I’m watching incense smoke linger in the sunlight from the windows, just hanging out laying thick like a familiar feeling. It smells like woody strawberries and peace. And my apartment is gold in the eyes of a miner. And a train wreck strain is a great additive to the pleasure the pleasuring and the pleasured right beside the train station where phenomenal orgasms prance across the tracks of time pockets if you just relax. Hearing the quickened breath like a horn that blows again and again coming like trains on a restless summer night. Listening to stoner doom metal and the irony lies in the grass of it being one of the most hopeful noises under the sun of it being the opposite of doom and sounding like divine design. The sound that jumps the tracks. The sound that takes a long ride to somewhere they don’t know and it’s over as quick as it came and they’re gone. Then somehow it comes back around on time schedules and the patterns of our days and we see it and we know it and we are it. It’s all of it it’s everything. And it spirals out again hopping freight to fright to freight to love to freight again moment to moment never ending because stars keep being born and giving way to black holes and we don’t know where any of it goes except for halting here right now for that one second to climb on board.
I spent July fourth weekend at work and with Clayton. A book on his bookshelf caught my eye called The Physics of Consciousness by Evan Harris Walker. Apparently Cody or someone gave it to him for Christmas one year. I read the first few pages aloud and was automatically hooked with that funky inspired feeling I get when I read word combinations that are animated by deep thought. Clayton said it sounded good while I was reading it and that I could take the book with me.
I’m about 70 pages in this book that’s talking about quantum mechanics, and frequencies of light, and Schrödinger, and Bohr’s atom. On the way down there was something so comforting reading about classical physics with Isaac Newton and his laws relating to material objective reality. Something I threefourths-heartedly believed in, that there was nothing more than what’s in front of us. As I speak, we’re miles into our trip home from Parris Island, SC with a freshly pressed marine. The abandonment and flatlands of the early south are whizzing by me as my thoughts dive into the ever-deeper southern recesses of my mind. I haven’t written in a while due to lack of inspiration.
On the way down, my dad, sister, and I began the trip with stimulating conversations about religion, politics, energy, the (non)existence of angels demons, mental disease, and existence. This discussion put my mind in analytical motion for our visit to Parris Island. As soon as I got out of the car at the base I felt a strange energy of institutionalization and brainwashing. It vaguely nauseated me to watch the recruits file onto the parade deck before the motivational run in such sickening uniformity, all mentally and physically trained to kill and die for our country. Then I saw Dalton.
An irrationally strong and large tidal wave of pride washed over my entire occupancy of space in the universe. The classical period of my mental physics was over. It was now about the contradiction of light existing as both particles and waves. I started weeping uncontrollably seeing before me a man; shoulders back, hands closed, both feet at a 45 degree angle, never breaking bearing. Front and left, a PFC squad leader of platoon 3052 of Lima Company 3rd Batallion, I could not take my tear-filled eyes off of him. Always standing strong between his two sisters, Ella and I; he then stood stronger among his 200-something new brothers. Another tidal wave of fear suddenly overlapped the pride. I do not want him to die for me or this country, I thought to myself. Watching him stand there still as a stone basking in the glory of accomplishment after the trials and tribulations of the past 90 days, I didn’t feel like I, or the country, even deserved the honor of being in Dalton’s presence. I couldn’t stop crying with how fucked up it all felt.
I am a huge advocate of free thinking and free action and sometimes I am very “fuck the man.” Sometimes I feel like our government is the most evil, greedy, and corrupt thing, but do I get up everyday and basically do whatever the fuck I want to do because I am free to do so? Because I was lucky enough to be born in this country where there have been and continue to be thousands of men and women who fight, kill, and die for me and you to do what we want? It’s so fucked up. Freedom should be free for all living beings. This all speaks volumes of the human race. The need for military and war is one of the most depressing facts of this life. Because people are greedy, hateful, jealous, and don’t know how to fucking act.
I observed Dalton closely all day on Thursday for Family Day which was the first time I had seen him in three months. “Yes ma’am. . . Thank you, sir. . .” His whole demeanor more polite and more calm. A boy who left the recruiting office in Martinsburg, WV, not even wanting to clean his room or put his dirty dishes in the sink had just “skuzzed” floors and gotten belittled for 90 days. I used to want to put his face in the dirt for being a lazy asshole. Now I feel like I should kiss the ground he walks on. And he’s so handsome in his uniform!
