[what u mean]

i’ve said so many things i don’t mean.

i’ve typed so many things i don’t mean.

i hear no substance.

i see no substance.

most things are empty of meaning.

you just have to look.

and see.

and observe.

we’re all empty.

but i can’t find the bottom

we're so fickle.

but i see the bottom of the tipple.

it’s so empty.

i thought maybe with age,

i thought maybe with space.

i thought maybe with people.

but i have never really needed them.

and we just keep talking with no substance.

keep typing with no substance.

maybe it’s time.

or maybe i’m just stuck in my ways.

water

if you take a second to think about it,
water has many different personalities.

water will burn you, unapologetically, if it is boiled;
but it can be so silently cold that it chills your every bone.

water can flow freely, through underground pipers or a river bend;
but it can be stagnant, become sickly.

water can be clear, completely transparent, a country night’s sky;
or it can be clouded and dark, all depending on where you find it.

water is life-giving, it can save you if you are dying of thirst;
but it can be only a poison, if not properly treated before taking a sip.

water is strong enough to destroy entire cities in a single day;
but it is gentle and caring enough to bring life to spring flowers.

it can keep a ship afloat for it’s entire lifetime;
but it slips through your fingers in an instant.

if you ask water a thousand contextual questions,
you will still be searching for the right impression.

chapter one

The halls of Nexus Middle School were empty. That’s the way Roscoe wished they always were, minus the yellowed tile that couldn't have been cleaned in weeks. The sound of the soles beneath his immaculate new Jordan sneakers clicking the floor in rhythm to whatever what blasting through his headphones was subtle, but comforting. His friends called him a "sneakerhead" but he preferred the formal "shoe connoisseur". Those pulsating steps which marked his alone time on his path to the nurse’s office was what made his trips to the room of countless cleaners mixed with the aroma of teenage trepidation worth his time.

It was December or -- more importantly for the boy -- flu season. During the cold months, the affects of his asthma always heightened. Going to the nurse's office to get his blood sugar tested had become habitual, so the asthma check ups were just a bonus during these months. The boy tapped down the hallway to Katy Perry’s new album that a blonde named Eva in his history class told him to listen to. He looked down to his phone, refreshed his Twitter feed, then looked past his phone, stopped, licked his index finger and wiped a scuff off of the side of his shoe. 

That girl doesn’t even talk to me, he thought. She didn’t even tell me to listen to this. She told me and 396 of her other followers that she liked one song. I don’t even think I like this. Not at all. I just want her to think I do so she will maybe engage in conversation with me.

He turned the corner, which meant he was in front of the nurse’s office. He didn’t see anyone in the hallway today, which he found a bit curious, since he hadn’t seen anyone on Tuesday or Wednesday either. He was trying to figure out some scientific formula for when he saw people in the halls on his way to the nurse’s office, but that operation was falling through the cracks. He was okay with that, although it constantly had him divvying up a new formula that was bound to fail. The last someone he saw in the hall was Alene, whom also, coincidentally, was the same girl that the boy had been texting for weeks on end. 

I could have at least looked up and smiled or said something — anything, the boy thought to himself as he walked into a frigid wall of Lysol and Germ-X and pulled one of his earbuds out. It was the same thing he had thought for the past three days since a hall-encounter that was even more awkward than the others. He had replayed that diminutive — nearly nonexistent — social rendezvous hundreds of times and didn’t know what he would do differently. But he kept texting her anyways, and she kept texting him, too. Fundamentally, it’s all the same, he thought. It’s just communication. I could have a relationship over text, hypothetically.

As the nurse pricked his finger for the 146th time this year and ran through the rest of his  routine that had become smooth as butter, he internally bounced around this idea of a relationship with Alene. He couldn’t determine if there was any relationship at all, which was bizarre, because they “talked” every day. He hadn’t interacted with her face-to-face, other than looking at the side of her freckled profile a few lunch tables away, which he couldn’t help himself from doing every now and again. 

He didn’t think she ever noticed, but he did wonder if she ever glanced at him the way he did her. If she did, he never noticed, which disappointed him. In his head he analogized himself to a dial up internet connection that exerted everything it had to load a single meaningless video from WorldStarHipHop until the connection timed out. He was trying so hard, but nothing was showing up; coming up short., over and over again, day after day.

But he felt something when he saw her, which meant all of those feelings had been built up digitally over weeks of sending circumstantial jokes that she would “haha” or “lol” at, which felt silly. Until she would come back with something two or three times as weird as whatever he had spewed out before. She was odd sometimes, but also wise in a way that Roscoe could never be. 

He loved that part of Alene. The type of love you feel for a slice of pizza or a colorful bird that lands on a frail winter branch and is bound to fly away any second for no particular reason. That kind of love is close to sincere love, but also nowhere near it. 

Love is a broad word, he thought.

