about that place/state of being

There is a place.
a place we all may one day reach, where the hurt is so constant that you are inured, immune to the power of it. this place is a settling of the spirit I like to term"Meh."

Meh is not a place to be dignified with the term limbo. it is not some place of balance and expectation. it is a place of negligent torment and wasted feeling. it is...meh

it is a place to which we are consigned, but make no mistake - we are consigned to it by virtue of our choice. we choose to accept the treatment meted out to us that ensures our spot in Meh' purgatory.

why?
it is the easiest thing to abandon the world of Meh, to break free and banish the heart fractures of expectations and promises, to not live in the realm of hope in the face of sustained disappointment.

but we will not.

that one time out of a thousand is just behind the next meh episode. that one time that makes it worth it, that makes you for even a minute feel the warmth of affection and desire...

may your moment not be of steadily diminishing returns.

meanwhile, you have the meh for company.

Musings

Boris Vallejo's "Prometheus"

There is a titan who it was said, was eternally damned for his daring to bring fire to the world of man. He was berated and punished by his equals for giving the gift of progress,  of warmth, of LIGHT to a dark cold and forbidding world. While the mortals who before him knew only cold and darkness praised him, he hung physically on the altar of his peers disdain and alienation for his compassion. This tale takes shape every time we as a Caribbean people are gifted with a luminary who also has a soul.

You would think we would learn to love and share freely; that resentment and divisiveness serve no one; that the only prestige worth having is the peace of mind that acknowledging and loving your fellow man brings...but no.

We live, aggrandising our efforts, deigning to  consider the work of those less than our opinion of ourselves as worthwhile - worse yet on par in importance as ours. We create colonies of exclusion,  we seek out superiority.

We have put ego above community.

We have put self above family.

We have put pride before service

And, fools that we are, we believe that we all each are immune to these - even judging others for their levels of self indulgence.

Who have we become? Who have some of us always been?

What qualifies us to cast nets of negativity and dissent? From what pedestal of righteous indignation do we feel justified in causing division and discord? 

We live in an age where information and wisdom are mistaken for each other;  an age where same wisdom can no longer be counted in years lived,  and authority a construct to be questioned and daily revised under the scrutiny it has needed for evolution.  This is a glorious time to be alive, a fantastic time and opportunity to bridge the gap.

But we are not bridging the gap. We are creating walls of transparent titanium metres thick, and digging trenches of separation miles wide and deep.

And it is a problem that will destroy us.

The aging cling to the legacies and advancements of the present, happy to receive the work of the young, and jealously guarding their birthright in their unwillingness to risk irrelevance. 

The young, now no longer constrained to wait for this (in their mind) unnecessarily rigorous baton passing, have already lost mass interest in their heritage.

And why wouldn't they? So many other cultures are there for the choosing - and all readily available and packaged to look like everything they ever desired.

There is much to reckon for, and you on your various mounts Olympus are sadly first to blame.

There have been too few Prometheans and far too many incensed gods.

You cannot hold welcome and inclusion into community as tools for manipulation when to survive you need their presence and interest. You curse yourself to the bitterest of damnatio memoriae - and the world is poorer for it.

The young...oh that I could lay all the ills at the feet of those charged to tend us; to blame the society that failed to make us confident of her embrace. But I cannot. We have allowed the privilege of birth to become shadowed by the spirit of entitlement. We seek belonging through demands, ourselves needing to be handled carefully.

And so we create, not a subculture,  but remove ourselves from the well of inherited and inherent to sip from the meagre canteen of self. 

We have struck valiantly out on our own, to commit the sins errors and evils that generations before should have inoculated us against but were too busy carving themselves into the now, marginally concerned for the tomorrow that they know they will not be part of.

And it is STUPID.

And it hurts us

But you do not truly care

And to the few that do, they are shamed before they can turn the lens of your petty self absorption on you.

No one is free from Sin,  but the stones have been cast in blind fury so wide that the village is in ruins. And now, I finally see why hermits are content by their streams of solitude.

It is said God is dead, and that we killed him. Community's soul lies bleeding out,  and, but for the odd gasp and grimace fading out in the shamefully 'indignifiable' death to which we have consigned it.

And....I am tired

Tired of false "we," people containing themselves into an invisible multitude, invoking narcissism too great for one body.

Tired of empty empathy that fails to even be sympathy

Tired of underhanded schemes and barefaced manipulation when the honesty of admission of a sense of disconnect would solve the loneliness.

