Requiescat

 I have been having a really hard time writing this. Between my last post and this one, a friend of mine I had known for many years passed away. My grief is so loaded with all the things I want to say, but it doesn't feel right to say them right here or in this moment. I've tried to write this post several times; my friend was a complicated, gifted, flawed, amazing walking contradiction of humanity who strove with their demons and grappled with world-sized heavyweight sorrows.There is simply no thing I am capable of writing, right now, that would do even a semblance of justice to their memory, and to the void they leave behind. There are many parts of this that, for me, are intractable from my hang-ups and guilt about not being a better friend, but using my friend's death as an opportunity to publicly work through personal issues seems anything but reverent of their memory. 

But its been two months, and I don't know how to do it. I suppose their memory looms large over this blog for me, because we had discussed it in one of our last phone conversations. They could not have been more encouraging of my writing, especially in a moment when I needed to hear it. They could not have complimented me more with their actual excitement about it. What is extending yourself through these creative acts but asking for validation? I had theirs. It made me excited to return to this blog. It made me want to live up to all the nice things they said about it. 

But its been daunting and crushing to think about. I used to say I don't deal well with death, but who does? I don't grieve well, is what I really mean. I don't want to move on. I want my dead people to be alive; even moreso when the living world has become this screaming existence of artlessness and despair. It would be less unbearable without them. 

Its also been exquisitely difficult to manage the cognitive and emotional dissonance of feeling a lot of sorrow, grief, and regret, and recognizing how ancillary my feelings are to the central tragedies that follow in the wake of my friend leaving this life. Their daughter will only know them through secondhand memories. Their wife has lost an anchoring presence in their home, in their family, in their love story. It more than breaks my heart. Its bewildering, and frustrating, and overwhelming. I want to shout mountains into rubble, and, also, never get out of bed. I cannot fathom how this feels for their widow, for their family -- from inside the daily life from which they are now missing. 

I was blessed to be in more contact with them over the last year; I'm wounded, now that they are gone.

In memory of Hawthorne,

I hope you are finding answers, making music, collecting rocks, and enjoying a painless peace as a soul in freedom from and victory over this physical world. I miss you. There was still so much to talk about. 

-p

We Do Long Form Here

This blog spot is a strange place and I'm sorry that I'd abandoned it. I was too afraid to grow in front of you. I hope you'll forgive me, but I've been doing a lot of work in the meantime. I was a one trick horse in a one note town. I'm not even sure what that means, but it wasn't good. Simply describing it as being superficial doesn't quite capture the activeness with which I pursued superficiality. But if a person could be vastly superficial, I had it covered. Like a really intricate paper doll.

This was a choice. I ended up getting swallowed in it. 

Out of my human shaped puddle of sludge, the man I wanted to become had not yet taken his first steps forward. The narrative of an evolution always takes much less time than the thing itself, and so for all this time I've been evolving in lurches and backslides, towards now. Maybe I'll tell that story one day and more fully here, but suffice it to say these are some of the relevant points:

1. There is no doubt that the world is now and is at every moment more quickly sliding into this walking night terror of a shambolic dystopia. At least that is something we can all agree on. I could sense it coming, and late quarter 2015 had begun to close my bite around the idea of becoming a better person. I don't believe anyone is required to do this, and I certainly didn't require it of myself. But I knew I needed to. I kind of even wanted to. Here's the thing though was it required me to change every goddamn thing about my life. A story from right around this time is also the perfect metaphor: I spent too much money on a junk car and drove it for four days before the transmission shat the bed and it was basically totalled. My life is the car, see? I decide to take ownership of this flawed thing. And suddenly I wanted to go somewhere different, in a vehicle unsuited to carry me in that direction. And so whatever it is that is life's equivalent of transmission failure is in this extended metaphor, that's where I was headed.

2. I decided I was not willing to go down that road. I decided there's still some shit I wanna try. I decided my life didn't have to be fixed in a place of abyssal gloom and stagnation. There is more to experience in the realm of choices outside of the ones I was making. How do I get *there*? By choosing differently. This is not easy. That I can sum it up in so few words makes it sound like a deceptively simple process, but it isn't. 

3. It'll suffice to talk about this time, before a few years ago, as one that was plagued by poor health in every sense of the word. It was an Ill Time. Again, maybe one day I'll get into specifics, but a set of collective factors really had me in an impoverished state. Not necessarily financially... but...also financially. (I still haven't figured this part out yet, btw.) Getting well, or more well, is incredibly hard, and happens too slowly to derive any immediate satisfaction from it. But terrible things slowly do make their exit eventually, and they make room for better things, and that is a satisfaction all its own. I am, of course, not a doctor, but yet certain I had at least three different identifiable medical conditions, and they're all gross for different reasons I'll not go into now. I thought I was dying, although its apparent to me now that I wasn't, really. But by any metric, I was not well.

Some of these stress factors I am responsible for inviting on myself. Others perhaps not. Either way, I was sinking beneath them and I knew I was the only one who could really look out for me. No one was going to save me from it. I didn't ask for some of the shitstorm avalanche sandwiches I had, and others I very much demanded to the face. But in either case, whether I asked for it or not, it is for me to deal with now. 

At any rate, I had a boutique array of rarefied and curated reasons not to put in the effort, and I went through all of them, never realizing they were just ways to avoid getting real with the silly things I really wanted out of life.

And, what I was partly too shy, and ashamed, and unready to admit, is that a lot of what I want out of life has to do with you. I don't know what time is left to me to pursue the unanswered equations of my life, but I thought this could at least be a place where I could show you my work in both the mathematical and artistic senses of that phrasing. 

Its not enough for me to make stuff; I want you to see it. 

Its taken me some time to start showing up. If I don't, I can't expect it of you. I'll be sharing some things here soon, and you'll be able to find similar content on my Instagram account. Since I find the interactive capabilities of  the other casual social media platforms like twitter and Facebook to be highly abbreviated and manipulated, I refuse to engage in them any longer. I believe in nuance and complexity and striving for understanding and I cannot interact in contexts that have rendered those obsolete. 

We do long form here. Occam's Razor is bullshit. Things are complicated. We live in a giant Rube Goldberg device that we barely understand. There is no such thing as simple, really; that is just a choice of resolution. A matter of focus. We are so far past what should be an acceptable level of mass stultification in what's left of civil society that it becomes scorn-worthy and rebellious to invest in the long form. 

Well. 

Ain't that just my style. 

See you in the future,

-P