I am a prisoner of consciousness. I think too much. I think myself into a shame-filled bubble of remorse and self-loathing.
I am a prisoner of consciousness. I am too self-aware, all too painfully self-aware. If ignorance is bliss, then awareness is a prison. It's a prison of my own making, and so far I can loose the latch to my gate only when I'm on some alcohol bender. And even that's not a guarantee that I'll be free if only for a minute.
I am a prisoner of consciousness. The rub is that it's a prison of my own making, and in truth I made nothing. I am a prisoner on the envelope of neuronal activity. I'm cresting a wave of brain electricity, but it's persistent stormy cloud of neuronal awareness that is particular to my situation.
I am a prisoner of consciousness. I fight demons that are already impaled on my knife's point. You can't wound a wound. You can't cut a cut. You can remove the life from something that never existed.
I'm a prisoner of consciousness. It's a grammatical prison. It begins with the frame--prisoner. It situates this in an activity--thinking. And it seals the deal with the subjective affirmation--I am.
I am not a prisoner of consciousness, and I know why the caged bird sings. The mind is a prison. The thinking substance cannot transcend the thing which it is. The prison is just one manifestation of the thinking substance coming into self awareness. Self-awareness is the prison, the condition for self-discipline. It's time to go back to counting tiles, anything to take my mind of my situation.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Thursday, July 21, 2011
"Fake love to me."
My friend Thomas shares a birthday with me. His is the day before mine. So we shared the celebration together this year. Since we celebrated on his birthdate, he called the shots and we went where he decided. He invited the group, and we all moved together across the city.
Among the crowd of friends was a woman that he used to date. I made a few overtures at her that night. And we danced. I was blacked out for some of this, but I do remember with vivid clarity the end of the night. She drove me home from the bar.
Except we didn't go home.
We drove across the river into Fairmount City and ended up at the Cahokia Mounds historic site. The ride was quiet. No one said a word. I had this creeping suspicion that she wanted me to have sex with her there. I grew anxious, not in anticipation of the event but fearing the inevitable problem--my fear and my impotence and my fear of my impotence.
When we arrived she ducked into some weeds to take a leak. I wandered around in the dark for a minute at the base of Monk's mound--the largest earthen structure on the complex and the largest earthen mound structure in the world. We began the trek up to the top. Upon arriving at the top I found a place to take a leak and we found a bench. Immediately she pulled her pants and underwear down to her ankles and laid on the concrete bench set at the plateau of Monk's Mound. Following through, I pulled my pants down. Knowing what would come of the situation I made the best of it. I went down on her. After a few minutes she faked an orgasm and she encouraged me to cum on her tits. Frozen in fear but mechanically performing what I could do intimately I felt nothing. I did what I could.
We pulled our pants up and walked back down the mound to the car. I briefly explained that I never can get an erection the first time. It's a truth, but in it is a lie. Sometimes, I cannot get hard the second time, or the third time. Encountering an issue I didn't know existed until I first encountered it I was able to overcome it in subsequent encounters. But, since then, the problem has been compounded by my own thinking.
She said something briefly to me on the ride back to St. Louis. She coached me on getting over that fear. The conversation ended. I asked her for her phone number. Instead of saying "no," she told me that she had a boyfriend.
"I understand," I replied.
I did actually. This was a throw-away evening. I was just the lucky recipient of a coincidence of factors--a sexually frustrated woman attending a birthday celebration for her former lover in the midst of his new love interest. She was happy to find a measure of retaliation in me, so she let me flirt and dance with her. She took me to the mound not out of love or interest but out of a need to conclude the evening and to conclude the play of forces between her and her ex.
We arrived at Thomas' house where I parked my car. I noted that he wasn't home yet. I noticed that my phone was dead, and so were my chances at getting her number anyway. But that night is seared in memory and serves as a painful reminder of something that I've yet to enjoy--meaningless, momentary sex with acquaintances.
Liz said as much to me after enjoying this with a fellow Peace Corpse volunteer. I could read the frustration in her story. After all I did one morning to please her I couldn't do that one thing to please her--put my erect penis inside her and eventually cum.
My lack of an erection is wish fulfillment. I intend to be a disappointment, not only to me but to others. My current employment status has a bittersweet component to it that I sip like a fine scotch. Emotional pain is my vice, and so I bathe in it every chance I get. I overthink situations anyway, and so I end up feeling alienated from the scene as it plays out before me. At times, when I'm very close to a woman I become so distant. I want to hide, and so I retreat to the darkest and inner most recesses of myself. I become virtually unresponsive physically, emotionally, and mentally. I enter a state of catatonia.
So here's to Liz and to Eleanor: "Fake love to me." That's all you're ever going to get from me.
Among the crowd of friends was a woman that he used to date. I made a few overtures at her that night. And we danced. I was blacked out for some of this, but I do remember with vivid clarity the end of the night. She drove me home from the bar.
Except we didn't go home.
We drove across the river into Fairmount City and ended up at the Cahokia Mounds historic site. The ride was quiet. No one said a word. I had this creeping suspicion that she wanted me to have sex with her there. I grew anxious, not in anticipation of the event but fearing the inevitable problem--my fear and my impotence and my fear of my impotence.
