Mick

Jorgen was right - you never wake up expecting to dig a grave for your best friend.
Everything that's happened so far this week is really making me re-evaluate the way in which I prioritize my life. I don't think it's right. I don't understand why I'm going to school, why I have a job, why I wake up and spend so much time getting ready in the morning...what the hell am I doing?
There's only one thing that matters in life - connections. Not only connections with people, but connections with all things - animals, nature, everything. Between Jorgen, Mick, and myself, we developed a connection on such a deep level- one that I didn't even know existed until then. People can laugh and say that he was just a cat, but I saw him as my equal, if not more than anything I could ever hope to be. The year and a half of my life with Mick in it was the closest thing to heaven I'll ever get. It's unfortunate and unfair that from now on he has to live on through me, because I can't represent him the same way he could have represented himself.
I keep thinking, "When am I going to feel good again? When will things be back to normal?" But I realize now that I don't want things to be the way they were before. I want to live knowing that I don't care how attractive I appear, how much money I make, how jealous I feel, or how well I can fake it by putting on a smile for the sake of customer service. It's all bull shit. I need to embrace the people/animals/things I feel REAL connections with.
Nothing else matters.
I'll always love and miss you Mick. You'll always be my best friend. There won't be a day that passes that I won't wish you were here with me. I'm so sorry.

Half-Drunken Thoughts of Hawaii

Thinking about Hawaii. REmemBERing the flight in. Honolulu to Hilo. That looooooooooooooooooooooong stretch of asphalt seeming intrusive among all the green. Emerald, Jade, Olive, Lime, Fern, Forest, Moss, and ocean reflecting clouds as far as my eye could see. Walking off the plane; heavy, sweaty, thick heat. A stench you can't quite place. The airport so informal. The Islander attitude built every bit of its structure. On our way into town it started to rain, and it smelled different than rain I'd smelled before.
The difference between that place and this one is life. Walking into any front yard there is like walking into a jungle. In Utah and its surrounding areas, the buildings and the people are filled with useless knowledge. None of us are really alive. At all. Most of us walk around like zombies and the buildings around us reflect those same feelings. Plants are only planted specifically where they are wanted and anything else is weeded out. But I suppose its the same with people. There it just seemed natural, everything was filled with life. It's easy.
All of these thoughts can be condensed into a greater thought...








...I need to go back.

"I want to look at the flower and appreciate the beauty of a flower, for instance. Somebody else might say, you can look at the flower and become the flower, isn't that even better? But I further would love it on the cruise if I could look at the flower, appreciate the beauty of the flower and then have the flower appreciate the beauty of me."

The Ground Beneath My Feet

Certain illnesses sweep across large communities, and then we learn that no such illnesses ever existed. Men and women recover memories of having been sexually abused as children. Whoosh, no they don't, their parents are reinstated as the most loving and laudable people you could imagine. Genocide occurs; no it doesn't. Nuclear waste contaminates large swathes of entire continents, and we all learn words like 'half-life.' But in a flash all the contamination has gone, the sheep aren't ticking, you can happily eat your lamb chops.

The maps are wrong. Frontiers snake across disputed territory, bending and cracking. A road no longer goes where it went yesterday. A lake vanishes. Mountains rise and fall. Well-known books acquire different endings. Color bursts out of black and white movies. Art is a hoax. Style is substance. The dead are embarrassing. There are no dead.

You're a sports fan but the rules are different every time you watch. You've got a job. No you don't. That woman powdered the President's johnson. In her dreams--she's a celebrated fantasist. She's to die for. She's a slut. [not necessarily irreconcilable truths; merely different views of a single circumstance] You don't have cancer. April Fools, yes you do. That good man in Nigeria is a murderer. The murderer in Algeria is a good man. That psycho killer is an American patriot. That American psycho is a patriot killer. And is that Pol Pot dying in the Angkoran jungle, or merely Nol Not?

These things are bad for you; sex, high-rise buildings, chocolate, lack of exercise, dictatorship, racism. No. Celibacy damages the brain, high-rise buildings bring us closer to god, tests show that a bar of chocolate a day significantly improves children's academic performance, exercise kills, tyranny is just a part of our culture so I'll thank you to keep your cultural-imperialist ideas off my fucking fiefdom, and as for racism, let's not get all preachy about this, it's better out in the open than under some grubby carpet. That extremist is a moderate. That universal right is culturally specific. This circumcised woman is culturally happy. That Aboriginal whistlecockery is culturally barbaric. Pictures don't lie. This image has been faked. Free the press. Ban nosy journalists. The novel is dead. Honor is dead. God is dead. Ugh, they're all alive. That star is rising. No, she's falling. You were on time. No, you were late. East is West. Up is down. Yes is no. In is out. Lies are truth. Two and two makes five. And all is for the best, in this best of all possible worlds.

