Sometimes there's just nothing to be done....

Author’s disclaimer: As this project continues to unfold, I hope to traverse many genres and styles, emotions and ideas. Please don’t think that all the words that hit the page are indicative of any particular thing. Just as a sad song can be created from joy and the world from a nutshell that its words, may this be a spot of many styles of entertainment; in my mind its more about what you may take away rather than my motivation behind any particular work. If you would like to know more about anything of anything you may direct all inquires to ijb@gmail.com.

Sometimes there’s just nothing to be done. This morning came and went in the same way that it seems to these days, all too short and not as intended. Despite the shopping cart blocking the door and the intermittent sun showers providing the water sucked by the consumption of the night before, the ruts in road seem to grow deeper as I trudged to my destination.
A reality that didn’t seem quite right, but what was amiss? Where was the intention for the day, where was the motivation? The period of day was still the same, the sun still shot its photons at nearly the speed of light, I still breathed the same air as ever before. Why didn’t it smell as sweet?

It’s tough to feel numb in the midst of celebration; everything the same, yet through a pall of anesthetic. The thoughts, the beliefs, the drives and desires, all the same yet without the pulse. Zombie inertia. Nothing else but the crash of years of misdirection, bubbling up from the sickly depths, provides a reminder of my position on this sphere. And not even that, all I can show myself is that something doesn’t feel, but isn’t the absence of feeling a feeling in itself? It’s all so confusing, it makes you wonder just how we get about at all? What, with our habits and our compulsions, our autopilot honed by years of overexposure to the same media that provides traction to the notion that we can substitute ire for ambivalence, where to be then?

Perhaps there is no real; perhaps we can only tap into our ideas. When I see you, what do I see? What may seem to be a set of traits, are they not defined in relation to where I’ve been? I wonder how far we can manage to extend our empathy. Say I feel you, what do I feel? Do I feel the hours you played catch in the park, or the latchkey days learning to smoke Kamel Reds from the bedroom window, trying over and over until you collapse, dizzy from the rush of the pleasure the R.J Reynolds happens to sell. Is this your life, or is it mine?

I seem to remember the days that the distinction used to be clear. You and I and the rest of the world shared the same mission, everyone digging from the many sides of the same great mountain, joined by the idea that we thrive because it is all that we know. And what a beautiful naivety, so simply in it’s existence does it live. And then we learn, somewhere, somehow that the thirst for its own sake is at best penultimate, buried between the oughts and shoulds. I feel now as if I can almost see them, chains holding me from something so beautiful yet just out of reach.

So close yet stuck in the ego, the I and the need. The need to be validated, the need to understand, the need be pleasured, the need to discern. Despite my immersion as one member of the whole, suddenly there sits a need for comfort that simply didn’t feel before. A whole host of new feelings in fact, but is it awakening or the random firings of a mind that simply is bored with being content? After all, the darkness and the light each without the other can be nothing more than a wide field of grey.

And what of these feelings that at once refuse to present yet cannot be denied. These thoughts, these motivations, they each devolve ultimately into notions with no more grounding then poorly written stage or screen. Such diversity from uniformity, yet how can we know we feel the same?

The mind raced as I noticed some no small strangeness around me. How did I end up here? What is my motivation? From where did I come and to where do I go? How will I even know if I’ve gotten there when it does? From what comes this awkward, and where will that hopefully go? I could have seen it if I had only checked in before now. This place, so familiar yet so strange – I could have sworn your eyes were blue…

But there is no time, at least not that I can see, and it gets more confusing as I swing my head about. My contemporaries, clad in a confusing range of garb seeming to represent more than outfit, but characteristics themselves. I see swagger, and desperation, and love and sadness, all wrapped around their wearers as the lines between them blur and blur, until the mizzle from my eyes joined with the sweat from my whisky and turned my landscape into a child’s watercolor.
Oh what I place to be, as tides of numb and crashes of emotion take turns battering my thoughts on the rocks until I am adrift – lost now from anywhere I had been. Staring out at the sea, the thin disapproving horizon the only mark between the blue of the sky and that of the water. I’m not sure where my raft arrived from, but it had to be mine, there’s no chance I threw someone off for more space for me?

Wait, how did, where did, what is here? Why am I so madly in love yet so blisteringly confused? Why do you call to me? I check my watch but I cannot discern the time, yet as I look for the sun I find none in a cloudless sky. How can this be, and is that a swath of nightfall I see? I must be mad, but look, is that a truly a slice of night in the day? Can you rip the canvass of what I see, and what happens on the other side? Who is in charge of this place, and how do I get back to what I remember?
And I yelled and I screamed but instead there was a void, the words trapped like antacid in the pigeon, growing and growing until I wonder if there was room for reason, room for my own life amidst this interloping reality, the edges growing more and more light as I reach for anything that will hold…

And with a start I awoke and with a shake it was gone. The emotions, the desires, the journey, it was all so real. But no, with the nuzzle of my feline and the creeping rays of dawn my visit faded, and with it the lifetime I seemed to spend in all but a few moments. Am I to learn, reflect or ignore? Perhaps the trick is to lose sight of the distinction between the two, for if we see it was it not in a very real way present to us? I couldn’t disturb the notion that there was more to it, but there’s a day to be had, no time to reflect…