosing between several interpretations of what happens to Sam, Buttle, Tuttle, Jill, and the other characters.

On the level of satire, Brazil makes its most brilliant work in broad strokes as well as beautifully crafted details. The dizzying backdrop of mixed metaphors, (the highway signs obscuring the view of the toxic landscapes, the propaganda posters, signage, and menacing architecture, the shine on the helmets of the security guards in Sam's new workplace). They all add up to a biting, precise, and utterly charming if not hypnotic mixture of social commentary, slapstick, tragedy, and the blackest form of comedy: self-loathing wrapped up with the kind of ribbon only British writers could develop.

And the parallel between self-disconnection and societal self-disconnection is complete within the satire. Both man and the system are joined irrevocably in a power struggle between structure and freedom, practicality and whimsy, necessity and fantasy. It is an age-old struggle, but each time I watch I find myself rooting for Sam while I also feel sorry for his misguided Quixotic journey, and at times, I am jealous of his ability to make his dreams come true. After all, isn't that what we all want?

Am I on the water or in the water?

Spinning around on a circular raft, waves crashing down from all directions, stormy winds buffeting my crumpled frame...

This is where I am when you wake me to say that the dogs miss me and that there's coffee made...

And in the moment between nightmares and reality I feel confusion and relief. My bed is not moving, but my body must have been...

It was just a dream, I tell myself as I stir and rise, but I only half believe it.

Like my brother, I have an emotional and physical vigilance that borders on obsession and it is all part of the armor-making that protected us from being crushed by our own grief, anger, fear, pain, sadness, and loss... when we were too young to use rational thought and other tools of adulthood to put it all into perspective.

But we are not boys. Just as the bed was not moving. It was a self-inflicted illusion, anxiety left over from a long-ago past. Ripples from a stone sank and broken down into gravel by now.

And life here with John and the furry ones is stable and calm and reliable, and we are preparing for the new adventure of marriage. A new context. And naturally this scares the crap out of me.

And still we prepare. And again my dreams shift. Today it is enough for me to have a few loved ones who occasionally read these posts, or not, because I do not need to prove anything to myself or to the world. At least not right now.

The answers I seek may still elude me, some of them, but when you live for what is now, letting go of the clawing of desire, the asking falls away into something else entirely.

My ability to engage in critical thinking is and will likely always be something I take pride in, but it cannot always be an end to itself. It has a place and a time.

I have been thinking about existentialism lately, and as with many things, so much of my view of this troublesome post-modern philosophy depends on interpretation. To observe that life has stunning paradoxes, a pattern of built-in irony, and an undeniable level of absurdity is not quite the same as saying that life is a cruel joke to be endured through cynically gritted teeth.

If absurdity is the premise, then the irony-filled battles against the joke are only one way to interpret the truth. For me, it is becoming enough to appreciate the occasional ironies, whether they are painful or comical, without throwing away the possibilities that might exist given the fact that some of the rules are rigged. Not all the rules point you down a path of self-defeat.

So perhaps in a Hegelian turnaround, I have finally come to terms with all the little existentialist tyrants, children, fools, kings, and entertainers in my own head. And somehow I have grown beyond them by embracing what they all have in common. Struggle is the nature of modern life, but it is not everything there is in life. Human experience is fully capable of embracing the array of possibilities.

And I am back in a conundrum. And that is part of the premise! So I am back on a spinning boat, at the mercy of the waves, but I also have oar, compass, memory, perhaps even the rare sea creature to help me through.

And so it goes. Woosh!

Fever dreams

He could see the towers from Williamsburg, hovering above the houses in the foreground like twin magnetic beacons, pulling him toward the city, calling to him is some primal way. That skyline pulled him in, held for him a future, a purpose, the seduction of a lifetime. He didn't think of the cost, he only ached to turn himself into something new, someone unrecognizable to his former self.

He did not move away from home to live in a Brooklyn neighborhood that time forgot. He moved here to dive off the edge of the rest of the country and into Manhattan, into the new self he longed to invent out of nothing, or at least out of the ashes of his other life.

It was 1995. He was young and had nothing to lose, at least nothing material, except the contents of a suitcase. New York was the metal-shaper's block around which he would fashion himself, define what and who he would be. He was someone, but he wanted to be someone envied by other New Yorkers, accepted as a someone other than the someone who moved there and crashed on friend's sofas and floors until he could get an apartment and a cot... that was the year he sent holiday cards he had re-fashioned and decorated after buying a few generic boxes from the local mega-pharmacy by the always crowded subway station and the bank where he kept his modest earnings.