He seemed to believe that he had surmised the entirety of Alene’s personality digitally. Wirelessly, Roscoe didn’t see how the two could be any more compatible. But there was a disconnect when their digital lives ld them to their possible encounters real life. He liked to think it was because of him, but she seemed just as broken as he was. Their relationship — whatever it had come to — was stuck in some sort of a digital funk. He definitely liked her; oddly enough, he thought he more than liked her. But he didn’t know if she more than liked him, or even like him at all. She never said. So Roscoe didn’t say anything, either. 

He thought a lot, and he wasn’t ashamed of his thoughts. He thought about what he should say, or send, whether she thought about him, whether he was being pretentious with this entire situation. He wondered if this was normal, he wondered if what he felt was real because it was online. He mostly wondered why he was built the way that he was. He wondered if whatever Alene saw through text messages and Twitter posts was really him. 

Nevertheless, he was content to enjoy yet another asthma-stricken winter; this time with small digital victories in back-and-forth messages with someone that he could confide himself in. He wanted to think it was himself, and not himself as a playwright, writing his life’s script for an audience of one. 

He put his dangling headphone back in and walked back to his class. “Roar” was his favorite song on the album, he decided after looking at his queue. That’s what he would tell Eva next class, or whenever the opportunity came. He wasn’t anywhere close to important to her, so opportunities would be scarce. But he also didn’t actually like any of it. Suddenly when he had found something that he would say to Eva, he knew why he was listening to this noise in the first place. He just needed to practice picking his head up and saying something — anything.

an important quote

I was watching a quick TED talk today on living life for a resumé or for a eulogy. Towards the end of the talk, the speaker gave us this quote, from Reinhold Neibuhr in his 1952 book The Irony of American History.

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, could be accomplish alone; therefore, we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our own standpoint; therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.

Sometimes we get swept up into trying to create every moment so that it is perfect, to write every relationship fit for a Hollywood premier, and to accomplish everything at once. But it's important to remember that a it is just one moment, one person, and every step on the road to accomplishment that should be cherished. Realize that it's the journey we're on -- the journey that we have been on -- that pushes us forward and teaches us new lessons about ourselves and the people around us. The past teaches us hope, faith, love, and forgiveness though trial and error of the journey that we are all on.

excerpt from untitled project

He snapped his fingers, the lights clicked off. He cleared out a place for his glasses on his nightstand, then flipped his radio to any station that was playing music. Tunes were the only thing that allowed him to wade past the transcendental half-sleep phase and into an actual sleep.

The boy settled in on his back and brought the covers up. A few minutes passed and he had sunk into that phase of half-awareness. The clock struck 11. The news guy on the radio said so.

He always wanted a grandfather clock so he could know what time it was on the hour. He knew someone who had one, but they weren't really friends. He just went to his house once and liked his clock. The news guy seemed more tolerable, anyway. His parents would have bought him one if he ever would have asked for one.

More shootings. A stabbing. Two house fires. A car crash. People were dying. He shook that descending phase and laid awake. Staring up at the ceiling.

"ROBIN!" he screamed, but not in fear. He didn't hear anything. He wasn't okay with waiting. "R O B I N!"

She came running across the hall. She was wearing those curls that she was in every night. She smelled of lotion which reminded him of honeysuckles. It was nice, but the boy knew she got it on sale. The boy suddenly realized how much he enjoyed that aroma.

"What the hell took you so long?" Roscoe said, annoyed.

"I was in bed, swee--"

Roscoe cut her off.

"People are dying," Roscoe exclaimed, as stoic as a teenager can be. The news segment was over but he gazed into the dim blue light of the alarm clock. 11:10.

"It's almost 11:11. Shut up."

Robin stood in the doorway. She looked disappointed, but she had to be there. Roscoe liked to think she signed some sort of contract saying she would wait for his 11:11 wishes. Roscoe broke the silence when the clock flipped to 11:12.

"There's something in the corner," Roscoe pointed towards his computer. "Go look."

Robin waded though his dirty t-shirts and pants with belts still in the loops -- he never took them out of his pair jeans unless he needed to. He usually just bought a new belt.

Robin couldn't see much, but "ROSCOE'S WETSUIT" bounced about the screen in silver block letters which helped light his desk. Roscoe set that as his screensaver because it was usually the default screensaver: what old people used. Old people were interesting to him. He had never even worn a wetsuit. Sometimes he laughed when he pictured his grandma in a wetsuit.

"There's nothing there," she said.

Roscoe lifted his head.

"Wha?"

"There is nothing over here."

"You aren't looking in the right places," he said as he buried his face back into his pillows. "Go look in the other corners. Then look again."

She looked around the room, trekking through the dirty laundry and CDs that laid across the floor.  Her bare foot stepped on something that wasn't the floor. She wished she could take the step back right when she laid her foot down. There was a loud squeak; the sound water can make when it makes contact with naked human skin in the right context. She brushed it off, then she started leaving.

"You need to clean your room. Good ni--"

"You need to clean my room," Roscoe said, words muffled by his pillows. "Look. Again."

"I have looked everywhere, Roscoe! You're too old for this. I can't be here for you forever," she snapped, and she kept walking out.

She looked back before she shut the door. She started to say something, but decided to leave it cracked instead.

