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IN My Head

Basically, it’s all in my head. All of it. They way I want to be treated is based off of how people perceive me which is based off of how I present myself, especially in the small details. The manner in which I take my time to eat, how I move my food to my mouth or mouth to my food, the space I give after someone says something to respond, where on them I look. All of these influence them on an unconscious level, you know, the little voices in all of our heads? The ones we don’t have complete control over, who make us happy or sad or flung to the depths of emotion for the smallest, most unreal of reasons. Hitting those will make folks treat me in any manner.

But hitting them isn’t a conscious, do-exactly-this-and-this-will-exactly-result kind of thing. It’s a consequence of my own internal dialogue & self-perception. What I believe about myself, and how it comes through in my actions.

I’ve routinely been subjected to high swings of emotion, which highly swing my self-talk, self-perception, and self-worth. If I take those under control, whew.

What does taking them under control look like? Like in Meditation by Eknath Easwaran, getting very high opens you up to getting very low. I think that getting high on very short time-frame things certainly opens you up to that, because it’s a temporary change-in-state that doesn’t impact how you are all the time. You certainly can present certain ways and get certain effects, but if the source of that certainty is uncertain, then you’re at the whims of someone else who know how to play the game. What to do?

Relax. Let your shoulders down, breathe for a moment, know that time is large. There’s no need to rush.

Observe. You’re in no hurry to do, just allow it to come in. Be curious, not judgmental.

Relax. It’s all going to be OK, and nothing really matters in the end. There’s no rush or quota, just let it be. Let it breathe.

Yeah.

Also: observe how typing has impacted my tone. If writing, I 100% would have many more I’s in here, and there would be more depth of insight into myself. In my mind, I intend to share this with other people, since the only things I’ve typed on a computer have been shared. The way I give examples and alliterate is like I’m doing it for an audience (perhaps in a newspaper, hmmm??). And the frantic speed. Writing long-hand slows me down, allows the thoughts to press out. But typing is just boom boom boom, fall out of my head onto my keyboard. I just noticed that I almost exclusively hit the space bar with my right thumb. Funs!

I have a way of putting people on a pedestal in my mind. It’s as if they have it all figured out, and I should try to be like them. I WANT to be like them, because I perceive them as having friends or being like. But I think it’s one of those self-referential loops: I like them because I perceive them as being liked because I like them because I perceive them as ...

And when I stop liking them so much because they have hurt me in some way, I realize that they aren’t somebody on a pedestal but just a dude. Their flaws and negativity flop out onto a napkin, and I throw it way with the other boogers. Those boogers are my recycled resentment for not living up to my initial expectations (never meet your heroes??). The pendulum oscillates wildly from them being the absolute cream, role-model behavior to distaste and resentment. I think it’s more of a disappointment. Then I get real high and feel-good because they’re normal and so am I, so those things that I valued highly are entirely within my wheelhouse, and I relax and those good qualities fall out of me, and I feel good. Then I meet someone new and am sucked back into the cycle, recycling those feelings yet never reducing their impact on me.

How to overcome, or to break?

I think that, from the beginning interactions, I should have the mindset that this is a normal ass person that shouldn’t immediately be idolized. If they’re worth idolizing, they’ll be worth it in a few days, because those qualities are genuine a pervasive. Try to love an appreciate them always, but be restrictive of my pedestal. Keep it in a gated community, with only the richest and high-value residents. When I meet someone, and interact with them, know that they are at my level in terms of social standing. Don’t stoop, don’t inherently consider higher. I always see that other people have something I don’t (such as knowing someone I don’t) so I see them higher and want to impress/be like them, which turns them off from me since it automatically places me below them. People want to be around equals, or strive for the attention/validation of those above them. They don’t give a shit about those below, that attention is fucking pointless. Again: perspective. Manage perspective. Do good always, don’t manipulate for personal gain, but understand that controlling and moving perspective is key to developing those relationships. Keep yourself high, so they want you, so when you love them it feels more valuable to them.

Like my Mom always said, titles are everything. That one guy who went from just some guy to Olympic Silver Medalist some guy. First impressions last, and people automatically pedestalize you based on things like your title and perceived social standing. If you can out-of-the-gate place yourself up, they’ll consider your subsequent actions from that viewpoint, to either your benefit or detriment.

