solid congealed masses of fat sit
balloons filling within joints
stagnant extremities feel as if they are solidifying
the man becoming a statue; a watcher
here lies a perfect specimen of 21st (and in the latter half to a third) a  20th century man seated before the primary means of oral, aural and visual communication.  Oral pertaining to the man's ability to only speak of it and the programmes displayed on it . . . .  .
as still as the brain is telling them to be
as still as the brain wants them to be
it doesn't want to be left out you see, feels secluded when dormant
alongside a healthy, active set of limbs and torso
so it persuades them ever so gently to become as lazy as he
so he feels more at home in his body; the brain he lords over the body tyrannically and purposefully.


Extraneous effort can be avoided, in all manners of life; whilst sitting, whilst working, whilst running.  Being properly lazy has to do with how little you can do without doing something else.  It is possible to run at a speed that does not cease to be running but it is not walking.  You can sit only so still before you are asleep.  Being properly lazy is being able to sit precariously on this line so perfectly you don't slip backwards or forwards into a useful action or being in the top percentile of the new lesser action which you are in essence, lording over physically.  An extremely intelligent man can be extremely lazy in an activity that would take a long concentrated effort from another less intelligent man, but in essence, he is really just avoiding falling asleep.

Laziness can be misappropriated; attributed to men who are not lazy at all.  A man at the enth of any discipline could not be considered lazy; the same could be said about a man at the enth of his ability.  We speak of course in terms of natural ability.  Actions achieved in ones current capability; carried out without carrying on other efforts to cavort himself into a higher category of actions (a laziness compared to ability graph could be constructed/plotted and then correlated if one could be bothered).  Of course, it goes without saying that the achievance of these goals necessary to propel or descend a man into the new upper or lower segment of before described laziness are in turn harder or easier to achieve depending on the man's predetermined stature; position in life even, considering we are talking of afflictions that affect a man and not a boy, and therefore we are assuming that the formative years are not thus (formative) and are but a compulsory precursor, a cross that every man must bear; not a development that pertains to the quantity of laziness he possesses.

with a sea of unachieved tasks/goals laid out before him he resides to sit patiently waiting for something to happen in front of him, sometimes clicking a mouse, sometimes a remote
sometimes he is angry that he is boring
sometimes he calls a friend to be angry at the boxes with him
sometimes he feels sick that he is a *******
sometimes he laughs at people on the boxes who are pieces of ****
but most of the time he is a ******* happily, content that he is at least part of a healthy digestive system, whether he is the result/byproduct of, or the action that produced the **** in the first place.

I’ve always been the quiet type, never one to do the speaking, just listening and observing the lives of those around me.
If I can remember correctly, I began as a light blue, sheltering a newborn baby, Conner, I was covered in wallpaper lined by teddy bears with white silk bow ties like pin stripe pants.
Those few days before his birth in ’62 were filled with anxiety and anticipation, with his parents sneaking in to gaze upon my blue coat, tears in their eyes for the gift that they were days away from receiving. However, they would soon find that the young baby spent little time in my embrace other than evening naps, otherwise his cries became loud with the longing for his mum.

Six years later the teddy bears came down from the walls along with the crib, to be replaced by a bed, the baby blue coat replaced by a loud red.
Watching him grow, I saw his good days and his bad, he was built for math, fast cars, and jubilant laughter.
He had come to me in the midst of April when the flowers outside the windows bloomed, and left for a university after they flowered a mere twelve times.
Once again, his parents visited me, with tears in their eyes as if by being with me his presence would be restored.

His father had talked of a promotion he’d dreamed of, so with more money they were off to a more luxurious home, I was not sad, I was not lonely, I was happy.

