Have You Seen This Boy?

Self Induced Insomnia

I’m just not writing these days. My mind is aclutter with useless thoughts. There’s nothing in there worth a tirade of late. There was a time I was filled with irk and ire, intellectual brimstone and fire, and I put it to good use. But lately I’m the cerebral equivalent of an old fortune cookie. I don’t taste very good, and you won’t find anything enlightening inside. So what’s happened? I have a pretty good idea. I’ve been drawn out of my hermitude. I used to have it pretty good; not many friends (that I talked to anyway), and a job that didn’t require conversation. But now… now I’m playing soccer again, which is good in that I’m playing soccer again, but bad in that I’m part of a social circle again, and have less time to do nothing but wonder, surmise, and study quantum physics. I also now have a job that flies in the face of all my hermitic beliefs. I answer a phone for a living, and spend all day every day talking to the kind of people I spent previous years attempting to avoid; the drabbest minds on the spectrum of smarts, the "<" to my ">", those hobbled by crippling inanity. At the end of the day I find myself brooding over the stupidity of my surroundings, instead of postulating, conjecturing, and studying quantum physics.

There was a time I did all of those things with the fervor of an Evangelist, and I’d like that time to return, so I’ve come up with a plan. The last time I found myself in this state it was a dire state indeed. I wasn’t sleeping much at all, drinking cappuccinos like Gatorade, and generally shuffling through my days like a blind deaf mute with his shoelaces tied together. I hit rock bottom. Eventually though, I had a re-awakening, a renaissance if you will, and my mind came racing back like a death proof car, smashing conventional wisdom to bits, and leaving gory, severed limns all over the information highway. My plan now is to plummet back to those depths. I need to hurl myself into the Loneliness Chasm with only my wits and a small pocket knife for protection. I need to immerse myself in my pain once more, to feed off it, and let it feed off me. Maybe a little water boarding of the brain is in order. Then, when I’m convinced I’m drowning, I’ll pick myself back up and write a novel, or maybe a magazine article, that will literaturely blow your minds.

River of Thought

My stream of thought is immense. It’s a vast flowing river. It has many tributaries, bringing with them knowledge from the Far Reaches. It is slow moving, but ever changing. It meanders to and fro, always searching for new sources, always threatening to burst its banks. My river of thought is warm and inviting, clear and refreshing. You can frolic at the water’s edge, or let yourself drift away on its gentle current and be whisked away to witness wonders beyond the scope of your Mind's Eye.

My river of thought is deep, its true depth as yet unrevealed. It is a seemingly endless torrent of contemplation, analysis, and introspection. Most dare not venture far from the surface, for the warmth and clarity that are at first so inviting soon fade to blackness and cold that pervade the soul. My river of thought is deep, much deeper than it might seem at first glance, and the depths are not to be plumbed without due care. There are things in the deep that are best left undisturbed.

Many streams are shallow. They may move quickly, but they don’t possess any significant depth. Many of these are the recipients of few tributaries, and meander very little. As a result, these streams of thought carry with them precious little nutrients. They don’t have the capacity to sustain an abundance of life. Most peter out in lakes or small ponds, never contributing to much more than the local tadpole population. Some are so lacking in substance that they run dry when things heat up, and many are so polluted and befouled by the course they take that they spread only evil thought, contaminating everything in their midst.

The final destination for my river of thought is unclear thus far. It could dry up like so many others, but I do not think this is its fate. Its thirst for knowledge is too great, and its sources too substantial for such an insignificant end. More likely it will soldier on, surviving drought and hardship, and eventually achieve that which all streams are meant to achieve; the Holy Grail of streams of thought, the Sea of Enlightenment.

