didyouknowiwasalive

[didyouknowiwasalive]

In a glorious rejection of death, I have decided that I will live forever. I will drink deep from the joyus spring of life and I will fill myself with lust for the simple act of living. In such a state, I will exist suckling calf-young on clover in the field and mark my nose dandelion yellow. I will love and be loved in equal measure by the moon and sky, and dissolve myself in gentle rains.

[didyouknowiwasalive]

The face of one of the newly alive, wormy second-chances.

I Found God In A Dead Kitten, Part 2: I Have Been Given A Second Chance With A New Life (Crayon and marker, 2023)

[didyouknowiwasalive]

Candy Age Of The Undead Mall-Palm

Sense is lost in some places- a place like this is a sponge for senses. You begin to feel so lost, in a place once so familiar to you.

There is a mall I went to often throughout my childhood, then adulthood. Once it was thriving, full, a place of life and joy, where community would proliferate. It stands, now, a husk; devoid of any sense of fullness, save for its own fullness of stillness. Music four decades old now spills out tinny over unseen speakers and echoes past an arcade, and movie theater. In all my years I have never seen a person at the candy dispenser. I wonder to myself: is that sun-faded candy inside the same from my first visit here? Has anyone ever gotten a single piece? Do they even check for quarters inside anymore?

Near the eternal candy dispenser sits a row of mall-palms- the palm fronds one finds inside a mall of this era- that are somehow, pitifully, still alive. Bedraggled, wilting over their edges, but alive. The same can not be said of the stores. One month I came to visit, after my favorite store inside had closed, to find just in that time, four more had gone. No anchors remain, (though, one was turned into a hospital center.) Though the fountain still runs, and the tables still sit, no place inside the court still serves food- it is simply a court now, where old men sit and watch the occasional passing patron. Where once there was an indoor playground, it is now simply a depressed pit in front of what was once a JC Penney. One day, I will return to find that, as if I had blinked and missed it, the doors will have closed forever.

It was in this place I found my favorite shirt. It was here that I was encouraged to try piercing. In these halls, my father and I ate soft cinnamon pretzels and waited for my grandmothers to be done in the kitschy holiday store. It was down that long, strange hallway that I first felt confident enough to use the men's restroom. A part of my spirit, my memories, live in that place.

In such a way, perhaps, the mall is never empty, because my ghost lives there.

In another way, I suppose you could say, my soul is a dead mall.

I am selfish, then. I want the mall to live forever. I want it to be as eternal as the candy dispenser, as ageless and timeless as the once-green watermelon gumballs inside it. I want it to limp on, defiant, as resilient as the mall-palm found only on the westmost end of the corridor. I want to hear my footsteps and Easy Lover echo down forever. I want a brilliant firework-return to vibrancy and life.

Alive.

Alive.

Alive.

[didyouknowiwasalive]

I Found God In A Dead Kitten, Part 2: I Have Been Given A Second Chance With A New Life (Crayon and marker, 2023)

[didyouknowiwasalive]

There is something absolutely magical about the world outside at night. Humanity's stubborn refusal to bow to the will of the sun, to exist at all hours within cities, and the vast tracks of land steeped in the quiet out here in the countryside...

[didyouknowiwasalive]

I'm repurposing this old vent blog into something more positive and expressive. Going through a hard time where I can't be on the computer due to chronic illness, so I'm gonna get back into writing musings and all.

[didyouknowiwasalive]

I want to have a concrete house,

Concrete walls, concrete floors,

To paint one hundred thousand colors,

Gradient ceilings, eggshell doors.

My home, brutal in efficacy,

Cheap, through, ever efficient,

Though personal by the work of us,

Full, Lived-in, quaintly resplendent.

The curse of the artist, ever so,

To own, to change to one's desire,

Is not opposed to the ethic ideal,

To give, for others, when times are dire.

I'd build hundreds of my brutal homes,

For hundreds of artists, a selfish need,

To see the beauty these hands create,

To plant in them this uncanny seed.

Is it selfish to foster this hope?

To ask for beauty and all thereof?

To paint one hundred thousand colors,

One must first fill their world with love.

[11/28/2020]