Similar Snowflakes

[Vatman]

What do you do when you can do anything?

WOOSH. Whats that flying through the air, is a bird, is it a plane? Superheroes. They are the human response to being lackluster, with a few exaggerated characteristics we are the change we desire. Which is why they are so telling of humanity. These caped crusaders are the emphasis of interest of the time, the age, and more importantly...the mentality.

Once upon a time a radioactive spider bit a young boy and gave him superpowers. And voila Spiderman was born. How is this telling of the times you ask? Well, radiation, nuclear power, all of these things held huge promise for the people of the 1930-40s when spiderman was conceived. When they revamped the story for our modern generation, it became a genetically altered spider. Because lets face it, bioengineering is the new big thing that holds potential in our generation.

All I can say is...

My spidey senses are tingling, and I don't need no docta.

[Vatman]

I've heard stories about Buddhist monks that can focus in on each individual beat of their heart so intensely that they can actually control their heart-rate and by extension...their metabolic process.

I don't believe it for a second. Or at least I pity them enough to ignore the potential of logic. There is too much to achieve in the realm of control, and its disheartening...because its far and far the most boring byproduct of the human experience. Do you grow every time you hold in tears or fight the urge to laugh? Does your heart soar each time you mind your own business and go to bed early?

Okay, so impulse doesn't get along well with morality. But neither do people afterall. I get that. I get alot of things. But whenever she closes those amber eyes and tries to bear her burden.

I want to snap, kind of like an overarching shrub in love with the storm.

[Vatman]

"It is a great thing, reading a man to know, not 'His Tricks are not as yet my Tricks, but I can easily make them mine' but 'His message is my message. We will see that men hear it."

Ezra Pound wrote that of Walt Whitman in a journal entry. I wonder now what it is that we decide as we write. Much like a metaphor, ideas are based off a particular knowledge and expressed abstractly... No. I'm not going there. It's 7am and I don't drink coffee. I should be getting ready for school, but I don't feel compelled to do anything other than to understand. Why are our backs designed to slouch and our eyes fine tuned to focus on individual characters. A B C D E F...gee its early. I don't want to start my day. I want to be aware of coincidence and the way pupils dart left to write like type, inventing the meaning behind melodrama.

Okay enough madness, I'm sticking to somewhat of a structure now. Lets assume for a moment that we are predisposed to story in the same way that we are to eating. Our minds are bullet points of a character under construction. Memory of course in this instance serves as plot points, highs and low's begging for climax. So what does ...this concept sucks. Next.

Assume that humanity is building towards something. Each story, each life, another dot revealing a picture. I like where this one is going...but I don't want to elaborate....I started with a line from Pound, and I'll finish just as heavy.

"I am an heir of the ages and I demand my birth-right."

[Vatman]

Falling just short of drizzle...

April's started, NaPoWriMo in full swing though its not quite the burden it was when I first started doing it five years ago. I already write about 30 poems a month, though consistency is always missing from the bandwagon. Hmm I think your just dying to know how my weekend went.

I drove to Boston again to visit my girlfriend, rain, five dollars in tokens, arcade...the 3rd highest score that the movie theaters mortal combat screen had ever seen. Oh there was a zoo too...and just as we were leaving...we heard the lion wake up. Ever run on painted zebra prints to a destination?

I feel scattered today, look at that windshield go, remember to breathe through your diaphragm....Is it really spring?

[Vatman]

If your wondering where I went, though I doubt you were....its something of an ailment, a sickness if you will..

The doctor looked down upon it and said, "congratulations, its a book."

But in all honestly there are more durable excuses, life, life, life, or what poses for it these days. I've been writing like a mad man, the letters on my almost brand new keyboard are worn off. Really only the "q" and "z" keys survived the onslaught. Which is telling of my vocabulary, but also a sad commentary on linguistics and how we favor certain assonance. Wording aside I have missed you, can you feel it? Someone caring whether or not you stubbed your toe or couldn't figure out who that number belonged to that awoke you half past seven.

I'm still me, still in love, still certain of it anyway.

My book has come along nicely, I see some sort of ebb and flow in the characters, they breathe, they sing...well they don't sing. But they damned sure cry. I've technically written two books now. I haven't titled them yet. One I based off a particularly bad nose bleed. The other....well.

