Blog

  • Your mind is using you

    Jeff, I’m not muscular. I have muscles, but I do not perceive that my body type would fit in to the classification of ‘muscular’ out of those body type options on lavalife.

    After two years of looking at but always restraining myself, i bought an iPod today. An acquaintance was selling an iPod mini for a price I couldn’t refuse. After a few hours of using it my speculations about the benefits of an iPod were proven true. I love it.

    Also listening to Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power of Now as an audiobook on my iPod. So far, really inspiring. Some really profound information.

    I think a lot. I like thinking but I long for a way to turn it off. A way to control it. I am a a slave to my thoughts, to my brain, my computer in my head. It makes so much noise that I’m never at peace unless I am distracting myself. I do not think this is the most advantagous (sp) or exclusive way to live. With all my involuntary thought, 90% of it is useless. Repetitive and meaningless or worse self-depricating thoughts that block myself from truly experiencing peace, joy and serenity that are the natural state of my being, myself, or my ego in the Freudian definition. Today I learned my thoughts are not me. I am not my thoughts. My thoughts are a tool. A tool which is malfunctioning in its current state. Today I was awakened to the truth that there is an off switch to my brain. Today I was offered a glimpse of what I truly believe will soon be my new state of operation.

    I looked at Anna today in the meeting. We stared in to each other’s eyes. In to each other’s souls. But after a couple of seconds all thought subsided, and I was still. I was simply existing. No worries. No judgements. No preconceptions or ideas. Just still. As I looked in to her eyes I felt a deep connection with her, that I am joyous to have her in my life, that we love one another. But I did not think this. I simply knew it. It felt like a feeling. Eckhart Tolle talks about brief instances where we can break out of our constant opression from the mind and have momentary peace. He says that these instances however brief are usually triggered by experiencing intense fear or witnessing something intensely beautiful. I believe this was one of those moments. I saw Anna as intensely beautiful. It was a profound experience. Eckhart Tolle says that by observing the mind, as a seperate entity we can begin to detatch from identifying ourselves as the mind. That after practice it becomes habit, and the mind soon becomes a tool that we can pick up when we need it and put down when we do not, therefor leaving us with ourselves; our conciousness; our being, where there is no pain, because pain is an emotional and physiological byproduct of our mind.

  • Yeeeeeaaahh Whatevah.

    I hate Thanksgiving. It’s a crock of shit. Has no relevence to our society anymore. I can see it being enjoyable if we were still all pilgrims pulling in the harvest this time of year and being thankful our Christian god gave us enough potatos to last us through the winter, but that just isn’t the state of things anymore. Maybe we should have some culturally-asjusted holidays to replace these aging traditions. Happy Petroleum Day. Women’s Oppression Day. Apartheid Long Weekend. Eventually Christianity will be breeded out of existence and we can do away with these bullshit events to bring the turkey to the table. I don’t even really enjoy turkey. Ugly fucking animals.

    The truck broke down coming back from Galiano today. blah blah blah. Told this story a million times today. Short story is it took me 12 fucking hours to get back to Vancouver. Wait till you see the picture Steph took of the redneck “mechanic” that semi-fixed our truck on Galiano. This dude was straight out of Deliverence.

    News is, I’m going to LA next weekend for some AA rally. Thousands of young sober Cali babes. Stoked. Then, in November going to New York, New Jersey and Minneapolis to build three or four stores for my friend’s company. Never been to any of those places. Then, after that trip, our crew is going to Cuba. It was going to be Belize, but now it’s looking more like Cuba. Life’s tough. Yeeeeeaaahh Whatevah.

  • Breakfast at Bon’s

    There are a few things in my life recently that have become something of a routine. Jeff, Chris and I have been going to Bon’s every Saturday and sometimes Sunday to eat breakfast for the past 2 or three months. i will please have the breakfast special with sausages, eggs over hard, brown toast and garlic on my pan fries. no coffee please. We stopped drinking coffee with our meals last week to try out the difference and much to our satisfaction we left feeling more human than if we had each thrown back ten cups of sketchy diner coffee. I’m not even kidding when I say ten cups.

