Discussions involving swabbing the anuses of one’s in-laws always lead to constructive conclusions. I’ve pondered many times in this journal and in many other tomes lying about about how my upbringing shaped me. Marred me, rather. I sometimes think whether I can put a positive spin on my childhood and how it affected my current personality.
I’d firstly like to say that it taught me resilliance. I was for years bombarded with scurrility from my so-called peers. Even my friends found negative reinforcement their favourite means of making a point. So, does criticism slide off me like, for example, boiling wax? If that is the case, then past wounds from said wax have become scars. I feel nothing when the taunts come.
However, I’d say this is more numbness than resilliance.
It’s more a function of growing older than learning from constant barrages to ignore insecure cunts who attempt to lower you into the netherworld with words of scorn. Simple writing / music / art / enunciation - bashing would break me into shards when I was a teen. Reassembly took days, even weeks when certain slivers flew to distant parts. I suppose somewhere along the way I found more cohesive glue.
I rebelled because I was offered no freedom of expression. Many things I did were looked on with suspicion. Poems I wrote in High School threatened to get me into counselling. Any view which pointed to the abstinence from religion tripped me up.
tripping me up …
My writing this evening is tripping me up. I stumble through the words and I am changing the subject because all the previous paragraphs have been covered ad nauseum. To what am I changing the subject? Well, I am changing the subject to the topic of changing subjects.
What does it mean to drift from position to position in my mind while writing casually about it? I’m typing as quickly as possible while still attempting to hold coherent sentences together with a glue which was not aforementioned in this entry. I should be proud that I am able to do such a thing without falling flat onto my pointed proboscis.
The television blares from the other room. My door is securely closed, but the noise lurches into my ears. It is distracting, dismaying and stiltifying. I know it brings my parents comfort, however, just as religion does.
We are back to conformity! Dogma! Living by a set of rules is easier than creating one’s own principles to adhere by. I have a book that tells me what I can and cannot do, otherwise there is anarchy, eh? I don’t despise all dogma, but I am deeply suspicious of it. Vague philosophy seems more suitable for my life than concrete rules.
I’ve held this belief since my early teens, though I am sure I never articulated it in the manner I just did in the previous paragraph. In fact, I’d like to read something I scribed back then. Sure, I’d most likely find it daft, but it would be telling at least of my budding brain’s processes. When I stretch my memory back to when I was twelve or thirteen, the bare bones impressions cannot possibly be accurate.
Flashes.
The flashes can be assembled, but make little sense in the context of sitting on my bed even in Seminole at this moment.
Were I able, I’d absorb all of the memories this bed has, for I have been contained in it intermittently for over thirty years. I could sop it all into my spongy brain. Once the next millenium rolls around and external brains are common, I’ll be sure to upload everything pertaining to this bed into it, tar and bzip it up and share it on whatever the equivalent of Dropbox is.
Sucking information directly from objects would make creative writing unnecessary. Lists of objective facts will replace the novel. Imagination will become unnatural, even disdained. See that external USB drive? It’s a brain. When it makes contact with that water bottle you found in a trash heap in yonder alleyway, it will reveal the physical contact of the transient who was blind drunk sprawled atop it.
He didn’t even feel the crunchy lump of plastic under him as he clutched the teenage prostitute to him. Even though she was on top, his strength was too much for her. Even in the abyss of his intoxication, his body strived to pry her existence from her corporeal form.
The brain, later plugged back into the universal network, reveals the identity of the filthy transient. Over the next weeks, he is hunted down. When finally found in a slum near Olomouc, he is praised, given gifts of myrrh and osmium, and installed in a tenement. A small sum arrives at his door every Tuesday.
Thinking back, the transient who is no longer a transient considers the bare-bones reconstruction of that drunken night. He only comes up with blurs and flashes. Finally, he can only be content that he ridded the universe of another teenage floozy.
His name, of course, is Shambal. He goes into the kitchen to make a sandwich.