Wait and see.

[Crow]

Vatman, you are fucking amazing. Please come back.

[Blobthe15]

Crow Wrote:Vatman, you are fucking amazing. Please come back.

[Vatman]

I'm addicted to need, of being wanted rather. And a sucker for praise as well.

Not every place wants me, needs me, and it's a damnable crime I figure. I'm in Tokyo right now at this very moment as I place these words down for you to read. I like using the world "place"...I picture myself arranging fork and knife ontop of a Dora-the-explora napkin set. Ah right, in Tokyo I am. Yoda be praised.

I ended up spending my summer around Asia, South Korea mostly, but I have had a lovely detour in Japan only to find that very few places actually serve chicken teriyaki. It's a different sort of life traveling, living in hostel's with seven other people from various countries and stories. I've met many a person who fell victim to the travel bug which I have dubbed unoriginally as "professional" travelers as they have spent years of their life drifting from place to ...well. If you travel far enough away you'll find that you need a remote control to flush your toilet and that every new street presents itself a potential to change your life.

It's beautiful...addicted to change, never sitting still long enough to fall in love with the specifics. I adore those specifics though...it's like the realization that dandelions are weeds.

[thewake]

Vatman Wrote:It's beautiful...addicted to change, never sitting still long enough to fall in love with the specifics. I adore those specifics though...it's like the realization that dandelions are weeds.

Change is probably the thing I'm most scared of right now.

Oh, and hello Vatman. Long time, no "see."

[Vatman]

Hello Wes....long ti-

-Me...me...me...me.. Slaves to symbols is what we aught to be. You'd think in a thousand years the human experience could be described in some other way than vague characters only serving that miniscule role in what we can only hope to obscure. I don't know what I was getting at, I'll take handouts from the audience though. Change. It's not real, it doesn't come suddenly like waking up to orange sky.

Ah the sunset...

If reality does what its supposed to do, we must be solid. Every possibility of life must be well within our understanding of a grasp. Cling if you will, but tomorrow has been predetermined. Don't shout fate, destiny, the meaning of potatoes at me. I'll spud you off as easy as I'll rant. I mean to say that if you can fathom existance, then nothing really changes. We just travel from point a to point b in time. And isn't that just efficient of us. (I wonder if from point A to point B there are decimals....like A.CAKLT and B to the Q power.)

I haven't enjoyed my haitus from SS nor have I expected it. In the same way that I drove into Irene's eye and found a love note tucked in a flip flop.

[Absnt]

This guy's still alive? I thought we had him killed ages ago... Sup vatman.

[Elfy]

I do enjoy reading Vatman's blog posts.

[Vatman]

Empty Orchestra...

Did you know that Beethoven's last words were, "friends applaud the comedy is over"...

So I'll tell all the gents and damsels who read these scribblings a story of a traveler. It's me of course, but I wear a title at least half as well as I do a tie. We're in Tokyo now, where nights aren't as dark as you remember them to be. People litter the streets much the same way potato chips rain murder when you pop the bag to aggressively, and we aren't quite up to salt. I'm lounging in a hostel, which if you haven't experienced one yet in your lifetime...make sure to do so. It's like one of those sleepovers in grade school were the entire class is invited before you know eachothers names. I didn't care to share mine, whats the point of learning someones name on a countdown. Well then, I suppose its all winding down in the end.

The poorly smelling cushion I sit on, begs me to get off of it. That's when a girl with red curly hair asked if I wanted to go to karaoke with the other youth's in the dorm. She smelled of travels unshowered and her red curls hung so long and restless I imagine her the type to not take no for an answer. I accept as my body remembers those scant muscles that make movement possible...following those red curls out the door with a group of people with scattered nationality and level of sobriety. We arrive at a place covered in posters I can't read nor desire to, we are then led by a woman dressed traditionally in kimono and wooden sandle...The room is bathed in orange with a slight mahogany platform and microphone. Sake and beer were brought out instantaneously and I sat down with my glass of water slowing losing circulation in my calves....moo

