Creative Cloud

Scum

                I left at four-thirty-seven in the morning and I’d like to tell you that I didn’t. I’d like to tell you that I woke up and felt a sense of satisfaction or ecstasy; that I felt happy and secure and well-meaning, but I didn’t, and so, I left. Your apartment was a wreck, clothes were thrown all over the floor and dishes piled up in the sink; your dark hardwood floor was covered in dust and your bathroom mirror was smudged with finger prints and drawings traced in the steam from hot showers. You were tossing in turning in your sleep; you rolled from one side to the other and kept stretching your arms out and around me. It made me nervous, the way your twig-like arms would circle around my body; the un-cut and jagged keratin that laid at the end of each finger. Your greasy hair and un-washed face, the smell of liquor radiating off your breath and body, your ashy feet and dry skin, all signaling me to leave before you’d wake up and force me to stay.

                It reminded me of December; when I had invited you to a small Christmas party I was holding, and being short on funds I had gone out of my way to spend a dollar or two on you; to buy you something that you’d think is cute and well-meaning. Something small, just because I wanted to make sure you knew. Then you didn’t show, or respond, or say anything for the month while I was still in that hell of a town. Five months pass by and then you shoot off a text message acting like nothing’s changed; a little screen that flashes “Hey what’s up?” as if we’re old friends who were just too busy to catch up. It made me sick, the way I’d be stuck with you at four-thirty-seven in the morning; It sickened me the way I’d respond, the way I’d walk over to your apartment and let you run your hands over my body—let you talk to me like we were just old friends, lost in the day-to-day commotion. It sickened me the way you talked, the way you held on: the way this was, “my fault”; the way you were the one that was hurt—you were the savior and I was the devil.

                I’d like to tell you that I didn’t leave. I’d like to tell you that I felt remorse, but I didn’t. You were scum, you had been scum for some time now, and what you once were, wasn’t coming back.

Selected Scenes | Chicken

You danced around the kitchen to the tune of Hold Me Tight from the Across the Universe soundtrack while the chicken pieces turned brown in the pan. You had cut them up into little squares with such an ease; I had never been good around a kitchen knife, mine were much too dull and with my shaky hands I could never hold them proper. The cuts I made were tears in the breast, often ripping them apart with my own hands: chicken juices flying everywhere forcing you into a disinfectant spree, Lysoling the countertops till the whole place smelled of sterilization. 

There was this thing that you mother used to tell me during thanksgiving dinners and Christmases spent at your house. She used to tell me how she was surprised that you had ever managed to develop patience of any sort; she cooked everything on high and tried to force the heat into the pieces letting them grow black and send out clouds of thick smoke through the kitchen. I laughed, I was the same way; I set off the smoke alarm every time I cooked, I had never heard of such a thing as medium-high heat, or even medium. My chicken was always black and burnt and a horrible thing while yours was always simmering in the pan in a perfect sizzle, browning around the edges and forming the perfect ridges of perfect seasoning that rested on your tongue and produced only the smallest clouds of steam that would flow to your forehead and sprinkle it with tiny drops of perspiration. 

She said you had always been the patient type, you were prone to bits of solitude; a meditative man who focused on the introverted qualities of life. When we went to the DMV you stood in line and cracked jokes just loud enough so that the people ahead and behind us could hear; we’d pass the time by the laughs we could gather from the crowd, making it our day’s mission to send fits of laughter into the bellies of those leaning against the beige color walls and waiting through the endlessly long line and processes of bureaucratic red-tape that we had all grown to love. The chicken settles and you without missing a step shift on the balls of your feet from position to position, toss a small bit of oil in the pan and let the bell peppers and onions glide out of the bowl and into the pan, sizzling on contact. Each one is cut into perfect little pieces; you drop the bowl from your hand and slide back into your song, white cord tracing your frame against the beige-faux-wood background of the kitchen cabinets.  

