harold_maude's journal

These days it feels like getting through the day is alot like going up a really steep rocky hill.

I made it through another wensday. The last few days have been very strange. They almost feel like I've been asleep and am dreaming again.
I wonder how many other people in the world feel this way at least some of the time.

I'm not talking about getting loaded and then beginning the day, I'm talking about waking up and not being absoulty sure if you really are awake or still asleep.
I've actually had several of these days over the last year or so.
They are strange to say the least. The ablity to concentrate is difficult at best, and sometimes it feels alot like a running dream where everyone is passing you by at high speed and the more people that pass by the more you feel like your sinking into oblivion.

I was writing in my private journal and all these strange random thoughts kept going through my head.
I wonder if that's part of this experience.
In alot of ways it reminds me of the month I spent a couple of falls ago in a state of hallucination.
I still have trouble trying to discribe what I saw that month.
Some of it I was able to, but other things I still have seen nothing to compare it to.

I've talked to alot of people about that time, hoping I could find someone who experienced something even similar, but no luck yet.
It makes me feel very alone when I think about that time.
I wonder if down the road a peice someone else will write about something like it.
I've had other experiences like that too. Doing something that no one else that I could find was doing and then a few years pass by and someone starts doing it on their own and it becomes a fad of a kind.
Makes me feel that maybe I'm spending most of my life in a somewhere else state, and anyone else here is so far away that I will never meet them.

I had a crazy dream last night by the way. I was in this old house, and there were soilders everywhere rounding people up, the reason everyone was told, was so that a physical censes could be taken with physical I.D.'s.
I met some people I knew, but can't remember who they were, and we were trying to calm each other with happy stories.
Trying to make light of things so that we could hide the fear we all felt, that none of us were comming back.
Funny thing is that I wasn't scared.
I woke up thinking if the future holds something like this I will ask the soilder that I face if he loves his country and his country men? And if he says yes, then I will ask him to shoot me because I have no interest in listening to my fellow countrymen and women screaming in pain.

It's dreams like thoes, I've had three now over the last year,
that make me wonder if I'm dreaming about some future that is part of the waking world only it hasn't materialized just yet.

Sometimes I really envy people who die. With the exception of different people's accounts of what near death experiences are, there isn't alot of physical evidence to tell us much of anything.
Sometimes I envy them because any loss of love they knew in life doesn't touch them I don't think, anymore. Maybe it does.
I don't know.

I know of one man who was "dead" for 30 minuets. He was flat line for 30 minuets. The paramedics who were trying to resessate him were about to pronounce him dead when he sat up and asked where he was.
I asked him about it and all he would do is smile. I talked to his sister about it and she confirmed the story about his being dead for 30 minuets.
I really wish he had told me what he saw instead of just smiling at me with eyes that told me that death is nothing to fear, because there is so much bigger and better on the other side of that door.

There have been many days here lately that I can't tell if I'm still asleep dreaming some kind of lucid dream or if I'm actually awake.
I assume I am because nothing has happened to the contrary to show me that this is all nothing more than many dreams that have no end.

Last night after work I was so wiped out, it had been a busy day and we were short handed. It didn't slow down for almost 2and 1/2 hours. There was so much to do, and then truck came in and I ended up getting out of there an hour and a half later than normal.
I was wiped out. Working around people all day tends to be somewhat draining anyway. I have learned not to listen to most of what hits me when people are there, but it still exausts me.
I think I should have been a hermit after all.

Left to the immagination and personal interpretation of anyone who was curious.

Well, it's sunday according to the calander on the wall.
Winter seems to be melting away finally.
I'm glad but at the same time I don't look forward to summer which I have this feeling is going to decend on this town and cook what it will.

The last two days have been realitivly quiet for the most part.
No drama just the quiet. I love the quiet, more so now than at other times.
Sometimes I want there to it to be party on and on and on.

But lately, I've been craving quiet. I spend part of the quiet reading journal entries and thinking about what I'm reading.
It's all very much like a very huge book, many autors, many stories.
Much history of many people.
Faces sitting in front of screens much like this one bringing
their part of the world to the rest of us showing us something that what we know from day to day.

I've found myself seaching the net through links that have lead me places that have sparked questions and thoughts.