EGO,  that ruins the "we" only when it is given full autonomy over not only the self but the selves of others... an interpersonal colonisation of toxic result.

And we make it hard to love us

So very hard

And yet we demand it. That which we won't selflessly give for fear of being in a position of vulnerability. How foolish! 

Even this letter and it's hubris in supposing it will change anything hurts.

But it can't not exist. 

And I can't stop believing in a world where Prometheus is all of us, and so celebrated is the act of freely sharing and loving that it is impossible to consider the warmth as not eternal. Maybe I will awake to the reality that my hope is not a fantasy. 

Til then, the queue for a slab altar and the removal of regenerative livers is thinning...and not because love granted the foolish Pardon ego and selfishness demanded.

Sin Cera,

Carl Anthony Hines

cycle, circle, closed.

"You see dat ting you do? you gwine have to stop it and LISTEN TO YOUR HEAD ... from you little mi a tell you say people a people, and dem not always ready like you fi 'see full picture' - sometimes dem nuh even ready fi more dan one line at a time... and you always know when enuh, you always know when, but you just stubborn. anyway, as usual mi bet yuh tiyad now an' ready fi finally listen. clear out and go again. an' dis time, don't call me when is prayer time (the only woman I know who from 4 am to 7 is prayer time) to ask what you already know. mi love you. take care a yuhself, and God have it - even when yuh nuh feel it."

My Grandmother has a pertinent and present voice in my head, and almost none of our talks are new - for some reason I keep heading to the same spiral.

...maybe the book everyone claims to want to live by is secondary to the egos everyone wants to nurture and I'm behind on truly believing that. well, this rubber duck has left the gyre

Love yourself. Value yourself. Be good to and for yourself

Why do I keep Venting? On Self Worth

We are told everywhere we go, all we do "let no one dictate your worth." But do we truly know what that means?  And  can we ever escape it?
Self worth has always been a bit of a recurring theme for me. Those readers and friends (and here that may as well be a synonym) who follow this blog have seen me constantly navigating that minefield of identity,  worth and belief. sadly, I come away with the same conclusion most days: the unsettling realisation that all men dictate our worth. Men here may be misconstrued as the male of the species... I do not mean them (or rather us) specifically,  but mankind on a whole.
Now...when you think of yourself,  when you truly consider yourself, what do you picture? For many the mental mirror comes out and we appraise and present our physical self. Eyes that may or may not be aligned with our concept of beauty, a nose that may be too wide or narrow, ears to big/small/pixie like for our faces. We may think of our ill health, of lack of musculature,  of disease and dis - ease. Then slowly if at all we come round to the positives, and we begrudgingly admit our face isn't quite so wonky, our smile a likeable thing, our bodies graceful enough.

Why is it that many of us precede this list of the physical traits with the faulty aspects of our being? Why do we even think of the outside first?

Then there are those who go abstract in their search - abstract here not a term for offense but a lumping term for the intangible aspects of self, such as personality - coming up with traits that define them "I am reflective/peaceful/passionate."

And here we present them first as flaws and not as value free aspects of out makeup.

Everything, even the vocabulary we use to evaluate our worth were things observed and legitimised through collective experience. We define our worth and feelings and experiences on the index of human collective experience and expression.

And here's the thing: we don't get freed from it.

The true sociopaths among us navigate life free from it while manipulating others with the knowledge of it, yes but think of all you have lived as units across the index.

- a sticker for a well done school project
- positive words to a baby on an achieved milestone
- a cheer when an athlete performs spectacularly

Though only one of those instances directly affect fiscal value (itself a whole other system of self valuation and its own Pandora's box), all of them contribute to both our individual sense of worth and the collective appraisal of our worth.

So are we...free?

More time,

Carl.

What word of grace
in such a place
could save a brother's soul?
- O. Wilde,
Ballad of Reading Gaol

Poetry to make you go "hmmm"...

Little Beast

By Richard Siken

1


An all-night barbeque. A dance on the courthouse lawn.

The radio aches a little tune that tells the story of what the night

is thinking. It’s thinking of love.

It’s thinking of stabbing us to death

and leaving our bodies in a dumpster.

That’s a nice touch, stains in the night, whiskey and kisses for everyone.


Tonight, by the freeway, a man eating fruit pie with a buckknife

carves the likeness of his lover’s face into the motel wall. I like him

and I want to be like him, my hands no longer an afterthought.


2


Someone once told me that explaining is an admission of failure.

I’m sure you remember, I was on the phone with you, sweetheart.


3


History repeats itself. Somebody says this.