I was alone for a while, while the wallpaper had been striped from me and I lay bear and exposed for quite some time, only briefly being introduced to new families by a smiling woman with high heels and big hair.
A group of four moved in, Tom, Adam, Lana, and Louisa. They painted my walls a bright yellow and carpeted my wooden floors, they added filing cabinets, desks, a white board, a telephone, and a book shelf that decorated my left side.
The boys were mechanics, around thirty years at the time, and worked strenuous hours. They bent over their desks re-drawing, re-scaling, and re-shaping until perfection.
Blue prints poured from their cabinets. The two girls owned a boutique down by the grocery store, I saw them less often, but they didn’t bring home their work, only their stories and their stress. It was a short acquaintance with the group, as their hearts were set on the big city and soon their paychecks were capable of supporting that lifestyle.

I was not sad, I was not lonely, I was happy for them.

The following year in ’88 a family of four moved in.
John, Ali and their twin girls converted me to a gym with barbells and some odd-looking mechanism called a “Bo Flex” used for hanging up dry cleaning and attracting the dust.
By then my vibrant yellow walls had faded to beige and my beige carpet had faded to yellow.

I don’t know much about those folks, as in-home gyms are more for decoration than utilization, I guess. The girls visited on days when the heat was unbearable in the Texas sun, running in with loud laughter as they let their weight thud into the ground. They sprawled themselves out on my floors making snow angels, in my warm, worn carpet. Oh, how I loved their attention!

They also left the windows open unlike Adam and Tom, so even when they weren’t around the sunshine kept me company. After fourteen years Bailey left shortly after Annie. I rarely saw anyone for a year or so after that.
The house became too big for John and Ali, and they decided to make the move to Florida that they’d always dreamed of.

The movers came and lifted the heavy weights from my creaking floors, but I was not sad, I was not lonely, I was happy.

The last person that came to live among my embrace was the eldest daughter of three girls. She and I became the closest of all prior inhabitants. Perhaps it was because of the frequent lack of happiness in her eyes, it was the only time I’d had an issue with my inability to intervene in a situation and speak as opposed to listening.
She left my walls there bare color, but adorned me with newspaper clippings and photographs. I was never lonely because her sisters looked up to her, never wanting to leave me, because they never wanted to leave her.
She was more imaginative than the young boy, and more precise than the mechanics.
The music she played was constant and expansive, from Sinatra and Coltrane to A Tribe Called Quest and the Rolling stones. It all correlated with her mood, causing me great joy when the tempo was fast, and depression in times when the dark music fell upon the room.
Her life appeared to be a struggle, as she often threw herself upon the carpet crying until late hours in the night. Only to wake up before the sun rose to write lengthy accounts of the inexplicable sadness she frequently experienced.

Soon she found the help that I was unable to provide with a therapist who visited her in the privacy of her own bedroom. The kind woman encouraged her to participate in activities beyond the confines of my four walls.
She had dreamed to be a psychologist, she wanted to help people, because she knew first hand how much some really needed it. And at age eighteen, that’s exactly what she set off to become.

She moved to Boulder the university she had written about and had wanted to attend for years past.
So I was not sad, I was not lonely, I was happy for her.

She doesn’t rest within my walls and doesn’t watch my flowers bloom, but the sisters, they often come back to visit and roll up the blinds to let the sun shine in, practice their own talents, and fall in love with their own dreams, I am not lonely, they don’t leave me. In fact, one of them is sprawled out upon my floor now, taking over her sister’s absence with a pen and paper of her own.

If the Sacred Fire of Vesta went out, it meant one of two things:
             meant
1. Rome was in danger;
                                                  meant
2. A Vestal ******, a guardian of the flame, was having ***.  
Chastity                                      and                                       fire
are two attributes that are directly correlated.  If one is lost,
the other will follow.  Trust me.  This is fact:
                                                                ­                 only ****** women
                                                                ­                   can be celebrated.

The ****** Mary,
                                the ****** goddesses,
                                                      ­                 the way **** was seen as a crime
                                                           ­        against the father, not the daughter:
                            women
                     ­         must
                            remain
                ­              pure.  

Do not eat the pomegranate seeds,
do not touch the fruit of knowledge.  A
                                                   ­                    statue of a young boy
                                                             ­              holding an apple
                                               does not hold
                                        the same connotation
as a woman holding an apple.  Offering it to a man who
could have refused.  Getting blamed for the fall from Eden.  