Half/Asleep Hallucinations Far Away From Home.

Like any _____, recurring ______ have invited many interpretations. This appears to be a series of events in my head:

I'm laying in bed. My eyes are closed though for some reason I can't sleep. I'm thinking too much I guess. A drip-drip-dripping on my head startles me and I open my eyes. Noises are leaking in through my ceiling. I sit up.
Spiders. They're crawling in through every crack and corner on the opposite side of the room. They're white, so white I can't see them. I can only see their shadows running and stopping. They're everywhere.
Being disgusted I turn and put my feet off the side of my bed. I step down and the carpet is wet. It squishes down and comes out between my toes. Wet with what? I don't know.
I sit back down and look at the door. I put my arm out to reach the door handle but it's already moving. Twisting, like someone is coming in slowly. A few seconds later it bursts open, slamming into the wall. It's dark and the light from my room barely penetrates outside. All I see is the silhouette of something moving. It's far away, but coming fast. It comes in the room and overtakes me, washes over me, and it's thick. I start swimming though through the muck of it all, I can't tell where I'm going. On my way out long strings of plants wrap around my legs, I twist and pull and they snap. I keep swimming and it seems to take forever.
At that moment I decide to give up. It leaks into my mouth and I happily breath it in. But I don't get the chance. Not a second later I'm at the top, I'm out of it, coughing and spitting, letting it spill out of me. There are green hills in front of me. I stagger out and start running towards them. It's not long until I'm panting and gasping for air.
I can feel it, right behind me, right at my ankles. I don't need to turn around. I can't slow down. I run right in between two of the hills and it doesn't follow. I can still hear it. I catch my breath and sit down. It's leaked into my eyes and I rub them to get it out. Everything goes fuzzy and I get a head rush.
Right in front of me, on the back of this hill, there's a tunnel. Not big. I lean in, pucker my mouth like I'm going to whistle, and blow into it. I'm echoed by a wind 100 times stronger. It blows through my hair and drags tears out the corner of my eyes. This tunnel is just big enough for me to crawl into, so I do. I crawl until it's dark enough, then I pull my knees up to my chest and close my eyes. I fall asleep.
What wakes me up is the drip-drip-dripping on my head. The noise. I open my eyes. I'm laying in bed.

School

As I'm writing this there's a girl sitting across from me, staring at me. She's got an open book she's not reading resting in her lap, and a pen in her hand that looks like it's frozen to the page. The only things moving are her eyes, burning through my shoes as I took them off and tossed them next to my bag. Hah. I keep glancing at her through my hair, or carefully twisting my neck up to pop it and scanning my eyes past her, but the second I see her still staring at me I look back at this paper and start writing again. She has a bag and a purse. I don't understand that. I've never had that much to carry around, or maybe I just keep it all in one bag because the chances of me losing my things is all too high. She's wearing heavy eye make up, which isn't helping me feel any more comfortable to have her looking at me. Blonde hair...blue shirt...wait. She just coughed. The girl sitting behind her has boyishly short brown hair. Her shoulders are hunched so the shoulders of that nice button up shirt she's wearing are bunching up around the green vest she has on over top of that. She's wearing dangly earrings that dance back and forth even when she's not moving. I wonder how she's doing that. She's completely consumed by a book, and she's got a smile permanently plastered on her face. She keeps looking over like she's talking to someone, but there's no one sitting anywhere near her. The first girl I mentioned is staring at someone else now. I knew the second she looked away from me because I instantly stopped feeling sick. She's let her mouth hang open for the last few minutes. She hasn't shut it even to swallow. Another girl is tapping her animal covered moccassins to a beat I can't pick up on. Hah. I wonder if these people know how easily they can be preserved on a piece of paper. I wonder if they'd do anything differently. There's a symphony of swishing pants, squeaky shoes, the coffee machine downstairs, and little coughs every now and then. There's an overweight girl in a lime green shirt walking around behind me. Her steps are different from the others, her short legs take even shorter steps that are too heavy and loud. The girl with the dangly earrings is still smiling, but looking out the window and shaking her head. I can't see the mountains across the lake. I live by a lake and I only really look at it a handful of times a year. Maybe that's because it's full of almost as much shit as most of the people around here, so why do I look at them all the time? I can smell the BLT they just called out downstairs. It's disgusting. Woody Guthrie got a hereditary brain disease that eventually killed him. He was only 55 when he died. The disease caused his body to move uncontrollably and it ended up getting so bad that he couldn't even hold his guitar. It's strange to realize that everything will die. I'd like to see a post-apocalyptic world, where all that's left all are a bunch of billboards and twisted scraps of metal lining every horizon. Cars will be immobile homes for cats that aren't called "strays" anymore, but instead are called wild.