The gears in my head were turning ferociously all day. I felt and still feel conflicted about the whole experience. I am so fucking proud of my brother and love him so much but I can hardly bear to think about a bullet going through his chest or the chance of his eternal misery from PTSD or losing an arm and not being able to work out like he always has loved to do. Him dying for a country who considers him a number, property of the government, like their tagged cattle put out for slaughter.
I think he saw the gears turning and the tears streaming behind my sunglasses because as we walked back to his barracks during liberty he asked me if I was okay and said that I didn’t look very happy. I said “Dalton, I am so happy to see you!” I began weeping again, and with me in my tye-dye skirt and him in his digies, we shared one of the best hugs of my life. He told me he read one of the letters I wrote him out loud to some of his friends in which I wrote some Red Hot Chili Peppers’ lyrics and that they all interpreted it for motivation for that day in basic. Most of us know it:
“Destruction leads to a very rough road, But it also breeds creation.” – Californication
It made my day.
And I know, perhaps, that, “Men do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction, they fight for one another” (William Manchester). And though it goes against everything I believe in, this experience has half tempted me to drop everything and head to the recruiter’s office to join Marine Corps basic training myself. I would do that just to be with him. To fight beside him and experience the world with him and keep him safe. To find self-discipline and self-sacrifice, which in my eyes, are two of the most respectful aspects of character.
Dearest brother, “Your battles inspired me – not the obvious material battles, but those that were fought and won behind your forehead” (James Joyce). I love you and I’m so proud of you. I can’t speak for everyone but upon this new experience, I feel it is my duty to be worthy of your fight. . . and to keep expanding my perception.
To knowledge. To growth. To expansion. To Valhalla.
I was laying on a red suede couch on Hollow Tree Lane nine years ago watching, with horror and astonishment, a movie called 28 Weeks Later. My best friend at the time- Amber, me, and her younger sister, Addison, were up late laying on that couch, as always it seemed, not knowing at all who we were or who we would become nine years later.
All three of us piled into Amber’s bed after the movie because we had scared ourselves out of our minds by watching it. It was probably around 4am when those two finally went to sleep. But I didn’t.
I remember lying there paralyzed with fear. There was a night light on but the only thing I could see were the images of sprinting, gnarled, bloody, lifeless-but-animate bodies on a never-ending movie-reel for my mind’s eye. The bodies were those of which belonged to my mother and father and brother and sister. I watched their eyes go wide and bloodshot with a viral living death that in one way or another, as my mind played it out -momturnsandbitesdadwhilehe’stryingtosavedaltonandellaandturnsandthenbitesdaltonwhobitesellaandthey’vehoardedintotheherd-, they were now coming after me. They were SPRINTING after me to tear away the flesh from my bones and turn me into something I am petrified of. I would have to kill them -the four people I love more than anything in this world- to survive, or die only to come back as a threat to the human existence. Lying there, I imagined that zombies -infected bodies as hosts to a virus that destroys life, soul, and personality – were hissing and growling just outside the window. I devised multiple elaborate plans to either quickly kill myself in case these nonexistent-zombies-that-were-just-outside-the-window got into the house, and then also fabricated multiple elaborate back up plans of action to escape and hide could I not execute a suicide. I watched the sun start to peak through the cracks of the blinds in Amber’s room before I could drift into a nightmare infested sleep.
I’ve had zombie dreams frequently and infrequently in spurts since watching that movie nine years ago. They still fester sometimes and I’ll wake up in utter panic, sometimes in a pool of my own sweat, and I’ll thank the universe that it was only a dream. But why? Why does the concept of a zombie haunt my subconscious on way deeper level than just a normal and rational fear of the living dead that most people probably have?
