We are not Alchemists.

The alchemy of the act of creation happens in between synapses.
So subtle, your hands know things your mind will never fathom.
Your thinking brain is only ever playing catch up.


From the outside, it's romantic. A myth arising.
The Creative Genius. The Tortured Artist. The Eccentric Visionary.
Such familiar phantoms.
All drama and intensity; conviction and passionate purpose, flamboyance and elegant outrageousness.

So much caricature.

Because on the inside, creativity isn't always dynamic.

It isn't always pretty. Or cool.
Sometimes it isn't even particularly interesting.
It lives in the quiet places.
And sometimes more resembles sheer doggedness than beatific ingenuity.
That telegenic flurry of inspiring activity you're imagining?
That's a movie montage.


That isn’t to say that sudden, electric flash of inspiration isn't a thing.
It's just not 'The Only Thing'.


Between the seminal flash and the realized creation there is all the work of creating.


And it is work.
It is sweat. It is muscle, blood and bone. It is creative ADHD. It is schizophrenia. It is loneliness. It is resistance. It is doubt. It is losing perspective. It is going too far out. It is not knowing the way back. It is giving up. It is getting back on. It is lumbering through. It is feeling. It is finding. It is doing. It is looking. It is looking again. It is repetitive. It is mundane. It is grunt work strung together, end to end till something larger unfolds...becomes; till something of value is formed.
It is work.


Myth-makers you do us no favours.

The Shard

It may have happened before.
And maybe it'll happen again.
But every time, like a serial somnambulist shocked to wake up and find yourself teetering on a high-wire, you wonder how the fuck you let it happen. Again.

You let someone get under your skin. Not just that - you went ahead and built them a fucking serviced apartment under there.
And you did it without checking to see if they had further travel plans.
And they moved right in. Stayed; used the facilities.
Why not? There was a heated pool and room service. No need to pick up after themselves.

And then it happened. You woke up on that fucking high wire.

I break it off.
You break it off.
He/she breaks it off.
We break it off.
It doesn't matter.
Point is - it breaks off.

And everything you thought they were/ we were/ it was - is gone.
Your pleasure palace burned to a cinder, razed to the ground.
All That Was/Might Have Been is reduced to rubble - to a hard jagged shard left inside you like a molten splinter to gouge with vicious glee at the soft unguarded heart of you.

In the thick of the aftermath, every breath is blood.
But, the thing is, you've been to this circus before.
And so, you know that fortunately, at some point, the bleeding will stop.
And not so fortunately, all you can do till then is wait.
Wait till breathing is only merely excruciating...and then only painful.
Wait for the wounds to scab over. Wait for the scar tissue to come in. Wait for it all to eventually be just one more unevenly mended rent on the fabric of your existence.

And the irony is that it won't be the pain you'll resent.
It'll be the time - the time it'll take for that scar tissue to form; the time it'll take till you're you again.
When you aren't busy being utterly devastated, you'll find yourself mostly being really annoyed by that inconvenient little nugget of reality.

Because that shard is a voracious, persistent, many pointed little bitch and it won't let go of you easy.

A few weeks in, its bite will have dulled to the degree that you'll stop being constantly braced for impact. You'll manage to go about your day to day business doing a credible enough impression of a functional human adult.
But then, when you least expect it, someone somewhere will drop a word into the conversation - a word as random as Dremel, or as mundane as July. Or you'll see something as banal as AstroTurf, or as ubiquitous as sunlight. And suddenly that little bitch will shift and stick you with renewed vehemence.

Over time, though, that scar tissue will come in right and thick. The Shard will settle in and become a numbness within that remains largely inert. At the most sometimes, in maudlin moments, it might cause you a dull twinge - if you're the sentimental kind.

In time you'll forget it's there.
You'll forget that the numbness hosts a living wound.

And then someday in the future, you'll open your eyes and come to the sick realization that once more somehow, despite all your efforts to the contrary, you've landed on the same fucking high wire you swore you'd never so much as go near, let alone attempt to traverse.

And as the newly implanted remnant is in the process of ripping you a new one, as though that itself weren't punishment enough, every old forgotten shard inside of you will come screaming to life, as sharp and vociferous as the day it was born.

Gleefully, in unison, this syndicate will turn full circles under your skin to make sure to jab you with their pointiest sides. And as the voices in your head start up on their symphony of recriminations, mocking you mercilessly for the dumb fucking impulse that led you to make the same fucking mistake all over again, The Shards will join in to offer a command performance of their greatest hits - 'I Told You So', 'You Should Have Known Better.' & 'How Did You Not See This Coming?' 

Get your fucking splinter out of me.

You left your splinter in me.

I gave you lunch and moral support.
Held your hand when the pain wracked through.
You said it was like barbed wire
scraping your insides raw.
I assumed it was the cancer.
Now I wonder it wasn’t the cocaine shakes.

 Fat lot l know about either.

You took a nap and you took your chance.
The Shins and your mouth.
Wincing the Night Away
and the late afternoon sunlight
streaming in from the sea.

And you left your splinter in me.

Right in the middle by my breast bone.
I guess I'm lucky you weren't aiming for the heart.

I made you coffee after.

