bleh bleh bleh

to aquamarina (addressing your comment): i wasn't really jealous of uma, i related to her cuz she wasn't trained by a master, she was tortured by a master. i mean, yeah, she could get herself out of a coffin six feet under ground cuz of the torture/training but she's a killer too. i coulda been a killer, i coulda been a contender, but somewhere along the line i lost that bloodlust, that ambition. maybe it's all the smoke in my brain. maybe it's all the things i think i saw in all the places i've been. if i'm jealous it would be because i fear i've lost some skill in losing the ambition.

the rest of this post is not necessarily for aquamarina but you're like the only reader of this. i'll let other folks know about this little blog where i blurt all this bleh bleh bleh after this post. anyway, i'm often thinking about this ambition thing in some way and sat down at the computer tonight cuz i wanted to shake off some of that, particularly as it relates to my literal worth. i'm the working broke right now and i believe i've kept a stiff upper lip about it but tonight i felt a little trembly, like the center was about to give and i would burst from the inside out all over the papers telling me what i owe and the little calendar i was making for myself of when and how i would pay it back. i had been ripping little post-its, putting dollar amounts of what i get and what i have to give next to every friday on the calendar. it helped for a second, you know, i was trying to get organized, see what was feasible, but then the OCD stopped comforting me. the day-glo post-it chart wasn't fun anymore, it was getting confusing and hurting me in fact. i'll actually be OK according to my calculations but just barely by the skin of my ass.

and it was distracting me from other shit i wanted to think about like the poetry classes i think i will understand only years and months after they're done. i just think and hope i learn everything by osmosis cuz precision and training and like, discipline, those things are no longer in my repertoire. i mean, i'm sure some of these poets aren't that precise or disciplined but they seem to have some sense of what they talk about. what happens to me is i believe i understand and then i try and put something down on paper and i get funny looks from the teacher like, um, no. they're not being mean, they just react to what's not working, which is my understanding of let's say gertrude stein and all the funky shit she was doing and some ancient egyptian curse-writers and all the funky shit they were doing. it's all fascinating to me but my understanding i think is kind of surface and somewhat bullshit. and sometimes i feel like i get some of this stuff better than i ever have, or feel that i couldn't have understood things in this way until now, like in the past, i just don't know what i was thinking. how could i have read gabriel garcia marquez at fifteen and really have an understanding? i mean i was a smart kid but i was probably bullshittin too. cuz i read that shit again like two years ago and all i could think was i didn't understand shit when i was younger. i got things a lot better now, as you can see cuz i explain what things are so precisely, shit, all i can call it is things. but no, i do get the sense of time, this rootedness in the ancient, but yet getting this idea that we're dust and repetitious as hell in the meantime before we return to dust, that humans do the same old shit and nothing is modern and nothing is old, it's all the same, mostly. so yeah, that's something but do i have a clue as to how the man approached that kind of work. no. and that's how i feel in the poetry classes. i get it but it doesn't really translate into my writing. that whole long paragraph just to say i don't know a damn thing.

that's how i feel at jobs a lot too. i have to get jobs, right, to pay bills, but i get to these jobs and with every day that passes i feel more and more like i don't what i'm doing. i know what the task is, i've done it millions of times but the repetition seems not to improve my ability but erode it. like i get tired of it. it does not thrill me. cuz it's true i don't do thrilling things. currently i am let's say an information assistant, i gather trivia, a trivia gatherer, trivia as it relates to a particular piece of writing. shit i really could give a shit about. but i have to give some small shit, enough to get the check and pay the bill. ay vey, here we are again with the money. this circular thinking sucks. but i'm trapped in this cycle of worthless work on this "dark planet of insanity" (a psychic's description i have appropriated). and i want to write things that break cycles and i read things that do but i can't get to those places yet.

i don't want to write about my life but most of the time it's only my life that gets me writing. i'm interested in other people's lives often as they relate to mine. i can wear their skin and pretend i'm somebody else but it's insincere and self-centered always. if i insist on writing about my life i want it to be new somehow but i just ranted a paragraph ago about how nothing's new, it's all been done, history, writing, living. i've been attracted to these poetries i don't understand because they're new to me. i might not love them all the time but when i get the explanation of what they're trying to do, i can appreciate it, to a degree. to the degree at least of its newness. and maybe i just fetishize that, but i get so bored with this life i'm from, this circle i've been in. i just wanna see someone scramble it in a way that entertains i was gonna say but maybe it should be deeper than that. that changes things, scramble it in a way that changes a mind or a life, like i was reading today, john cage, something like that, change society by changing a mind. that's large and small at the same time. cuz it's small too it doesn't scare me so much.

