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[Jun. 27th, 2006|07:34 am] |
there are fears we inherit, fears we discover, and fears we invent. if you ask a person why he is afraid of dogs it is nine times out of ten because of a formative experience when their parents cautioned them away from the neighbor's retriever. that is an inherited fear.
he was afraid of the big city, but it was an inherited fear. he was not scared by the organism as a whole, but by the many pitfalls in this hugely complicated machine. elevators couldn't be trusted and claustrophobic subway tunnels spun his internal compass. when his parents took him to see the enormous suspended whale at the natural history museum, they kept him close at all times. in this way he was taught to be afraid.
he did not know that the city was the most functionally sound creation in all of human history. it was a self-correcting system. in truth it was safer than twenty disneylands in a row. yes, you could get lost in such a huge, crowded place. what no one ever told him was that the things it was crowded with were people and places themselves, and if people couldn't help him get where he meant to go, places were all around him.
it would eventually happen that he'd have to contend with the city and his mostly learned fear of it. that is where life and culture happened and part of him ached to join it. at times he felt betrayed. he would ask his parents why they had not encouraged him to explore. they didn't see the necessity of being involved in a thing like that. he knew they had meant for him to be only the best kind of afraid. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 23rd, 2006|11:51 pm] |
he was constantly spouting philosophies that made sense at the moment. they might be the bits of dreams left upon waking or simply thoughts that had grown dramatically out of proportion. in either case he would hardly ever commit to any of them, though he'd expound upon them to anyone near enough to listen. in this way he filled the world with meaning, layer upon layer, until everything bulged at the seams with the value of its potential.
he was a lonely nihilist, but a few things needed self-evident value. writing was elevated to a near-mystical status in his mind and though he doubted his faculty for it, he never dared question its necessity.
another thing was taking showers. they settled his thoughts down like shaking a bucket of stones. bicycling was important to him in the reverse capacity, to help get the loom spinning. bicycling was a lonely thing to do, but he was never afraid.
these are insubstantial things, though. you can only take so many showers, after all, and inclement weather dampens the brakes on any road bicycle. the rest of his universe was peopled with frustration, fear, and boredom. frustration was anger that couldn't come out. it was like something unpleasant under his nails. it was deep, constant, and he could not articulate a word of it. the thought alone made him squirm.
fear was wonderful to him. it was his way of connecting the complicated internal systems of a boy to the complicated external systems of the universe. this was because he was a rootless organism and so needed some way to make sense of things. the easiest way to make sense of things is to avoid them and he spent a lot of life hiding.
when he hid from life, the boredom came, and that was almost the end of him. hiding from life is the worst thing you can do. life will never find you. you can keep eating and sleeping, that's your business, but the fact is that life is for the living and not just the metabolizing. life is not an angel with a trumpet that wakes you up when you've been in bed too long. it's a whole symphony of things and it's constantly parading right outside your window, but you're the one that has to pull the bedsheets down from your face and look. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 22nd, 2006|03:19 pm] |
he sat very still with his knees bent like a mantis's. he closed his eyes, but it only made their mouths' sounds clearer in his mind. it was the sound of two, distinctly, he heard that, not one mouthsound but the stereo of interiors: lips and tongues wet against the hidden sides of cheeks.
he averted his eyes politely, concentrated on the patterns in the carpet. if he let his eyes unfocus the greens and red fibers rippled and crawled. his eyes ached so he returned to staring at nothing while the girls kissed exploratively on his bed. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 19th, 2006|02:26 am] |
he was born a claustrophobic. the only thing that frightened him more than subway trains or elevators was the physical nature of his self. he hated seeing how lanky he was, so he kept his too-long arms crossed and his legs folded. he was terrified at the sight of this whole body that he had to operate. if he put it out of mind long enough, his fear would snap back, only harder, and he would shudder and his heart would pound.
he felt trapped in his body, especially when there was so much more going on behind his eyes where his soul lived. his body seemed to trail awkwardly behind his thoughts like the string on a lofty kite. there was no pride or shame, only a strong sense of disattachment to this bone marionette. |
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