whatnow

Life is entirely mad at the moment. I'm at a family reunion where two professors, a doctor, an entrepreneur and a lawyer comprise the original siblings and they still manage to leave their families food insecure for two days because no one can communicate or think of others. Apart from that they are great though.
My housing situation has been totally reversed. I decided literally at the last minute (well, literally in the last two days) that the housing senario was not actually how I had imagined it and realistically it was not what I needed. So now I'm living in a shithole party house instead of a 100 year old salmon colored sweet little thing, but that's what I needed. I needed friends, and proximity to campus, and a known quantity.
And then I'm off to burning man.
So I don't know what is happening but since changing my housing plans I don't really care because it all feels pretty alright.
Also I ate food and got a good night's sleep.
It's weird how much food and sleep matter oh wait no those are pretty much the only things that matter how are they neglected at this fucking reunion.
The only thing about family that is not overrated is my little brother who is a fucking angel and got me food when I had litterally just broken down after being told to stop cooking myself two eggs because there were only 7 to go around after we had just gone on a huge hike (during which I'd been pretty much tripping off of oxygen deprivation because of the altitude) and my total food consumption for the day had been porridge, half a banana, and a rice cake with avocado and cheese on it.
Right, so I promise I feel better now.

Graffiti near my room

200th Post, and it's a good one.

I feel so free.

1. will not be able to explain this. I think maybe my blood has changed color. I look out the window and I see magenta glowing from purple clouds, I see thunder and hear lightning and I know that these are the substance that flows in my veins.

It is too dark to read the book that has set me free, but not too dark to edit the poems on my box of light.

Black Swan Green thank you. This was so precisely what I needed. I guess I am a 13 year old stammering, British, teenage boy. I guess that is the level of emotional maturity and determinism my life has achieved.

BUT THAT IS FINE. Oh I am so relieved to find this book (again, I read it a long time ago) and I am crying at it's perfection. Not crying like I was before, but crying like a bird because unformed noises are the only way to fully commune with it.

I am free.

It's strange: the lamp that I turned on to read this book is bringing back the HPPD from MDA. It's the same as the lamp in E's room, in terms of color. Why I didn't use it all the time is one of the things that ought to cause the stabbing guilt about this summer, but doesn't. The things that do are almost forgotten. The knife is dull.

Even though the fan makes it stutter, it's still better than the fluorescent light.

At the beginning of the summer, looking at the sky broke my heart. It would immediately be grainy and distill its one perfect hue into a bunch of oscillating dots that would fade in and out of approximations. I knew that if my mind could just average the points, I would see the sky. And as I looked up, each time, there would be a blink before the dots came out. In that microsecond I would see the blue. The perfect blue, and then it would leave me.

And I thought I was punished for my rashness. I thought what I should tell my brother, or anyone, who wants to try drugs. How much do you value the sky? It scared me more than the idea of schizophrenia ever did, to think that I'd never see a clear sky. The dots were less aggressive when it was thoroughly cloudy. It was the blank slate that let them in.

But that faded. Thank... Thank life that faded. I can see the sky again. If I'm tired, overcaffinated, crying too much, or what-have-you, the sky is taken from my but when I'm in good form, it's mine.

And tonight in the dark, the trails are back. No messy dots, just graceful trails following my hand. Nothing compared to the dots. Indeed, just an added charm to the incandescent light.

Incandescent means more now, with these two experiences building its power.

David Mitchell, I love you.

Back in the states in a matter of hours. I mean, a matter of a hundred or so hours but they are hours and they are small compared to me.

\MY CENTER OF POWER/

is there. Is here. I felt it in Paris too. It tastes like invention and smells like choice. It invades my saliva and through it twists my tongue and shapes my lips.

Sometimes it says I OWN YOU and I'm afraid of it

Sometimes it says I AM WEAK and I forget myself

Sometimes it hits my heart like adrenaline and drives the beat by itself and I feel like I'm flying. Sometimes everything else is ripped off, in the moments when I know that I am dying, and I am alone with it and the Harmony we create is electrifying, and real, and PERFECT. That word that is so empty to me, but here it finds its substance.

The truth is that I am made for myself.

Maybe this light brings back more than visuals and I am back in that heaven of MDA. Not quite the same. I knew amphetemines would be heaven. I knew that to have my brain be working more intensely and creatively was all I ever wanted. And that's why I put off trying them.

Well, I didn't get addicted but this feeling is familiar because I felt it then. I know I can get this feeling, any feeling, without drugs but to be able to call it up is... good. It leaves me free to send that energy elsewhere. Drugs are a shortcut.

LI<3RE is my favorite form of the pun so far. I think it's too ironic to get tattooed but it's amazing and I love it.

I fixed some poems. They're still a work in progress. Here is my favorite so far. Still a work in progress.