Bare Knuckles

I get excited a lot. I dive right into things and do them whole assed, as if they were the very things I was meant to do. But then I get bored. Once I’ve done it a little I want to do a new thing. I need a new love, a new fancy, anything else to pique my interest. I throw it away (insert apology to every ex-girlfriend here), but it’s not because I don’t like it anymore. It’s because I love it. A long time ago, perhaps in a dream, I decided that I don’t deserve happiness, so I actively seek the things that make me happiest, and cut them out of my life. I’m a psychopath. I torture my victim. I promise him escape and then take it away. I serve him a feast, and spit in it right before his eyes. I love my captor. I trust him. I’ll do anything he asks, even though I know he hates me beyond reckoning. I’m the venomous snake who slithers through a room full of mice, jubilant that he’ll never have to hunt again, right before he bites his own tail. I’m the most self destructive person I know.

I have a new motto that I’m really excited about. It goes; “Never get excited about anything because you know you’ll only let yourself down.” I’m really going to try to stick by this one, because it’s the only motto that has ever rung so true. I do that. I get excited about lots of shit, and I always quit. I don’t do all of my favorite things; read, write, play drums, watch/play soccer. My life is like a steeplechase, except that every obstacle is a mirror that punches me in the face and tells me it hates me, and I’m always in last place. It’s a bare knuckle bout against my shadow that I have no intention of winning. I’m just waiting for myself to tap out.

Re-New Chapter

Have you ever been in the middle of a really good book, but for reasons unknown you just stop reading? You think about it occasionally, and say to yourself, “I really should start reading that book again,” but you don’t. It can take a long while to get back to reading again, and by then you’ve forgotten where the story was going. When that happens, I usually read the last chapter over, to refresh my memory, and remind myself of where I was. That’s sort of what the last year of my life has been like. I stopped moving forward, started stagnating. Eventually I forgot which way I was headed, so I skipped back a chapter to try to remember. The thing about re-reading a chapter though, is that nothing is new. There are no surprises, and the more you read, the more you realize you always knew what happens. I’ve been re-reading that chapter for some time, but I’m finally on the last page. I know how it ends, and now all I need to do is power through so I can begin a new chapter, and get on with this book. That’s always exciting.

Idle Hands

Lately, writing has taken a backseat to another of my strengths (and not a good backseat, like my proverbial driver, he’s been quite silent of late). The strength I refer to is the result of a life of complacency and/or malaise; slacking. Now, I’m not a slacker in the conventional sense, the Costanza sense. I’m a hard worker when moved. Give me a shovel and I’ll dig a tunnel to the moon if you want me to. My inner sloth however, bears its claws when it comes time to use my mind. Let’s say, for instance, that I have a blog, which I use to hone my writing skills, in hopes of one day penning a children’s book or some such thing. Let’s imagine I have loyal fans, all of whom wake up salivating each morning, thirsty for a healthy word shake in blog format. And let’s make pretend, just this once, that I try to always have something new there to nourish them. I spend most of my days trying to think of something sweet to write that night, so my fans can begin the following day with a nice warm word lump in their brain bellies. But that’s when my mind so often plays possum, or sloth, or whatever. Anyway, I’ve been a very lazy boy lately, in a literary sense.

I’d like to say I’m going to turn that back around again post haste, but let’s face it, I’d like to say a lot of things. “Professor Fingerbottom,” but that’s just fun to say. I have had a few ideas for blogs lately, like the one where I compare my life to that of Jesus (by the way, can anybody think of any reason that I may be a martyr?), but nothing stuck with me, other than this pesky Tinea. Maybe I’m out of ideas. Is the mine played out? Are there no gems left to dazzle my readers? I’ve done zombies, done birds, done gymnastics…what’s left? My mind is a blank canvas and I feel as though I’m out of brushes, or paint, or whatever. How can this be?

There is actually one reason I can think of for my lack of limn of late. I’ve pretty much become a Guitar Hero hero. I’m a Rock God on the small plastic button guitar. I can play Paranoid flawlessly behind my back, behind my head, pretty much behind any part of my body. I used my Linus to play Welcome to the Jungle, and even lit the guitar on fire to play Knights of Cydonia, but liquid plastic dripped onto my sack and I had to smother the fire with the soil from a house plant and dip my danglies in yoghurt for about two hours (hey Catfish, what would that be called?) I also suffered a rotator cuff injury trying to “drop the needle” mid-Mississippi Queen. It was an ugly incident. I’m just not as spry as I once was. I don’t have the cute, nimble fingers of a Kevin Shen, but I do pull shapes and make guitar faces like Mick Jagger (if Mick Jagger played Guitar Hero…or guitar) while I shred through Dragonforce’s Through the Fire and Flames, on medium difficulty. Perhaps I am spending a little too much time on this.

