Zombie

I’ve been very busy, which has caused me to miss posting these last couple weeks.  Two weeks ago I was just constantly busy with work; now I’m just as busy because I went to the AWP writer’s conference this past weekend.  Missing five days of work definitely puts me behind.

Even so, I’m pretty excited about this poem I just completed a draft for.  I’m sure it needs work, but as I go through it, I remain pretty happy about it.  I’m surprised I don’t end up changing a bunch of stuff.  Surely I will after workshop next week, but…for now, I feel like posting it.  It’s called ‘Zombie.’

Zombie

Dangle head-over-heels as skies await your soles
And echoing canyons flee your fingers.  Angel
Shale stripes Muav like ribbon, but melts to grayscale,
Faded chalk, as sunlight dribbles away.  Shamble
Back, park in seclusion, recline your bed.  Night comes
At ten.  Breathe pale heat, not flat air; x-ray the dead
Upholstered waste to an upside-down dark ceiling
Whose blank white specks quietly judge you.  Successful
Beams all-present as one bulb, blocked by felt padding.

Thudding on glass, fingertips catch under
Your air slit, snapping like peanut brittle.
They decay and drool while they tumble down
Your naked chest.  Gray rotted blueberries.
The window breaks devoid of echo, struck
Like by a fermented melon, catching
Shards in its flesh, and you topple away,
Writhing through the passenger door.  It snarls
Lazily at your tired bare foot, grabbing
You.  Only craving sleep.  Its hand slides off
Like wet cardboard pulled apart; you stumble,
Crawling, and quash it, popping black brain chunks
Out the car-door-compactor.  Wash yourself,
As the goo sloshed your ear, infecting you.

Corrupted before and will be again, squashed bile—
Caked and bursting these never-ending secretions—
Is too familiar.  The noxious bag haunting you
Oozes, anxious.  Clean it in the morning, not now;
Trickle hot liquid from the trunk and scrub the gook
Until you’re fresh.  Stretch long on the cool roof, gazing
At kaleidoscope clusters that swirl, hypnotize,
And hush you away.  Heat brushes your tiny fur;
Forget the monster who will taint your flesh again.

Positivity

I’ve been particularly unenthusiastic lately.  Little has excited me–and the things that have excited me haven’t excited me much.  This has caused me to wake as late as possible: when I teach at 11, I wake at 9:30; on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays, since I’m free to do whatever I want, I wake at eleven, noon, one, or sometimes two.  Then the sun goes down a few hours later and I feel like my day has been wasted–which of course it has.

I just end up sitting there, dreading the cold outside of my soft, warm bed.  I don’t have any heat on at night because it’s completely unnecessary: even if it gets down to 40 degrees or lower, it’s perfectly warm in bed.  Because of this and because of who knows what else, bed has been the high point of my life lately, and today this disgusted me more than it has in a while.

I generally haven’t done anything about this lazy lifestyle, as much as I’ve wanted to change it.  I’m well aware that a healthy sleep schedule is the most important thing I can do to keep myself functioning well, yet it eludes me, making me feel a victim to it.  Nothing motivates me to get out of bed in the morning, so I don’t.  My emotions tell me to stay in the warmth and comfort, and I don’t resist, because those emotions and lack of motivation seem to be all I am at that early hour.  I often set my alarm early, but hit the snooze because, by morning, I forget how much I’ve previously regretted oversleeping.  In the morning, I don’t care about any of that.

As much as I’ve resolved to wake early, I have yet to accomplish this.  I found something today, though, that has inspired me in the past, and worked to inspire me today.  While I woke today at noon, I proceeded from there to have as productive of a day as I could because of this text I returned to: Actualizing (A Constructive Living Approach), an article at The Eyeslit-Crypt in which my good friend Jamie responds to Dr. David K. Reynolds’s book, Reality’s Reminders.

Making this text fit his own purposes, Jamie speaks to his readers, “As you read this blog, you could be doing any number of things, but you aren’t – you’re reading this blog. Is reading this blog moving you toward where you need to go in your life? If so, please, keep reading. If not, please get on with doing what you need to do.”  Reading this months ago, the article prompted me to return to my work.  I had perhaps been procrastinating–taking a moment from the consistent work I had established–and could easily return to work.  Today, though, I needed this.  I’ve needed something, and still am unsure that today’s inspiration will help guide me to push myself from this slump, but this was very valuable today.

This article asked me to ask myself “how is what [I am] doing right now moving [me] toward [my] goals, toward where [I] want to go?”  As much as I’ve felt uninspired to work towards my goals right now, I have many goals, and reaching toward them is important to me.  Further articulating this, Jamie’s blog led me to another article: a discussion of what’s controllable in life.