History throws its shadow over the beginning, over the desktop,

over the sock drawer with its socks, its hidden letters.

History is a little man in a brown suit

trying to define a room he is outside of.

I know history. There are many names in history

but none of them are ours.


4


He had green eyes,

so I wanted to sleep with him—

green eyes flecked with yellow, dried leaves on the surface of a pool-

You could drown in those eyes, I said.

The fact of his pulse,

the way he pulled his body in, out of shyness or shame or a desire

not to disturb the air around him.

Everyone could see the way his muscles worked,

the way we look like animals,

his skin barely keeping him inside.

I wanted to take him home

and rough him up and get my hands inside him, drive my body into his

like a crash test car.

I wanted to be wanted and he was

very beautiful, kissed with his eyes closed, and only felt good while moving.

You could drown in those eyes, I said,

so it’s summer, so it’s suicide,

so we’re helpless in sleep and struggling at the bottom of the pool.


5


It wasn’t until we were well past the middle of it

that we realized

the old dull pain, whose stitched wrists and clammy fingers,

far from being subverted,

had only slipped underneath us, freshly scrubbed.

Mirrors and shop windows returned our faces to us,

replete with the tight lips and the eyes that remained eyes

and not the doorways we had hoped for.

His wounds healed, the skin a bit thicker than before,

scars like train tracks on his arms and on his body underneath his shirt.


6


We still groped for each other on the backstairs or in parked cars

as the roads around us

grew glossy with ice and our breath softened the view through a glass

already laced with frost,

but more frequently I was finding myself sleepless, and he was running out

of lullabies.

But damn if there isn’t anything sexier

than a slender boy with a handgun,

a fast car, a bottle of pills.


7


What would you like? I’d like my money’s worth.

Try explaining a life bundled with episodes of this—

swallowing mud, swallowing glass, the smell of blood

on the first four knuckles.

We pull our boots on with both hands

but we can’t punch ourselves awake and all I can do

is stand on the curb and say Sorry

about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine.




I couldn’t get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time.

I release you...and ask your forgiveness as I freely give mine

I refer here to my true self, the one unafraid to live, laugh, love...to be, do and help


It has always served me well to be myself. Even in such moments where I pay the price of ostracism and loneliness, it has been as a refusal to lose myself at the gain of hollow offerings of companionship or material gain. What need have I of the company of those who sought to remove aspects of me that denied my right to personhood? There is a line between those changes that may enrich or otherwise benefit an individual or society, and the changing of a person to have them simply aligned with your view of them - usually an abasement to serve your ego. This interpersonal colonisation is often not readily recognised for what it is, and indeed can be enacted without even being seen as such by the perpetrator.
I previously wrote about treading softly around the dreams of others. I expand that thought to the treatment of the sanctity of personhood and individual choice: insomuch as a defining trait does not infringe on the rights and freedoms of another, it may be taken value-free as is.
THIS DOES NOT MEAN ONE SHOULD TOLERATE THOSE WHO ABUSE THIS ARGUMENT.
it also does not excuse one from being beholden to ones thoughts feelings and most importantly, the consequences of one's actions and opinions. My generation has taken to feeling their words and deeds, flung carelessly into the ether are at once ex cathedra as well as free of ramifications so long as they bear the "It's my opinion"/"it's who i am" cadence...no

BECAUSE they are YOUR thoughts
BECAUSE they are YOUR deeds
they WILL be used to come to a conclusion about YOU
THEY WILL NOT always be aligned with your true self or even your self-concept
they will sometimes be ordinarily abhorrent to you
but honour the realisation that they will be all persons observing will have to go on
UNTIL they are greeted with the true you through interaction.
It would be lovely if we all waited until we had full pictures before we judged...but the world is not such a place.


So...this rant may be foolish, may be disjoint...even pointless.

I accept all of those likely definitions, as well as the truth that it is simply a rant. it is a manifestation in cyberspace of my current mental ruminations.

All my Mind
CH

 it deepens. I do not know what pockets of myself I can trust to remain intact anymore. I was once a meticulous and ordered soul, if not the most detail oriented then in my own way systematic. and yet...I find myself with a floor strewn with the paraphernalia of my life here that I have absolutely no drive to remedy. and I should be terrified. I should be upset. I should be many things, but catatonically going along should not be one of them. Do I dare ride this out til I can remedy it? will it come any time soon? will it even be worth it? I don't know that the fight now does not seem pyrrhic. Yet, push on as I must, I wake each morning, after nights of little sleep. what works? what helps? why can't I just get up already? I wish pray and hope...as I wait. with optimism? hope?... they taste bitter in my mouth, like lies. and to all other words I am apathetic.