I guess I can justify all of it by saying that in spending my time playing Guitar Hero instead of doing something productive, I have, in effect, been physically training to be a writer by nimbling up my fingers for prolonged writing sessions, and virtuosic word sprints. Now I’ll be able to shred through a stream of consciousness odyssey with nary a worry about writer’s cramp. I’ve basically trained my way from amateur writer to Olympic writer, in that I’m still amateur, but that much more fit. And now that I’m back to “lean writing machine,” I can concentrate on the mental aspect, and try to shake that sloth off my back, or monkey, or whatever. First up: some quality hammock time with my newest writer’s reference, The Writer’s Journey – Mythic Structure for Writers. Stay tuned.

The Serpent and The Chimp Entertain

The Serpent and The Chimp woke up very excited. They had decided to live together, so they were moving The Chimp’s things to The Serpent’s house-barn in the country. They ate oatmeal, loaded all of The Chimp’s belongings onto The Serpent’s back, and began their long journey home. It was a very long journey. First they missed the bus, then they missed the ferry, and then they paid $3.65 for Mr. Noodles. It took the whole day to get home. They were both tired, hungry, and a little cranky when finally they arrived at the barn. All they wanted to do was slither into bed and say goodnight. But when The Serpent opened his door he found a very distressing scene. It seemed Mr. Moucifer had thrown a mouse party in The Serpent’s absence, and left little kernels of evidence all over the house. There was poop on the table, poop on the fridge, poop on the counter, and poop all over the gigantic pile of dirty dishes. There was poop on the bookshelf, poop on the couch, and The Chimp discovered Mr. Moucifer had even pooped while he slept in the bed. There was nothing that didn’t have poop on it. It was a very large party indeed. Realizing they couldn’t touch anything, and had nowhere to sleep, without getting all poopy, The Serpent and The Chimp set about cleaning up after the messy little mice.

“I set some live traps before I left” The Serpent told The Chimp. “Mr. Moucifer is just too clever. And I don’t like using death traps. It’s not very sporting.”

They continued cleaning long into the night, and even began to see humour in their situation. It was after all, The Chimp’s first night living in the barn. After a few hours The Serpent suggested they take a break. The couch was clean by then, so they had a place to relax. He went to his secret stash of homemade chocolates for a treat to cheer up The Chimp, only to find Mr. Moucifer had a sweet tooth. “Funk and Wagnall’s!” cried The Serpent, adding with a hiss, “I’ll kill the motherfather.”

The Serpent was especially upset about this. He’s a chocolate miser, and those special homemade chocolates can only be acquired once a year. It would be almost twelve months before he could get more. So he went to the cupboard and produced a rusty old blood stained guillotine, and smearing it with peanut butter said, “Let’s see our little friend outsmart this shall we?”

The next six nights were dark ones for the local rodent community. One soft, doe eyed cutie was killed each night. Bodies were piling up outside. The Serpent justified this killing spree with a twisted Darwinian logic.

“It’s survival of the fittest” he explained to a distraught The Chimp. “By pooping where we eat and sleep the mice were, in effect, attacking us, biologically, and we have a right to defend ourselves.” The Chimp was convinced, but The Serpent suspected it was just because she too loves chocolate. After a week of deaths word had gotten out. Mice stopped coming to the barn, and things began to go back to normal. The two lovers continued to scour and disinfect every cubic inch of their nest until it was almost safe to eat crumbs off the floor again, and as the weeks went by they even caught up on all the dirty, poopy laundry. Intimacy flourished once more, and they began acting as two honeymooners should; kissing, snuggling, and watching old episodes of Arrested Development, without a care in the world. At least not about rolling around in crumbly bits of feces.

