#theres also the element of human connection. so frightened of being alone we talk into the air | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

craftedcoils-blog-blog · 4 years ago

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A Room With A View

Not only is the floor hard but its covered in wires. The empty cigarette packs make a nice cushion if they're in the right position. Theres a vent high above me that almost touches the cement ceiling but stops short. I like to look at it like it's some bond villain; more powerful than the wall but not quite as collected and austere as the ceiling. Like it's waiting at the bus terminal with a bomb. Waiting for a certain bus with a certain passenger but is to distracted by it's own motive and doesn't read the right sign and ends up missing the bus because he isn't sure which passenger is on which bus. Always he misses the bus. Will always miss the bus. Theres no two ways about it.

There are pipes. One is in a perpendicular erection to the wall but straight forward like the penis had a muzzled dog nose. Another pipe behind it, thicker and spray painted for some reason, was burrowed into a drywall box in one corner on one end and painted the same color as the drywall box in the opposite corner. This is weird to me. Fucking weird. Like an ironic mistake. It occurs to me that I have to think about these things if I ever want to fall asleep. Especially in this place. Unless I am comfortable, my mind will devour me and I will eat reality like I'm starving and it's a delicious hamburger, until the daydream becomes a nightmare and I become comfortable because I have picked certain things out to help occupy my brain with meaningless information. It has to be this way. Things have to bear absolutely no importance on my waking life, it has to be random, arbitrary, stupid…otherwise my mind will eat it up and I cannot handle the digestion because my metabolism is too quick. And insatiable, never filled, always hungry. Like there is a tunnel inside of the mind and at the end is a slight glimmer of something you can barely touch and despite how much you want it and how obsessed you become with it, it just becomes a part of your dream or twisted nightmare. And then you fall asleep.

I have been in this room for an indeterminable amount of time. Its part of an experiment, I have agreed to. I cannot leave, it is part of the experiment, and if I do, everything will fall apart somehow and I will loose what I have been trying to obtain and in one fell swoop become exposed again to the fucked up world outside and my mind, the frailest of organs, will once again become diluted by society. It will give me information that I do not need or want and it will reduce me proper. Like vermiculite to soil, like sand, like the croppings of beetle wings, sawdust and basil that, in some mad scientist's version of an antidote to some disease I do not have, is somehow connected to the panacea that I need but can never bring myself to ask for.

I have a friend that comes by and brings me things. Survival elements; Food, beer and cigarettes mostly. The later two without question, the former can momentarily be substituted by meditation and further drinking. The food is usually dim sum. I didn't ask for it but I don't really care. I'll eat shoelaces when Im drunk and the MSG makes me feel like i'm sparkles and helps me sleep so I go with it. Sometimes he brings me trinkets which I usually throw into a corner somewhere but then rearrange them quickly if I know he's coming to establish a perception that maybe I am ministering these stupid items as if they mean something to me. Maybe they should. I just don't seem to care. My friend's name is Fred.

Sometimes Fred comes by, and for reasons I can only explain to myself, I can tell he is afraid. Maybe it's the awkward look on his face and the darting glances that shoot out like an estranged chrysalis atop an asparagus high on lightning and forcing itself into every conceived corner of non-space, but it frightens me back actually, seeing a human being so offensively perturbed by another. Or maybe its not me he is afraid of and if its not then that scares me even more. I guess it's a sort of symbiosis that we have. A collaboration in fear.

I hate to say it, perhaps because I rely on him so much and have known him for so long but, sometimes I sense something almost sinister in Fred. A betrayal; but not from him in particular. He is a good person, I can sense it. I wouldn't have begun this whole thing if he weren't. But I feel as if he is some kind of a henchman, perhaps even for this whole situation, this weird experiment that we have agreed to. In the beginning it was more jovial, I had it under control, or at least I thought I did and that was good enough to keep me happy or whatever. But at this juncture I am no longer sure who is in control of what or if there is any control to be had at all. Sometimes its like I have become not mine or Fred's but some other force's twisted experiment. Like I am a prisoner. I think I have to imagine these scenarios because I have no contact with the outside world. In this scenario I have created I can imagine him driving away from this room in silence as some dark overlord pats him on the back, appearing out of nowhere in the backseat and congratulating him on a job well done. He resists the accolades because he hates what he has do to but has no say in the matter regardless. At least this is what I see in his eyes as he hands me the half rack and bags of dim sum and seems to be begging me to be the one to stop all this. He handles it all like he's fucking poisoning it and I look at him. I try to tell him that I've poisoned myself and that he has nothing to do with it, but my eyes are not so revealing, forgiving.

Yesterday, I think it must have been, I wrote a a small bit about altruism on the wall next to a strange hole that only goes as deep as my longest finger will allow. I think I love this hole. I don't understand it, and it makes as little sense to me as a monkey on a tugboat, but I don't seem to want to know why or how this hole is here either. I just want to love it as it is. It is a beautiful thing when you can choose not to care about what you love because you know it just is and will always be what you think you love. But I wrote this thing on the wall and I was thinking that it doesn't matter if you do nice things at all. Assholes do nice things all the time. I think you have to be afraid to be an asshole. Fear is the overlooked cousin of empathy but balancing fear and empathy is too difficult for most of us to imagine. Fear makes you sensitive and through the introspection that is created through your own knowledge of it you become empathetic. False confidence does not breed sensitivity, that much I am sure of. The gift shop is what we cant help but expose to the rest of the world. The gallery is what we have inside that people are constantly trying to figure out. I used to think that I was a nice person until I realized that having these kind of thoughts make me an asshole.