i stopped to look up the john cage thing i was reading earlier. there's a tone in it that's so mellow and not abusive. that's not my tone. abusive is part of my tone. i think about that too, that it rings true for how i understand things but sometimes it's too much. i wish i could say i don't know without being mad at me for not knowing. i think it's a family thing. i want to elaborate but it would drain me too much right now and i am delirious from waking up to go somewhere in the morning. how i miss my bed. when i walk the few blocks to work after the train ride i pass by a train station for the B, D, E and the other morning i read BED in orange and blue. i sleep on the train down too, sleep on it up going home. i feel like a baby rocked in my crib when i put my hood on, or my sunglasses, and tuck myself into the bucket seat on the 1. never been mugged, thank the train god for that.

i'm getting tired. just wanted to bleh bleh bleh. this whole life could be bleh, bleh, bleh. my mom once tried to make me eat a salad at wendy's and it was just nasty and while she ate that fi-dolla grossness i was staring out at the highway in south brooklyn, it was like a flat sky day, i could see the verrazano but it wasn't that pretty cuz of the dull sky, and i took the yellow wendy's napkin and wrote, life is bleh like a fast food salad. ok that's it, that's what i'm leaving you with. i'm passing out.

beatrix kidding

have to subtract seven minutes from the bedroom clock to figure out the time, uh, damn the time changed before i could, 4:07 am, there. lowered the volume on the tv in the living room, turned on the little space heater. ready to go. this is my hour, haven't gotten to see it much lately in the past few weeks cuz i've had a day job. my body rebels in the bed though, my mind moreso. i do it to myself but i've done it to myself all my life. that is my excuse. been up late for as long as i can remember. ma and pa never minded. i was always late to school, especially from junior high school on, but i did well then so i guess that was how i made up for it all. was absent a lot too but still did work. anyway, now work gets harder to do, sleeping getting easier. except at night, during the day sleeping easier.

looking forward to the sunday sleep-in, the afternoon breakfast, the video vegetation. just came back from the weekend family visit, a little more morbid lately but still required. my father's in the hospital, not as bad as it sounds but not great either, hospitals never fun. coney island hospital not on the zagat survey of hospitals. but close to the family home and gets my father semi-quick treatment for what ails lately, this time asthma gone haywire after a flu shot. and really it's ma, working full-time and not able to be full-time nursemaid too, had to get him care she couldn't give. he was alright, a little bug-eyed and talking kinda crazy, about some lady who died earlier in the year that he sees in dreams. this is common. he's seen dead people for quite some time. ma says he's obsesionado, but she is too just plays it cooler. as the child of obsessed, possessive people i am all of them and more but play it the coolest. nothing's cooler than leaving, which i get to do, spend my hours with them and then break the fuck out.

was chilling with my brother before i left. he hasn't broken out and he's quite a few years older. he's paid with his soul for staying there but it seems like he's on the brink of something. yeah. i would like to think that he is. he's another long story. just to say we watched part of amores perros, the second gael movie of the night. i had been watching crime of padre amaro with ma when he walked in. that was bananas, but blasphemous so it wins points for that. and gael is a papi, of course, you could watch him all day long, but i hear he's short, like my height, don't know about that. my brother was proud of his assessment of padre amaro, that he was doing all that to save his job as a priest, what was the point of that, and just was enjoying his observations during amores perros, like with this one heavy, grimy mexican dude he was all, "fernando valenzuela is a good actor" and that the brother doing all that to his other brother, fucking his girl and paying her and all this violent shit too, he was all he really wants to actually fuck his brother, like there are guys who get obsessed like that, did i read the paper about some brothers in brooklyn, one who killed another cuz he was the favorite. we were laughing about all that. when i say he was proud and enjoyed his observations he would stop to point out how succinct his points were, like damn i'm good kinda stuff. i told him it might be good if he didn't stop to pat himself on the back each time.

oh and kill bill 2 was on and i was saying my favorite part of it was when she's training with that vicious chinese teacher who just fucks with her and makes her beat a board with her fist and sleep like a prisoner and i told him i laugh at it like i relate to it cuz my training growing up felt that torturous. all it was though was my father and brother tormenting me with schoolwork from young, like multiplication table drills and shit like that when i was seven. they were some vicious chinese teachers though. i didn't laugh then. i'm still twitchy like uma thurman on the cot in the cell but i don't think i can break thru a board with my fist anymore.

alright, so i see this is just rambling, not gonna be too deep, might drone on a bit though, very little editing involved. what else do i want to remember. oh the dancing in the living room. why i come home, look forward to my space. was in my robe and fuzzy slippers and the feels good inc video came on, the gorillaz with de la soul and i was psyched, did a nice little interpretative dance there, it's got this quiet part that makes me spin slow and this rocking part that makes me spin fast and freak the air and generally get stupid. i don't have as much cable as they do in coney island but i have a great dancefloor. for that alone i need to be in my home. could have stayed there tonight but i have to fight that, es que alli no me allo, what ma says, i can't find myself there. i find myself here, the killers singing again on the tv, me wandering on the screen. good night, it's 4:57-7, so 4:50. it's better when i put the work on the page, i can't do it in my head.