Time passes as the boldest sing first. They seem to struggle to find that perfect tune their voice can poorly synchronize with. Don't get me wrong, there are worse singers...but some had prelubricated their inhibition and it showed in every clumsy step and note. I was growing weary and felt as out of place as I feared I would. But the girl with red curls got on stage for her first song, and let it be known I am far more curious than I am cowardly. She sings a song with a happy beat and sad lyrics, her hips bobbing back and forth to the bass. And then the spin...All I see is red, and I think in my weary state...she's been kissed by fire. I blush at the thought, I am not attracted so much as I am hypnotized. Those long red curls don't seem real...too red...too alive. I stupidly clap before anyone else does and she sits next to me. Whatever our conversation was I forget...she asked me to sing a song. Most of the people with us were so out of it at this point that I agreed on a self serving logic.

The girl kissed by fire gets up with me and picks out a song...since I have no real knowledge of any song come out after the 1970s.

"Do you ever feel like a plastic bag
Drifting through the wind, wanting to start again?
Do you ever feel, feel so paper thin
Like a house of cards, one blow from caving in?"

You get the picture....I sang well enough, people were surprised by my rendition of what I now gathered to be an embarrassing song to sing. I didn't feel embarrassed though, not due to any true semblance of skill or brevity. I just saw red, red, red, red...Not in curls...not in a pretty face...or existence...

It became apparent suddenly that the stares of strangers are the color red... if only you give it the chance.

[Vatman]

Negative outlook. It's the grime that grows on a windshield, a careless hand print, polka-dot-droplets of a sneeze you couldn't hold. You can still see of course, all the snot in the world couldn't stop that...but is it your same sight?

I find myself battering the walls of my nature, on one hand there are those precious minutes I am accustomed to spending in fantasy. And on the other, well, lets just add cliche and complain about homework shall we? It's a conundrum, I don't feel an ounce improved, it's a wet stone that doesn't sharpen. Words and ideas that hold nothing to my person and are forgotten far less painstakingly than learned. But I go on, for practicality, for the potential of improvement and lets not forget a pleasant decoration piece. It's seventy degree's out and I don't have a single one.

And now for the upside...turn off all the lights and there might be stars, turn on the lights and you'll see it's fragments catch in her hair, turn off the lights and be reminded that without eyes ones reach is infinite. Turn on the lights.

Turn on the lights...

[Vatman]

Writing is very similar to the functionality of eye lashes. Don't believe me? Eyelashes are primarily thought of as a minor aesthetic characteristic, but truth be told they are also there to stop dirt and unwanted substances from entering your eye. Not sounding like writing yet is it, my metaphor feels lost as of now, but wait...I am a tactile snake.

Right now at this very moment. Lift your finger up parallel to your face, and concentrate on keeping your eye open. Move your finger quickly as if you were to touch your eye. Nothing right, the mind is stronger than the body, yes? Now try again, but this time have your finger end up on your eyelash. Blinking is such sweet sorrow.

Simple strands of unmentioned hair give you the sense to close your eyes right on time. It's vital but not critical. A slight touch to remind us that we are infused with the most complex mechanics of any organism...How sweet, to be so intricate

and maddeningly simple..

[Vatman]

Today I finished reading Watchmen. I won't try and review it as it is out of my realm of expertise, nor will I bask in the charms of an alternate universe. Yet one idea in particular stuck with me throughout the series. The improbability of place, the improbability of existence. The sheer odds of my parents immigrating from different countries to the same street when they did is improbable. The fact that they went to different schools, had different friends, were five years apart in age, had, (and still have) nothing in common.

The odds are beyond my abilities to calculate. And it is the same way with every relationship you've ever had and will ever have. Yada Yada Yada, the worlds a complex sort of place..moving on.

I doing some reading in my college cafeteria the other day, it's a weary sort of space without color, hygiene, or quite frankly...edible food. But I am far far more lazy than I am practical. Anyway, I'm in the cafeteria, and a child of maybe a handful of years is walking playfully in what to me became a noteworthy pattern. He would put one foot on each of the gray tiles until he found himself on either a white or black tile. Then immediately he would put both feet down, lift himself up slightly on his toes continue onwards upon the gray tiles.

It is an image that I'd like to think fits this post. As impossible as it is to understand each step we take, there are those discretely placed moments that give us clarity of our position.