When your mother got sick years ago you handled things with such a stoic precision; you balanced the stress of school and sickness in your hands, slicing each task up into perfect little cubes and letting them sizzle at the same time. You brought books to the hospital, studied in between doctor’s visits and long-train rides home. You spent nights awake, desk lamp on, pouring through bank statements and college loans; filling out scholarships and working on term papers. You cooked dinner every night, even though I offered to help; you laughed, told me that you’d “Rather not die of food poisoning” but agreed that I could pay for pizza and burgers, when the time came. And of course it did; we would fumble through greasy yellow wrappers and sauce-stained cardboard boxes as we made the trip back and forth to your mother’s hospital room and you devoured the vanilla-chocolate-swirl pudding cups that your mother couldn’t stand while she laid in bed and rattled on to me about the time you got into her closet and the two of you played dress up, pretending to be fashion models on a runway stage. “I think I knew by then.” she said and then burst out into fits of laughter that turned to dry coughs as I poured her a glass of water, “Extra ice.” She said.

The vegetables are cooked and you’re spreading them out on the tortillas with one swift motion while another small pot of your “famous” chili con queso bubbles off in the corner. “It’s simple,” you say over the music flooding in your ears “but trust me, you’ll love it.” Then when your mother got better and things started to ease up you managed to shift back into the care-free lifestyle without a problem. “Don’t worry about me,” she said “You’ve worried about me too much this past year, you’re still young: enjoy yourself.” So that first night, when you were sure she was fine, we went out into the city, to some little club and you forced me to the dance floor and we were both sweating and the lights were intense and yet the claustrophobia of the past year seemed to have faded away with the night. We ended up at IHOP at two am in the morning and as you scarfed down what seemed like a hundred strawberry cheesecake pancakes and complained about your figure, and how you needed to lose some weight, I just smiled and told you not to worry, that “You still managed to pull off those Superman underwear you seemed to love so much.” That night, for the first time in a year, you fell asleep and slept till two o’clock in the afternoon. When you woke up you apologized, I just laughed.

The oven beeps and you’ve transitioned from the endless dance, stripped yourself of the white cord and started shoveling food onto my plate, despite my protests that I’m able enough to serve myself. You wave me back down, wielding a spatula in your right hand and a scowl on your face that shoots back up into a smile as I back down and sit down at the table. You sit down and take a bite and a giant gulp from your soda, “Go on.” you say and I get mad at you for always rushing me to eat. I take a bite and rejoice: the chicken’s cooked perfect, just like always.

The sun’s spliced over the fading image of tangles of hair and legs in weeds and vines, thistles that whistle with the wind; worn out pairs of blue-jean-shorts perched up on sunburned flesh that lays bare and open to the fresh dew-drop nature of this great dreary Thursday morning. There’s clouds of gray and bursts of black and violent violet that wrap around the neck of insincerity and fall forward fast into the facade of the future and into the realm of possibility that marks the present. There’s full moon-clear-sky-parts of the overarching blue that sits and screams about the great insecurity that stems from the sprout-like nature of misinformation and odd juxtapositions; American novels stacked like soup cans around an eggshell white room with a window perched open to let in the drafty nature of another failing Wednesday filled with margin-notations, ink scribbled stories on the pages of long lost writers and poetasters milked of their once shimmering glory. And their’s something else, something lost, something fleeting and fabricating, fictionalized and sensationalized; there’s something glory-bond and grinning. There’s something so sincere…oh no, that’s not the word; some fool-hearty hero licking at his fur and wilted wounds. There’s something…so…so sun spliced. 

We looked through solace and serenity and found only the faded remains of our youth; which, while fragile, seemed so delicate underneath the calm amber glow of an East Texas sunset. You had always told me about your fascination with film, how life to you was a series of super-8 footage running continually in your mind; grainy jumping square boxes of footage that charted out our lives and all the areas worth remembering. You would square things up, position them where you thought they’d get the most light, or where they’d be most dramatically staged, as to better serve the purpose of what was rattling on inside your film-strip head. You were careful and meticulous, never wanting to move a hair out of place, always wishing for the right things to be said at the right times. But that was a younger day, a younger thought process, and a younger frame of mind. We knew—I knew, but perhaps you didn’t—that the world wasn’t so cut and dry; we weren’t film strips or long scripts of text; we were simply what we were and nothing more: our lives couldn’t be planned, we weren’t actors, and most of all, the world was not a stage.

You always looked back to youth with longing, but me, I never considered much of it. The We that had existed before, the nostalgic We was gone. I wanted more out of life than fragile glass in amber glows; I wanted to live. I wanted to breathe.