Gave you leftovers to feed your body
And books for your soul.
I’d have given you anything.
Easing your emptiness,
that became my Holy Crusade.
Thank God, you'll never know.

And then, a couple of weeks or so later,
when you took me out like trash,
How come you got to keep all I gave you?

And all I got was this splinter.
This phantom shard in the center of my chest.

It’s real for all it’s invisible.
Too insipid to be called painful
too persistent to just ignore.

That's the size of the damage you got done.

Get your fucking splinter out of me.

Shut in. Shut out. Shut up.

I'm sitting here 

hating the sound of my phone when it rings

and still 

I'm pushing against the silence 

that's thickening and crusting over in this room,

smothering the furniture and the books and the TV flickering wordlessly.

I'm cultivating inertia. I'm courting apathy.
I dont know what I'm doing. 

Ignoring the things that need done, doing things that have no meaning.
Boredom. Lethargy. Exhaustion.

What is this? 

It would be so simple - to walk out into the world.
To engage. 

 

But right now it seems to require a monumental act of will. 

And right now I'm cultivating inertia. I'm courting apathy.
I'm letting the lonliness achieve critical mass.

I contain multitudes.

The chief problem in living with the schizophrenia of me is that I never know which avatar is going to be in the driver's seat at any given point.

There's obssessive compulsive mimi, paranoid delusional mimi, chocolate fueled degenerate mimi, endorphin laced earth mother mimi, ass-whuppin' tank grrrl mimi, whingeing wimp mimi, nasty crunchy PMS mimi, weeping willow PMS mimi, super efficient professional powerhouse mimi, temperamental prima donna artist mimi, mother of confusion mimi, super slick rockstar mimi, nobody loves me mimi, couldn't give a fuck mimi, hypersensitive wuss mimi, insensitive bitch mimi, oddball goof mimi, stoic buddha mimi, queen of chaos and melodrama mimi, rational pragmatist mimi, juvenile delinquint mimi, aging singleton mimi, infantile passive aggressive mimi, firebreathing dragon mimi, peace corps pacificst mimi, social butterfly mimi, complete social retard mimi, sanctimonious purist mimi, raving alcoholic mimi...

and on and on and on...and on.

And if you thought listening to these whinging wierdos was a pain in the ass, think about when it's time to buy them shoes!

I is for Idiot

Words fail me.
No really, they fail me. My brain fails me. I am devoid of coherent thought. As I sit here, I turn progressively into an idiot...with not even enough savant to back that up.

I think I probably peaked at the age of 9. At 10, I must have been a fucking genius brimming over; All pop-corn pop pop popping with thoughts and plans and ideas and notions. Bigger and better and more aerodynamic and packed to the sundecks with the protein enriched goodness of freshly squeezed possibility.

But i guess it's been downhill ever since. The vaunted balloon of my virtuosity hit a low pressure zone just short of the finish line and snagged itself on the jagged edge of mediocrity.

And now my intelligence works in fits and spurts, like a broken juicer or something...the blade keeps turning but the trough's jammed.
All I know is the shine's definitely off the old noggin. I'm not as razor sharp and puking possibility as i once was.

Who knows, at this rate I should be drooling into a sippy cup in about 7.5 years, give or take a few.

Gettin' wiggy wit it...

Ok, things that will forever confound me by their very existence #3847 - Bad toupees.

Got to thinking about this when I saw a man in a store the other day - regular old guy but he had, nestled atop his head, the mankiest rug to ever have existed in the HISTORY of hair!!
The wig itself was your garden variety cheap,noxious, vile,bad bad bad hairpiece. However, what made it's dead-rodent creepiness so in-your-face offensive was the fact that it looked like some one had tried tossing it, frisbee-like, onto this poor sod's shiny pink pate...without having quite managed the perfect throw.
So the wig just sat there, three clicks due east of it's ideal final destination, leaving a furrow of bald skin to cleanly demarcate the scraggly remaining natural hairline from the jagged edges of a toupee made by satan's milliners, while what could only have been a dark supernatural power at work prevented the whole mess from oozing down his ear and sliding off his head.

Now maybe this is just me, but I'd imagine that if you put yourself through the indignity of owning a hat made of fake hair or worse, dead hair that once belonged to another human being (or horse...or ape...or gerbil?) just so you could salvage the derelict vessel of your vanity, then what you really need to complete the illusion ( or delusion, depending on how you see it) is an assiduous and unshakable belief in, and acceptance of, said hairpiece.

I mean, give the rug it's due!! Lavish it. Pamper it. Treat it like a gorgeous but demanding mistress; one with magic secrets and a weakness for protein rinse. Get that flash new haircut. Go all out on the conditioning pomade. Hell! do the routine with the hot rollers if that's what it takes!!(oh, and for god's sake, get yourself some of that extra strong hair adhesive while you're at it!!)
Don't just slap it on and forget about it like it's the bastard child you wish you'd never had!!! Because the only way you'll get the world and me to suspend our disbelief for the moment and pretend that your head is actually full of your own hair is if you seem at least half-way convinced of it yourself first! Because if you're not, well then you may as well lay a dead cat on your head for all the difference it would make...it's might even be an improvement!