Pass me by. I'll be fine. Just give me time.

I wish I could take everything I have seen and heard and done in the past 9 years off just like a winter coat. I would hang it in the closet and store it for the summer. I still need that heavy coat, no doubt, but just for a little while I would like to feel a cool breeze on my bare shoulders.

I sat out on the driveway tonight trying to get it back, that feeling like tomorrow will always be better. Maybe it is the feeling that there is something different out there just around the corner. The silence of suburbia is deafening. The white noise of cars driving by and the crinkle of paper burning as I take a long drag off a cigarette are the only things to keep me company. And just for a second I thought I had it. But it slipped away before I could get a good hold on it.

Cigarettes make me feel like a kid. If only I had someone to hide them from.

Some people are afraid of change. I'm afraid of static. But it always finds me. It hunts me down. For some reason I give in to it. It comes sneaking in like a prowler, and all I can do is hide under the covers. But just when things get going good and steady I make a break for it and muck it all up real good, then try to make my way back. One of these days I'm not going to be able to go back. I will have fucked it up one to many times. Then what?

"Oh, the problems we had then. How were we to know we were happy?"

Unsolved Mysteries

I always hated that show as a child. I found it terrifying. I just didn't want to watch. The narrator and his creepy voice, it was all to much.

Now I find my life is like that, an unsolved mystery. I image that same voice narrating the things I found in my car and wondered about. Saying something mysterious and eerie. Where has all the time gone? What happened to all the things I did, but I just can't remember? Are they gone forever? Will I wake up one day with a memory of some lost action? Do I live these lost, forgotten deeds out in my dreams? How many things have I taken for granted? Why can't I seem to make myself stop it?

Pay attention! I'm screaming this. It hasn't caught on yet.

Would it be better to get rid of everything and never be reminded of the things you did in some version of your life that doesn't belong to you anymore?

The Glove Compartment

I cleaned out my car today. And I mean cleaned it. Big time. I have this little arm rest in between the front seats it opens up, you store things in it. I probably haven't cleaned it since I got the car. Six years ago. I found all sorts of stuff in there. Josh's number, Beth's number, Chris's number, all manner of aged breath mints, a tiny, little bottle of eyelash adhesive, change, tampons, pens. You know, all the things a girl needs in her arm rest for god only knows how many years and never uses any of it. Now you must be thinking, Who the hell is Josh? Cause I certainly am. All those other people make perfect sense. However, Josh is really baffling me. I got nothing.

They say everything is connected.

But how? Or more accurately why?

Reading Corley's blog about god and love I thought about the book I am reading "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde. I have always loved quotes by Oscar Wilde so I bought a huge book of his collected works. It is a great book, though I have only read about 40 pages. It is about art, and beauty, and all sorts of social issues including homosexuality. When I read this book I think someone has taken my thoughts and put them down on paper. How could that be? Someone from the past has stole my ideas from the future? How could it be that I think some of the same things about life as someone did in 1890? That is just a mind fuck. Plus he was half way around the globe, a man, famous, and gay. What is it about my life that could possibly be the same as his?

My history teacher last semester said repeatedly that everything is connected. The first time he said it I had just turned off "The World According to Garp" on cd. It was at the very end and Garp was saying that everything is connected. It blew my mind. I felt an overwhelming need to get up and leave. I wanted to go back to my car rewind "Garp" and listen again, and cry again. Sometimes I wish that I could just do anything I feel like, even if it is the most socially unacceptable thing under the sun. Are socially inept people happier in the end?

Here is a great passage.
"'I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream- I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal-to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and you soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.'"


I strongly believe in a collected consciousness. So does Kyle. We were discussing this thought one day and it came to me. What if artists can tap into the collected consciousness at greater depths? Maybe that is why we see our ideas on the tv or in music more frequently. More specifically Jacob had come up with this song about shitting the sheets. It was really funny and He sang it to a song. They recorded it. Then within a year Tool had a song with the lyrics, "God damn. Shit the bed." Have you ever heard a song about shitting the bed? I hadn't either until Jacob came up with it. Too many of Kyle's jokes have ended up on Aqua Teen Hunger Force to even count. And for some reason it always amazes us.

So maybe artists thoughts linger longer as well? Is that why I have thought the very same thoughts that were written by Oscar Wilde? Well over 100 years and his thoughts are still in the consciousness? Or is it that society is still basically the same and it forces free thinkers to think alike?

I work with a guy who told me this week that he has never read a book from start to finish in his whole life. It made me really sad to think of that. A boy in his twenties had never read a complete book. If I could possibly imagine my life without books it would be a sad, shallow existence. One of my favorite teachers in college, (just happened to be a sociology teacher) Dr. Linda Tobin, tries to remedy that. At the beginning of her class she gives out a book list. They are all novels ex: Life of Pi, Lovely Bones, Secret Life of Bees easy reads. Then you are to write a seven page paper on the sociological theories represented in the novel. Incredibly easy. I have talked to a number of people who dropped out of her class because of the reading thing. I was talking to her in the hall one day about my reading choice, "The Lovely Bones". I was telling her how hard it was to read and after every ten pages I had to put it down because it was traumatising me. We started talking about reading and how we couldn't live without reading and she said the reason why she does this is because she knows students don't read. I can't image in my life having never read Island, or Tom Robbins. To have an experience all your own. To have a connection with someone you have never met, who has never even existed in the same time. That is amazing to me. Thoughts and ideas shared over hundreds of years. I cherish anything that is timeless.

I hope I am immortalized in thought.