So, without being arrogant, present yourself in all interactions as worthy and high. Be slow and assured in your actions. If necessary, take an interaction to play a part, just to see what the reaction is. But make sure you prepare for your role, and walk on-stage having been that character for 10 minutes already. And stay in character!!

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How it feels on me right now

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Sudoku Steel Cable

I’ve got a fat crush. A crush of immeasurable mass, one of those ‘Immovable Objects’, you know? The kind that scourge every unstoppable force in the Western hemisphere. It all started with a bump at SpookyFest, when Elizabeth danced her elbow into my left arm in the crowd of awkwardly bobbing Riddle students. And later when her shoulder just kept finding its way into my personal bubble, and every time Austin bobbed his way between us, we found a way to dance back together.

And then at Jac & Lily’s Halloween party the next evening, the one where I almost texted Lily to confirm if Elizabeth would be there, but was afraid I was reading subtext without supporting text. The party where she kept ending up next to me at the counter, chatting and laughing. Her hands had a way of carelessly placing themselves on the edge where my hips leaned, and my hands brushed over hers when they spread themselves out, crossing at her elbow to catch the edge by her hips. The party where some of us danced our way outside and in the quickest moment we found ourselves alone, and she pulled me back to the counter with her pinky finger wrapped about my index. Where we held hands behind her back, half-heartedly hiding it from our conversation partners. Yes, I’m talking about the very same party where she left rather early with Ngozi and in a moment of life-saving courage I followed her to the door to ask for the phone number. The party where she dressed as a Hershey’s Kiss. With a ribbon holding her smooth black hair. And a light pink dress holding her Kiss.

The Kiss I thought of when texting her the next day, asking to have her for dinner and a movie and to see her at the office of the Board of Campus Activities on Monday morning, 10am. It was in my day planner.

Cue: Monday Oct. 31, ★Elizabeth BCA 10am

Chatting with Lily & Ngozi, they already know all about our plans. Austin arrives and then a Kiss. BCA’s couch facing the window had the right amount of mess that it could be moved by my immovable object. Homework, chatting, shifting weight, until we’re dangerously close to one another. Blah blah blah, you want me to get to the juicy part.

Cue: extended metaphor.

She’s so bad at sudoku. The designed solution path for the New York Times’ easy puzzles does not involve completing every row in numerical order, nor does it want you to just guess the digits you don’t know while saying you’re “saving them for later”, which just means you’ll use the checker tool to tell you your 2’s and 3’s are messed up in every numerically completed row.

She’s so bad at sudoku, but she doesn’t know it and she doesn’t care. My folly compelled me to place digits for her and explain logic and point at her screen. Her laptop screen, placed on her crisscross folded lap on that couch. Her crisscross folded lap, with her knee placed dangerously upon my thigh. I thought I saw a sly smile when she put it there. And wouldn’t you know it, my pointing necessitated some leaning over her, and sometimes my hand rested on her knee, and my arm landed on the couch behind her back.

Witnessing her tragic playing style and the way she played it made me want to crush her with affection. Never before in my life have I had such an urge to smother someone’s lips with power. Vector! Both magnitude and direction. It pointed me straight into her depths, centered on her playfulness, driven by a carnal knowledge that only sudoku could teach.