In the quiet I can almost hear the writers narating their entries, but since I don't know what each voice sounds like I have to just accept the voice I hear each one in.

I've looked at pictures of some faces, and thought with amazment at the brilliance I see. Happy faces, happy times.

Friends and families of writers that I would have probably never other wise met, how ever vicariously, and it's been alot like flipping through a photo album as I've read and looked.

A friend who I haven't talked to for almost two years tracked me down last week. It seemed that it was going to be a strong reconnection.
Then a series of events took place and my friend seems to be gone again.
I tried to get ahold of her several times, but it seems the lines are disconnected yet once again.

I am leaning again what I have known for many years, that many people come and go. Their time in my world is brief. I think that reason alone would make me like this place. It's the same reason I like books, it doesn't matter if someone goes, what ever they had to say I can read and re-read.
Unless someone does what I did, their work stays here.

So even though the person is gone out of my view, the impact of their words remain alive.

I did some more work on a chest that I started several months ago. I am learning about construction with small parts. It's alot like putting a puzzle together. There is no picture except the one you draw, and make measurments for.

Anyway, this chest I'm doing is going to be a good sized chest, and it will also be in the sculpture group that is growning.
I want to take a picture of it before I either sell it or find out who it belongs to. My art does that sometimes. I will do a peice and someone will show up and I know that the peice belongs to them.

I guess that makes everything in my life temporary. Everything in reality is temporary as well. It's just hard to see that when we seem to live longer and longer.
Some times it feels like I'm standing still and the world is disolving around me.
Layer after layer. Melting away into haze.
I feel my eyes close in slow motion and another minuet passes.
I once again feel out of sync with the world around me.
Out of time, shifted just enough out of kilter that nothing quite feels like everyday feels.

It feels unreal somedays, almost like I shift forward just enough so that I'm out of kilter with my body. I don't know how many other people in the world go through this, or if it's just unique to me.

Sometimes I wonder if maybe all of this is just some very long very detailed dream, and I'm laying in some hosptial bed somewhere else in a coma or something like that.
Everything feels real, but very often our senses fool us into believing something that really isn't real at all.
So maybe this isn't any thing more than just some dream I'm stuck in.

Here it is again, thursday night. Feels like a full circle
just got completed again, because the last thrusday I wrote here the laundry was hanging up to drain.

Last Saturday evening I got to hear the sound of a fast moving stream off of shout cast radio.
I listened to something that used to be able to hold me for hours, just like watching the sky used to, or burring my face into the branches of a pine tree, so I could drink the perfume of fresh pine. Yes, I love to smell trees.
Deal with it.

sorry about the deal with it, but I have come to accept that not everything about me makes any sense at all, I don't know how much makes any sense at all, but your not living in my skin, or living my life, or taking care of me, I am, so if I like burring my head in the branches of trees what does that matter to your life anyway?

My hormones are raging tonight.

That's another part of my life I don't talk about because until your there, you can only guess at what it looks like from behind my eyes.

Anyway, I realized as I sat there listening to something that used to make me melt into happy land, couldn't touch me at all.
I felt so removed from such a deep place inside me that I realized that I have spent the last 6 years thinking about survival and thinking about survival, that the things that make me happiest I am completely disconnected from.

I've been soul searching since then. Trying to anyway. I've seen so much failure over the last few days. Failure to be doing more and better by now.
Expectations birthed in this need to show the world how strong I really am.
Promises made in all honest intent and failure to be able to keep them, because the requirements to survive have been so demanding.

I used to be really good at a lot of things. I used to be able to write letters for hours on end.
I used to be able to sit down at a piano and be facinated beyond belief that there were sounds that made music and how beautiful it felt to feel thoes sounds.
Now when I sit down at the piano, all I can hear is crap, and more tired crap.
I can't touch that place right now.

Now when I sit down to write a letter, it's painful. Everything I write sounds and looks like crap.

I've been tired for a long time. So many things have happened in just the last year. And there has been so little time between events that I can barely catch my breath from one before the next thing hits.

I used to meditate alot. That was something I started doing again here about 2 years ago. It helped me by keeping things as balanced as I could in this fragile world I live in.
I don't know where or when but I stopped.
I can't recall the day I stopped, but now when I try all I find is something that resembles high speed traffic.

