Three Shades of Awesome

Bitter black balls of brokenness,
Crunch cracking clapping.
The sound underfoot in a land called Sorrow.
It’s where I make my home tonight,

Under burnt out stars, and dried up rains.
Where nothing lives and nothing’s gained.
Where children died before their fathers,
And mothers learned to hate their daughters.
I’ll sleep for an hour here tonight,
If the gnashing of teeth quiets down a little.
I’d say there was hell fire,
But that might spark some passion.
Apathy is much more cold,
And despair is like a sunrise that never comes.
Lay here with me tonight,
Rest your head on sand paper pillows.
Oh my Lord if you might, stay with me broken.
Just, just for the night.
I’ve heard stories of you, I’ve told them as well.
Camped out on bitter broken blackness,
They’ve all escaped my memory.
I’ll tell you one name, the name I loved,
Before waking here.
I’ll tell you another and another,
Who abandoned me here.
I’ll tell you stories, Lord could I make you laugh?
Each one has a punch line, I deliver it golden every time.
But golden words glimmer like dust here,
Shimmer is dead under burnt out stars.
Lord why do the bright things die?
Lord why do these hands shake?
Just hold me tonight, where no one sleeps.
Eat with me in a land where hunger is never satisfied.
Touch me and know I’m not a whore.
Lord, tell me, please tell me I’m not a whore.
I just, I thought, wasn’t it fair to think?
It felt like every bit of beauty in my soul,
Well I thought I’d found the matching parts.
But the stars burnt out, and the grass died cold,
The rivers ran dry and the songs stopped playing.
Left on bitter black balls, I’m broken, so broken.
Love always leaves me, and hope is a fools game.
Faith is an awful certainty, because love always leaves me.
And that’s the crux,
Yes that’s my dirty secret.
Love always lost, and a fool forever chasing after.
This broken heart is breaking again,
Under the weight of lost names.
But scatter my heart to the wind,
Let it fall on fertile grounds.
Some day I pray let life rise and I’ll be something more.
I’ve run out of tears, this is the last one I’ll cry.
But Lord if you love me, make it wine.
The most true wine the world has known.
Let it dry on my cheek, and mark me yours.
And let no one believe I was alone here.
So rest with me here Lord, an hour or seven.
Then I’ll rise and run till the cracking clapping makes an ovation!
Until the sound splits the sky and the sun is a glorious day!
Least that’s the plan.
But stay with me Lord.
I have no one else tonight.

Playing with my robotic vacuum has been the highlight of my day.  I’m writing from a place of patheticness today.  Apparently OS X and I disagree on whether patheticness is a word or not.  Google agrees with me though… oh trusty Google… always there to tell me anything I want to know.

I haven’t showered today, I’ve barely been awake today.  I watched downloaded cartoons for a good portion of the evening.  I was supposed to get together with a friend who had to cancel, and spent the rest of the night unsuccessfully trying to find someone to just make me not feel so horribly lonely.  Apparently free pizza isn’t even enough to coax my friends out of hiding.  Most minutes of the day I feel so alone I’m on the verge of tears.  Like, just sitting here, I feel like just breaking down.

Somehow I’ve lost everything.  And everything I have seems wasted.  Everything I am is unwanted, and all my accomplishments are little more than dusty trophies on the shelf of my mind.

If you look at my life, I try and create order from chaos, I try and create stability from instability, and most of the time I do a pretty decent job.  All the while I wonder if anyone can see that in trying to create safe places for others, I’m just desperately trying to find a place that’s safe for me.  But these never last, I did it when I used to help with Sunday School, when I ran a message board site which was actually fairly successful, in college in dorm, the youth group at my old Church, Adullam, I’m always creating systems that work better, support structures for people, creating causes for others to believe in, giving people excuses to love each other a bit more than they’re comfortable with.

But it’s a fools game, cause it never lasts.  But I think this is my broken understanding of the Kingdom.  What is the Kingdom of God if not order from chaos, what is the Kingdom if not love from apathy?  Whatever I build in whatever situation, be it a group or a one on one relationship, people always tire, people always bore.  The fire burns and then runs out, and I’m left in sack cloth and ashes.