And the feeling! The tension. It’s as if you’re warmed up in the most thorough of ways: your body’s slowly been moved through its full range of motion, your heartrate has been driven to a peak then allowed to settle, your muscles are filled with blood and your mind is centered on every motion and feeling. You are locked into your body, mind and task, and you begin squatting. Just your bodyweight, going down below parallel and back up to near-lockout. With such fluid intentional motions that the squats aren’t separated by any distinct point. It’s just you and your body moving. No feelings arise at first, but you eventually pin pricks find their way into your thighs. Lightly at first. The pins multiply and spread about until you rename them as ‘tightness’. The squats require a touch more effort in certain spots but you keep moving in rhythm. Then the pins ascend into your lungs and are renamed ‘pressure’. Instead of feeling your chest expanding and contracting, your awareness is on the interior lining of your lungs as you feel them push against air. The force is centered within your chest but it’s the actual lungs doing the work and feeling the push. Every continuous breath takes 0.1% more effort and that interest compounds second-by-second as the tightness extends through your body’s entire internals. The subcutaneous layer of fascia begins to bear the weight of every individual contraction as your motions become more fluid while feeling the steep climb and fall of every cycle. Your physical system transforms into a hydraulic press that takes every swath of applied force and squeezes it down into the smallest surface area to apply maximum pressure to push. All surfaces contract down into the most dense volume possible as everything pushes. Your legs rise and fall and rise again at the same rate that your lungs contract and pull apart and contract at the same rate that your heart ventricles contract and relax and contract, one unified beat in errorless waveform that resonates through every structure. The pores in your bones vibrate at that frequency so they can help the system push up and down. Your body is tension. It is not in tension it is tension itself. Your skin is a steel cage containing the most ferocious beast ever recorded in human mythology as it thrashes at its captivity yet no claw or horn could cause so much of a scratch upon the inside surface, no Rockwell Hardness value could every be established because you are the impenetrable cage. A twisted steel wire in tension in every direction. You span from pier to tower in a suspension bridge that carries one thousand metric tons upon every square meter of deck. You give levity to the entire machinations of complex 21st century society as it transfers its weight into your steel. Your iron and carbon in crystallographic structures somehow more densely packed than anything Dr. Lanning could dream of. Your body and mind and eternal spirit experience cosmic incomprehensible loads as you squat up and down yet no plastic deformation will ever be found because your planes cannot slip. You want to resist the unbearable weight by clenching your jaw and yet your face remains completely relaxed, mouth open just enough to let the breadth of breath swell in and out of your lungs. Complete relaxation and complete tension in singularity because you know how to drive in an efficiency known only to the Good God Above. Your blood swells to heal the microtears occurring across the surface of every muscle and you pump. Pump. You are big, powerful, and PNUEMATIC. KILL IT.  Your pneumatics suspend your entire life into that singular moment of motion and clarity and tension. Part of you screams and cries for mercy and finality yet you know your humanity drives on. Your insatiable human spirit causes you to squat and squat until nothing exists except for you and squats. Your feet no longer touch the ground and there is no light nor imagery in front of your eyes. Singularity of purpose at the center of a black hole and just as dense, on your squats.

THAT is the tension I felt as I watched Elizabeth Salazar play sudoku. She is the most golden gate bridge upon which the commerce of my livelihood travels, and the steel cables supporting her decks wind up my spine. The indominable human spirit did not exist before on this Earth until it welled into a 3” diameter ball placed squarely within my chest. Everyone else can pack up and head home, there is nothing left for them. All sin and evil is defeated by the grace of God acting through my hands. Nevermore shall man perish in sadness and hopelessness. I have seen the light of this Universe and it dressed as a Hershey’s Kiss for Halloween.

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Streamlines and Velocity Potentials

When I find myself as a stream, carried along down the cool mountain glaciers through rivers of life – my river of dreams – I know what it is like to love. Passing the sunsets of royal purple and pure gold, past the pastures and canyons through which wind carries its gentle humming tune. The gravity of my life rushes me forward and downward and onward in its neverending race, with its ultimate aim unknown to me. I can only guess.