    It’s 8:22am on a Saturday. I’m awake. I took an early night last night, 12:30 bedtime. And this is actually sleeping in for me.

    Got paid yesterday. It feels like Monopoly, getting handed seventeen 100 dollar bills. You lose your grasp on the value of money pretty fast. I remember buying pot when I was 17, I’d lay down 600 at a time for a quarter-pound, without even blinking.

    Wow, this entry is so boring, I’m even bored writing it.

  • Manipulation, Control, My harms

    I asked her if she even reads my blog anymore. ya know, with all the nice things I say about her it’d be an alright side bennefit to have her think fondly of me for thinking fondly of her. What the fuck is that? The manipulation I’m capable of blindly inflicting on others sickens me. She told me she doesn’t read my bullshit anymore. She stopped reading my blog after I pasted pictures of my bloody arms up on here. It was then she realized that my blog might not be healthy for her to be exposed to and was probably a detriment. I commended her wisdom for staying clear from that which hurts her, in this case, my own words and images.

    When I was talking to her I was overcome by a feeling of needy attachment and what i learned to call “love”, which was really codependence. It started out as giving a part of myself to another person to control. Here, take this part of me. You want to give me a part of you? How fucking cool! This must mean that we feel connected with one another and that we share a common bond, a common likeness of one another. By giving them a part of me I always gave them the power to make me complete or to make me incomplete. This time, when I was talking to her I realized this error in what I have done. I have done it again without even conciously thinking of it – I gave her a part of me. It was when we kissed. No, it was when we slept together. No, it was when I started talking to her again. No, it was when I became aware of her slowly more and more. It started with my own thoughts. It started when I gave her a part of my thoughts daily. Over time rematerializing in to action and multiplied by her reactions. I wasn’t a knowingly willing participant of this transaction. It just happened, but this time the precipitent I recognized. That feeling of incompletion, of dissapointment when she wasn’t controlling the part of me I gave her to my satisfaction. Thus breeds all sorts of manipulation. Give them the power to change you then manipulate them to control the outcome of your own emotions.

    But is self-awareness enough? Can information alone bring about a natural reaction in myself to make change?

  • check in

    I’m not on an island. I’m at my computer again, so i have no excuse but to satisfy the haunting feeling telling me to write.

    I got back from Galiano on Friday. We ditched out early cause we were all losing our minds on that island. The end of the third tour of duty. Without Carl, our crew seemed to lack direction and motivation to work. So we came back a day early. Good for me, cause I only really had one hand after my incident with the nail gun the day previous.

    I slept with her last night. I hesitate writing this… cause I know every girl I’ve slept with in the last 6 months reads this blog. But what the hell… feeling like living on the edge. And it’s not like any of the girls I’ve slept with in the past siz months have been monogomous. Jealousy is a weird emotion. It’s taken a toll on me, and I’ve come to realize that hiding shit for fear of causing jealousy only makes the emotion more painful when inevitably the truth comes out.

    Still though, isn’t denial great? To think you’re one with one person, and one person only. To feel total comfort with that person? Total trust, even for a moment? To wake up beside them without guilt? To not want to run away but to just kick off the external world and stay in bed all day? I only feel that with you. Fuck, why is that? Why is it that you are the only one that seems so perfect to me in all your blatent imperfection? I’m happy I feel free to write you honest poetry without fear of losing you. Cause I’ve lost you too many times to count and it seems we are always connected again. It was perfect.

    My MOTU 828 broke. fucking bullshit. had it for less than three weeks and now i can’t fucking record anything. Ack. Fucking bullshit, I tell you.

    So I’m in town till Thursday morning. On Thursday I’m going back to Galiano to pick up the tools and gear and bring it all back to Vancouver. That will mean the end of the Galiano jaunt.

    My serenity has become dependant upon my work lately. Whenever I am at work I feel satisfied, useful, alive and connected to whatever the fuck ‘god’ has become. Money? Whenever I am not working I feel volatile, toxic, confused, anxious, stressed and chaotic. I’m gonna start meditating every day for half an hour. See what that does for me.

    Listening to Lou Reed’s Berlin and Transformer.

  • Nail Gun Injury

    Nothing’s meant to last forever.