Odd Socks

Yesterday Chimpit called me an odd sock, and I’m not sure what she meant by that. Did she mean I’m one of a kind, or was it something more sinister? Could she have been trying to tell me I’m obsolete? Perhaps I’m reading too much into it (although there was the time I was going to a party where everybody was dressing up as dairy products, and Chimpit told me to go as a Kraft single). Perhaps I’m jumping to conclusions because that very day I had a drawer cleanse. It was one of those times when you’re doing laundry and you notice you have a lot of odd socks. Way too many. I had just about as many odd socks as I had pairs, and they weren’t even similar. There were black ones, blue ones, grey ones, outgrew ones; socks with holes, socks without soles, socks as old as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Half my drawer was full of odd socks. I had to get rid of them, but instead of throwing out the whole lot, I kept a handful of the good ones. These were the cream of the odd sock crop. The ones that had obviously only been worn a few times before their twin went MIA. They were too good to toss, because who knows, one day that errant twin could show up at my drawer.

What is it about us that makes us keep things like that? Is it Faith? Hope? Do we cling to relics like odd socks in the hope that one day The Fates will conspire to show us our diligence was not unwarranted? Do we hope that one day all things odd will become like, and Balance will be restored? Maybe it’s an allegory for the rest of our lives. Maybe we symbolically lament for our lost socks, and always keep their room just the way it was when they left, so we don’t have to face the real issues. Maybe those odd socks represent the hauntings of lost loves, or missed opportunities. Whatever it is, I’m too much of a realist to believe that my wayward socks will return with horns blaring to restore the glory of my second drawer. Even so, I often allow the odd socks to linger on, forgotten, neglected, nothing more than moth fodder, as if some part of me actually does believe in Resurrection. Perhaps a small part of me is optimist after all…

You may have noticed that I mentioned Chimpit earlier. In an unexpected move she told her boss to stick it and came home to me. The left sock has returned to join the right and complete the pair. These two odd socks are like once more. Perhaps we’re proof that it’s possible. In that case maybe it isn’t foolishness to cling to our odd sock-like possessions...I wish I’d thought of that before I went to the dump. I could have devoted a separate drawer to my odd socks, a shrine if you will, or at the very least made an army of sock puppets.

A Royal Feast

Alright, I know what you’ve all been thinking; “I bet all that Runaway Typewriter has been doing is sitting around eating chimichangas and watching Daily Show re-runs.” Well you my friends, are wrong. You’re even wrong if you’ve been thinking, “I bet he’s been slacking, lying on the couch for at least 4 hours every night, letting the dishes pile up, and eating bags of chips, while a bushel of apples rots on top of his fridge.” And those of you who thought all I’ve been doing is eating family packs of meat and watching Avril Lavigne videos while I play with myself… well you’re actually not that far off. But I have not been totally unproductive in my literary hiatus. My experimentations with food have transcended the dairy section of the Nutrition Pyramid. The latest concoction mixes meat with sweet in a puddle of grease. It’s the dessert breakfast for dinner. Akin to most of my ideas, I’m not sure exactly where this one came from. Like the Minotaur, my best ideas often come charging from deep within the catacombs of my ethereal mind, tearing convention limb from limb. On the menu tonight:

Chocolate Eggs

Ingredients:

- One loaf of Honey Oat bread

- Spicy chorizo (that’s a six pack of sausages, for those of you who don’t speak Spanish)

- One dozen Jumbo Free Run eggs

- One 9.5 litre jug of glacier water

- One tin of powdered Gatorade

And the most important ingredient:

- One Hershey Milk Chocolate bar (no nuts, just pure milk chocolate)

Preparation:

-Cook chorizo in butter, on low heat so all the grease doesn’t splash about your kitchen. You’re going to need that grease.

-The chorizo will take some time, so while you wait, grate the chocolate. A standard cheese grater will do just fine. Make sure you grate a lot, like a whole bowl, because you’re going to pick at it. Trust me.