Selected Scenes | East Texas Stillness

“There is the phenomenal gap between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead. One, in which the person is forever living with the constant fear of the other, and the other, in which the person is forever longing for the fear of the first. There is no way of rectifying that, save years of meditation and belonging. We are, from the moment of birth, tossed into the world and forced to fight off the justification of death. We are left without a way of doing so, and in such, we spend our life time in regret, tirelessly seeking out a way of being happy.” He takes a sip of water from the glass resting on the outside balcony; the east Texas sun is just now finding its way deep into the confines of the mountain side. The two of them linger on in the coming darkness as the pressure of words builds up around the two of them.

“Would you agree?” The man on the right asks. The man on the left doesn’t want to answer, he already knows there’s no dissolving this argument; it’s the type of argument that’s created on the sole basis of venting frustration. He knows it’s no use fighting it; after all, you can’t put out a forest fire with a squirt gun. He keeps silent and watches the sunset, knowing that quiet times like this are so rare these days.

“I’ll take that as a no,” he says and then takes the last gulp of water from his glass before resting it back against the balcony “just as well, I’d imagine it’s not something worth thinking about—death that is—too melodramatic right?”

“Right,” The man on the left says “it’s not something I love to think about.”
“Nah,” The man on the right says “no one really does.”

The world of the light is replaced by the world of the dark, the coming glow from the fog light has reached its peak; the spectrum of the night is now in full force as the two of them reflect upon the rareness of such serene stillness in such troubling times.

                I’ve taken your name with me, past the depth of the wide wood stairs that stands in our old house, northwest of Houston—a thirty minute drive from the city. I’ve taken so many things from the old remains of that ashy brick house. I’ve taken the creek of the floors at night that would keep me awake and away from dreams, the orange glow of the neighbor’s flood light that pierced my ears, that small room with the big window that I used to share with my dear brother till we both became old enough to live alone—our brother having moved out, off to college for a while. I remember the first nights of sleep alone never seemed so great and vast and empty, and transposed into the present of years later , I remember a similar night in a twin-xl bed that sat in the corner of the room, up from the window. I remember the feeling of isolation and alienation; the utter blackness that would fill the room. I thanked the night for the orange glow of the flood lights across the way that would allow me, temporarily, to be transported back to the singular room, where I wrote on the white desk and tacked posters of places I’d never go but would always want to, on dark blue walls that have since changed to bubblegum blue.

                I’ve taken your name and the poison that it brings with me to the depths and the heights of the glorious earth. I’ve taken the memory of you and kept it close to my heart, never tattered, never blown away by the breeze of the morning or the lonely Saturdays or the nights that stretch on into infinity. I’ve taken your name as the trophy, the talisman that could keep me away from harm; that which could keep me alive and well, breathing and healthy—my endless mantra—my meditative word that keeps my mind from falling apart. The name which is endlessly sketched into my skin, etched into my blood and bone, weaved into my growing hair, and radiate through the iris of my dark-hickory eyes that sit and stair through the fabric of the universe into the endless worlds beyond. And, somewhere, within the realm of desire—within the fabric of the endless mirage of worlds and words—there is the lasting legacy, the faint trace of a name echoing through the endless void, that keeps me sane.

Series of Imperfections:

There’s a series of imperfections that form a perfect line on the left side of my body—just above, and in between, the scar near my ribcage where, when I was little, I was forced onto an operating table after catching an infection while I had chickenpox. Tiny imperfections that form a solid line—mutations during cell division that have formed freckles and black dots on the skin; accidents that have created a unique part of my human anatomy, that create the map of genetic identity that separates me from them out there.  Then there’s a whole mess of phenotypic things; cultural traits that have triggered responses in my gene flow, traits that have been triggered by diet or sleep patterns—natural elements inducing chemical and molecular changes that result in the phenotypic expression of a trait which in turn leads to my identity: the “the” that stands before you.

Mutations that have resulted, throughout the entirety of the human condition, in the absolute species that walks this earth today, homo sapien, merely one organism amongst many others: a million and one odds of natural selection working in such an accidental manner. Whole generations of conscious thought created just out of chance alone, out of the sheer accident that the world would increase in temperature and that, in turn, would result in the necessity of bipedal travel; giant dinosaurs who went extent due to catastrophic moments of chance. The whole of human history—the creation of the absolute person that you see reflected in the mirror: that line of imperfections that trails down the left side of your body, all a product of spontaneity; a dice roll in the grand scheme of the universal order. I marvel at the uncertainty of it all.