Lets look at the list of what is not controllable: the weather, other people’s actions, other people’s opinions, the outcome of events, my thoughts, my feelings, my moods. When we look realistically at life we see that a great deal of it is not directly controllable. What is controllable, then? My own behavior is always controllable. With a very few exceptions (stuttering, trembling and impotence) my behavior, that is, what I do at all times is fully within my control. Sometimes action is difficult. For example I notice that having the flu as I write this article makes me feel lethargic; it doesn’t, however, prevent my fingers from typing the words of this lesson. Writing is possible. It is behavior. I can do that action, even while “not in the mood.” I do it because it needs to be done.

This can be a startling fact for many of us who have believed that “motivation” of some kind must precede action. What a relief to discover that I need not fix my feeling or my self esteem or my motivation in order to act. Realistically we know that life can’t be perpetually easy, comfortable, “exciting” all the time. As we gain maturity we accept this as reality. The “good news” is that my behavior is in my control at all times. I don’t need to wait for motivation, inspiration, or self esteem to act. I can act on what needs to be done because it fulfills a purpose. I can act now. My behavior is always controllable.

This discussion is incredibly basic: of course my behavior is controllable.  Even so, I forget this.  I grow so attached to my emotions and my lethargy that it takes over.  The only real cause for lethargy, though, is previous lethargy: it perpetuates itself, slowly destroying me.  Before Christmas break, all I did was work, and I enjoyed it.  I was active in creating things and fulfilling my goals, and that continued activity inspired me.  Taking a vacation from those goals shifted me into a new mode of living that is without them, and I’ve struggled to return since then.  Without activity, I seem to only want to continue that inactivity. Inactivity, though, fills me with dread and ennui.  It makes me want nothing.  The cure to this ennui will be understanding that my emotions, while uncontrollable, contribute nothing to my action.  No matter what I’m feeling, I can always act towards my goals.  No matter how warm and comfortable my bed feels, I can leap out of it and into my day.

Seeing this articulated is inspiring, and writing this out is inspiring.  I don’t know if articulating these simple but difficult truths will help me in the future, but it helped me today, and perhaps it will help others stumbling on this unknown blog.  Perhaps I should repeat these quotations and simple truths to myself before bed so that I can remember them when I wake: perhaps repitition will engrain them in my brain.

Either way–whatever successes or failures stand in my future–writing in this blog is positive, whether or not anyone else finds what I write worthwhile.  I previously wanted this blog to be entertaining and interesting to others, but I don’t care about that anymore.  All I care about is committing to writing here weekly, and making positive posts.  I think committing to that will generally be positive for me, especially while still somewhat mired in negativity: if I resolve to create something positive every week, even if it’s only dull journal-style writing, this blog should have a positive influence on my life, and it should help me grow out of this negativity.  This negativity and laziness is only indicative of past choices, not those I can make in the future: while this negativity and laziness has weighed on my emotions, positive choices will shift those emotions so that making positive and productive choices will come easier.  I can’t change my emotions directly, by snapping my fingers or resolving to be inspired, but by ignoring them when choosing my behaviors and actions, I can guide them to correspond with what I want my life to be.

I Return

Before today, I’d never cooked a whole chicken. I’ve always purchased the breasts separately as some sort of obscure entity separate from the animal-chicken. I’ve bought them shrinkwrapped to those styrofoam trays in packs of two or four or five or whatever random number of breasts some factory-butcher decided to pack. They are slabs of meat: pink productblobs. Fairly recently I’ve also bought them as the whole full breast of one chicken, connected between the two breasts with its breastbone, which at least alludes to the chicken it was once connected to. I’d never experienced holding the cold, dead chicken before. Slipped from the bag, it has all the heft and fleshy meat of an animal. Other than the decapitated head and scooped innards, it resembles the living and potentially happy chicken it once was (probably not–as much as the bag tries to advertise the product as “all natural” and “without antibiotics,” it doesn’t mention anywhere that it’s free-range, so it probably isn’t.) or could have been. It was strange to hold the whole carcass. The animal gave everything it had to provide me with protein, vitamins, and general sustenance–that is: I indirectly took this everything away from the animal. I feel a little guilty, and while I’m not contemplating vegetarianism, there is an imbalance here. It’s true that those dollars I gave to the farm company went towards giving the chicken life, as certainly it wouldn’t have been bred if not for this end product of my purchase, but this itself seems problematic. Something is out of balance. This something is well beyond this small situation, though. The world in general is out of balance. My balancing act within it includes eating animals, but perhaps to steady myself, I should appreciate that a bit more. Dealing with the animal-resembling carcass is a start.

I didn’t realize I would deliberate chicken for so long, but it’s no surprise. Strengthening my depth of attention is important. Without that attention I feel like someone else I don’t like: a blob or brainless animal carrying out life minus purpose. All life has a tendency to grow, but without purpose, it either grows negative and destructive energy or bloats.