When we arrived she ducked into some weeds to take a leak. I wandered around in the dark for a minute at the base of Monk's mound--the largest earthen structure on the complex and the largest earthen mound structure in the world. We began the trek up to the top. Upon arriving at the top I found a place to take a leak and we found a bench. Immediately she pulled her pants and underwear down to her ankles and laid on the concrete bench set at the plateau of Monk's Mound. Following through, I pulled my pants down. Knowing what would come of the situation I made the best of it. I went down on her. After a few minutes she faked an orgasm and she encouraged me to cum on her tits. Frozen in fear but mechanically performing what I could do intimately I felt nothing. I did what I could.
We pulled our pants up and walked back down the mound to the car. I briefly explained that I never can get an erection the first time. It's a truth, but in it is a lie. Sometimes, I cannot get hard the second time, or the third time. Encountering an issue I didn't know existed until I first encountered it I was able to overcome it in subsequent encounters. But, since then, the problem has been compounded by my own thinking.
She said something briefly to me on the ride back to St. Louis. She coached me on getting over that fear. The conversation ended. I asked her for her phone number. Instead of saying "no," she told me that she had a boyfriend.
"I understand," I replied.
I did actually. This was a throw-away evening. I was just the lucky recipient of a coincidence of factors--a sexually frustrated woman attending a birthday celebration for her former lover in the midst of his new love interest. She was happy to find a measure of retaliation in me, so she let me flirt and dance with her. She took me to the mound not out of love or interest but out of a need to conclude the evening and to conclude the play of forces between her and her ex.
We arrived at Thomas' house where I parked my car. I noted that he wasn't home yet. I noticed that my phone was dead, and so were my chances at getting her number anyway. But that night is seared in memory and serves as a painful reminder of something that I've yet to enjoy--meaningless, momentary sex with acquaintances.
Liz said as much to me after enjoying this with a fellow Peace Corpse volunteer. I could read the frustration in her story. After all I did one morning to please her I couldn't do that one thing to please her--put my erect penis inside her and eventually cum.
My lack of an erection is wish fulfillment. I intend to be a disappointment, not only to me but to others. My current employment status has a bittersweet component to it that I sip like a fine scotch. Emotional pain is my vice, and so I bathe in it every chance I get. I overthink situations anyway, and so I end up feeling alienated from the scene as it plays out before me. At times, when I'm very close to a woman I become so distant. I want to hide, and so I retreat to the darkest and inner most recesses of myself. I become virtually unresponsive physically, emotionally, and mentally. I enter a state of catatonia.
So here's to Liz and to Eleanor: "Fake love to me." That's all you're ever going to get from me.
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Facebook commodifies weak social ties.
"Hi, you're in my biology lab. What are you doing Friday?"
College does one of those interesting things that only modern institutions do. It brings together a great number of men and women in their prime. Walking the halls and grounds of a university in between classes is a cavalcade of beauty and opportunity. One can suspect that each face has a future, a potential financial success.
Before was the city, a convergence point of people from far and wide. It was a measure of the degraded institutions of family and community that would have placed strictures on intimate contact.
"Hi, you work at the Triangle Shirt Factory. Are you going to the dance Friday?"
Then came modern travel: the steamboat and the steam engine became a recursive social algorithm for those weak social ties.
"Hi, I saw you on the westbound 4:19. Seeing anyone?"
Something intoxicating occurs when I go to a hotel. There among the halls I sense an opportunity to meet and have completely meaningless encounters with others. The freedom from significance is all that I seek. And removed from the strictures of social ties I can be a nobody, a perfect nobody.
Freed from my social body I shed the social anxieties and pathologies of self, which they have created and which become the behavioral automata that I self-medicate in order to mitigate.
Facebook is merely a communication appliance that extends this weak tie. I use something as simple as Google to seek out the names of those missed opportunities. It's a wishing well for the information age. Carving one's name on a tree along an oft-traversed path is the graffiti of one's discontent.
"Hi, you're in my biology lab. What are you doing Friday?"
College does one of those interesting things that only modern institutions do. It brings together a great number of men and women in their prime. Walking the halls and grounds of a university in between classes is a cavalcade of beauty and opportunity. One can suspect that each face has a future, a potential financial success.
Before was the city, a convergence point of people from far and wide. It was a measure of the degraded institutions of family and community that would have placed strictures on intimate contact.
"Hi, you work at the Triangle Shirt Factory. Are you going to the dance Friday?"
Then came modern travel: the steamboat and the steam engine became a recursive social algorithm for those weak social ties.
"Hi, I saw you on the westbound 4:19. Seeing anyone?"
Something intoxicating occurs when I go to a hotel. There among the halls I sense an opportunity to meet and have completely meaningless encounters with others. The freedom from significance is all that I seek. And removed from the strictures of social ties I can be a nobody, a perfect nobody.
Freed from my social body I shed the social anxieties and pathologies of self, which they have created and which become the behavioral automata that I self-medicate in order to mitigate.
Facebook is merely a communication appliance that extends this weak tie. I use something as simple as Google to seek out the names of those missed opportunities. It's a wishing well for the information age. Carving one's name on a tree along an oft-traversed path is the graffiti of one's discontent.
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