The part of the movie that got me the most is when the kids, who’s blood might carry hope for a cure or vaccine, (the very beautiful, very sexy) Jeremy Renner as a soldier named Doyle appointed to keep the children safe at all costs, and another female soldier who is injured, are running away from, not only zombies, but military personnel roaming the streets of the UK with poisonous gas and flamethrowers killing zombies and humans alike. Eradicating. With shirts pulled over their noses, the group finds an abandoned vehicle and they get in. It’s a manual and it won’t start. The soldiers aren’t far behind them and they will end anyone who could be infected. Doyle, in order to save the children, decides he must get out and push the car so the woman soldier can pump the clutch and move the gear shift to hopefully get the car started. He gets out of the car and starts pushing with all his might, yelling, “Go! Go! GO!” The children are crying and screaming. The military personnel with the flamethrowers see him and begin to throw. Just as his clothing and body catch fire, the car starts. The camera shows the children looking back in turmoil, it flashes to the view from the back seat looking back at his flailing, flaming, waving arms. He falls to his knees, and then to the ground. Dying. Burning.
All of this happened in what seemed like in-the-moment-slow-motion, and I was uncontrollably bawling. This is one of the few movie scenes that has had complete gut-wrenching, heart-ripping, empathy-evoking, soul-inspiring impact on me. Doyle gave his life to save those children, he sacrificed his life for the hopes of saving the human race. We’d like to think we could be so selfless in the same situation. In all situations.
Is this the reason I so deeply fear the idea of a zombie and a zombie apocalypse? You see, I live for those moments where I feel like being human has a purpose. That we didn’t evolve into this level of consciousness just for shits and giggs. That we can be transcendent, even if just for a few seconds. That we can sacrifice ourselves for the happiness and betterment of another’s life. That we can feel and love endlessly and unconditionally. That we are a part of that far-out-tremendously-deep kick. Vastly connected to one another and all things. To be a zombie means that there is matter (the body and physical identity pertaining to the recognition of who you are) without meaning. To be a zombie means to be void of all emotion. To be a zombie means you will kill your family. To be a zombie means to never love. To be a zombie is to never feel. To be a zombie is the annihilation of all communication. To be a zombie means loss of all hope for that transcendence. To be a zombie is to die without death. To be a zombie is to catapult into oblivion.
And I’m not sure why or when or what happened, but, I fell in love with an emotional zombie. I am sacrificing my every single heart’s desires, every sexual desire, my emotional desires, in the hopes to save the existence of a relationship that may or may not fail horribly, if it hasn’t already. The lack of communication kills me inside. The confusion is equivalent to my suffering. Will it really lead to an enlightened more knowledgable state of mind? I aim to find a cure, to mend, to vaccinate. The bite marks he left on my right forearm and left shoulder on Monday faded away Friday.
And though I am surrounded by them, lurking in every corner of this existence, some too far gone to come back; I have sworn to myself never to be one- emotional or otherwise. I would rather burn a thousand times to save a child from the same fate. To save human existence and consciousness. To save emotion. To save love. Even if all of this means nothing. To do that is to reach that transcendence, even if just for this or that moment. To be a part of that deep kick. It’s the running from the somnolence, the zombie-ism, that exhausts you to the point that you would almost rather be one than to endure the misery and torment of the end. It is that primal will to survive, to make things better, that may one day save us. How much time do we have left as a species, as humans, as consciousness? How much time do we have left. We all fear death, but I fear a living death far more.
And we all know fog is a thick cloud of tiny water droplets suspended in the atmosphere at or near the earth’s surface that obscures or restricts visibility.
But it’s also something that obscures and confuses a situation or someone’s thought processes.
And I don’t know what this means for me or you or us or them.
But above the fog hung the crescent moon, low and south east. And guiding. And beckoning.
And the Stairway to Heaven has never been denied in my car. And so many times has it come out of my smartphone and I’m stoned and I’m dancing to Jimmy Page’s guitar solo in a steamy shower.
And I left a warm bed on a cold morning because I had to do my homework, but also because I had a vision for a poem that I had to write– because words are my medium. It must have come to me in my vino-induced sleep. I woke up dizzy and tucked under a different blanket.
And I can’t paint or draw.
I was told I was the next chapter, but the pages keep quickly turning.
And our time here keeps flying. And you know sometimes words have two meanings, and all of our thoughts are misleading. And Robert Plant looks like him. Not the other way around. And that’s what is different now. From everything before. Perception and feeling.
And beneath laundry detergent and construction; love, to me, smells like sage and smudge and gasoline, skin, and the musk of man and earth.