I know I'm burned out. But have no choice but to keep trying to find what I need so that I can get back to thoes things I really love.

The last few days have shown me where I have been living inside.

As painful as it has been to relive so much stuff, it's helped me see that it's just as important to make time for the things that at one point, were the rich soil of my soul, or maybe they were just water and fertilizer for what soil there already was.

I don't know.

I have felt things over the last few days, going by just as fast and hitting just as hard. All the fear that has been, and more fears connected with the future. And I can't run from any of it, nor do I want to because it has to be faced and delt with.
And there isn't anybody else who can do it for me, and I'm pretty sure that even if someone else could deal with this stuff for me, they really wouldn't want to.
I wouldn't expect that of any one, even if they could.

This is my stuff. The stuff in the closet. There have been times over the last six years that I believed I had at least some parts figured out but I realized that I don't know anything.
I understand how some things might work. But the really important things, I really, do not know.
That's what I am getting hammered into my head.

I don't know if tomorrow morning will come. Or the next 5 minuets. Or if anyone I know and love will be here tomorrow or not.
I don't know.
I have tried to live with that knowledge front and center every day for a long time now.
But that crazy need to survive seems to demand so much practical application to everything that even living there has made holding onto that difficult at best.

I have had so little energy the last couple of months that I have to gear my head into possition just to get through the day.
I want to take naps all the time now!

When I sleep, I either have insane dreams, like several parts of obscure movies pasted together badly and when I wake up,I feel like I've been running laps.
When I don't dream, I wake up exausted and disoriented. Like
I'm not sure where I am. It makes me wonder about thoes nights and what really goes on when I'm sleeping.

All of these things have been going through my mind since I heard the sound of the stream last saturday night.
Now I'm waiting for daylight.
Hope it comes soon.

Sometimes when we sit with something for a long, long time, when it comes time to deal with it, trying to do so is not so easy.

I realized tonight that I have been at war with anger for a very long time.
Anger at not being heard. Anger at being judged. Anger at giving in. Anger at not being heard...I already said that, I know, but it's at the top of my list.

My anger goes deep. And like any deep well I'm not sure where the bottom is.
I have used this well of anger to get the adreniline in my system up high enough to get through the day, especially when going to work is the last thing I want to do.

That happens sometimes. I go anyway because I know if I don't
I don't get to eat, food from a store at least. I would end up going out into the wild and figure it out from there.
I'm not sure I want to do that just at this moment.

I wouldn't have enough money to cover the lot rent here and I would end up loosing this place.
It would end up with me ass to eye balls deep in debt until I could get my head clear enough to figure a way out.

In liu of that I keep going to work.
Simple economics. Right?

I just want to let the anger go, but have no idea how to.
The anger I feel now is based on events that ended up hurting me deeply.
People that I have let close have turned on me and I end up
getting the short end of things.
And the bill for what ever economic mess that comes with it ends
up on my shoulders.
What hurts the deepest about all of thoes events is not that things happened. They do. That's life. But thoes things came about from people who I thought and believed cared as much about me as I did about them.
That's what makes me the angeriest about all of this, is that the people I let close enough to find a place in my life and in my heart, didn't really give a shit at all.

If I let my anger have justice as it wants to, I'm very sure that I would end up going to jail for something or other.
And that's not where I want to be. So I don't give my anger
free reign to wreak havoc back at thoes people.

So tonight I war once again with a dark place. Hopefully I will win the war. Hopefully.

As my laundry hangs dripping over the tub, I learned that wringing out too many clothes after washing is painful on the hands and so I let them hand for about an hour before I wring them out, I was thinking about this project I have going on.
It's a set of 25, or will be in a few days, of 25 moncromatic drawings in color on black.

Now the virtues of drawing on black paper are many. Using black to start with tends to mess with how we see the world.
You deal with only the light reflection if your going for something along the lines of a still life, and the colors that are generally reserved for highlights becomes main players on black.
I'm not fond of drawing in pink. It doesn't do alot for me, but on black it's amazing.
When I'm done with the set, I have planned to go to kinkos to get them onto disk so I can show them on line.
I don't have a good digital camera and no scanner at the moment, this is the solution left to me.