- When the chorizo is done (make sure it’s done. I’ve seen the way chorizo is just left out on a table in the sun in markets. It’s E-coli in fly fodder format), put them in the oven (again on low heat) to keep them warm while you…

-Cook the eggs in all that grease (this is a fried egg recipe. Scrambled eggs are for cooks with two left hands. Left handed people need not read on). Really let the egg whites crackle in there, but flip them quite early, because the other side needs to cook long enough to…

- Melt the chocolate all over the eggs. Melt it all over. Sprinkle so much chocolate on the eggs that it looks like you’re deep frying doody. This is important, because you’re going to want enough chocolate on the eggs to dip the chorizo in it. The spicy and the sweet waging war on your taste buds really ties the meal together.

- Now, just as you’re ready to take the eggs off the pan, before they’re over-cooked, remember that you never put any bread in the toaster. Panic. Pick the pan up off the element to stop the eggs from cooking, burn your hand, and slam it back down. Grab a wet dish towel and push it onto a cool element.

- Get some bread in the friggin toaster!!

- Pace around the kitchen cursing at the bread to toast faster.

- Butter the toast. Be sure to use enough butter that it won’t all soak in. There should be a wet sheen of butter on top of the toast, like an oil slick near a nature preserve.

- Angrily scoop your eggs onto the toast. Notice that the yolks are hard. Curse again.

- Scoop the chorizo on top. Do this all recklessly. An aesthetic breakfast is a mess, like my table desk. There should be oil splashed all around the outside of your plate, like fruit sauce on a French dessert.

- Find your biggest juice jug and fill it with Gatorade, mixed to taste. Drink from the jug. That’s fewer dishes to leave on the counter.

Now sit down and enjoy your dinner. If your heart hurts at any point, as if trying to say that you should eat a fruit or vegetable, it’s ok to grab a handful of raisins from the bag of trail mix on your table desk. A small handful. You’re going to need room for the rest of that chorizo.

If you’ve followed these directions carefully you’ve had yourself a hell of a meal. Lay down, put your feet up, and try not to think too much. All the grease in your system is going to make it difficult to grasp any complex concepts for a while. Just veg right out, watch a Daily Show re-run, or if you’re feeling ambitious, look up some Avril Lavigne videos on the internet. You deserve it.

Ode to a Phone (an iPoem)

Metallic pink, silver, bejeweled,
Like a spoiled young girl’s tutu.
Try to get me on the horn,
It would belt out White Unicorn.
Text messaging was a breeze,
Fingers and thumbs flying on the keys.
Brain Challenge and Centipede,
My workplace drive did they impede,
But now it’s gone without a trace,
It could have gotten anyplace.
Between seats of a yellow cab,
Or spirited away by Queen Mab.
I won’t though, let this chance be blown,
This excuse to upgrade to iPhone.

To Did List

Things I did on my 30^th birthday:

- Not go to work

- Go for a long walk

- Open the half carton of milk that’s been in my fridge for over a year

- Shoot fireworks at said milk

- Buy a lottery ticket

- Wipe out trying to do bike tricks at the skate park in the rain

- Ride my bike down a hill standing up, with no hands

- Sit on the couch alone, drinking beer, and eating sausage

- Have dinner with The Momma

- Turn in early

The Chasm II - The Will to Live

Travel weary I rest for a while. My blood runs cold, like too thick a milkshake being sucked through a straw. I can barely discern a half-hearted beating in my chest. There is a mere flicker of warmth, like a candle in the breeze, barely able to stay alight. I reach into my coat, to the inside pocket. Numb fingers fondle around until they find their prize. In the palm of my hand is a weather beaten photo. Faded as it is I can still make out her face. When I look upon it it re-ignites the flame in my heart, and a surge of warmth rushes through my veins. My cracked lips turn up in a smile, and my resolve grows strong again. With a twinkle in my eye I gaze at the picture for some time. I have long memorized every feature, when I close my eyes it is there, but each time I look upon it I am stunned anew by its perfect symmetry. I am emboldened. I cry out, “You will not take me, cursed chasm! I will not succumb!” One last look, then I carefully put the picture away. I am ready to continue my crossing. I will make the other side.

I plod on.