Of Memory and Magic...and missing

We have a tradition...
I can't say which of us started it - mostly because for different reasons it is something we'd both do- but it has become an unspoken  and reflexive action. We dress each other as a means of saying goodbye. I say "dress" to describe it, but it feels, as most words feel, inadequate to describe the sentiment and ritual itself... but it does give the idea. We end the rite with the person leaving fully dressed, though sometimes with a rumpled shirt by the time we share parting glances. It begins with a shared shower, but sometimes in the interest of time this is done separately.  Each limb is surreptitiously and reverently washed,  every bit of skin caressed by Lathered loofah and the warmth of soapy palms. There is much holding and embraces, awkward smiles and blushing, as the spray of the shower blurs visibility. We dry each other, with our own towels, lying to ourselves that we do so to the parts that would ordinarily be hard to reach: the middle of a back, nape of a neck. Surprisingly we manoeuvre from bathroom to bedchamber,  a tangle of arms still patting the acreage of each others skin dry. It is often at this point that one of us - invariably the one most likely leaving later or being left behind - falls back into the bed, at turns reconciling ourself to the impending parting, while vainly hoping to pose as inviting enough to tempt the other into forgoing plans. The one with the deadline (and this time it is he), would hurriedly if a bit jerkily get dressed off to the side, often deeply aware of being watched, and yet just as often steeling themself against returning the gaze lest resolve disappears. Having lost this last stand, the other would move out of bed, clothes for their departure or something to accompany the other to the bus stop being picked and laid out before. This round, I was the one standing denuded before him, willing my hands to my sides rather than to subconsciously attempt to shade the bits of my body I am not comfortable with. He'd start with boxers, slowly drawn up my legs, thumbs in the waistline dragging parallel lines up my flesh, the elastics taking the fabric in their trails wake. Just before it settles on my hips, he plants a quick kiss on my thigh, a process is repeated with each article of clothing, caresses topped off with a kiss to an area being covered up. All the while, a look of awe laced with sadness emanates from the twin depths of his eyes. Now clothed, we stand face to face in a tight embrace, which he invariably breaks to look at me quizzically.  Grudgingly I nod, giving the permission which we both know is for me a frightening prospect. He lifts me. What had begun as a taste of own medicine (as I have on numerous occasions lifted others easily), became tentatively Canon to our routine. Holding me aloft, swaying gently with me. Unhooking my legs, the action is reversed, and I hold him while his legs are wrapped around me. Throughout this exchange, soft words of affection are traded, with all the gravity of a jurors verdict. It is a slow uncoupling as we separate,  our hands the last things to become disjoined. We say no actual goodbye,  but a lingering gaze into each others eyes as we express love in our awkward "get there safely" or "I miss you already".

We have a tradition...
I can't say which of us started it...but we live for when it becomes obsolete

Why?

"...but think of how it looks. persons are saying..."
I do not quite know why, but hearing these words never fail to make me suspicious of the messenger. It is not that in the moment they do not mean well, or even that they do. I do not react to the implication that they have discussed me with others, nor that others have low opinions of me. I listen for the rest of the rhetoric. and in this instance, I was disappointed to note that it was as expected. you fall in line with the opinions of them. you who should know better. but then, I cannot say that I blame you; after all, open as I am, you do not feel comfortable asking, you rather speculation until such time as you feel you have enough backing to confront. I think that is the problem...why do you - and this is non specific to one person - need the validation of a group behind you to speak of your fears to a friend? What's more, your fears allayed with truth, you never return to those who shared the ill opinion in hopes of enlightening them. but then the wheels set in motion are rarely stopped by the one who does so. that would demand a maturity that in this and most instances, you feign.

"...Donkeys live a long time. none of you has ever seen a dead donkey."
 - Orwell