Author’s Note 12:

note this could be like number 13 really, I’ve kind of lost count by how many of these I’ve done.

So I’d like to make a statement now, and if you wouldn’t mind engaging me for just a little while, I think it might be worth your while.

The most obvious and harmful fallacy you can make is assuming the narrative voice, or the narrative usage of the first person singular in writing amounts a direct correlation with the authorial voice. Seriously, it’s probably the most obvious mistake people make when engaging in literary criticism or theory; just because the author paints his character as “I” doesn’t amount to much of anything aside the character that’s telling the story is the one engaging in the story. That’s pretty much it.

I say this because I’ve heard a lot of talk about the need to use a fiction tag when you’re writing to denote fiction and I find that all just ridiculous. Granted, I’ve probably tagged some of my work with fiction once or twice but that’s kind of a trap, generally I tag my work with fiction so the people that I know in real life who read my blog won’t get mad that I’m basically attacking them within my writing. That being said, all of my writing is generally fictitious unless it’s denoted by the tag, personal, or, spilled ink, or something like that. (Which of course I don’t like using either as the concept of spilled ink is sort of benign now considering that most writing is done with ballpoint pens and the only real people who use ink these days are visual artists, but that’s a rant for another day.) 

Truthfully I don’t think it’s possible to be completely non-fictitious in writing; the very usage of words to associate a meaning or derive an experience is fictitious in nature. You’re not truthfully portraying what happened at that moment in time, you’re just portraying you’re feelings towards that particular moment in time, which is skewed and constrained by the confines of memory. In such, it seems more prudent to me that the worlds we’re reliving aren’t worlds that are factual, but alternate realities or parallel dimensions of the lives we used to live, or thought we lived; the only true reality being that which is recorded in full on a video camera. 

But that’s all super constrained you know? Then there’s the whole thing that this, right here, isn’t fictitious which throws a hamper on my whole argument in some way. Of course, if you take what I’m really saying: that the personalized long-winded narratives of individuals seeks spiritual enlightenment aren’t factual in any sense of the word, as opposed to posts like this, which are, for the most part, engaging in an argument and offering no past narrative voice while affirming the direct correlation between the author and the narrative voice, via the title, then you can assume I’m not contradicting myself. Which helps me sleep at night.

Anyway, take for example the last piece I posted. There is no me presented in that piece, or rather, the I isn’t the me. It’s not the person talking to you right now. That I is someone else; he’s a character that’s been created that does all the talking for me. He’s the one that generally speaks when there’s an I narrative, he’s the one going through the experiences, and he’s the one who’s engaging in whatever he’s engaging in at the current moment. 

To the best of my knowledge I have never marveled at the moon at night. I know that’s what some of you would love to think; the idea of a spiritually enlightened individual engaging in this active meditation as he gets into a retrospective mindset is astounding. It’s a false vision though. Most of the time I’m watching American Dad on Netflix or Bob’s Burgers, or trying to find something on Netflix to watch. A few times I’m sitting in my bed and trying to get to sleep but I had way too much sugar and caffeine and my body won’t sit right and some nights I’m super itchy and it keeps my brain awake. I have yet to meet a night where I’ve marveled at the moon. Nor have I ever lived in an apartment that overlooks the hills; I’m actually fairly certain that an apartment of that caliber either doesn’t exist, or has a sky-high rent. I do engage in mid-morning lunches, which I put the time period around 11:35, when it’s too late for breakfast but still too early for lunch, that’s a mid-morning lunch to me and I have on occasion stubbed my toe on something, though not hardwood floor as I’m an expert installer of hardwood floor along with my father and in such I’ve never had to deal with warped floors. 

I am also almost certain, as depressing as this sounds, that I have never actually spent the night with a boy laying in the same bed as them. I think I have been in the same bed as a boy before, and I’ve laid next to various girls, although it’s always been a “we’re tired after hot-tubbing” sort of thing. My brother does currently live in apartment where if you go to the top of the building and look out over the ledge you can see in the distance a few scarce hills, as it’s located in Austin and if you get high enough there you’re bound to see a hill or too, and the whole fireplace bit is borrowed from the fact that my apartment next year has a fireplace.

