i really don’t know how my dad can keep asking me, “what are you going to do when hip-hop is over?”

it’s never going to be. too many people have fallen in love. if we’re all in love, we’re all putting in the effort. it loves us back every day it spreads a message and spreads a smile.

i have no idea what life is going to hold for any avenue of my life and any detail of the planet and its inhabitants. time travel, space travel, hope travel, war travel, organ donors, radio transmissions, x-ray images, machines and epidemics. no clue what’s to come. no matter what though, it’s terrifyingly reassuring to realize that i’ll keep falling in love with it all. there’s always going to be a passage through my sphere that will distract my intentions and redirect my passion and dissect my attitude.

there’s always love around the corner. and anybody who doubts that just needs to live six more months and not be afraid to try new things.

“you’re just blunt and speak in a confrontational tone sometimes and i don’t know what to do with it.”

having a beer, looking at my gpa drop from being abroad, and listening to atmosphere from 2002. trying to relax, trying to reconcile with myself, trying to drown myself. that’s what all of these things equate to, one at a time.

i think i’m terrible at journaling. it’s never, sadly, been my style to write with my hand outside of note taking in class. i’m all about the keyboard. it’s how i grew up writing. a blog since 2003. i like who my writing has become, and where my thoughts have landed. i hardly ever, if ever, re-read things i wrote back then. i don’t even re-read things i wrote last year, or last week. something about me journaling or writing is just a spewing mechanism, coming out of me, and rarely wanting to be read or shared, not even with myself. i can handle stories i’ve written, and sometimes even poems, but damn the journals. a buddy of mine once told that if we are always thinking about feelings, we depress ourselves. very accurate. about the only accurate thing anyone has ever told me about that side of my brain. anything else, fuck it, it’s unknown territory to all.

this semester i’ve been battling this feeling inside of me where all i want to do is write and write poetry and write stories and paint pictures and draw cartoons and make love to expression. so that’s a side of the leaf. i sort of want to get drunk right now. sometimes i think the more i read, the more i drink, the more i can think. aware of the strange substance abusing artistic ring that statement has. it’s fine with me. it’s what is coming out of my mouth, so it’s probably what’s coming out of my heart.

i have no desire to patch things up. i have no desire to instruct broken things on how to fix themselves. what i really want is to love everything until they all find themselves enough to love me back, if they can’t do it this second. i just want to make something for someone to look at and say to themselves, oh okay, i guess it’s okay for me to show myself too. if i poop onto the page, into the phone, every time i raise my hand in class, it’s only because someone has to pave the way for the lines to run clearly. i’ll draw you through every step of my thought process if it means you share your point B with me. everyone needs to be allowed. everyone needs to be welcomed. we’re all going to die alone, we might as well die self-aware. we might as well die with brushes in our hands.

i guess i don’t mind my gpa. i guess i mind holding things inside. time for beer number two. we’re out, so time for that red wine. it’s fine. i’ll run two miles tomorrow too.

peep this.

hahaha PURE GOLD. so much fun.

all music should be a vehicle for knowledge. if it’s not expanding your feet or your head, turn it off. passive music can play at your funeral.

listening to this tonight, after hearing a men’s anti-sexist, anti-violence speaker at my school. all sorts of fire in my veins. it’s so rewarding to go to those talks, because it’s mental stimulation without the politics of a grind or expectations.

and now? i want to read dostoevsky. i want to listen to all the independent hip-hop albums advertising self-love i can find. i want to flip from one internet window to the next while i find new places to hear thoughts and new places to write thoughts. this is what i do for fun. this is what i do to stay inspired. this is what i do to get hyped up and relax.

next on the list after sector 7g’s stuff? ecid. and then, probably more impulse by way of kristoff krane by way of abzorbr by way of eyedea by way of eyedea & abilities by way of slug by way of…. atmosphere and rhymesayers. by way of everything.

also, writing and journaling and poeming and blogging and downloading and emailing. maybe eventually i’ll do my homework, but chances are good i’ll go to bed before that happens. feels so good to be thursday and almost break. getting in my head on doing what i want.

so late to say this, but seeing as how i am finally in my first poetry class as an english major, let me say it now. this poem hits where it hurts. i had read it before, but now when i read it, i feel the pain and age. the world’s too round sometimes.

this was tough to see in my newsfeed today.

i don’t want may 12th to come and i don’t want to end this. not because something is starting after that, or because a next chapter might ensue, but because i’m living on such a cloud right now. i want another beer. or maybe i just want sleep. or maybe i just want to walk down the hall, or down the stairs and down that hall. i always just want to drop by. watch an anime, watch twin peaks, talk about conspiracies while we build a friendship, talk about friendship while we build a past. we can trade music and we can sit staring off into the same space while we think about the goodness that will slip away. we’re always doing that. every semester, there’s always that same space to stare at. things are too transient.

it’s incredible to me that i’m the same person i was seven years ago. or five years ago. or three years ago. or any other prime number ago. i never knew i’d become so good at making eye contact. i never knew i’d have so many options, and that it would really bring me stress to have to pick from the good things. i never knew i’d feel this way about myself. it’s like i believe, without ever seeing. i never knew i’d be turning twenty-one and still quote sayings about the easter bunny and santa claus while i talk about my future. i never thought i’d turn twenty-one. probably one of the weirdest things about living life into adulthood is that i can recognize a childhood. we’re all just one big bildungsroman. if we’re lucky.

i wish i could write rhymes right now. all i can do is talk to myself, and tell myself i’m doing alright. i hope i’m being honest.

