My Whole World is

change. And changed, and changing. I have oftentimes wondered, previously in my life, how things seem to change so rapidly. My mind naturally turns toward history, and I can’t help but reflect on the last two years of my life, and good god one helluva lot has happened. For example, I have decided that helluva is a word, and screw Microsoft Word. Perhaps it’s because I am trying desperately to be very conscious of my decisions, but the problem I have encountered is that when you are aware of your decisions—even the smallest ones like deciding to say “screw Microsoft Word”—you became very aware of the fallout.

I think differently now. My mind has constructed whole new channels of flow. In a lot of ways I can only be grateful for the way I can somehow see the neurons firing along new paths, because it means that I am still developing new areas of my brain. This means a lot to me. I have tended to downplay the fact that within the last two years I have begun and completed a Master’s degree. Only in my recent reflections have I come to realize just how important this time was to my life/existence development. There was, essentially, either a consistent disinterest in what it was I was studying on the part of people around me, or a consistent desire to keep it hidden on the part of me. My very first semester of class sent my brain spiraling down paths it had not encountered before, and I am still struggling with some of the basic concepts I learned in that first four months. One of my classes consisted of something like sixteen women and me. I think I could have gone two ways with this. First, I could have tried to “represent the male perspective” consistently in class, to the point where I would have probably just caused contention and ill will—which would have stunted my growth, I think. Instead, I decided to learn from all of their perspectives, and get to know a new way to see the world.

I’m unfortunately too attached to this idea of seeing things through others’ eyes. I write. I have decided that recently. I am a writer, and writing is what I do. It has to be my focus. It’s part of the reason that I find myself so consistently attempting to see things through other people’s eyes: it’s all character development to me. I wrote my thesis on Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, whose main thrust was in the experiencing—at any level—the act, the event, the subject he was writing about. In a way, while Thompson’s writing often employs grotesque imagery and exaggeration—with a backdrop of paranoia—it rings with truth like no other writer of the time. We all know Tom Wolfe pulled some information from Thompson in the writing of the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test from Hell’s Angels. Thompson once told somebody that it didn’t really matter to him because the difference between Tom and him was that he was there.

I am writing a book. It is complicated. It is based on Ulysses by Joyce. It employs techniques similar to Thompson’s. It is largely incomprehensible to anybody but it’s author. In what we could equate to the Wandering Rocks episode, one chapter is snippets of people’s lives from around New York City. I like most of them, but there is one that rings false. It has rung thusly ever since I wrote the damn thing. In a lot of ways it is because I have absolutely no experience with the particular subject of that snippet—nothing beyond what I’ve seen in the movies, and I guess I never trust what I see in movies. But I think in the last two (and a half) years I have decided to experience things in a way I had never thought of experiencing things before.

It has created an objective/subjective split in my self that is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, I feel like I learn more from each day when I can be inside a scene but acting for something outside of it: a sort of full-time Thompsonesque investigation of everything in the world. I am there, but at the same time I am not there. My desire for objectivity leaves me outside while maintaining corporal proximity ensures that I am intimately involved. While it provides outstanding fodder for the book and for the unquenchable thirst for analysis and examination that is my head, I find that the turn of the screw is my almost complete lack of subjectivity. I have become a character in my own story.

I feel a brain split that I can’t quite get a handle on. It’s like one part is sinking into the other, or one part is eating the other…I can’t quite tell which it is. I’d like to think that it is a healthy part consuming an ailing part and putting it out of it’s memory, but there is a part of me that is a little bit worried that one part is just sick, but it’s also contagious and has infect the healthy part of me.

Worrisome it is. I derive meaning from too much. Some things are meant to be experienced. They are build to be a subjective experience. You need to be so involved in them that there is no way to tell the story straight. That is where Thompson succeeds and I fail. Sometimes I move too far away, mentally, from where I am supposed to be involved. I have been feeling like I keep people more at arm’s length lately when it comes to my head. I usually divide humans up into their body, spirit, and mind. There is a way in which all three are connected. My body and my spirit are fair game, but there is a high security situation with my head. I have put the walls up that even a grenade launcher could not penetrate. You can’t come in. You’re not allowed. When you even get close I will launch an all-out attack on getting you away. I feel safe inside my head, the fortress of my mind. But I only feel safe when I’m alone inside there. I have used the word sociopathos to describe the kind of the thing I think I’m feeling. It may amount to a purely egotistical unwillingness to let myself go, my real self, the self inside my mind. But it could be that I’m protecting something. But what? The fabric of my mind, perhaps. The unfortunately fragile nature of my mind? Inside thick walls, is there simply a glass house? Have I realized this and raised defense levels?

Self-investigation can go too far. I write fiction. I write non-fiction. I write poetry. I write songs. They all fall under a certain sense of self-investigation as far as I’m concerned. Writing, thinking about change, thinking about history, thinking about action, thinking about non-action, thinking about music, thinking about love, thinking about existence, thinking about Aristotle, thinking about ethics, thinking about style, thinking about subjectivity, thinking about existentialism, thinking about the sun, thinking about the moon, thinking about rotation and revolution, thinking about drinking, thinking about smoking, thinking about cereal, thinking about milk, thinking about pasteurized processed cheese food products, thinking about the body, thinking about the spirit, and thinking about the mind can sometimes bee too much. I didn’t used to do this, you know.