Tonight all he could think about was the fact that as cool as NYC was, it didn't have an art supply store that was open all night. Were he a more motivated man, he would start his own business to cater to those overlooked, untapped insomniac artists. Surely in a city famous for not sleeping it would be a success, but he also knew that NYC is a self-drawn Etch A Sketch that likes to clear away its own designs and institutions at times, shaking off the old for the new and the new for the old. And so it is that the city has a life all its own, an amalgamation of all its residents but also something other. A force of its own nature. A shape-shifting experiment in humanity and physical space.

And that was all. He could entertain the notion of a new business, but he could not transform it into anything more than another daydream, or in this case, another post-midnight dream, waking and half sleeping and full of halves of whole thoughts, ideas, plans, desires... full of the pain of knowing his own limitations intimately, and giving up the fight to stretch them.

Still, he had moments of grace when he thanked God, Buddha, Allah, the Universe, Higher Power, whatever he was calling it that week, for all the gifts he enjoyed, the love of friends and family, of husband and dogs, all the positives stacked in his favor, the warm healing glow in which he occasionally allowed himself to bask. And he was able to know those moments too, and even extend them when he was aware enough, focused and present and ready.

The sparkling glimpse of hot silvery stars in the freezing navy blue night sky as he dragged all his portfolios and briefcases and winter accessories out of the car after a long day of gym-work and job interviews, this was a brief moment of recognition that, even if he had lost his way, there was a path somewhere to rejoin, and this path intersected with him in the present. In the now. And then the moment flickered out like the star beneath the deep February cloud, jockeying for position in the heavens, tormented by the desire to fling snow down on everyone and the desire to build bigger versions of itself, a gathering storm in training, a hatching factory for deadly blizzards and paralyzing ice storms. Or, was it he who allowed the happy moment to pass away too quickly? Did he in fact banish it?

Feelings required energy, and he was tired as he rummaged through the drawers of his makeshift painting studio for anything resembling yellow, even amber would suffice, and yet, he remembered that he used all his yellow in the last painting, with its swirling pools of color and its prominent phallic shape dominating the composition. But this was an ethereal cock, if there could be such a thing.

It had neither depth nor weight. It simply floated in the alternative landscape of his experimentation in acrylic. Like a ghost or a totem, pointing up to the ceiling like a road sign from a lost civilization of acid-dropping penis-worshiping impressionists. Van Gogh vs Haight Ashbury, with just enough Willliam S. Bourroughs tossed into the blender to make the viewer both intellectually titillated as viscerally off-center.

And that was his yellow-hogging mural, a paean to never-existent gods, a pictorial rendering of one of his own obsessions, abstracted from the canny truth of experience and struggle and lust. Just a shadow of a symbol for his so-called sexual orientation, as if sex were to be mapped and navigated by the direction of one's needs and desires...

And now a song comes on the computer that reminds him of old friends, an unforgettable car ride with Mollee when he leaned his head out the window to feel the brisk air pushing against his skin and hair, and his friend, ever a cautious driver, begging him to return to the safe confines of the inside of the vehicle.

And so reluctantly, he rejoined the real world, the confines of which chafed his spirit and also challenged him to succeed, to make it in the big bad city, to prove what though? To prove to himself that he could do it?

That was a part of it, sure. But what else drove him through those first intolerable winters? The notion of destiny waiting to be discovered. And yes, he knew how corny that sounded, and yet, that's as close as he came to explaining his motives.

Verses bereft of structure

Gripped in my left hand
Two leashes, two dogs, same breed
Silent salvation

Saving up all my fluency
For a time and place
Where people may need it

I may need it more.
The plane floated in the river
Where am I floating?
My current insensible
Waits.

Poetry doesn't really salve the wounds this morning, as my insomnia seems both symptom and cause of something much more complicated. A series of mishaps, maybe, fumbling around with my own flaws. Drumming the ground for some rhythm, the symbols for which were lost in the flames.

Images criss-cross and disconnect me. I missed a party tonight, opting for domestic stillness with my 3 loved ones. Still, the restlessness within me lurks, threatening to undermine what little stability I have left.

All I need to regrow the sanity in my heart is a look around, and a bit of gratitude. And understanding. My mother understands me too well, and it unnerves me how right she can be. But she wants me to crawl out of the funk. She has given me explicit instructions. They are not written in my own language, yet they are sound. The theme is resonant.

It is hard to be friends with others when you have such enmity with yourself. And I am at war here, my psyche is split, agitated, raw. Splicing myself into parts, I wield weapons of self-defeat and self-aggrandizing and swing them both every which way but free.