Pheromones alone could make this life worth living.
I wonder about everything.
And I’m sorry I drink so much wine. And I’m sorry I think about sex and love and life all the time. I am.
He wished me clairvoyance. One of the cutest things I’ve ever seen in the dark.
And I can only hope and wait and be and do. And love fiercely with a mindful sensuality that I’ve only seen in one person.
Me.
And that crescent moon on a dresser in a foggy morning hollow.
Working two jobs and going to school full time is a choice. I understand that. But overwhelmed doesn’t begin to cover the range of emotions that flood my body every single day when I wake up. And even though I feel completely psychotically exhausted, sleep doesn’t come easily because I have to drink at least 40oz of coffee during the day to keep moving forward. I work in two bars so alcohol is also a part of daily life. Consider in addition, shoving food in my mouth because I don’t have time to take my time to chew, swallow, and digest. So I’m highly caffeinated, a little tipsy, and have some serious indigestion. Health becomes an issue. Health becomes an issue when you’re so stressed and anxious, it feels like the walls of your heart are going to give out. Especially when your heart is already broken, and then scar tissue builds so that eventually, instead of giving out, it will get so tough you can’t feel anything anymore. Just a big beating ball of nerveless scar tissue. You gotta ask yourself (in more of a statement form), seriously, what the fuck. What the fuck are you doing. Why.
And there really isn’t an answer, and maybe that’s why there is no need for a question mark. Money, maybe. Maybe it’s just because you’re living and you have to do something. You have to occupy your existence. Finding a purpose (is there even a purpose). Maybe it’s simply because I live in America in 2015. I don’t know. I feel as though I’m trapped in a hole that I have created for myself, but that society gave me the shovel and basically said, “Dig or I’m going to burn you.” A hole where I’m constantly moving, never getting ahead, and always breaking/fixing, deconstructing/rebuilding, sleeping/waking, and no matter how much I win: I lose. I’m lost, and I’m very, very confused. I’m not even in debt for shit’s sake and I feel like this. So I’m in a hole holding this shovel while everything I do just cancels out. Shouldn’t that equal a sort of balance or something? Cause really, for some reason, it just feels shitty. And I know 100% IT COULD BE WAY WORSE. I know that.
I feel like I have lost every connection I’ve ever had with anyone or anything. Including my own family. Yes, we are always there for one another, yes we love each other endlessly, yes to all of those things that make a family a family. But what’s true is true and I truly feel like the only thing I’m connected to on that deep kick is an aching desire to be finished with everything. I’m 21 and I already feel so jaded and numb and anxious for the long sleep. How. Is. This. Possible.
I would say part of it is because I haven’t been to a yoga class in months. It kills me and I can’t wait to have time and energy to get back to that once this semester is over. Maybe once I get back on track I won’t feel any of these current feelings and I’ll get back to my old self. My zen, my peace, my purpose, my goals, bettering my being, etc. I’ll be able to more clearly cut out what isn’t serving me, what isn’t treating me right, what isn’t good for me. But for right now I’m just taking a minute to sit down and say fuck it.
“No one gives a shit about your problems” was something someone said to be about two months ago. It echoes in my head. Reverberating off of the ever-forming scar tissue in my heart and my brain. Right now, instead of writing this whiny bullshit down that no one is going to give a shit about, I could be doing something productive, like my homework. Or attempting to sleep. But sitting down, saying fuck it, and writing feels good so I did, and I’m going to. As I learned and realized in my English 301 critical theory class, we are a culture of complaint. What can I/we say.
And, quite frankly, I don’t know what I’m trying to say. Usually I am trying to say something, but right now, “fuck it” is the only thing coming to the forefront. I don’t have some brilliant lesson I’ve learned, or some feminist/humanist manifesto, or even a brush of wisdom I believe I’ve stroked onto my mental canvas. I feel fried like an egg somebody cooked a long time ago and it’s sticking to the pan just waiting, unknowingly, to be washed down the drain. I feel like the train has left the station, and I’m still at the station. I feel like a book collecting dust on a shelf among the billions of other books on this shelf of the universe called earth that simply just aren’t opened. But inside, inside, those sweet words create worlds of their own and you can connect to them and love them and feel them and be a part of them.
