for you

ne jjascuro muhgneun buhreutdo griwuh

“this world owes us nothing but a hard road to walk”

there’s a lot floating around in my head right now.  so many things i want to get out, but i’m not sure how to organize any of it, nor what medium i want to release it in.  i know there is so much more to life than this, but here i go again, dreaming of myself in the future to avoid what is right now.  i try my best to be here now, but i am in desperate need of moving forward.  i wish the rain would stop fluttering on and off and stay with the downpour.  i yet again find it all too comforting.  this weekend was a powerful experience, you and i…we share a very strange bond, but it’s very powerful.  i can’t believe how long i have known you and how strong of a friendship we share, yet in the ten years i’ve known you, the interactions we have had have been very few and far between.  hopefully we’ll break that spell of only seeing each other every five years.

nothing ever goes as planned in this life.  this is one of the few things i know to be true.  and it’s not to say you shouldn’t plan, but it’s a balance of living for today and planning enough for the future, that if you are lucky enough for it to coming knocking on your door, that you’ll be somewhat prepared for it.  that future however, will almost never be anything like you planned.

i realized something yesterday.  i’ve been reading an extensive history of Black Flag which i finished this morning.  many of the individuals in that band had an idea of what they wanted to do and they fully dedicated themselves to these ideas.  i always dream of being a better artist, of being able to create art in some way shape or form that i enjoy and think is worthwhile.  i am however, far too aware of the fact that i am by no means an artist.  most things i lay my hand to i fail, if i even get past trying to start them.  my realization was that i have a much bigger goal tho, something i am passionate about in a different way, and something that luckily, hopefully, will coincide with being able to pay rent and afford to eat.  while i intend to continue pursuing certain artistic endeavors,   i think i have a better idea of what will really define me for the next couple of years and what work will really matter.

but then again, i could easily be wrong about all of this.

following past footsteps in a different pattern

“i think san francisco would be the best place for you right now”

“-”

…i spent a a very brief moment today as part of an assembly line to hand out food to whoever approached us in San Francisco.  i didn’t obtain the food, i didn’t prepare it…nor did i serve it.   all i did was hand the cups to a very awesome friend of mine.  she then filled them with soup, her girlfriend added a spoon, and our other companion offered bread to those we were serving.  i think to myself that to some, this action might seem amazing, something i deserve thanks for.  to me though, it was really nothing.  something i spent 20 or so minutes doing while i was hanging out with my friends.  all i did was hand cups to someone.  and i know for a fact, that without me there, this action would have still been taken care of.  that however, is because i was just a guest tonight in performing this service.  i have done other things that had i not shown up to do them, they would not have happened.  some of those moments have felt fantastic, some haven’t.  i don’t really know where i am going with this, and as usual, i am losing my ability with words.  it’s not enough, and it needs to go a lot further, and we certainly could debate over a simple direct action with a immediate result vs. creating a wider systemic change, and while i don’t feel i did anything special, i spent part of my saturday evening making sure a few more of my fellow humans had something to eat.

“the persistence of loss: leaving hope”

i had a teacher in middle school who is hands down one of the best teachers i ever had.  she’s about my brother’s age and doesn’t bullshit.  this led to us developing a very strong friendship that still exists over a decade later.  she once assigned a project that revolved around assembling a poetry collection.  i can’t remember if i put this particular poem into the collection, or if it was just considered to go into the final product.

the poem was told from the perspective of a child.  not a child in the sense that the speaker was a young kid, but in the sense that the poet was the child of someone.  the author was speaking of her mother…or maybe the author was speaking of her aunt…or her friend, it really doesn’t matter, though i’m pretty sure it was about her mother.  i don’t remember any specific lines, but i remember the poem told the story of an older figure in the hospital, very sick, and fatally ill.  it told of the older figure holding on, persisting through the pain despite the reality of no hope…….she didn’t persist for herself though, she persisted for the sake of her family, for her loved ones.  she stayed alive to keep them happy despite the intense suffering it forced her to endure.

while the poet came to no concrete conclusion in the end, she did raise the question whether or not it was selfish or not for an individual to desire a doomed being’s life to continue on just for the sake of the hopeful individual, because it fulfilled their needs, if only for a one more day.  is it selfish to hope your dying love lives one more suffering day, just so that you have one more day with them?

i doubt i would be much different if i hadn’t found this poem, but that’s not to say i didn’t find profound ideas within it.  it is one of the many cases where i found someone else could better express what i was feeling.  this was within a year of my mom being diagnosed with heart failure…less than a year before being diagnosed with cancer.

art into art

inspired by the limousines first physical release, the scrapbook ep

tfh #00

tfh produced it’s first zine lyrical deviance.  the production was months in the making, 98% plagiarized and didn’t turn out quite like i expected.  copies are limited and hand assembled.  most are being personally delivered, though some inextricably end up on BART trains and in other random spots in the Bay Area.

the grieving process and normalization

so i saw my sister last night for the first time in far too long.  there was a lot to talk about what’s happening in the wake of my current life.  i mentioned to her how recently i’ve been rewatching a TV show i really like.  there’s a period of time where the family the show focuses on is living in a house with great grandma who’s hooked up to oxygen and other medical equipment.  she’s damn near a vegetable, decaying slowly and only ever says one thing,  ’kill me.’  i explained that watching this, and having this situation used as the backdrop for a few hours of what i’m watching is comforting to me.  similarly, when i first moved home, driving around in the car screaming along to my new favorite song about cancer helped comfort me knowing my mom’s death from cancer was quickly approaching.  mixed in with all of this has been a surge in my musical tastes littered with brutal and gory lyrical content.

my sister told me this doesn’t surprise her.  it’s a process of normalizing what’s going on around you.  this doesn’t change how strange i find myself, but it does lend some reasoning behind me which i like.

 

addition:
i realize i’ve done this before.  after zech hung himself i took comfort in listening to songs about suicide, particularly a song about a guy hanging himself.  i probably doodled a lot of nooses then too.

(we)

we spent our days skipping class
getting stoned in the meadow
getting stoned on the beach

we spent nights getting drunk
and telling beautiful women
how stupid their boyfriends were
for choosing world of warcraft over them
especially on a friday night

we spent birthdays taking shots
and waking up lost
bloody & bruised
with no wallet or keys
(but at least we saved that girl)

we spent years getting to know each other
only to spread so far

we spent afternoons exchanging needles
and handing out condoms
collecting food and supplies,
clean socks for the poor
we were saving the world
and fucking loving it

we took (decade) long journeys
exploring the woods
and inbetween
exploring our souls
trying to find what would make us whole

we ate dollar slice pizza religiously
and talked about dirty sex
and the meaning of everything
it was the best part of the week

“i’m only waiting to slip through the pavement”

it’s the first major rain
it’s beautiful
i just wish it was raining harder
i wish it was pouring
i wish the winds were raging harder
i wish that the clouds were nearly blacking out the sky
the lack of hope outside is strangely comforting right now
i wish the outside weather reflected even less hope
i hear the weather is more akin to what i’d like where i belong…

since i was a kid i’ve always dreamed of enjoying this weather with a partner by my side, cuddled up on the couch on a saturday morning, maybe the fire place is going and we just stare out into the vast chaos…i wonder if that day will ever come