when things start to get edgy and too close for comfort, i turn to slug’s voice. i am fully aware there is something strange and maybe creepy and possibly pathetic about this, but for my entire memorable life, his voice has been a huge guiding force for me. i hear it, i reflect on his words, and i feel reassured. i know this quality in him as a human being is what has allowed him to be so successful musically and personally. it’s the type of quality i hope to inspire one day in somebody else, or somebodies else even. it’s probably all that matters to me in life. loving people enough that they love themselves. or, at least caring about humanity enough that it cares about itself.

things are getting edgy and too close for comfort for me these past few days. i feel confused and as a result, stressed. i want to make some more smiles, but i don’t really know where to go to properly dive into my own fun. i’m torn between roads. really, very literally. in so many parts of my life.

i’m tired and going to have a beer and slug time. i wish my eyes would let me read more. i wish my brain would let me write more.

sometimes i wonder if the kids are going to be ok. what if all we have to communicate is 160 characters? i can’t even write thoughts anymore, only rhetorical questions.

i am listening, happily, to a lot of music i have neglected for the past year or two. modest mouse a lot. and then stuff i’ve neglected for five or six years. finch, dido, ben folds five, belle & sebestian. it makes me feel like i have a lot more time that i maybe do. it makes me want to write. it’s refreshing.

i’m scared time is running out though for most people. we lose our time by the time we’re eighteen or nineteen or twenty years old. most of us at least. some people lose it earlier, some later. but around then. and some people die earlier than others, but for the most part, we still have double or triple that span of life to live. twenty years, times two or three. we’re going to be around. and it’s sad we don’t own our own time during the remainder of that life.

i’m convinced nobody’s happy once they lose that time. because that time is for creativity. it’s for probing. self-discovery. creating identity. loving people. loving self. creating something to leave behind.

what if everything we have to leave behind after our deaths is built in the first fifteen or twenty years of our lives?

should we all just be teachers?

i don’t know, i don’t know. i can’t figure out the natural order of feelings or thoughts between human beings. sorry to sound like a brand new song.

this blog was made in amsterdam, and only reminds me of prinsengracht 223 n. i miss that green wall and those coasters and that 10 euro coffee maker with its euro shopper coffee filters every morning. nothing will ever, ever feel better. jumbo brand kleur detergent. best day of my life for four months. i’ll never forget jan the taxi driver, at 9am on tuesday, december 20th, there to drive me away in the perfect sunshine.

listening to the new milo and feeling like i really don’t have to try that hard right now. it’s refreshing to hear this guy and remember you don’t have to apologize for following your dreams, even if it means you leave certain people or expectations out of it.

i’d rather look back on my life and know i was exactly myself and did exactly what fulfilled me rather than look back and see i was well-liked, well-received, or understood. maybe that last one is harder to admit to myself, but sometimes self-expression has to be for the self and that kid in bumsfuck, nowhere town. i think i’m ready to face my goals after graduation. it’s scary to feel so ready.

from freud

“In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself. The patient represents his ego to us as worthless, incapable of any achievement and morally despicable; he reproaches himself, vilifies himself and expects to be cast out and punished. He abases himself before everyone and commiserates with his own relatives for being connected with anyone so unworthy. He is not of the opinion that a change has taken place in him, but extends his self-criticism back over the past; he declares that he was never any better. This picture of a delusion of (mainly moral) inferiority is completed by sleeplessness and refusal to take nourishment, and—what is psychologically very remarkable—by an overcoming of the instinct which compels every living thing to cling to life. It would be equally fruitless from a scientific and a therapeutic point of view to contradict a patient who brings these accusations against his ego. He must surely be right in some way and be describing something that is as it seems to him to be. Indeed, we must at once confirm some of his statements without reservation. He really is as lacking in interest and as incapable of love and achievement as he says. But that, as we know, is secondary; it is the effect of the internal work which is consuming his ego—work which is unknown to us but which is comparable to the work of mourning. He also seems to us justified in certain other self-accusations; it is merely that he has a keener eye for the truth than other people who are not melancholic. When in his heightened self-criticism he describes himself as petty, egoistic, dishonest, lacking in independence, one whose sole aim has been to hide the weaknesses of his own nature, it may be, so far as we know, that he has come pretty near to understanding himself; we only wonder why a man has to be ill before he can be accessible to a truth of this kind. For there can be no doubt that if anyone holds and expresses to others an opinion of himself such as this (an opinion which Hamlet held both of himself and of everyone else), he is ill, whether he is speaking thtruth or whether he is being more or less unfair to himself. Nor is it difficult to see that there is no correspondence, so far as we can judge, between the degree of self-abasement and its real justification. A good, capable, conscientious woman will speak no better of herself after she develops melancholia than one who is in fact worthless; indeed, the former is perhaps more likely to fall ill of the disease than the latter, of whom we too should have nothing good to say. Finally, it must strike us that after all the melancholic does not behave in quite the same way as a person who is crushed by remorse and self-reproach in a normal fashion. Feelings of shame in front of other people, which would more than anything characterize this latter condition, are lacking in the melancholic, or at least they are not prominent in him. One might emphasize the presence in him of an almost opposite trait of insistent communicativeness which finds satisfaction in self-exposure. The essential thing, therefore, is not whether the melancholic’s distressing self-denigration is correct, in the sense that his self-criticism agrees with the opinion of other people. The point must rather be that he is giving a correct description of his psychological situation. He has lost his self-respect and he must have good reason for this. It is true that we are then faced with a contradiction that presents a problem which is hard to solve. The analogy with mourning led us to conclude that he had suffered a loss in regard to an object; what he tells us points to a loss in regard to his ego.”

-mourning and melancholia