Anyways, I have to let myself breath sometime and sometimes I miss people because, despite all their annoying faults and beautiful problems, they are at least interesting. I miss being downtown and looking at some random guy 's head lesion after I establish eye contact and then they look away right before I do. I miss catching a fearful glance from someone dressed in a halloween costume that is slightly more outgoing than their comfort can allow. I miss sitting awkwardly in a stairwell with a cigarette, watching the people go up and down wondering if it's normal or not. I miss the mystery of whether or not things are normal because right now I have no idea. I guess I need that self proclaimed vindication. I need some kind of reference point, I need something to see so that I can at least see through it. In this room I cannot bring myself to see anything let alone see through anything. The only faults I can identify are my own and they have no reference. I guess the only thing you can actually see through is yourself and once you pass through that and into the other room all there is are one way mirrors.

I miss little interactions with people that don't matter. People that don't matter say the most interesting things because they don't care and they don't care because no one has ever cared about them. Their thoughts are only their own. I miss the homeless superheroes, riding that electric rainbow into foreverness. I miss talking about things that I don"t give a shit about just for my own therapy. I miss calculating the time it takes for grocery clerks to bag your groceries. Some of them are really good, but i'll never tell them. I guess I just miss slipping on the slime that coats the city. It has a strange cushion when you fall. It's like a lillypad, you might fall in but you can't expect anything. In this room I have my shoes in a small duffle bag in the corner and all I use are flip-flops.

What I don't miss is the planing and strategy that comes along with interacting with society, contorting my face and personality to match an assumed perception of some female, hobgoblin or whatnot that I see on the bus, looking off with squinted eyes and lips pursed like an asshole. Im definitely an asshole, at this point i've relaxed to this fact. I don't really miss sex all that much. At least not as much as I miss talking to women and kissing their faces. I masturbate about once every 4 hours but I don't have a clock in here. There's also that thing that happens when your talking to people and you weigh their personality and react to them accordingly. People will tell you they don't do this but they all definitely do, its just that some people are not very self aware or too much so, at this point i cant really tell. I do miss friendship. And I miss being a brother.

I can tell my friend is here again because I can hear the estranged echo of footsteps and the rustling of plastic bags and him typing in the code onto the keypad on the door. You have to press the buttons in very firmly otherwise it takes forever and it's no longer a secret. I have given him the privilege of coming in unannounced because I feel it gives me a very small amount of spontaneity that i think is important. I hear him keying in the code and my brain has to immediately shift from private to social in 3-5 seconds. I think that humans need this shift to survive. When you pull them out into the world it is overwhelming. They are in a constant state of trying to understand the private recesses of their mind's while spontaneously interacting with others in the process. Thats why society is schizophrenic. Why do children learn to talk? Because everyone else is doing it, and so I have arranged for the lowest possible amount of this. Learn to react immediately.

I have one bucket in the corner in which I pee and shit the massive amounts of MSG I consume. I cover it with seran wrap. It may not be the best system but I'm too lazy to think of anything else. I'm not Alan fucking Turing. I've told Fred not to give me any advice and to overlook any discrepancy that he may see in my behavior while i'm in here. I have directed him to abandon any formula for this scenario that he may construct and I tell him to shut up and I am still learning to do the same: Any mistakes I may make in this eternity are my own to live with and thats the way I've decided it should go.

Sometimes I want to talk to Fred about the world. This is not one of those times but sometimes I do. I occasionally want to engage with him about the ticks and tocks of life out there. But I have expressed very clearly that he is not to speak to me about anything other than what may be happening in this room. There's something about this that I don't think he likes.

The list of items I have in this room are as follows: a tiny glockenspiel that I hammer out rhythms with, a recording interface, two microphones, two speakers, a children sized drum set, 37 books of empty college ruled paper piled up in the corner and 3 scattered about the room with diametric scribblings and esoteric remarks on random pages about divinity, 20 30 paged books of staff paper untouched, a USB keyboard, a Bob Hope marionette I bought from a Ukrainian gypsy on 4th ave in Olympia, 3 firewire cables, 7 xlr cables, a pair of colorful boots, an amplifier and 3 foot switches.

I have acquired the habit of marking, with a ball point pen, all of the spots where I bruised, cut or hurt myself. For example, I fell onto a cymbal stand the other day and now my shoulder is in considerable pain. I think i'll keep re-marking it until it goes away. At least I can reach it. At least I can diagnose the problem. I feel as if this calculated procedure will help in identifying things about myself that would otherwise go unnoticed. At least the parts of myself that I can reach. If I am not becoming a robot, than I am coming close to being one. As if thought were just an amalgam of circumstance. My environment is finite, like a local bar where you are a regular. You keep thinking you are going to experience something different with each day, but nothing ever changes. You go in, expecting to find that one thing that tells you that you are alive and not just a machine, but it never comes. You are the same person you were yesterday, and the day before, and you can never expect anything different. You can never expect life to be something that it isn't because then it never will. You will always be seeing past life instead of through it. Your frustration of what is not happening will shadow reality and make you a non-entity, a husk of what was once a human. But then you wake up for some reason in the middle of the night and go outside, because this is where you think life happens.

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