But nobody wants to open up books anymore, the pages turning between your fingers, the smell of ink and paper wafting up towards your nose, taking part of the mystery inside, the sensuality of being alive and in love. Because you’re on a shelf in a hole.
I’m good without a god;
and I’m human enough
to be treated as such,
though I’ve probably loved
a little too much.
And touch is equal to craving
and life is equal to saving
and the climate is ever changing;
because of the struggle,
we suffer enough.
After Forrest and Jenny walked through D.C.
you hated the feeling of watching her leave
again, but
this reflection, is you and me, and us and them.
And Jimi Hendrix hands move soft like silk
on freshly shaven skin,
soft within
and activism springs forward
from man and his kind
from women, equally divine.
But businessmen still drink my wine,
and ignorance destroys my Earth;
and intellectually speaking,
I don’t know what to do
when I feel lonely like this
on a sunday afternoon.
I came back down onto the beach today after taking a glorious “Dirty Hippie” shit (a chai drink from Hunga Bunga Java Coffee shop where we have become regulars even for only being here once a year). I sat down in my chair and my sister Ella said, “Did you see that girl that just came down?”
The tall tan blonde must have seductively glided down the public walk way we are sharing with neighboring oceanfront beach homes, and people staying sound-side, moments before I did. But I came down the steps jauntily, rather than seductively, as my mother explained how I walk. I replied “No” to Ella as my eyes wondered to the tent beside us on the beach and I spotted her. “You should see her butt,” Ella added as she returned to reading 30-Second Brain, a book about neuroscience. “I don’t give a fuck about her ass,” I said.
Approximately 15 yards away from this lean tall ass-beauty, I examined all that she had to aesthetically offer me. Again, long blonde straight hair, lean and tall, sun-kissed, and if I had a microscope, probably not a peach fuzz on her youthful flat-stomached, thigh-gapped, around 17-year-old body.
Yeah, I remember being 17 too.
But the question, my friends, that I ask now as a 21-year-old woman is, “Do they have the funk?”
Do they radiate charisma? And I’m not talking about “Is he or she a good person?” No, that is irrelevant and unknowable unless you indeed know the person and spend months, even years, with said person. I’m talking about an energy that certain people carry with them. Even places have the capability to carry this energy. Like where I am now, in Topsail Island, North Carolina. A pretty funky state in its entirety. But the young woman’s energy radiates the same energy that houses at the North end of the island radiate. Yes, they are huge and luxurious and have hot tubs and a million rooms decorated with expensive shit that someone can afford to own and rent in addition to their mansion in Maine along with a fleet of Lamborghinis… But these North end beach houses all look the same. I have stayed in several of them over the years and have always found myself longing for the South end. Where we are now. Tucked in between two of the only gnarly beach trees that can be seen for blocks down the dunes. With wooden walls and ceilings and weirdly placed and shaped windows added and built by the hands of a charismatic man, or woman. You can fucking tell. Our little island hideaway has the funk. It has words, and a story, and an energy emitting from it’s little thought-out structure. It’s like Bilbo Baggins and the Shire. Hello.
But this isn’t the first thing that Ella has said to me that triggered this reaction from me. Not but two weeks ago, she walked into my room wearing a new open-backed dress, asking if I had any stick boobs (the bra that sticks to your breasts so you don’t have to worry about straps). I replied and asked why she needed them. She said, “My boobs are too small. It will look weird.”
Now, my reaction is coming from someone who doesn’t wear a bra unless I’m wearing a shirt that requires me to at work or I’m running a long distance, but pure anger was and is indeed the reaction to my sister’s statement.
For those of you who don’t know, but she will willingly talk about it now, Ella, my sister, was anorexic.
I’m sure running track has something to do with it because anorexia is common among track athletes for some reason, but my dears, society has everything to do with it. And all of us know why. From technology to porn and this idealization of what women and men should look like, we know what eats us alive when we wake up and look in the mirror and we think, “How SHOULD I look today?” And then usually the following question is “Why can’t I look this way?” And the following reactions ensue trying to achieve that “look” that is expected of us. Anorexia can KILL you, and it’s a result of society’s standards. SOCIETY COULD HAVE KILLED MY SISTER! And people, we are all a part of society! Are we killing each other with our expectations?