Kind of like laying outside on wet grass, and filling your palms with color...one strand at a time.

[IllusoryDeath]

(09-29-2011 05:02 AM)Vatman Wrote:  Today I finished reading Watchmen. I won't try and review it as it is out of my realm of expertise, nor will I bask in the charms of an alternate universe. Yet one idea in particular stuck with me throughout the series. The improbability of place, the improbability of existence. The sheer odds of my parents immigrating from different countries to the same street when they did is improbable. The fact that they went to different schools, had different friends, were five years apart in age, had, (and still have) nothing in common.

I'm wearing my Rorschach shirt today.

[Vatman]

Quote:I'm wearing my Rorschach shirt today.

I'm wearing a batman shirt...wanna trade?

[IllusoryDeath]

(09-29-2011 08:09 AM)Vatman Wrote:  

Quote:I'm wearing my Rorschach shirt today.

I'm wearing a batman shirt...wanna trade?

Tempting. So very tempting.

But nah. Rory's my bro.

...then again, so is the Bats.

[Vatman]

(09-29-2011 08:13 AM)IllusoryDeath Wrote:  

(09-29-2011 08:09 AM)Vatman Wrote:  

Quote:I'm wearing my Rorschach shirt today.

I'm wearing a batman shirt...wanna trade?

Tempting. So very tempting.

I've always been upset at how there are far too few opportunities in life to just give in to temptation.

[IllusoryDeath]

(09-29-2011 08:17 AM)Vatman Wrote:  I've always been upset at how there are far too few opportunities in life to just give in to temptation.

Pssh. I can resit anything...except temptation.

If you get the refrence, which I am sure you will, cookie for yooooou!

[Vatman]

A woman's fan can cause all sorts of trouble...as can a cookie.

[ModestMusic]

Just thought I would mention how I've been missing the blog updates. Also, just curious if you are planning on participating in this years NaNoWriMo.

[Vatman]

Modesty is a crime against ego, and with music on that tune. I refuse to be modest, in fact, I am beyond it. Although I am far more interesting than I am honest, it can be said that I have great skill in many a region, but perhaps not the unified government to justify it. I'll answer your question ModestMusic, Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. I absolutely will be participating in this years challenge; how far I will go depends on a great deal of things. Starting with this power outage we are facing in New England, and ending with my fantastic talent at never finishing anything I. Stop, its too much to bare.

I'm sitting in a Cosi typing this now, as I can only part from the internet for brief periods before my troublesome mitochondria refuses to power my interest further. A new way to say boredom. Check. Moving on. Nanowrimo if you did not know, is a challenge to which the author tries to spew out 50,000 words in a single 30 day period. It's is an attempt at production. It's the ability to sit and produce without expecting result. 200 pages of pure determination. Last year I wrote 4/5th of my first fantasy piece entitled Archon. Which was a cloying, exaggerated tale about a small portion of humanity that was able to turn their imagined thoughts into a temporary reality. It was okay, nothing special. I talked to a publisher about it...he liked it, offered me something and a deadline. I declined. Archon isn't going anywhere, and it isn't particularly good either. I'll rewrite it at some point...(which is what I say about everything I spew)

This year. I don't know. I have ideas...and time. But writing is taxing, you are only given a finite amount of thoughts in a lifetime...Circles don't fit into squares, cliche, cliche. It's alot of work.

Such is...

[Vatman]

I tell him how to live. I keep telling him.

No-one knows enough at twenty to be able to map out a life. You're going at it in entirely the wrong fashion. Just chill. Find out the reason why you must validate your life with impossible goals and then simply live. Oh I'm not saying that I don't have impossible goals. I demand them! But, ah, I enjoy the journey.

Oh no, again you mistake the meaning. I do not mean possessions. I mean that you think in terms of things, you think literally. I do not. I think spiritually. Aesthetically. My journey is spiritual. Yours involved physical movement.

Look, what if I phrase it this way? It is in experiencing the world that you find a sense of belonging. The more you have lived, the more you connect. Art can paint a veneer over that distance. It makes a soul feel as if they have experienced something, but it's an illusion until you have entered the canvas and can say, ah! I know! I was there.