I mean look at things with Dan?  I was stupid, I let myself love someone, not just hope, but I honestly loved him.  I should have seen all the signs that he wasn’t ready for a relationship, and he wasn’t interested in one with me.  But we had one, of a sort.  I convinced myself it was OK to care for him, I allowed myself to love him.  Dan’s not the only person I’ve loved in my life, and I don’t mean just in a romantic sense.  I’ve loved a lot of people, Bryan, Danielle, Josh, Dan, Mike, Michael, Colin, Jeremy, Matt, Jacob, Rob, Mark, the list goes on and on and on, but so often, I have to hold back.  You can’t always go and buy an iPod for someone just because they don’t have a CD player (though she did enjoy the iPod and it’s a great story).  But every now and again I show people how much I care about them.  Every so often I give as much of myself as I truly crave to give, and some times, now and again I even believe people notice, and I make people happy.  Sometimes I even believe what I do matters.

But it doesn’t, and I’m alone.  I don’t know what it is about me that makes me so unable to be happy alone.  When I hear people talk about the communal nature of God, or the ancient hebrew understanding of community, I love those sermons.  Those are the ones that resonate with me, because those are the ones that tell me I’m not so crazy.  Those are the ones that tell me, I’m like God.  And now I sound like a delusional heretic.  But when I read the Bible, that’s when I feel like somebody else gets it.  Somebody else knows that it’s not just about getting stuff, or accomplishing things, it’s about loving people, taking care of them, loving the image of God in others.

But still I’m alone.  Is the Kingdom just a fool’s game?  I told Josh a while ago that I hoped he found someone, and then I was like, make sure you find someone who reminds you of God.  He liked that idea.

There isn’t a simple answer.  But I’ve got nothing left right now.  I’m falling apart and there isn’t anyone to catch the pieces.  People talk to me like I must be so strong because I’m confident when I talk to people, cause I don’t take crap from anyone.  But I do… I just take it from the people I love.  I constantly invite people to share their life with em, I constantly ask people to let me know them a bit better.  And it’s all a fool’s joke.  Righteousness is an exercise in futility against wave after wave of pride, and apathy, and fear.

And so I wait, in the glow of a laptop screen, unwashed in ashes.  The most exciting thing I did today was play with my robotic vacuum.  Because that’s all that I could give today.

Seems the air in my apt is drier now, causing me to wake up in the middle of the night scratching like crazy at my face and scalp.  Worst part is I don’t know if it’s dry air, the weather, stress, or a horrible triple threat of all three.

In general it seems my life has gone nuts the last few days, I’ve been flipping out at people left right and centre, my room mate’s been come the biggest asshole on the planet lately, (perfect timing) work has been less than calm, and of course there’s that nagging reminder, “You never meant a damn to him you sap.”  That keeps coming to mind every three seconds.  The one calming aspect is I discovered a fun new game for my iPhone…

To be perfectly honest the last few days it’s really felt like there’s nothing good in my life.  I haven’t spent time with friends, I haven’t done anything of substance, I’ve barely even run into a nice person.  And if I did run into a nice person I probably wanted to start swearing at them for some random reason…

Oh and did I mention people keep getting engaged?  I’ve had like two people at work, one friend from college, some random guy I don’t even talk to that much, and it’s like seriously people, I’m happy for you, but more than anything I’m still depressed about the fact that the one person I’ve really let myself believe might have felt the same way, recently ripped my heart out, spat down my neck and said have a nice day!  So really I just can’t be that happy for you!

So I’m listening to Levi Kreis’s “I don’t want to be your friend” off his Bygones album.  Not a particularly amazing song but it really fits his I feel toward a certain someone.  I’m supposed to go through my blog and remove his name, part of me just finds that to be too much effort to make someone happy who at least this second I never wanna talk to again.  I mean in a few minutes that might change… but right now, the whole thing just seems like a surreal dream that reminds me yet again how much regardless of how much I love people, they’re all infuriating.

We had a talk yesterday morning, I woke up earlier and was tired, I set my alarm too early for Church, ironically I didn’t go.  I was just miserable, and something about going and being around those people, I didn’t want to be happy, and I love my Church, but yesterday I just wanted to lay in bed alone.

At around 9ish, I phoned him up, and we talked, I was like, “I’m mad at you.”  I don’t think he was happy that I woke him up.  I was kind of glad he wasn’t happy… is that wrong?  I don’t care.