And friends, I am by no means NOT also affected by this. Yes, I have become very confident about myself over the past few years with the help of working in the restaurant business and dealing with customers, having a few funky friends, spirit guides, my loving parents, and heavy metal music (yes). . . But just the other night while I was at work, I was struck pretty hard inside my 21st century self-esteem. And I am not afraid to openly admit what bothers me about myself:
Physically: 1) My drinking habits along with my lack of exercise habits sometimes show visibly on my lower stomach area, hips, and upper thighs. 2) I wish my arms were more toned as well. 3) I wish I was a tanned bronzed beauty 24/7/365. 4) I have dark hair so my body hair is darker and easier to see if not freshly shaven. (Though I care less and less about this as I get older. I plan to rock my landing-strip for as long as I can bend over to keep it up with the utmost 70’s pride). And 5) Sometimes I wish my face was different but that’s just life and you are 100% stuck with your face, I don’t know what else to say about that.
Personality: 1) My drinking habits make me do and say shit that I would never do or say sober, and I can’t control my habit sometimes, so fuck – – but that’s a different blog. 2) Sometimes when I get nervous under high pressure situations I will lie, and I fucking hate when I do that. I’m working on it. 3) I have the tendency to be attracted to people I probably shouldn’t be attracted to, resulting in me doing weird shit and then going through a long self-loathing process. 4) I can’t stick with a routine to save my life. And last, but not least 5) I’ll contradict myself, like I probably have already in this blog, which I also hate, but everyone does that and the very universe is a contradiction in itself so there really isn’t anything I can do about it.
Anyways, at work, my 21st century societal self-esteem was struck by a strawberry-blonde beauty in a patterned open-back dress who definitely does have the funk. I nonchalantly asked my coworker and dear friend, “How do you compete with that?” He replied, “You’re Tricia, you already won.” Of course, exhausted and hungover, I looked at him with teary eyes, and I remembered what the funk is about and that it is totally inside of me.
Now, I was never anorexic but I have come a long way since 15, 16, 17 years old; when you aren’t a child but you are hardly yet a woman. I can happily say, at 21, I am happy with myself for the most part, though I know my sister still struggles.
Currently, in the book I am reading called Dark Days, a memoir by Randy Blythe (who is now a best-selling author! Congrats!) he said something about people trying to be rockstars and that you can try really really hard to be rockstar, your hardest even, but some people just don’t have it. The same concept applies to the funk. But you can get it, and I’ll explain how.
Mother Earth is my greatest example. Even as I decay writing this, getting closer and closer to death with every breath. . . every moment, every year, I can feel Mother Earth’s funk getting stronger. She’s old now, and aging faster with this 21st century mentality as our environmental awareness fades with our irreversable technological sprawl across her. But like Lamb of God iterates in one of my favorite songs by them called “Reclamation”. . . The lyrics are “The elements reclaim what was taken.” And Mother Earth will. She is older than this 21st century society, and she will win.
My point is, funk is a side-effect of being an old soul.The earth has an old soul and I’m pretty sure I myself have an old soul. You have to die to be reborn within this life and in others (and I’m not even sure if reincarnation is real or how it works. I’m just guessing here). If your soul is older than the current society we live in, you probably have the funk. And it isn’t the tall skinny tan girl’s fault, I’m not trying to judge or shun her, it’s not bad that she gave me the vibe of a simple product of society. She just probably hasn’t died that many deaths or lived that many lives yet. She will learn, and one day you will learn, we will all learn that we’ll be better. And hopefully one day, society will be a reflection of positive funk. (You can still have the funk and be a complete asshole who hasn’t really learned anything, I was morbidly in love with someone like this once.) It’s up to us to sway the funk in a positive way as we live and learn.
So every second that my beautiful sister sits in that beach chair reading her brain book, and not looking in the mirror worrying about “What should I look like today,” she is gaining funk momentum. And as I sit here under the funky moon and write this, so am I.
All I ask is that you question yourself, and question society. Believe in yourself, and believe in self-empowerment. Wake up and skip the mirror. Don’t look at it. Go outside and look INTO the earth. Then you’ll see your true reflection.
moonglowmountain 