Another [Broken] Box

“Author, why are you so fascinated with boxes, and containment, and structure, and assigned purpose?”

The reasons are so cliché I don’t want to put them on the page.  I don’t feel like they deserve to be set in ink.  That might give them power and I don’t know if I could control them after that.  How often can we hear the chorus before we can’t stand hearing the song?  Sure, the verses are different with every artist, but the refrain is sung all together:  This is the song that never ends, yes it goes on and on my friends, some people started singing it not knowing what it was and they’ll continue singing it forever just because this is the song that never ends . . . Maybe this feeling about the song comes from nearsightedness.  I want the future now.

I don't know what this is going to be about

Alrighty Darlings, let's begin.  I have had an interesting week and I realize that I haven't updated in a bit.  I've also been really busy, but enough with the excuses.  Here is another box for you:

We are going to see how our boxes are doing today.  You will go first.  Tell us:  what color your box is today, whether or not it has sprouted any new growth, if it has changed color, if it has died, if it is flowering, if it looks more or less wilted since yesterday, if you fed it yesterday, if its soil is moist or dry, if you are going to feed it today, if it has begun to smell.  If it is dead, or has just died, tell us:  if it is deteriorating, if it has now begun to smell, what it’s color is, whether or not other growth has sprouted in lieu of its death, whether its soil is still moist or has dried, if you will continue to water it, what you believe the cause of it’s death was.

More interesting stuff after the jump.

This is a box about a photograph.

Let’s see how I can focus.  Focus.  Focus.  Flash.  And now you are captured.  In an instant you are depicted in an unchanging state.  This box can be colorful, or not.  How do we escape this one if it is worth a thousand words?  Some of them must still apply, even now.  “Mexican”.  How does one escape this one?  “Male”.  I know this one is not “permanent”, but neither is “young”.  Assimilation or estrangement?  I am stuck in this photograph as I am stuck in the pieces of my life.  I do not want to escape from some:  male, brown, thick haired.  Others I want to rip through, cut out, erase, expose, develop into whiteness, or black, or grey.

The Third Largest, Something on Passion and Grief

One should reflect upon their life at moments like this.  I am on a train, underground, beneath the third largest city in America.  School brought me here.  From the south side of San Antonio Texas, the seventh largest city in America, to Santa Fe, New Mexico, a decidedly less populated place than I first thought, to the Midwest and public transportation.  I have been noticing when Chicago is mentioned in films and on television.  I think it is because I am trying to adjust to the circumstance of living here.  I think I am almost there, but I have been trying for seven months now.  Maybe it is because I have done what I did in Santa Fe.  I willingly changed my life to pursue school and found a job.  It's more than some, less than others.  I wonder if I will feel different when school is over and it comes time to go to school again.  I will say that I won't miss it.  I wonder if that will be true?  It is exhaustive this school thing.  I don't know if I was ever very good at it, but I slid through four years of it.  I don't want that to be how my life is after I don't have to worry about school.  I don't want to be able to "just get through" how I choose to live.

Passion is sought through the experience of moments and only when you stumble upon it, and label it after the fact, do you realize that you found what it was you were seeking.  An active moment of passion is life's orgasm.  That I am "passionate" about writing is not evidence of passion.  At times it may be an acknowledgment of passion previously experienced, or of hoped at passion.  A marker signifying experience at this or that point along the road and through the hills and valleys of whatever it is you were/are passionate about.

So what?  I was once passionate about playing music.  Look where that has taken me - a tour of the East and Midwest of America (and a survey of hospitality from each person and place that helped along the way) - but now music has no place in my life.  I played the clarinet in high school and then in college as part of my music minor.  I wasn't very good, or passionate enough to put forth the extra effort towards becoming better, and now it is a decidedly severed part of me.  I think I had to let it go with one last big, emotive hurrah.

Another Box

You can’t see it?  That’s because you are inside it.  One does not look too closely to their own surroundings.  I should say living quarters.  One does not inspect their living quarters.  Perhaps I should say home, but that is another thing entirely.  Those places-where-we-reside are quite small and require a certain degree of blindness.  A special kind of not seeing.  The minutiae are maddening.  Keep your sanity.  Make the most out of the box.  Once it becomes a prison a certain kind of alchemy sets upon the box and the only things one can see are prisons, cages.  The boxes of others seem to be calling out.  They want to be destroyed.

Let us begin:

This is an excerpt from a non-fiction type piece I have been working on. Each chunk of the piece is centered in the middle of the page and is ten typed lines long and forms a square. I say this because I don't think the formatting will transfer from Word.  Here is the second "page".

This is a box.  It is imaginary, but it contains you and everything that you are and everything that you can be to another person.  It is a pretty box, sometimes.  Other times it has been dipped in toxic sludge and no one wants to go near it.  It smells, sometimes.  You can taste it with your nose and your mouth.  Licorice.  Old paper.  Raw meat.  Fresh toilet bowl water.  The salt spray drifting over the docks.  The sweet tang of toxicity.  Do not confuse these smells with their sight.  Separate the picture from the experience and simply smell and taste.  That is what it is like when the box that contains you smells.  It is separate from the experience of objects.

The 1, 2, 3's

So, here we go.  I have decided to begin this blog for a couple of different reasons.

First, I would like to try and keep up with my writing, even if it is a little blurb or something.  I used to keep journals, and while they weren't all that great to go back and re-read, at least I was writing something.

Second, I would like to put excerpts of pieces of writing that I am currently working on, to see how people respond to it and so I can look at it someplace that isn't a word document.

Third, I like trolling the interwebs and finding fun stuff, though I promise that websites, videos and other junk will be kept to a minimum.

Fourth, why the hell not?