We talked, and things were almost sorted out, almost fine, I probably would have gone on for a good long while before something else came up.  And then he said something that, I’d never considered, and it hurt like hell.  Apparently despite talking for hours on the phone, despite having deep involved conversations about everything under the sun, despite me knowing more about him than just about anyone else, when he thinks of me, that’s not what he thinks about, he thinks of how we met.  Granted we started out pretty much more on a physical level than any sort of emotional level, but you know you’d be amazed how many people don’t know that they’re the result of their parents having a crazy wild passionate woops.  But apparently that’s what I am to him, just, the echo of one night.  Do you know what it’s like for the world’s best gay church boy to hear that?

I mean, I never thought anyone would think about me like that period, let alone that someone would fixate on that and never be able to move past it.  Here I am head over heels for this guy who I like on so many levels, the least of which was physical (not that there was anything at all to complain about there) smiling every time he talks, gushing like an idiot over possibilities… and all along I had no idea all I was to him was a nagging reminder of something he’s ashamed of.

Part of me should be flattered I guess.  I remember joking with Colin when we were still friends that I’d love for someone to just treat me like a piece of meat… granted I guess I didn’t plan on having that be someone who was like, my dream guy.

At the same time, I guess it’s a good thing to hear, if things are never gonna work out that’s about the perfect thing to tell me to have me get over someone.  ”Hey I think you’re great, but basically when I think of you I don’t really think of any sort of appreciation of your person hood, I just think of a bad choice I made… sorry bout that.” Like, wow.  Actually it was a similar statement from Josh, not along the same lines, but just something that showed that who I was was really of secondary concern in his mind to something else.  And it’s like… yah.

I’m not really sure what to do now.  Or if to do anything.  Part of me really never wants to talk to him again.  Would it be good for him to have a friend to keep talking to?  Sure, but I’d rather be appreciated if that’s the case… and that’s not really in the cards.  Do I still care about him?  Yup.  Do I still want the best for him?  Sure.  Do I want to know that anyone else makes him happy?  Nope.  Do I want to hear about how he’s able to have a friendship with someone else that I crave?  Nope.  Do I want to find out when he’s finally dating someone how happy he is?  I think I’d sooner stick my face in a blender.

So for now, I’ll just put sad music on repeat.

You’re pretty when you smile,
Or, handsome.
I never quite got that one right.
But it’s more than that, much more.
It’s the sound of your smile,
The canter of your thoughts,
The wind that stops to hear your footsteps.

All the kind words on my walls,
They glow bright in the twilight,
And all the cruel words underfoot,
They wash away like laws under the tide.
When you smile.

I take your picture everywhere with me,
And it haunts me when we don’t speak.
Forever begging the question,
Have you kissed the sunrise?
And have you thought to try?

Cherry wood pulpits, and fiery reproaches,
like ashes into questions, seal them away in shoe boxes.
I want nothing more than to hold a hand within a hand,
And wait for morning to break the skyline.

The sound of laughter and sighs,
Says something deeper than the lines,
I’m something more than a whore,
And there’s nothing of a monster in you.

This is every poem I’ve written,
Three strands upon strand upon strand.
You’re pretty when you smile,
More handsome than all my sunsets.
Could I call you dapper?

So smile for me.
And we’ll wait for morning.

So I find myself in a strange land. Filled with strange things I’ve yet to fully come to grasp. This land it seems is a place called contentment. It’s not nearly as comfortable or certain. But the sun shines brighter here, the breeze is perhaps a little warm or a little chilly it depends on your tastes really, but it will never be quite right.

Back where I used to be from, I’d heard of this land called contentment. I’d heard all sorts of eonderius tales, there were rivers that flowed with sweet waters, meaning and purpose could be picked off a tree log figs. Yet as I rest in this new country as an alien things seem a bit different.

Here there are no houses. Simply tents. Or shacks, there are a few holes that people have dug out of the earth. Or shelters made from leaves and branches, and tarps you can buy on the corner for 5.99, a rather reasonable price. But there are no houses. The nights never get cold enough to remind you you’re alone as you sleep. Though somehow the couples always feel a chill so they cuddle closer.

The cell phones are all turned to vibrate, and a Lady GaGa ring tone has never been heard. Stress is considered offensive by those native to this land, and those that profess to follow in it’s ways are branded heritics.