When she went back to her room, Roscoe got up and closed the door. His door had to be closed. He couldn't let anyone in without at least the closure of knowing their voice.

Doors

As human beings, how do we resolve the inherited intentions between wanting to full realize our complete potential -- as individuals who stand with dignity -- and also resist the omnipotent tug of conformity, which lays a fair bed for each of our lives? How do we avoid succumbing to a zombified trance state of blindly following others in a herd, as sheep, or as hamsters running in hamster wheels?

The way we resolve that, I think, is by taking that plunge. Answer that call for individuality. Realize that there is no map to our lives. We do not need a leader. Become aware that reality is just a word, and we are not supposed to use it without quotation marks around it. We are all free to create our own reality.

But this is only ascertainable when we are bold enough to decondition the thinking of the human collective. As that collective, we all see open or closed doors. That's not the problem to freeing ourselves from the bounds of conformity. The problem is that we see doors.

There seems to be this linguistic tunnel that is symbolic of the framework that constructs our reality; a matrix pulled in front of our eyes, blinding each of us from ecstatic visions of what might be behind those walls. We are only larvae that have not yet transcended to butterflies yet.

Nietzsche said that those who are seen dancing are called insane by those who cannot hear the music. Jack Kerouac says, "the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars." At some point, to live, you have to separate yourself from the herd, without a leader. Stop seeing doors, and just walk.

- edits made 5/23/14 at

the deep web: thoughts on human communication

Deborah Tannen was right. “Sex, Lies, and Conversation” was truth. In a majority of human contact and communication, women channel and involve themselves more than men do. That said, there’s more than the somewhat watered down version of Tannen’s analysis of conversation.

Women can hold eye contact with one another -- even if an extra exertion is required – without it feeling like an obligatory eye contact. The eye-to-eye exposure between women comes naturally; effortlessly. When I observed woman-to-woman conversation, it seamlessly flowed from one topic to another without bumps or bruises. Even if two women had not known each other for long, the conversation the two held made it seem as if the women had known each other for ages. They didn’t seem to struggle to find a medium of which to hold a conversation on, while also maintaining eye contact with no buckles, awkward shifting or glancing eye movement.

Meanwhile, the opposite can be said of most men. Of course, “most” comes as a key word. Men, too, can hold a seamless conversation while maintaining eye-contact. However, there are two main differences in the ways that man-to-man and woman-to-woman conversation takes place. Firstly, men don’t revert to eye contact to begin a conversation; they avoid it at all costs. Men would rather look at their shuffling feet, past their partner in conversation, or at a screen than to make eye contact with the other man. Without eye contact, men manage to carry on a more thorough conversation, though it still tends not to be as fluid as a woman’s conversation. Secondly, men who are not acquainted with each other struggle to find conversation starters, while women filter through topics with ease until hitting on the point of conversation, regardless of each other’s status with the other. Men’s conformability to a conversation relies more heavily on the relationship the men share than do woman’s conversations. With a long-term friendship between men, conversation is better understood and more free-flowing; nearly as seamless as the conversation of women.

These differences in communication root to, as Tannen said, a malfunction in conversation. But in the new age, there’s a new reason for the lack of and failure of conversation, at least of the verbal variety: smart phones. An entire family sits on their iPhones without spewing a single word but to explain something that amused them on their tiny glowing screen. There’s another boy – a techie-type – sitting in the corner, alone, headphones in, enthralled by the screen that lays in his hand, but ignoring the physical world which everyone else seems to identify some sort of futility in. He’s communicating. He could be communicating with a friend, or maybe in a group message. Maybe he just updated his Facebook to his hundreds or friends and family. He could have just broadcasted a tweet to millions of people. But his conversation has been replaced by communication via the web, that seems much more fulfilling than anything that lies in front of him in the real world. The quiet family in the booth is doing the same. And the young couple at the bar, too; chatting, phones in hands. Though no communicating conversation, they are communicating with the web.

These devices have changed communication – for better or for worse, depending on how you look at it – and now there is no turning back, only evolving and learning how to communicate the right way. Conversation in the digital age – in this age – has been, and still is, a learning process. We are the guinea pigs for this new form of communication, and we’re all making it up as we go. Together. Our human collective is unconscious, but it builds a database for the way that our new world in the digital age will communicate and possibly even live someday in the near future. We are all testing ideas fearlessly and without violence: testing forms of communication that have never been tested before. Here we are free from limit. And here we can decide what kind of kid we what to be.

            The one who sits quietly and eats his meal, alone, headphones in, enthralled by the screen in front of him and turning a cold cheek to the physical world. Or the one who does not communicate in this new world; one who, rather, sits back and does not have en opinion until one is forced to him. Or we can be the boy who buzzes through the new world, setting innovative rules for others to break later, trading information, conversing, testing ideas without fear or violence.

            Regardless, we move forward, past the time of any other communication issues to this decision. This decision that each of us makes is important. It is up to us to decide what kind of kid we want to be. This moment in time is vital to our future. This decision is what builds our human collective: currently unconscious. Our deep web is at stake. Be aware.