I’ve bloated for a long time. I’ve also swooned in destructive energy in spite of or perhaps exacerbated by attempts to quash it. I use the preposition ‘in’ here with ’swoon’ attempting to counteract its inherent passivity and turn the word into an active practice, which still fails to suggest an attentive dance with that negativity, but swoon may be the proper verb after all. By definition, one does not choose a swoon. The best definition I find is of its noun form: “a spontaneous loss of consciousness caused by insufficient blood to the brain” (Wordnet, http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/swoon). My brain has been sad. I’ve been sad. This is redundant because the brain and the self are not mutually exclusive, but I repeat as reminder of that. “Insufficient blood to the brain” means much more than what it says.

My decision to temporarily live with my family was one cause of this. While I appreciate them allowing me to live there, it filled me with negativity and bloating. This is something I need to come to terms with, because they’re my family and because I love and care about them. They’re part of me, and vice-versa. I never managed to balance this, though: not while I lived there and not now as I reflect on it. I have no idea how to fit coexisting with them in any capacity into my life, and that’s frightening and difficult. It’s something I need to work on. That aside, living there was negative. There was a lot of sadness in that home brought by strife marching hand-in-hand with negativity. Even now I can’t escape that sadness, but living there focused it central within my life. When negativity sleeps there in the breast, in the center of one’s home, it begins to take over.

Prior to moving back, living at my apartment in downtown Grand Rapids allowed me to thrive, and this pipeline of energy sputtered once I left that place. It and I had filled it and me with many energies, and I turned my back on that. I decided this abandonment was necessary, but it also, to no surprise, brought negativity beyond what that succeeding living space would cast.

Amidst those symbiotic events taking shape, I departed on summer travels. I left Grand Rapids to circle the country, and it was amazing. It posed many difficulties, but these challenged and taught me. I want to discuss the trip more now, but doing so would spin this essay out of its focus. I’ll say that it was excellent and move on.

I returned thrilled to be home. As excellent as the trip was, driving those 12,000 miles exhausted and consumed me. The general limits of the trip kept me from caring for myself, and I felt these effects. In this return, the definition of swoon adopted its medical aspects: blood was not flowing properly to my brain, thus limiting my consciousness. The brain needs exercise and nourishment and care to function well–just as I, generally as a whole person need these things to function well–and I hadn’t given myself this. Driving allows some limited quality of thought, but my had brain tired of this, possibly because of the low-quality energy flowing through it from the low-quality food I had been eating. I hadn’t kept up with reading, something that takes practice to do well, and this added to my atrophy. As much as I’d missed my family and friends in Grand Rapids prior to my return, I was coming back to a homelife that would set me out of balance, and I did nothing to correct this. I remembered that, prior to my trip, there had been no solution, so I bloated and waited. I sat and watched as it flowed over me. I watched everyone through that soggy lens: many of my friends came to Grand Rapids from their lives far away, and I was thrilled to see them, but my mind couldn’t keep up. I felt like I’d reverted to my self six years ago, when I was exceedingly quiet because of much younger brainpower. I hated creating such an impression with these friends I see so rarely, but that’s how it was, and I enjoyed their brief visit as much as I could.

While I discussed things revolving around this general lethargy prior to my travels, since then I haven’t said a word: just as I waited to move, I waited for this. I would’ve felt pathetic discussing this in its midst because of my atrophy: as if I were making promises to or poking at hope for myself. I feel that these kinds of promises about the future are worthless, as the only important thing is keeping them. Action is important, not the promise of it. Announcing both to the “world” and to myself through this blog that once I moved, things would improve, would’ve been nothing but complaining drivel. My last post shows that: as much as I tried to sound intelligent in my discussion of a fairly random feeling of loneliness, at its heart it was a complaint about my situation. This annoyed me so I shut the blog down.

Now I’m back. I mean this, obviously, to suggest that I’m back writing in this blog, which I’ll hopefully continue with throughout my surely work-intensive schoolwork, but I also mean that I’m back in more holistic terms. I’m back to the self I like. I am who I was when I lived in that peaceful one-bedroom place in Grand Rapids: someone who knows and works towards what he wants out of life, who can use his brain to be conscious of the world he lives in, who can write with the clarity of that thought, who can analyze texts and learn from them, who can work, and who can step back from all that and completely relax. I love being able to at least seek that peaceful relaxation. Without all that, I’m not me.

Making my new home in Carbondale is making this happen again. Living alone allows me to step back to my basic self and move into the world from there; I don’t work well when thrust into the world. I need to thrust myself into it. I’ve done so by making a life for myself here that allows that. Things here aren’t exactly as I’d like, but I have that base of complete control of myself and my consciousness, and that fills everything with potential.

I will use part of that potential for work on here. Just as I’ve missed having an energized brain to carry on cohesive thought, I’ve missed expressing that thought here. I began this with Jeff Jefferson’s joking attitude in mind, and while I appreciate that mockery, degradation, one-tracked American success-based sensibility, and, to some extent, the cockiness, I see this as a much more intellectual outlet. I’d like to work towards combining those attitudes, because there’s something interesting and real there; maybe something that disgusts me, which is something I’d love to challenge myself with.

I’m thrilled to be writing in this again.