It's been good doing these. With so much of life these days consumed with doing what needs to get done, doing something creative with a goal is a good thing.

I love working in colored pencil and it seems to like me back.
My favorite pencils are prismacolor because they are as close to pastel as you can get without going the road of dealing with tools that are way to fragile for the intensity I tend to draw with.
I'm thinking that when I get it all done I want to attach cloth binding to each one and turn it into a book of art.

I have been working on the brown paper comix but I'm stuck in some places as well. The best inspiration for brown paper comix is life in stripped down mode.
So that is comming along. I just finished a list of fun things to do in winter that will be in the first issue:

1. Watch the thermometer drop. Take bets as to how long it will stay attached to that loose nail.

2. Count rasins.

3. Make cookie sculptures.

4. hold a spit freezing contest. The winner gets an armband made of aluminum foil and a tube of tooth paste.

5. list all the things you can't remember. This is challanging because if you can't remember than how can you list it?

6. Stop in mid-sentance. Don't start talking again for a few minuets. Look at the person your talking to with a really puzzled look. Say "OK and thank you" and let them wonder.

7. Discuss the life of a bean.

8. find something.

9. Make a chicken head out of an empty egg carton. Put a for sale sign on it and ask a $1,000 for it.

10.challange someone to lick their ear.

11. Take turns making shit up.

12. laugh until your sides hurt.

13. explain where toothpaste comes from. be creative, the more outlandish and strange you can make it, the better.

14. color snow.

The list is endless. So that is slowly growing.

The black works were started on Easter. I spent the majority of the day drawing and that's something I haven't done for a very long time. When given time I am prolific artist.

It will be easier when I get a scanner because then when something is done I can just scann it and put it up.
A website has been discussed and I'm thinking about it.
All art all the time...something like that.
I know I want to put as many artists on it as I can, at least links to their sites.
Of all the forms of communication that humans are capable of, to me art is the most profound and the most revealing about the person doing the art.
The viewer is invited to share the artists world. We need more art in the world, and more music.
Much more.

I got to hear some classical music today that was put to techno.
It was awesome. Beetoveen's ninth done in techno...it's yes..
They did the moonlight sonta as well. You can dance to it and it's fun and full of energy.
The moonlight sonta is also fun to put your own lirics to as well.
I was singing about squirels to it today. I've sung about socks as well.
It tends to make me smile and it's hard to sing while these immages are going through my head.

A few months ago I was introduced to sympony x, and I fell in love. A perfect marriage of metal and classical music.
I have felt for a long time that metal and classical were the perfect partners. They are both powerful in nature and equally intense. Both conjour immages and can take you away.
So when I heard it I naturally got goose bumps all over.
It was nice to find out that my feeling was right.

Well, I gotta go draw now. :)

In hindsight I wish sometimes I didn't do the things I end up doing.
Like yelling into the halls of this place and asking where everybody has gone. I miss reading the writing of other people.
I miss alot of things, and have missed much.

I really wish I hadn't yelled at the top of my lungs. I make mistakes and errors, and it doesn't take long for me to understand what I did wrong.
I'm greatful that it doesn't take long. Spending months in a place that my bad choice creates is not something I enjoy, the aftermath is generally not good.

So my appoligies again, I did it at the post and now I'm doing it here. I appoligize for yelling and wanting to know if anyone was out there.

Over the last two years I have learned that many people with brilliant minds and voices have left the building, all that's left is what they had to say.
Some of them I got introduced to durring that two years and at the same time I learned that they were dead.

When I got back here, I found myself wondering..some people were still here, that's a good thing.
They are still ok.

As I have been reading over old threads I found a discussion about this place dying. Martin, which when he was writing here, had powerful things to say. That stupid post that I wrote started there and was added to when every time I have come here since I got back and found last posts and journal entries from over a year ago.
It made me wonder, where have all the writers gone?
Is there anyone still out there?
Has life overwhelmed them and burried them under too much...and in that place I made a bad choice to write something I wish I could take back because it has offended some of the best people I know.
I am so sorry for making that bad choice.

Very sorry indeed...