Free indeed. Trapped is how I feel. Embedded in a scenario that I wrote, unable to perform the whole play and be done with it, half-solid and half-ethereal, fish-goat, stubborn swimmer, aquatic mountain climbing gentle giant with fins and horns and no owner's manual for either. Only impulses at cross purposes with needs, desires juxtaposed against practicalities, mud drenching the clear washing away of conscience. Lady Macbeth in a Laundromat with coins stuck to the blood on her fingers, and detergent blinding her eyes from the truth. Washing away from herself, she cries out for help but there is no one.

And that is just the beginning. So writing is necessary evil and leaden with half-hopes. Writing may be the one thing I can commit to, but it seems a hollow victory. Letting myself win at anything is not easy, actually. Maybe that kernel of knowledge is where I should stop. To commit to write and to try on the win as if it were a comfortable suit, success at being me, accepting the whole of me, relaxing enough to start caring again. To start a new game.

fda, some stray bits of dialogue, and very non-chronological thinking

for you regular readers (are there actually 4 of you now?), i apologize for avoiding upper case and playing fast and loose with punctuation, grammar, or proper sentence structure in this latest rambling post. but just in case you had not heard the news flash, here's my campy re-write of the headline, or maybe it's the local anchor doing a promo for an upcoming news expose.

"....enigmatic queen quits job and takes an ill-timed vacation. how does this affect your morning commute? we'll tell you how to keep your children save on Action News at eleven."

* * *

so i'm back at my hotel room in amsterdam. the room i'm staying in is clean and quiet; it looks similar to the ones here, only much smaller (ahh yes, the optical illusions inherent in surfing the Web for an affordable room on another continent from the one where you currently reside).

the tiny efficiency of the hotel room, and the fact that you decide not to complain about the size, speaks to your willingness to stretch your imagination and be flexible, just for a change of pace...

...and i'm trying to figure out what to do for dinner, because i'm starting to get a little hungry, and since the hotel doesn't serve dinner, "grazing" for the evening meal will require effort and energy on my part (i would have to put shoes back on my buzzing feet and get off my behind), and all the sight-seeing (the Reichtsmuseum* will be unimaginably stunning once the whole thing is open), pot smoking, and conversation with a very witty retired spanish teacher from palm springs california has made me very pleasantly sleepy, and as i unpack my trusty cocoa brown leather bag, i notice the large, mostly uneaten "space cake," and this little "conversation" happens inside my head:

self 1: well, since you are hungry, you could have some cake...
self 2: that's true, and you know i'm a sucker for chocolate baked goods, however, i think that thing qualifies more as a drug than a food...

and then, because i am an ex-medical writer, perhaps, i wonder how the food and drug administration (fda) would classify this almost delicious, but slightly grassy-tasting confection of sugar, eggs, flour, cocoa powder, and butter or shortening which has acquired the THC from the pot by some kind of sauteing process that i would likely never master no matter how many times i tried.

notice that it's not called the "food or drug administration." maybe the government has exploited a weak spot in the language. maybe they are onto something there. i suppose food, like sex, can be used and/or abused in the same way as drugs can... maybe the fda (and all those pharma ad agencies who have helped me support my self and my family in recent years) stands to benefit if pharmaceuticals and prescription drugs become assimilated into foodie culture. imagine a nice nuclear family gathered around a dinner table. maybe it's thanksgiving or christmas dinner. maybe kwanzaa or hannukah dinner:

mikey: son, someday you too will learn the fine art of carving up an anti-depressant before supper.

cora: don't pressure him honey. everyone has their own path.

flint: dad, face it, he's just not that into drugs. i personally cannot imagine life without my bladder control medication, mood stabilizer, and occasional cup of lithium with lemon, but he's just made differently. maybe he has a different genetic code, or he's just trying to stand out and be different. mommy's little boy could end up being the Plain Sane type.

bo: don't call me that!

*Reichmuseum site.
** Picture this: a tall blonde about to eat space cake...
i name this post non-chronological because the one i started to write yesterday is sitting inside a Word document on my laptop, awaiting its chance to be uploaded for the continued enjoyment of all both of my regular readers. i just had to jot down the little debate about how the US Government would classify the dense marijuana cake resting patiently in my chocolate-brown leather messenger bag...

Food and/or Drug Administration!!! You just add 1 word and a forward slash, and let the reader decide which is more appropriate. this might be construed as a liberal interpretation, but it may just hit the spot. if the wooden shoe and/or the social tolerance fits, wear it! and wear it with pride in your soul. spread that around and you have some good magic.

* * *

that whole fda tangent sure seemed witty at the time. we'll see how it reads when i get back to the land of normalcy and drug laws and active job hunting. maybe then it will seem trite, but for now, i am amused.