The only reason I bring this up is because the message I’m trying to portray in pieces is lost when the assumption is that I’m simply engaging in folkloric story-telling. If you, as the reader, assume that I’m simply telling you the story of what happened to me a year or so ago, you get the notion that the importance of the piece is the nostalgia involved in it, which is false. However, if you believe the I narrator isn’t me, then you’re allowed to engage in your own dialogue on what exactly does the piece mean (though in this case, please don’t, that piece isn’t much I wrote it in like ten minutes, maybe less. It was just writing for the sake of writing, though I’m assured it has some obvious message), which is, after all, the reason why we read: to derive meaning from writing that helps to perpetuate our own life forward in a positive or understanding nature.

I’ve marveled at moons that hang delicate up in the sky. I’ve watched with great spite as the sun-bursts have trickled down into the mid-morning lunches we used to share and burnt my skin to a tan crisp. I’ve spent nights marveling at the radiance that is reflected off the black velvet of our bedroom sheets; nights when the window was open—the one that overlooked the hills, in that old apartment we used to own together. The same one that leaked during the winter, that got drafty and forced us into blankets and shawls. The one where you bruised your elbow on the fireplace, and where I stubbed my toe on the rough hardwood floor after getting up late at night to make sure you had turned the stove off. 

I remember looking out of the window that lay opposite our bed—while you were still sleeping—and thinking about all the great things that could come from isolation and futuristic thought. I remember looking and regretting the fresh burst of the sun that would turn your skin from soft white to precious tan. I hated the moments I could never control, but in someways, they hated me.  

The People We Wished We Were

• PROLOGUE:

                We were young when we stumbled upon the things that made us so human that it hurt. We were mindless teenagers living with a misconception of Carpe Diem. We believed we were invincible, incapable of destruction; we believed we had obtained immortality—we were Gods. We believed our problems were the worse they could ever get, we believed we were damaged and unfixable, we believed in nothing, we prayed to no one. We got drunk and stoned and every now and then we got just high enough to forget who we were. We considered ourselves rebels, lost in the chaotic Pollock-like web of the world and its associations. We were young when we stumbled upon the things that made us so human that it hurt; we grew up and grew apart, we severed our bonds with each other and drove across the state. We got so far away from each other. We were afraid of what we had become. We were afraid of what would become, if we ever reached the same conclusion.

I.

                Cynthia started back down the stretch of road, she didn’t know where she was going; she was headed in the direction of the crash—or where the crash had been. She didn’t know if there was even any trace of it left; it had been years since Steven had the accident there, years since that red car hit the curb and went tumbling through the air. She didn’t know what she would hope to find there, but she went anyway. She kept hoping to find something that she didn’t understand; a part of her expected that if she could just get going fast enough—if she could reach the speeds he was at that night—then maybe she could transcend this time. Maybe, she thought, she could go so fast that she could start going backwards. Maybe she could fix this whole thing. Maybe she could have stopped him. Maybe things would have been different.

                She puts her foot to the accelerator and watches as the speedometer climbs up and stays steady at ninety-three-miles-per-hour. She thinks if she could just get going, maybe she could understand. She misses the curb and then slows back down. It’s the fifteenth time this has happened. She can’t bring herself to do it, she can’t understand why she can’t. Why does the will to live supersede the will to live well? Wouldn’t it be better, she thinks, wouldn’t it everything be better if none of this had happened? Why would she want to live rather than live well? Why would anyone choose the former when given the chance at the latter, when all the latter requires is ninety-three-miles-per-hour. She turns the car around and goes back to the end of the road, turns around and stares down the stretch of road again. She puts her foot to the accelerator and watches as the speedometer climbs up.

II.

                Dylan left Texas after an extended fight with his boy-to-be. He tried as hard as he could to separate himself from the monotonous overtone of their lives; he tried to be comfortable, to draw expressionism from the day-to-day mechanics, but none came. He was always the eternal ramble, and after getting his studio art degree he was tired of the vague faces staring him down at dinner parties and family-get-togethers. He was tired of all the endless necessity, the well-to-do, the lush, the drunken stupors. He was tired of things lacking of substance, of mid-morning talks about kittens and Fleet Foxes. It drove him crazy. He left Texas and went straight to Wyoming, saying he had always had a desire to live somewhere with substance.