There is something odd about this land, where police officers put down their radar guns, where employers follow labour laws. In this place report cards are read and children are understood. People don’t call wrong numbers, and there isn’t a soccer mom with a chip on her shoulder as far as the eye can see.

Such a strange place to live, if only for a short time. But I find myself here, and as I drink waters that somehow taste just a tad sweeter. My smile is bright, and I will sleep well tonight.

So today my Samsung Story Station arrived… Or SSS as I like to call it… actually I named it Samuel, continuing in naming things that pop up on my desktop after Biblical people. Samuel is a 1.5 Terabyte hard drive, that’s 1500 gigabytes. Of course a true terabyte is actually 10024 gigabytes and a gigabyte is actually 10024 megabytes but hard drive makers have actually been using 1000 instead of 1024… so if you use the right measurements I have something like a 1.36 TB drive… of course as of Snow Leopard Apple has your mother and mine in mind as they’ve decided to follow the lead of the Harddrive manufacturers when reporting HD space and what not, so Disk Utility shows it as a proud 1.5 TB drive… interestingly enough iTunes doesn’t follow the new convention so my 32 gig iPhone still reports as a 29 gig iPhone…

My new drive shall replace my old 320 gig HD named Elijah, who will be taken up in a chariot of fire to the house of my mother… no I’m not using feminine imagery for God (that’s stupid, only lesbians and Rob do that!) I mean I’m taking it to my mom’s to hook up to her new mini so that in the unlikely event that the new stock drive fails as badly as the stupid western digital drive that I gave her for her old one (bigger than her old one which still worked mind you… yah that old mini ran for 5 years and the only part that ever failed was the new HD I put in it… I feel like a tool and it’s all Western Digital’s fault!) then Time Machine will have a lovely backup of everything on her machine!

Now you might ask, what on earth could I use a 1 TB let alone 1.5 TB hard drive for? The answer is simple… I need the biggest E-penis. All my friends have newer computers… well except Dion he’s still plugging along on a really old PowerBook. Granted my machine is still better all around… since it doesn’t run Windows. But Adam’s MacBook has 4 gigs of RAM… which he bought off me when I found out the max my machine can handle is 2 gigs… (I felt so cheap and used!) so now I have the biggest hard drive of anyone I know… and so that of course makes me a better person.

Ultimately even if I don’t have 1TB of stuff to put on it, it’ll still be useful. See OS X has a great feature called Time Machine that keeps a running backup of your machine. But it doesn’t just keep a backup of what your hard drive currently looks like. Cause after all you might delete a file this year and realize next year that holy crap you need that file. Time Machine if you have a big enough HD will not have needed to delete that file. Besides the 1.5 TB version was only 20 bucks more than the 1 TB version… and if I’m gonna shell out a bunch of money might as well get the biggest available!

Oh, and for anyone who’s decided to Google the Samsung Story Station (which doesn’t look as bad as the pictures in person) the dial on the front is, I kid you not, for the soft light blue LED indicator on the underbelly of the device. Yes that’s right, there’s a dial on the front of it for how bright you want your silly light blue indicating glow to be… but of course in keeping with the silly Korean way of designing things, not only is this indicator a lovely shade of baby blue which kind of clashes with the dark red STORY on the front, it’s also not a standard blue or green LED like every other electronic device out there… and of course you can dim or brighten the LED… but not turn it right off. But really when you get 1.5 TB for 120 bucks… can you really complain? Besides I’ll probably hide it behind the 7 inch digital picture frame I also bought from Newegg.ca… oh Newegg you fill my life with so many electronic impulse buys that I didn’t quite need.

I’ve spent all day avoiding drawing. Even more than I normally spend days avoiding drawing when I actually have something to draw. No now I’ve got a whole bunch of things to draw, and I’m terrified… you see, they want me to… draw by hand. Not just draw by hand, that I can deal with, I mean I use my hand with my tablet, but they want me to use a pencil! A PENCIL! That would like… use graphite… on paper… not just digital. Like, if you make a mistake it’s forever etched into the surface of the page. I mean sure you can erase, you can go over it darker, you can do all kinds of things to help people not notice you made a mistake… but it’s there forever staring at you, laughing at you, reminding you of your imperfect talent!

