what do you believe in? musings in polar opposites.

i've been trying to work out an assortment of different cultural views on god lately in a place where half of the people have a spiked cross or jesus crying tattooed on random unattractive areas of their bodies and yet live by rules of everyone for themself. to me it is of course hypocritical but also very intimidating. this doublethink comes at a price: when a population is to the point where intimidation, dishonesty, and violence are common place, the only way to find any kind of moral base is to turn to religion. religion meaning, almost dominantly, some form of christianity. this means that to not believe is to not have morals. this was demonstrated to me in a man that i worked with who asked me the question "what do you believe in: yourself?" as a reaction to me telling him i didn't believe in god. i am still trying to process my response to this question because it caught me so far off guard. firstly, the question is based on the assumption that pride is the soul reason for not believing in god. under the logic of him, and so many others, god is the only route to humility and understanding. i just don't understand how that logic still has followers when clearly these believers are, as jesus would say, "puffed up". secondly, it is simply so far off my actual worldview. christianity is what tells you that you are an important creature with an important soul and an important place in the world so go ahead and shit all over it. i don't believe in myself at all, what i do believe is that when i die i'll become part of the ground and not become a god or a star system or a unicorn or something. thirdly, and this is the point i'm getting at, if i had had time to think about the question "what do you believe in" i would have responded with this: fear, peace, lonliness, friendship, oppression, equality. it seems to me that back and forth is always going to be back and forth. regardless of all the hypocracy, hostility, and bullshit, you can be happy if you realize that nothing is going to bring you peace, frienship, and equality besides your self and its relationship to the world around you.

buffalo

buffalo is this mighty
morbidly blobby
mess of misconceptions and
mistaken faces, meaning that if it were a human i wouldn't mind running into her on the street, because she'd smile and say hello and give me the unasked for time of day, and then she'd cry. it's a city they tried and tried to make safe but people continued to run from it. it's a place where race was always first, sex second, and everything else last, where respect continued to try to run at the toes of those white people and eventually gave up.
buffalo feels like the scraping shock of a crash
while it asks,
who are you?
who do you want me to be?
and people keep telling it different answers. some tell it that they want its industry to begin to blossom and make the city sexy. some say that to heal buffalo's disease can be healed when the communities inside it are moisturized to reduce fault lines of centuries-old hatred with a smile and a tip of the hat. some think that it needs to simply regurgitate what is causing the symptoms.

thoughts that everybody thinks.

for most of my life i was convinced that i had all these bizarre thoughts in my head that i was never going to voice because no one would really understand them. does the couch think i'm the one that's not alive? what if god replaced my feet with someone else's feet? etc. and some more unexplainable ones that i won't list because it's hard to put them to words. the point is that i think i was wrong about this and that people really do think retarded shit like that, they just never talk about it. which brings me to the point of this post: human thought processes and emotions are not what we think they are, and you are not different! like the concept of "feminine," which is more than a stereotype. it the way nearly everyone, man or woman, views half of the human race. i really don't beleive that some women are feminine and some aren't--obviously, by the meaning of a word, it incorporates the qualities of all women. strong is feminine. opinionated is feminine. sincere is feminine.

i'm rambling. thesis: we as a species are not honest with eachother about things that are different or perhaps uncomfortable which leads us to have very skewed perceptions of what it means to be a human being.

i love mirth

with a love that comes from me. like possibility, wonder, big dogs, and chick singers.

i love sand

with a love that comes from my feet. like fresh cut grass, cold water, warm socks, and the feet of someone i like.

i love squalor

with a love that comes from my mind. like mushrooms, physics, great books, and little puzzles.

oh and i love dinosaurs, rar.

appreciating winona

aka why-the-fuck-are-you-so-awesomely-edgey-and-perfectly-beautiful-and-ps-what-does-your-tattoo-mean,-girl?

i mean not to be overly dramatic but how can any woman be straight while winona ryder is in the world? that said, she needs a dyke spike.

today i thought that nelson mandela died

but, so, he didn't. but it made me think about how people would view him differently if he did, so i started thinking about how i never knew or was able to speak to any of the obscure figures i have been taught to respect. never talked to gandhi, was never able to size him up the way I size up the more little, more tangeable people of my real life. if he was ever a person with flaws all over his face and his hands, as i suspect he must have been, as i see we all become, he is that no longer. he, like so many others, has slipped away leaving the ability for others to judge them behind. i mean even in the movie his sexism was hailed as true love. who has done this while living? and why is it that men and women entangled in the given niceties of american culture, one laced with dependency on judgement, respect themselves for respecting the dead while tearing down the living in order to get on top? there is no top. but as america climbs more and more diagonally nowhere, our blindness has caused us to believe we are getting closer to one. ehh, maybe. that war can be morally superior to peace. that to level out a human being like a colored plastic player on a board will make them easier to defeat. that humans must gain dignity, instead of being handed it. as long as we are still all in this world together, we are unable or unwilling to forgive and bend. as soon as that is no longer the case, our walls of separation fall. i will not provide anomaly for this. i think that you either see it or you do not.

rip, nobody.

pound had to have interviewed some girl to write it

Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,
London has swept about you this score years
And bright ships left you this or that in fee:
Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,
Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price.
Great minds have sought you - lacking someone else.
You have been second always. Tragical?
No. You preferred it to the usual thing:One dull man, dulling and uxorious,
One average mind - with one thought less, each year.
Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit
Hours, where something might have floated up.And now you pay one.
Yes, you richly pay.
You are a person of some interest, one comes to youAnd takes strange gain away:
Trophies fished up; some curious suggestion;
Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale for two,
Pregnant with mandrakes,
or with something elseThat might prove useful and yet never proves,
That never fits a corner or shows use, Or finds its hour upon the loom of days:
The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work;
Idols and ambergris and rare inlays,
These are your riches, your great store;
and yet
For all this sea-hoard of deciduous things,
Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff:
In the slow float of differing light and deep,
No! there is nothing!
In the whole and all,Nothing that's quite your own.
Yet this is you.


and i thought i should post it if i was gonna reference it in my title. is there nothing in the world that is quite our own when our bodies are borrrowed property and our minds have been flattened out to open books? who the hell knows.

why we are not men and women

the cop outside is sucking feverishly on a cigarette (ette. feminine). he waits between the wall and the windowpane in my line of vision while i ask myself what the purpose is in standing up straight, lining my back against the counter to watch him. as i watch i desire revenge for something he never did. he lifts his head, exposing his sharp jaw line like another weapon in his holster. his gun was more attractive.

the couple next to me are holding hands, fingers interlaced, every other one pastel pink, every other one plain. she could be holding her hands up to her eyes and peeking out through the openings to look at me, but she's not. she is chewing on something, his mouth is still. i want to cut all of her hair off, all the way back to her eyes. then i want to look in them.

there is a woman wearing sweat pants cut at the knees pacing towards, the edges of her body wobbly and strange. she smells like fish and pot, and she stumbles when she gets close, muttering a confused apology. she is one of my least favorites.