                He chased his craziness. From town to town he watched as it would compile in street corners and in closet-spaces. He watched as it would strangle around him during his sleep, how it would cover the faces of those that he used to know—those that he grew close to him fading from bright and rosy to black-smudged faces. They all became charcoal, burning away. He chased his craziness and never found a way out of the abstraction of faces and places. He shut himself away, painted naked, for hours on end, why the world went by his window. He watched the sunset and rise. He went fishing, swam in rivers, ate well, and loved. He chased the craziness that was his life, the things he used to know so well had now vanished from his mind. He had gotten rid of nostalgia, but still something nagged him, in the back of his brain it kept at him. His craziness near devoured him; the world was specks of black and red; globs of orange and turquoise that extended past the material plane. He called Laura once, crying and after an intense three hour conversation he picked himself up and moved back to Texas, where his craziness still lingered like a toxic cloud over the fresh forest of his mind.

III.

                Steven never emerged from the crash, not mentally at least. He had picked himself up; he had crawled out of the heap of broken glass and metal, bleeding and moaning in pain. He relived the day over in his head. He was admitted to a mental hospital for a short period following the accident; they were working on his break down, what had caused the accident in the first place. They wanted to get to the core of what made him lose it, what could have possibly made him come to pieces like that? The doctors were skeptical, they considered, at times, that he was simply making it up; they figured that he wanted attention, that he had been listening to one too many depressing albums. They weren’t buying the world-crushing-incident being sparked by a simple text-message.

                How could you pick yourself back up and start anew though? Steven asked himself that every day. He had saved the text message in his phone so that it could linger on in his mind. Nothing seemed to stay—not for long at least. It all seemed to fade; the memories of that day coming strong and then melting away before he could reach them. It was a parade of gloom and darkness melting in an array of vivid colors in his mind. He couldn’t hold on to any one thing for too long; his only starting point was the text message that started the whole thing. The only feeling he had left was the catalyst for his own destruction.

                He stayed in the hospital for almost a year and Cynthia visited him three times before it was clear that nothing was as it was. He walked out of the hospital after almost a year. He was vacant and somewhat helpless. He moved back in with his parents, for a brief stint of time, and then went back off to finish his college career. When he slept at night he saw the crash. His phone broke in May and since then he’d never been sure of what the text message said. He lived each day in constant quandary; he was never able to sleep right again, he would always wake up emerging from the crash. He woke up moaning in pain; his mind was melting, he couldn’t stop it.

IV.

                Laura finished off the year with a bang. We lived together for a period of time till she grew tired of the Austin weather and found a job in upper Maryland. When she left she asked if I wanted to go with her and I denied out of fear for the future. I had always wanted to visit Maryland; to live there would have been a dream. I declined the dream though and found myself a small bookstore in west Texas that was struggling to survive. I spent a period of time there, years it seems, while Laura went off on her own and found love in the arms of some head-strong idealist with a passion for law.

                The two of them married in January, the wedding was small but magnificent. They bought an apartment first and then a house in the suburbs. For years they dismissed child-bearing as an act of foolishness; for the old. Laura ended up pregnant when, by supposed mistake, the condom broke. I’ve always believed they were both too proud to admit their goals had changed. They had a bright-blue-eyed boy with curly blond hair. They named him Sam and he was born on February 14^th in the middle of a snow storm.

                Laura would wake up some nights with nothing more to say. She would call me and we’d both sit in silence as the nights went on. She would, before she left, ask me how I was doing, and I would tell her of the love I’d found and the love I’d lost. I would tell her of a great many things I thought, and the great many things I have failed at. I would tell her of the boys I’d come to know, the men I’d come to love, and the one that I had grown so close to. We would never speak a word about crashes; we respected the boundary that had grown between the two of us. We both knew the other’s ideology. We both understood. She would leave when Sam started to cry, or later in life when he would have a bad dream. She came to introduce me as Uncle Tyler and Sam would soon call me the same.

                He grew into a wonderful man.