Not that I ever really thought I had perfect talent… but I like being the one who reminds me of that, not my artwork! So I came home and went to bed, then I phoned Dan, then I did stuff on the internet, then I had a shower, then I decided to blog. So you see, I’m doing any and everything to avoid just sitting down and drawing. I’m also convinced my desk isn’t clean enough to draw, so I need to clean my desk before I can draw. Which will hopefully then mean I find that paper work from Hydro so I can actually pay my hydro bill… UGH… I just don’t want to draw, I don’t want to do something I’m not that good at, and I certainly don’t want to have drawing with the medium that I’m not that good at be what keeps me from a career in what I want to do.

The nice thing is I ran into someone I know who’s apparently in the second year of graphic arts and I’m gonna ask him if he might be able to look over my portfolio and give me some tips, and critiques and hopefully not make me cry. Sigh, I’m gonna go out some time soon to a real art supplies store and get some better supplies. I spent 50 bucks at staples today… though most of that was on the electric sharpener I had to buy… I haven’t sharpened a pencil in… SOOOO LONG! Siigh… someone hold me.

I find myself caught between seconds. It feels like every step I take is almost a step into an entirely different life. I feel like I’m walking on the very edge of something profound, and it’s somewhat maddening.

I’ve never been loved. Or at least, not loved, loved. I mean people love me. I have a mother and father who care deeply about me, often in the most disturbing and confusing ways, but their love is genuine even if sometimes expressed with steam mops for Christmas, and the inability to understand the finer points of Bittorrent. And I have friends, who love and cherish me, even if that’s often expressed with middle fingers, and, “That’s what he said.” jokes. Beyond that I’ve always had the strangest sense of God’s love. But, I’ve never been, loved. I’ve never been in a consensual relationship of equal peers who share a bond that words cheapen, and where attempts to define madden. But today, and for a full week now, I’ve been skimming the edge of something wonderfully confounding.

I’m at my best when I trick myself into believing I’m loved. Something about it makes me walk taller, speak sweetly bolder, wax poetic, and smile. I always smile. I’ve never gotten to the point of actually knowing I was loved. I imagine it might cause earth quakes, horse men, and lesbian bikers to all collide with force enough to get my room mate to clean the kitchen. But even the glimmer of that white picket fence around preferably a downtown loft, or perhaps maybe we’d live somewhere in Corydon? It’s enough to push me to levels that suggest Adam’s right when he says pot would level me out.

I find myself thinking, thinking of whimsical reflections, somehow the world just isn’t nearly as dark when I have someone to make me smile. The sun shines brighter, and the moon, the moon is a reminder of lights yet to come. When I think of him I smile, somehow when we talk all those unkind words that clung to the bottom of my shoes stop sticking, and I think that life might be good.

It’s terrifying that one person could influence me so earth shakingly. Last night I prayed, honestly prayed one of the most honest prayers I’ve prayed since leaving Adullam and they haven’t been numerous. I asked God not to take him away. I had a pit in my stomach, that maybe I’m not supposed to be happy. And I was so scared that if I let myself find God in my relationship with someone else, that He’d take him away. The notion of holiness as corban stings in the back of my mind. The idea haunts me that some day soon I’ll be quoting “What father would give His son a snake when he asked for bread.” into night air that doesn’t seem to listen.

Every single part of me knows that being happy because of someone else isn’t a way to stay happy. I know that everyone tends to leave me once I fix them. Every time I patch up the wounds of the broken, they find other unbroken people to spend time with. I’m so scared to fix another broken wing only to be left waiting for the flood waters to recede. Relationships seem so temporary, and I’ve been taught time and time again that I can’t trust anyone to care the next day. Friends move on, lovers find new lovers.

But that brightness. The sound of a text message, or the feeling of my blankets curled around me as I hear his voice ramble about things too mundane for concern. The smile creeps in, and I believe, if only on a fools faith that I make him a fraction as happy as he makes me. Green grass flickers in the minds eye, of picnics, and dinner parties, and walks to nowhere in particular. When I make him laugh, the blankets wrap just a little bit tighter. I think God might be glad that I’m happy. I might be allowed to enjoy this.

So tonight I wait, skimming the edge of my longings, and loving every happy second.