                           A woman
with a snake draped around her body is not Eve,
is Lilith, but it’s close enough.  They are both to blame for
all the evils of the world, so what does it really matter anyway?  Women
are more susceptible to wavering in their faith in God,
to worshipping the devil, to practicing witchcraft—

            The flames are out.  Rome is not safe.  A “******” is buried
            alive for her sin.  Lilith is slaughtering women in childbirth.  
            Babies  are  dying.   A  man  is  celebrated  for  his  multiple
            lovers.   ****  shaming  in  79  AD.    The  beds   in   Pompeii
            brothels are made of stone.   St.  Cecilia  is  face  down in the
            dirt.   Women on the same level as slaves,  if not lower.  The
                                     goddess Vesta as a housewife.

“Put pressure on it, it needs more pressure”
Holding your wounds shut
That senseless force is what took you away
Pressure- to be... whilst not desiring to be
You saw the clouds moving in greyscale
I saw the hills below scattered in shades of green,
Cavernous, shadowed, cryptic, familiar-

We were advised to go as the crow flies
I cried to a nameless God that your crow’s feet
Were from insurmountable happiness, not the pressures endured
I’ve forgotten much since the storm some-178 weeks ago
Though my body remembers yours over and over again
My skin has yours imprinted, correlated
Forged into one point on the axis between here and there
You the X, I the Y

The Earth crept between the crevices, curling
Through the distance between the Right radius and ulna
Elbows breaking knuckles, blood remains to be spilt
Blood doesn’t connect, if anything it merely separates

Scarecrows don’t help much when the crops won’t grow this year
Ants crawled out of the barrel of a shotgun
Observing the process of cleaning bones after tragedy

Follow the moss to find your way North with no direction-
Sometimes on the other side it’s not greener,
It’s more terrifying than ever before
Terrain untouched, unspoiled, sacred-

Climb up the trees with me, find your quiet
We won’t carve our names but we’ll find our niche
You’ll have quills and I’ll have armor
Not even the thought of stolen arrows,
Lost time through distance,
Or perhaps a slew of chemical imbalances
Can reach us up here
I chose to glue your pieces back together with mud and straw
Taken from the fallen, the loved and now distant memories

You may be an abandoned military base offshore
What was once used by many-
Witnesses life again, life of a different kind
The vegetation will ease its way into the cracks
Constructed when the foundation began to decay
It has a beauty of its own, one of self-sustainment
An everlasting beauty that connects itself
To the surrounding extravagance, often times ignored,
Death isn’t the only way to be forged into nature, remembered

Fear doesn’t always win, nor death do us part so soon
I hope your skin and bones remember before the end

“He doesn’t even care to keep the knowledge of her possessions a secret, not the least worried about it being stolen”
“What’s worse, is that everyone knows his treasure exists. It’s common knowledge in town”
“How long will it take to get stolen?”
“It’s a matter of days, if you ask me.

He was, however, smiling in the corner. He coerced the enemy into being his friend.  This is why he doesn’t actually disclose himself to anyone, because she might be misunderstood, like what was unravelling right before his eyes. This time however, the misunderstanding just helped him protect his real treasure, something he thought no one could possess because……………

What if you need to think a certain way to know something; and you can’t think that way without feeling or experiencing something else. If that’s true, so much of this world remains hidden in sight, and we don’t even know its hidden.

You can, to an extent, disguise what arises from material belongings immaterially. That’s what makes the key to your locked doors. The keys to your secrets and trust. Our experiences may dictate the way we feel. Look closer however, and there will always be these cracks on the edges of interpretation, these nuances in feelings, small differences that stem out into larger and larger branches until you have at your disposal- uniqueness.

So, here is a complex network of questions and possible answers deconstructed to portray different perspectives of personality, trust and secrets.

Let’s start with trust. It should ideally start with mutual respect and admiration.   Most things fade away, so in reality you are not trusting the other person, you trust yourself to be hopeful enough to believe trust will not wither through time, which is why it may seem like it’s your fault or centered towards you when you are betrayed of trust.