 The most incredible of my blessings comes in the forms of the streams that surround me on all sides. In the eddies and river banks where I relax, even if for the most fleeting of moments, there are always soft variations between my and my constitutions that make me flow with joy. Leaving the comfort of the secure and solemn ports we race on again, into the fray. Here there and everywhere we play and dance about, always moving ahead and never ceasing in our low rumbling laughter. It’s nice to carry on with the gentle breeze riding us, and our niceness has the pleasure of intensifying as we approach the natural, loved challenges before us. Soft ripples rise and give way to higher rapids, concealing beneath them the rocks and strainers that would have us trapped, bound up where we are and stopped in our places. Through our momentum and choices we continue further down into life. My neighbors come and go, we sometimes split and are split apart forever. This I mind yet understand; I cannot control their paths, and hell I can hardly control mine. I just wish we had more time to be in each other’s company, and feel each other’s warmth against our smooth complexions. But alas, river forks and flood waters work to separate some of us. I shan’t fret this, as it’s opportunity and chance in disguise! Every neighbor lost makes way for another neighbor gained, and for this I’m grateful. Even when I reflect on what appears to be lost – the smooth crevasses of her hand in mine, the way she looks down and appears to close her eyes as our faces close on each other, the very specific and intimate and lovely way in which her stomach curves in towards her belly button -   . It’s hard to remember to move on when I can still feel her so strongly next to me. No matter how much I logically know it isn’t meant to work out, or how clearly I can see the signs she’s leaving, my vision melts with tears of the most solemn joy when I simply imagine her head, atopped with the softest of Carhart beanies, placed gently on my resting thigh. No equation in the world is enough to deny my heart its most passionate direction: hope. My eternal, optimistic hope that we can be one. That those travelling about my life would make the choice to join within my life, even if only for a moment. I’m not, I try not to be desperate, and I try to let them make their choices for themselves. I only ask that it’s genuine, and that they let me place a tender kiss upon their soft foreheads. Romantic and platonic love has thus far managed to elude my life, preferring to remain as a shadow eternally around the nearest corner. While their shadows play together where the lights are dim, mine remains in an endless chase around and around the streetlamps and ponderosa pines, hoping to catch a glimpse of the residual heat of the touch. Hey, at least my family loves me and I try to try my best.

But let’s digress back into the stream of life.

 Ever downhill and round new corners we pass, always jostling for position amongst the features of the Earth. Excitement fills me as I witness the jagged pebbles our flows smooth underfoot. Don’t we all want to see the fruits of our trees? Tumbling down we follow the railroads and interstate highways, and carry wary travelers upon our skyward boundary layers. I love the way we pass through boulders in our streams, thrown about yet always throwing ourselves onward. We ripple into whitewater, foam at our mouths for the chance at a challenge. It is when we feel the most contempt for ourselves and flows of constant mass, bounded by streamline of constant values, that we feel the most love for our smooth liquidations. Seeing my companions, new old or permanent, flinging themselves into the air to hang upon a gentle breeze, a create the courage to pray to God:

 Holy Father, our Creator, thanks. Thanks for the way in which we are jostled and tested, pushed and pulled. I humbly ask that you allow us to remain at our easiest, incompressible states, so that we can continue down our lives with the easiest governing equations. We love the challenge, but it remains nice to ride the gentle wave.

 I know Your presence in my holy friends: soaring within the breeze, if only for a moment. The warm sunlight reflecting off their smooth surface. The minor variations of color and composition from point to point in their body that give them such incredible richness and depth. Their white outlines, their silhouettes painted black upon the red rock landscape, the way their focused light darkens my shoulders and makes skin peel from exposure. These are the very ways in which I know You, God. The details, the souls of the very things the are and become.

 Thanks, God, for my life and all the wonders that flow within it.

 I don’t know where gravity will pull me next, but I know it will be further down this hill. Towards the ocean, where my streamness will end and we’ll all have the chance mix together as one in the cesspool of saltwater and sunscreen rubbed off the baked skin of America’s greatest export: mechanized tourists. I can’t say where I or my companions will end up, but I do have some preferences if it matters to anyone. If I were to make my way into an irrigation duct, to be sprayed out of some industrial metal tubing onto a farm of sorts, I hope that farm is in Palisade, and I am placed on the ripest of this season’s peaches. I hope my peach finds its way into a burlap sack in the back of an old manual pickup truck, taken into a small town, and sold at a market by someone who’s in this country ‘illegally’, who’s doing their best to survive and thrive in this world. That’s the most holy way my raging river can end: being passed from a callused farm hand into one belonging to the most innocent of children, and that being the end of me. If I make it all the way to the ocean, where I can mingle with the other streams for the rest of our collective eternity, never knowing the release of death, I just pray that they keep it exciting. Hopefully one of those tourists – God bless their hearts – has a spare car battery or two that they just fucking chuck straight into our body of water. Whether they know better or not it doesn’t matter, I just enjoy the irony of some dumbass destroying our makeup and desecrating our good names for some reason that really has no damn value. God bless ‘em. If these don’t come true, and I evaporate before I’m able to make it to any destination of sorts, I hope I’m assumed into the greatest, grayest of billowing rainclouds. I may simply be a single drop of rain, but I will remain.

Dedicated to a rose I once held

in an alley of my past