...I don't know

It is hard.
It is hard to feel any desire to wake up, and having woken, to feel...at all. that's it. no story, no images of crippling racing thoughts, self image, run - through of all I am to and will ultimately fail to accomplish with my day. nil. that all comes the moment I sit up.
It is hard.
Then comes getting out.of.bed. ha... if I make it more than the 14 steps to the bathroom and back then I am truly in top form that day. I hole up in a room I have by a friend's place. while initially I am watched over there, it has fast become a haven to escape the routine of going round to greet my landlady by the front of my apartment on mornings she comes to work at the studio and workshop out front.
It is hard.
I love to learn. I love reading. I love researching. lately I do almost none of it. everything hurts. everything evokes no sense of interest at all. nothing. I love to cook. I have no interest in food. I love music. I have almost no desire to hear it or practice it. I love to dance. it has become a chore.
It is hard.
The persons who don't know what's wrong sense something 'off' about me, but they don't pry. They just stay concerned from a safe distance, assuming it will sort itself out soon enough. It's worse dealing with those who know. to see the concern in their eyes laced with fear, as if I'm a time bomb and the countdown is barely audible, them on tenterhooks not able to see the timer but expecting the worst as inevitable.
It is hard.
I don't know how to tell my family. I hide from their disapproval as I've always hidden, hidden my fears, hidden my loves, hidden my passions, hidden...me. For all intents if they are ever concerned, it is placated with the excuse of "homesickness." Not a lie, but my fingers burn to type it in response, my throat tightens to say it. I am, in a way, homesick...but homesick for a feeling, for a sense of self....for who I had known myself to be.
It is hard.
I tried offing myself once...or twice...some books mention cases where the failure to succeed ends in a new lease on life, in a sense of purpose and the intense will to live. I find such accounts funny, so rosy that I wished I related. I'm now too wary of disrupting anyone's life and inconveniencing anyone to dare do something as costly and upsetting as dying.
It is hard.
I began my academic journey here in close to top form, and truly enjoyed my course of study and the discourse surrounding it. Now, it is a victory if I look at a notebook. I am likely to end the semester on academic probation. Who is this stranger I see in the mirror? that stares at me with vacant eyes and a soulless smirk? Is he here to stay?
It is hard.
I prided myself on being centred. Lately the phrase "I don't know" supplants every other string of words for most used in my vocabulary. I curve my back to the slow realisation that people are not always concerned for you, so much as for what you mean in the scheme of their lives. and that is okay. we gain our sense of identity from what we mean to others. I can't even muster anything close to bitterness. in truth I can't bring myself to feel. and like the dim awareness of danger that we inherently intuit, I know something is very wrong there
It is hard.

"Carl, you're presenting with the symptoms and behaviours of someone going through Clinical depression."
"okay"
"Do you understand? this is not some simple homesickness or mild or even moderate sadness. your scores here are very worrying."
"okay"
"I think you need to come in more steadily. I'd also recommend a Psychiatric appointment, meds may be a feasible option to aid in the process"
"okay"

three months later, and whoever I was before is becoming more and more distant memory.

"Do you think you are getting any better? seeing any progress?"
"okay"
"That is not quite a response. how do you feel in the mornings when you wake?"
"I don't"
"Do you think these sessions will work? Do you feel any closer to your usual self ?"
"I don't know."

It is hard.
and I don't know if I've ever been worth "hard."
and here i sit
fearing that with each breath I prove myself right

It is hard.
but stopping...stopping is not any easier.

so every friday I get dressed, I hop on taxis and buses. I go to my appointment, skating in minutes late (further evidence I am far gone from normal) I sit before my counsellor and waver between catatonic "I don't know" and frustrated "I don't know"... sometimes I talk about my week. every so often I say three sentences about someone or thing. then the weekend blurs by and I awake on Monday again...and I breathe shallow as my class time ticks by, my heart pumping past seconds, my confinement mocking my supreme failure to face the day...to face anything...and 10 hours later I muster up the will to leave and start my evening... and return 5 hours later spent and morose...saying 'maybe tuesday will be the day I make it outside'
...and then suddenly It is Friday, and i'm saying my new rosary...
"I don't know...I don't know...okay"

Maybe it will stop being hard soon

okay?

I don't know

Do not profess love for me on Valentine's day

I hate it. not the day, just the sharing on the day of romantic sentiment...hypocritically, I love seeing it in play around me. just...don't bring it here. I have no story I'm willing to share that would make one sit up and say "Oh, that's why. in truth I have just always treated love when directed at me with a measure of...skepticism? disbelief? agonising mistrust? pick your cadence, they have equal validity. this year is no real difference from years I have had the privilege of having a significant other, except that I do not have someone with which to shower my affection while skittering away from theirs. and that's okay. especially this year, where I share the sentiment, but could not on pain of death feel in any way motivated to demonstrate it. and that is a big thing. people who know me know that I write and I do, and if I feel no urge to do either...something is not right

to those in love: love on
to those in hate: may time heal the reason
to those ambivalent: my brethren, how will we cope?

ramblings and bumblings.

Bless