Day 35

             This one is going to be especially bad, today.  But it will be especially true.  True and bad are synonymous because you try to distance yourself from what you're writing to avoid being self conscious.  Self consciousness is the most paramount evil to try to avoid in life as well as writing, some people are trying to make me believe.  You're supposed to tell about "what you know", regardless of how trivial or bland or self-explanatory that might be.  So, yeah, it takes a lot of "bravery" to write, whether or not that's actual bravery or just a Don Quixote willingness to accept a challenge.  Things will start to happen once these characters become real, and you only fail when you stop.  Where's all my negative feedback?

His old interests started to fade away.  He no longer felt the desire or urge to watch the TV, movies, or internet.  The only time TV was necessary was when he was entertaining a girl, his interests had become multitudinous and elevated in his own mind and his newly expanded vocabulary created a gap.  He sat with his legs dangling in the precipice.

The toiletseat was still warm.  Living with Phillistines had its perks.  The toilet was always warm.  His paranoia was finally receding after years of wasted frivolous movement.  The key was abstraction, the other side of the coin of obfuscation, an objective reality which is created from the inside out, not thrust onto the world like a million fishing hooks on a placid lake.  They were not out to get you, they just didn’t understand what meaning there was in your study, which was admittedly absent minded and misguided.  “They want the best for you,”  His mother, the rudimentary voice of reason, proposed a blanket statement.

There was no point to these friendships, anyone who hadn’t been absorbed into the blue collar world were pretentious pseudo-adults.  The subtlety of character and simplicity of manners and behavior had never appeared important until he started watching for characters, trying to recreate daily life.  The burly barrel chested almond skinned man dragging the wire bird cage down the street was once just a weirdo, but now it turned out he was real, he was chasing something, there was meaning in what he was doing.  It could be rationalized.

He pictured himself in a new place.  A one bedroom, a studio, something inexpensive.  He had to prove to himself he could live independently, and could see his wings growing feather after feather, extended metacarpal, splayed and flattened biceps, the natural beauty that goes along with suffering transformation.  Self-adoring beauty moonlighting as discovery, which would no doubt give weight to new experiences and meaning to draw from.  In his superficiality, he still perceived meaning as a bottomless well, which you could draw water from which had no implicit significance, it would provide mental stimulation and artificially enhanced experience for temporary amounts of time, but it was not drawn through an irrigation system, there was no water wheel, there was no one tending to this well. 

He imagined himself a village of hardworking folk, this water being what they needed to exist, they had to recycle and renew this resource which was there in abundance.  The men in the village woke up at six, this resource was more potent when gathered out of their comfort zones, but the creator secretly doubted these men to be slackers and only efficient in his own imagination.  He would go there in the morning, and each man would be asleep with a straw hat over his eyes, laying back with their arms behind their head by a running stream.  Some would be chewing on stalks of wheat (or whatever their equivalents would be in his own world), content with the amount of work they had already done.  “This is hard work!” He’d call out in a self-deceiving tone, immediately questioning what hard work was or who it would benefit.

Each day presented moments that were ripe for creation.  He tried to demystify the concept which remained ingrained in his head like a railroad spike, that at the moment the geniuses of the world created their geniuses creations, let’s say The Rolling Stones “Satisfaction”, that for some reason it was this hallowed, sacred moment which was ripe for creating music.  The band made the creative process possible for themselves by establishing a consistent creative process which eventually created the expectation for success, Keith Richards did not allow moments to slip by like fish in the stream when they were starving.  They were here to catch fish, and they would remain here standing vigil until there was continued success, or atleast a product.

His friends were the idols of his previous group of peers.  Like a handful of sand, the only fine grains that remained at the end of the scoop were stuck in between his fingers, uncomfortable and unappealing.  Frozen in that moment, he could not remove those fragments or he’d be standing alone, but he could not unfreeze himself to wash those hands.  The adult, responsible thing would be to dust his hands and retreat from nature, but become a hermit at such a young age?  The logic and sense of music was gone, too.  It was a motivator, but also a soundtrack for boring, unimportant daily routines. 

Forming and influencing the behavior of this small village was an attempt to improve.  Setting out the groundwork, creating this world even inside his own head felt like progress, something to be built off of.  The men of the village improved at siphoning the well for its purest energies, they would excavate the well completely over time, appoint a foreman, their sons would continue in the trade, untapped potential formed mountains which would far outlive this generation.  The men started to build shanties and shelters underneath the ground, in an act to show solidarity to their overseer who they only assumed had to exist.  Even if this person did not exist, the work was becoming meaningful and rewarding.  Although the reward liquid didn’t sell as an export, it sustained the colony. An occasional tourist would cringe and wipe their mouth after tasting its bitterness, but he might remember that taste later on for nothing else but inability to forget it. 

The women of the village worked to exorcise ancient demons through discipline and work-for-the-sake-of-work. The children of the village sprouted out through stalks in the ground instantaneously, the plant would grow into a hollow wide appendage and dark black bodied balls with red caps would rest like turtles flipped onto their backs between rows of crops.  They would attempt to grow long, weapon-like arms unless kept pressed down into the earth.  Rows of stables were lined with the adolescents of this new species, who grew bulky veiny haunches that reduced them to verticality in form.

Just getting to a thousand isn't enough but I'm obsessive which seems to be the opposite of disciplined.  I need to manage my time more wisely.
Looking for better jobs.  Economic times or whatever.  Better just keep the mind sharp with reading and doing this all the time.  It's not work if you enjoy so work until you enjoy it.  Or one of a million epigrams.  Damn it, what was I going to tell you?  Oh, when you notice subtle progress being made on anything, on the minor scale of reading every day and getting your bookmark further in the book, or even more minor scale of learning a new word and attempting to use it, it feels like there's a little progress bar on your person somewhere that keeps ticking away with the little hourglass.  Technology should slowly make us more machinelike.