No, no, that really won't do at all. No-one accomplished anything that way. It's not a race. It's not about time. It's about the heart and soul you put into living your life.

I never listen to myself.

[Vatman]

An update to the disbelievers...It's barely four and the sun is starting to set.

I can't express how lonely I feel. Yet I'm not alone at all, I am meeting friends in a local diner maybe an hour after I write this. My girlfriend comes home from school in nine days and counting. I have a family all around me, whom genuinely care without condition.

It's an intellectual loneliness. Shakespeare reads like a formula, I've memorized all of Oscar Wilde's witty comments. I jump into Hemingway, Keats, Elliot.... It's just not there anymore for me. That feeling where my skin feels more like skin and minerals in the road glimmering in ways you only notice when your fully sated. I am a shell of the man I was at 18, full of hope and poetry...I'm a marketing major now. I don't write sonnets, I write jingles. It's not fun, but I'm good at it.

It would have been different with more devotion, or talent. I can tell people what I plan to do, it's simpler, they nod approvingly. Selling out for free.

[SoulRiser]

'intellectual loneliness' ... I know that feeling.

[magikarp]

I think there's a certain kind of loneliness that's unavoidable given too much time to think. I even have a quote that's likely suitably flowery for your taste. ;)

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies — all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.
~The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley

As for passion, I think there's something to be said for just letting things be what they are. There are matters about which you can change your own mind no more easily than you can change someone else's, and as you might imagine, persistent nagging is rarely the way to go about it. Relentlessly searching for passion is like trying to impress a woman by following her home every night. (That is, while it may be thrilling, it's rarely fruitful.) If the things you loved aren't quite what you remembered, it's probably time to set them aside for awhile. And I think, in any case, it's possible to read too much--it's a balance between having no context for your own thoughts and having no space for them.

[Vatman]

Cold fingers aren't of much use to anyone. You can't knit, or type, you even lose the pleasure in clasping someones hand. I'm sure that's why we invented the indoors, and glass too, we need to look out and see the chill...but we never want to feel it.

I continue in steady incline, life as it were, goes on despite feelings of being arbitrary. The Christmas season ends with a bang in a few nights and honestly I can't imagine it happening any other way. Would you be surprised if I didn't mention that I love change, I'm switching schools again, going to another college come the spring semester...perhaps I'm a hobo at heart, following train tracks simply because they continue to go on. Who knows for sure... I took what you said into consideration magikarp. I put down the books, well, not entirely, I still pick up some debut novel kind of jazz, but I'm not rereading, and I'm not doing it every day.

Also for the first time in my life I've found myself balancing a new medium. Music. I am not a musician, I couldn't keep up the beat to Patty-cake or Mrs. Marry Mack as a child. But I picked up a guitar at a pawn shop a few days after my last post. Washburn. The burden of being fresh, it seemed appropriate.

It's been a difficult process, calloused fingers, and weeks of sounding horrible. But much like poetry did for me as I learned it's nuances, there are shades of pure beauty in those failed notes. I'm 21 picking up my first instrument since I was 7, and I am pleasantly surprised at the creative freedom an instrument gives you. At first it was all mechanics, muscle memory, chords, strumming, transitions. Don't get me wrong there are a million things to learn on those fronts left for me. But there is this distinct feeling of creative power, overlapping one chord with another, varying the strum in different patterns and speeds. Perhaps.

Just perhaps.

You can play the strings with cold fingers.

[Vatman]

I returned the guitar.

Very few times in my life have I loved five words as much. No one returns guitars! You can put the guitar away; hang it somewhere...but never bring the receipt back to the store of purchase and get you're money back. I could explain why, but its far to practical...and practicality isn't romantic enough for this blog.

Where to begin? I'll start at the end. When I die I hope they bury me at the bottom of a ballpit. No, thats not right.

I have been feeling that all too important notion of confusion. It's all too simple to fall into the trap of contentment, but I did. I ran a routine well, school, school, video games, reading, work, school, school. Where is the adventure in that, if I wanted to be an ant I'd lift up an SUV. Today I did nothing of the sort. No reading or classes, no games or books. I simply sat outside and felt the air, watched people.

One woman didn't account for the chill.

I felt each shiver.