SOMNCALCULIST

Outside already understood

Flood of truth and loops of cool

But jaggedmixedandfickle dreams

                  Separate furtherthanspace                apartfromtime

Every side of this is mine

How can I sleep nestedinart

And allnight take the world apart

blarg art makes art is what I learned at the Pompidou and however mundane that is it is so true. I think it's because religion and earth have both lost their art to us. How sad. How known.

My world is small but I know that it is only one of many and so it grows. What-There-Is is big.

So. That works out.

I am made for myself.

But I think I can play with others too.

I'm so happy that I don't want to stop writing.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN. Hello Internet journal, I guess I'm back. It probably didn't feel long to you, but we had been so close so the week or two I was away felt like a long time.

Bitches. ← too much Yeezus in my ears but how can I stop because it's amazing.

I was freakin' and I wrote this to help.

I'm leaving for Paris soon. I haven't been typing at all lately, but I've written in a similar state of mind at least twice in No History in the past few days, so I've resorted to this as an effort to spare my re-reading self too much redundancy. This doesn't mean that I believe in blogging again, though who knows where that belief went or what took it, it just means that I don't know how else to manage. Writing by hand isn't enough when one is this stressed.

I want so much to understand why I am stressed. I think it's that I'm sad, and I'm misinterpreting the pain and exhaustion of sadness as the more familiar pain and exhaustion of stress. Yes, I have concerns, but I have pretty much decided how to deal with them and part of that decision involved dealing with them when I get back from Paris. I have also decided on the actual dealings. Don't worry. Of course there are still unknowns, but the unknowns are out of my control and I know what the knowns are. I know the knowns better than anyone else. If they think that their knowns are more important than mine, well, they'll see that they have another thing coming. Yesindeedio.

I think “No, my plane leaves in 30 hours,” will be enough to convince them that they are stuck with my solution. And anyways, I have already paid a big security deposit on this room that I don't think I can gracefully get back. I suppose I can give them my French bank coordinates but how I'll ever get money out of BNP Paribas will remain a question for a long time. My final duty, hauling all of my cooking supplies and my fan across town, will be a matter of brute force or the subway, or both. Brute force I can handle, and the exercise will do me good.

I've read 22 books this summer. I've also ready most of a 23rd, which I'm trying to slog my way through the last 30 pages of. Nikola Tesla's “My Inventions” essays were really good, but his ideas for how to increase human energy through a grand metaphor of Newton's Second Law are pretty much unreadable. I hate metaphysics, but he's creating life as a sort of sub-physics. That is even worse. Also, he is very naïve about how awesome it would be to live in a world where patriotism and religion are one and the same and there is only one government. Under normal circumstances I would stop but because I've started this list I don't want to put half-finished books on it. The list... is to make me feel like I've accomplished something this summer.

It works, but it's also pretty pathetic.

Finally 9 pm. My train leaves at 10:30. I'm nervous, but once I'm on the train I'll feel good, I know. Once I'm free. I can't wait to be home. Denver and the family reunion will give me a chance too look over last year's physics. I'm not set on relearning it yet, just re-familiarizing myself with it. Just so I hopefully won't be a total asshole when I'm back at school. “Back at school” is like heaven to my mind. Friends, purpose, fun, stimulus. The freedom of commitment. I had that here too, but it became an excuse not to deal with my emotions. I'm stuck in France doing work that kills my soul, so of course I'm sad and there's nothing I can do about it.

My boyfriend. I hate the word, but I'm glad I can use it. His friend asked me if I was his “significant other” which is a nicer term but also kind of lame. I'm so glad that happened. That was the best part of this summer. Even though we had that rough patch, even though we weren't that good of a match, we still... had some togetherness and I wasn't alone when I needed someone and that means so much to me. I think he has an inkling of what it was but he doesn't completely understand. That's fine. I think that's right. We struggled with the language barrier to the end, and the communication barrier that it masked as well. I think we might keep in touch, at least a little bit. God, his smell was what did it. His smell broke me down the last few days. I'd bury my head in his blanket and try to hide the tears. The last time we had sex was definitely the best. I felt his body shudder and his deep lips settle into mine and I felt so close to him.

It's silly that I didn't try to find a girlfriend, since the whole summer I'd been disgusted by men. Toulouse men are assholes. French girls are hot. But my boyfriend was also hot and rarely an asshole and he knew so many things about politics and science and sports and sometimes I wondered if he read the newspaper cover to cover ever day. Oh, and he liked Calvin and Hobbes. He had them framed on his wall, he had books on his shelves he had links that despaired at the intricacies of arithmetic. Calvin and Hobbes are perfect for him. Innocent and wise, just like him.

Maybe when I see all of the Reedies I miss so much he'll seem strange and alien, like he did at the beginning. I was so surprised by his hangups, and his mores. I think they'll seem a little messy after him. His gray sweater with the zipper on the shoulder.

I'm afraid of thinking I have summer depression because then maybe I'll realize I'm depressed more often than just summer.

I don't know how to be sad, it is crippling.