* * *

It's times like these when I wish Hallmark or American Greetings made a touching but also sweetly poignant "Mom, Sorry I ran off to Amsterdam Instead of Looking for a New Job in the US card. Would it be best to give it to her in person or use an AeroGram, or maybe even an AaroGram, so it's even more personalized. There used to be a certain kind of Air Mail letter that folds up into its own envelope... the paper is thin and therefore green in the ecological sense. the actual color of the paper was blue. If you were in a pinch, I suppose you could even use the paper to roll a joint. However, I don't recommend this strictly hypothetical tactic for 2 reasons:

1) Your mother may want to save the letter for posterity, assuming she gets it.
2) The ink may contain chemicals that are harmful to humans if they enter the lungs with just the right mixture of oxygen, THC, and an ever-stronger desire for escapism.

I DO love that woman, and not just because she delivered me into the world, but because she wants me to be a good man, and to stay in the world a long time, and she wants me to contribute and help people while finding my own happiness. She is also my hero in so many ways, and I think I used to be afraid to admit that. We are alike and we are different, but somehow we complement each other, even if we don't always agree.

so i'm feeling much better about the future, even though my plan still needs some fine-tuning. the talk with mom really helped. love u mamacita! i will see you very soon, but not yet.

* * *

scattering to the winds

parts of myself are already flying away now.

perfect language yesterday on the stage. equus vibrated through me like the final tolls of a chilling bell.

am i taking this next trip for self-defeating reasons? am i my own worst enemy?

thoughts collide with desires breeze past reason and cause.

the poor psychiatrist is left imprisoned by the god he removes from alan's psyche.

the little warrior inside me is maimed, fortified by the taste of blood, but whose?

do i really need to lose myself to find whatever's left of my own dreams?

do i really have a choice?

i need this and it is risky.

i want this penultimate fantasy trip and i am afraid of the wanting that i have left myself in charge of.

change is inevitable, and change is what drives me now. following it around like a stalker, i scream out my readiness, but stutter, my lips quiver, mt heart beats against by ribcage like a madman in jail, shaking the bars of his cell.

and so i know that i am no more ready for change than i am ready for criticism. and i am weak with fear and i am traveling anyway, for through the running away, i hope to find something more than what i left behind.

Pink vision

Pink sky outside the lie of the mind's eye.
Winter cold subsides as the laptop warms my thighs.

Famous verses flicker dimly in the cavernous rewinds.
You cannot go back there, the pink sky swears to me.

You cannot go back.

Chatter in my head. Is that what keeps me awake, or is it the part of myself spying on the chatter, waiting to see how it plays out, waiting for the crescendo in the conversation, the ultimate moment of chit-chat when everything slows down to a stillness in the breath beneath the noise, the quick inhale before the strident note is sung?

Penultimate hero. Semi-requited love. On the verge of going somewhere wonderful.

This is where my world crashes into my perception: in the silence of the snow-bereft skies above. Starless misty chill coats the atmosphere until. Crackling Dawn breaks the ether into hard lines and soft memory of the night before. The night. The mourning after the night before.

Eyes watch from inside, watch from above. Irises made of crystals, the beginning of ice solidifying somewhere beneath the surface of the visible world. Bonds forming. Reactions slowing. Colors changing into themselves. And again I watch, always looking up and out, as if the answers would be spelled there, just beyond the bare tree limb, like a dead witch hand reaching without moving.

Between the fingers there is the beginning of something and the ending. Have you ever felt left? Right in the middle of your life. Left behind. Just left...? That's right. I knew you knew the melody of the quiet jazz trumpet muted by its own doleful cries.

There is beauty in the stillness of winter nights when you're up way too late and there's nothing to do but string words together, carelessly braiding them however they seem to fit. For the words have their own life. I'm just a barren weaver, and the better I get at making intricate patterns match up with what's going on inside me, the more out of touch I am with the feeling of the cloth itself, the fabric of each syllable collapses under my rigid fingertips until I become the tree, dead and reaching ever upward without moving.

Slicing the pink icing into thirds and fourths for the next hungry soul who comes along this way...

I ride along an invisible sleigh through the pink paradise. My frozen body sticking to the metal, I become crystals and the wind sings through my hollowness. Echoes are my only feeling, for the pink starry night has burst into a million tiny snowflakes. But you cannot see them yet. Above the urban glow and below the black they float, microscopic and patient. They crave moisture and cold and as I freeze into them they fly faster toward a tree branch, a little boy's nose, a sleepy cemetery. And all is quiet.