    Details: 3″ Passlode framing spike from an air-powered nail gun shot through my pinkie finger on my left hand exiting through the finger nail. Lots of blood. Fractured bone. Antibiotics. Popped cherry.

  • Work. Work. Work.

    Worked somewhere between 90 and 100 hours in the last 9 days. 9 days and today is my first day off. I truly never thought I had the capacity to commit to a job and show up week after week. Past girlfriends I always admired because it seems they always had full-time jobs. They always worked and I waited around everyday to see them. It was like a post-nuclear family role-reversal. But now I can hardly believe that I, the fuck-up am working as much as I am. I don’t mind it. Work takes up some good sizeable chunks of my day which I would otherwise squander away.

    Listening to Lou Reed’s Berlin.

    I have carpal tunnel syndrome. I hadn’t had any symptoms all week till this morning. I woke up because my hand/wrist on my right side was numb and throbbing. An hour after waking up it still is. Physical injuries and illnesses are so all-encompassing and demobilizing. It’s frustrating not being able to rely on my body. The first day on the island at work I came down with a horrible flu. Felt like I was gonna pass out, ached all over and swollen glands. 18 hours in bed, sweating it out.

    I dreamed about you last night again. I dream about you in total more than anyone else in total, i think. It was one of the recurring themes in dreams involving you. It’s more about the feeling that I get being with you than anything we are doing or where we are. You and I are bestest friends, like I imagine we were in the beginning, like around that time when we went hiking in Manning Park, or the time we got drunk and went to the Folk Fest afterparty together. Companionship, you’re so beautiful. In my dreams you’re clean. We’re nice to each other. We’re comfortable with each other. Very comfortable. Nothing else in the world matters except for you. But I think that maybe these dreams mean nothing about you, but instead you are the personification of my ideal girlfriend in my dream, which I guess means that atleast physically, you are.

  • living mess

    Since Jeff transpired photos of his messy desk I decided to document the current state of my own living mess.

  • three messages

    sitting here with a bass between my knees. gratified. satisfied. put in a lot of hours this week at work. if you want a quantitative total it works out to 59 hours in the last 7 days. bling bling i guess. but more important to me is this feeling of usefulness and productivity. i haven’t felt depressed in ages. months.

    just plugged in my phone. charging the deadness. checked my messages. i love the people in my life. i really, really do. i love that i have the choice to contact who i want to and that there is a reciprocity between us.

    she called having a mental breakdown, by the sounds of it. she dropped her cell phone in her oatmeal a few days ago. so poetic. i’m the only phone number she knows by heart. i feel honored, come to think of it. even though the memory of my number over all others is probably nothing more than a coincidence. but yes, she was having a mental breakdown, on the message she left me. said she was near tears. said i was her only link to the outside world. told me she just needed to talk to me. She called at 8:05.

    SHE called me! I was so happy to see one missed call from her place of work. She actually called me, and she left a message too. I wish i hadn’t automatically deleted it after listening to it or maybe I wouldn’t have to recite her call for future reference. She was just calling to say hi. To tell me that she misses me. She fucking misses me. can you believe it? her tone was casual. Like nothing ever happened. Like everything is right as rain. and it is, cause she called me. She called at 8:22. I called her back right away. She called me more than three hours ago but my phone was dead. She picked up the phone. we talked for a couple minutes, the how are you, how are you nonesense. she’s calling me back in twenty.

    he called me to talk but got my answering machine. the message was long. a good 4 minutes. he called to tell me that he realized he is terrified of living. he used the word terrified. I don’;t think he mentioned any specific things he was terrified of but just referred to the scarryness of being alive especially now that he’s sober. nothing to dull the pain. nothing to hide the fear. but there is things. there is always something to dull the pain and hide the fear. it seems somedays that’s all i am looking for, is that next fix. that next dose of escape and numbness. or if nothing else a distraction. but what from? what is there to be afraid of? to hide from? to escape from? is our existence really that horrific or are these feelings void, figments of our imagination? no one is hunting us down. no one is too much to handle, too powerful to be cut out of our lives. nothing is too daunting. so then what is it? what is it that you are so terrified of? he called at 10:54.