The Whole Kit ‘n’ Caboodle

I post today to post tomorrow, because if I don’t post, all hope is lost.
I don’t honestly believe that, but jumping to the extremities (fingers and toes, usually) helps me to center myself in the actuality of things.
Things are as they are, and I have a choice to influence them, like a seal taunting the starving polar bear at the edge of his hunting territory.
Intention and influence are directly correlated. If I intend to influence something, chances are that an effect will take place in the general area of my desire. The stronger I intend something, the more that intention has a chance of working its cosmic mumbo jumbo toward the realm of physicality and impacting what really matters (though it’s not obvious what that may be, now more than ever).

Desire to make an impact is often the reason for most self-imparted action to the universe, as I’ve observed throughout my life. I’ve observed it and sometimes demanded the same for myself, but only when I’ve teed off on some meaningless tangent.

I used to be good at ‘trivia’, whatever that means. I used to hate my generation, whatever that means.
Now I’m awful at trivia because I find no reason for it. After all, its definition means it shouldn’t be important.
My generation and I are still at a crossroads, because my parents’ generation took me under its wing as a star baby (queue Guess Who song), precocious and lively in the intellectual sphere (which probably can be translated to cranium). When I was two, I told my mother that I wanted a violin and a suit. Fun times for this kid. My first grammatically sound sentence was ‘be careful’. I know how to throw a party, I tell ya what.

I’m not insinuating that I’m embarrassed or perturbed by my early geezerness, because I used to relish that fact. I took it as a sign of early maturity and independence, especially when I started taking the CTA Blue Line to school at the age of twelve.

College rolled around, and I gave youth a shot. A shot of tequila later, I decided I’d had enough. I like making products of wit and ingenuity, often with a word play or two involved, so you can imagine my zeal for throwing back cans of Natty Lite (Yes, lite, a word that probably shouldn’t exist, yet is undoubtedly a part of the English language). Good jokes go die when imbibed with alcohol, though it’s easier to get a laugh when you impart them to an intoxicated group (unless there are too many syllables and references to ironic word order and spelling).

Creativity is born, often lost in the pursuit of a ‘good living’. I don’t yet know what a ‘good living’ is, but it sure as hell isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

I’m often deemed ‘funny’. I guess I possess certain traits which convey a sense of humor to an unsuspecting ear, but I only use them because this world is too difficult to take seriously.

When I take this world seriously, there are seventy eight trillion things on the agenda. No, seventy seven trillion, eight hundred and seventy four billion, two hundred and forty nine million, five hundred and fourteen thousand, two hundred and ninety-nine things. I like to get my numbers straight.

When everything is tabulated and accounted for, I sit and look at them (or simply think about them if I don’t have a large enough spreadsheet). I look at them all at once and think: ‘this place needs a fucking laugh’.

-Aidan

I live like a book.
That doesn’t necessarily mean I live in books like a bookworm. It really just means that I live my life like a book. I let things wash over me as images and take them as metaphysics.

When I do, when I act, I improvise entirely. I’m at a point now where I improvise with every single person with whom I come into contact. I have no ‘interests’, per-se. I am interested by purest language, by purest beat, by purest vibration, by purest tone.

I am repulsed by tone for style. Style for beat. Beat for language. I could go on with these combinations. It’s odd, because that means I’m shunning the people who happen to like those things. The thing is, I don’t know these people, because they don’t know they like those things.

Do I know what I like? Yes. Can I effortlessly describe what it is that I like? No. I like simplicity in complexity, and I rarely like anything else. Rarely means occasions other than the guaranteed acceptance. I like a walking bass line. I like a 500 foot home run. I like a list of all the different kinds of chocolate in the world. I like taking something that everybody on this earth would think about and make it something that nobody would think about.

Porcupines are cute, right? What if a porcupine were to start up a small business in the middle of skunk country? Would the skunks be intimidated by the porcupine’s initial success? Would they leave menacing notes of odor around the porcupine’s establishment to let him know that he’s not welcome?

Those are the questions I ask of the world, ask of the reader, ask of the writer, ask of God.

Is it a crime to ask questions that nobody else wants to answer? Is that why I prefer to be alone with my thoughts most of the time?

I have a few kindred spirits who may enjoy indulging my wild thoughts and becoming avatars of the present tense with me. These spirits are few, but growing. I know it.

I don’t often go looking for these spirits. They often find me. They see me and think I could be like them. Often times I am, because I am like everybody sometimes.

Everybody is a nice affectation, sure, but it’s very heavy. Billions of personalities, even if they only weigh an ounce each, still make billions of pounds. I don’t like carrying a bag of faces on my back. I like holding my face to the sky. I know there are others, but I’m just sucky at finding them.

I’m running in circles now. But what is life if not cyclical?

Aidan

Today marks the first day of the rest of my writing life, which comes as no shock to myself. I’ve recently been contemplating what kind of writer I should be in my life. By recently, I should probably account for the last ten years of my life, where I’ve churned out snippets and assignments and poems and essays and lots of stream of consciousness work. During this time, I’ve always enjoyed affixing language (usually the English language) to the page, and it’s shifted between the keyboard and the pen with regularity. One day I’ll decide that I’m sick of typing things, because I can’t flow with my brain in the same way that I can when I’m writing with a pen. I can’t achieve the same kind of bravado with every stroke, and it always comes out in a straight line, always knowing when to go to the next line, even when I don’t want it to. I take a pen to paper, and there’s no guarantee what kind of mark is going to come out. I find that terrifically real, and sometimes even terrifying. When I write something on paper, I then have to store it somewhere, and I have no guaranteed method for returning to said documents. I often come back upon them a year and some change later, wondering why I never wrote my genius (ha ha, genius) in a more lasting medium, like a journal. Well, I dislike binding things when they’re such fragile little thoughts, barely conceived by the time they spurt out of my utensil (wow, sexual much?), feebly grinning at me from the page, because they know they’re special. I grin back at them when they’re on an index card, a legal pad, a junior legal pad, a notebook, a sketchbook, a napkin, a piece of printer paper, an interestingly shaped scrap of fabric. I love the words I make, and I’m pretty sure that they love me.

That’s it, I have to write. To write is to continue with my development as a writer (crazy how that works), and the more I do it, the less I worry about what nonfiction really is. For a while, I lived by my own brand of fiction, thinking I was the only person in the world unsatisfied with being a fish weaving together with millions of other fish in the attempt to get away from the sharks and dolphins and diving birds of the world. Then it hit me: I don’t have to be a fish. I don’t have to be a dolphin. I don’t have to be a shark. I don’t have to be a diving bird.

I have to be me. Aidan. I don’t use my own name very often, but when I do, it’s only to ground myself in the life I’ve lived (whether it’s to my advantage or detriment). I know that every second I live is a second in the forward progress of life, the race of the planet, etcetera.

I must write every day. Tall order? Yes. Of course it is. Sometimes I loathe the computer and my desk and my pens and my sketchpads and my printer paper and my notebooks and my index cards. Sometimes I despise food. Sometimes I despise myself for despising all of these things, and sometimes I despise every single one of those things in combination. Why? I don’t know, frankly. This world just has a way of getting to me sometimes. I may not interact with many of its inhabitants, but I know that’s going to change. If I loathe, if I despise, I lose.

I love myself as a human, which is really all I can do at this point.

This day forward, I shall don my skin with resolve to produce.

Excellent. I like today. I’m going to like tomorrow. I am also going to like the next day. I like this outlook, this foresight.

-Aidan