Even the reasons for choosing why we trust others is vastly different for each person. It goes to show how ephemeral our mind is at the microscopic level., almost like no one can truly know us. The reaction of others and their understanding of you may be an external input. But after that the interpretation is yours. And interpretation is slowly built over cycles of overlapping feelings and subtle thoughts.
Can we use this as a “key” to explore parts of ourselves whilst keeping them invisible to others? Can we recover old feelings or find out what means a lot to us, but we remain ignorant to?

Many things that matter deep inside, tend to have a personal lock, like an unspoken connection, or a bittersweet memory we like to visit. The most interesting part about these is that the key for some of these is unpredictable! Any future incident could somehow serve as an access to it, which is what makes personal locks so magical. No one can possess it because of no one, sometimes not even yourself, knows it's meaning to you. Such a key is truly unique, two people may go through the same thing, but for one person alone, that experience could serve as a key.  Here, an experience from the outside world can awaken memories, thoughts that we inadvertently treasured. It can, in a sense, almost transport us to a different timeline.

The phenomenon of getting goosebumps from listening to a piece of music (called frisson), and experiencing a surge of sensory feeling could be a doorway to some great things and could be a sign of higher levels of creativity. When you re-listen to a song you hadn’t listened to in many years, you can relive the time you originally heard it to startling detail. You may notice newer things about memories, be aware of nuanced feelings. Essentially, it becomes something that’s only yours, because you can’t predict how you yourself will be. The only key for such a secret is a unique reaction to an external input.

When you listen to this song, even ambiguously (not attaching it to any particular person or experience), even then when you later hear it, it will be infused with meaning. Why? Because the environment around you at that time possessed some emotional meaning, even if you didn’t know it. It became like recovering a part of you. Like recovering your own perspective on what’s in front of everybody.

Suppose instead of attaching significance, you simply create scenarios in your mind. You just imagine instances and do this repeatedly. Over time, the song’s original meaning will tarnish away. Such imagination gives temporary satisfaction, and even though one can imagine a variety of different scenes and emotions; imagination itself, feels the same. It does not carry any value by itself. It would seem that listening to a song a couple of times and then years later seems to be the world’s best time machine, but when we overplay it, and tamper it using imagination, neural networks get diluted and may not be serve as a very effective train of reminiscence anymore. *^


Mulling things over in our mind in loops can change almost everything about it- it may change a happy sentence into a sad one, a normal experience into a special one, and now these emotions that have been created by you, are like small filters that complicate further experiences.
Consider that two people go through the same experiences from birth. They may not feel each experience to the same degree. The second point is that subtler feelings are experienced by each of them. One may react more heavily, and the other may have auxiliary feeling in more magnitude than the other. Though these differences may be minimal at the start, these subtle thoughts become triggers, just like the initial experience.
Look at what’s happened. Now the seed of subsequent thoughts and emotion is no longer EXTERNAL. Its internalized. As they grow, though material interactions give rise to initial waves of thoughts, our lives are culminated by infinite intertwined feelings and emotions- so for each material interaction, a hundred immaterial ones are processed subconsciously. A symphony can’t be broken down to violins, piano, and drums separately. The feeling that arises when they are played in unison is simply “different” though its just a conglomeration of its parts. This is similar to our mind, and the concept of “The whole is greater than its parts”. What’s more is that the thoughts occurs in different order, and a different order creates a different story.
The concept of “personality” is viewed as abstract sometimes”.  Like character is something that describes the mind, rather than the experience. But this is contradictory, as “Personality” is immaterial, while the experience, the derivative, is material. So, there is a possibility that during this invisible conversion process, our internal reactions and what we make of things in our mind may gradually shape our personality more than the experience itself.


In a strange way, that makes us original. Perhaps not completely original, but it’s possible that no two people are the same, even if they have gone through the same things.
But since the development of originality is subconscious, let us look at conscious examples to put it into application:

Often, there is a part of a song that appeals to us, a favorite part.  When we ask ourselves why that particular melody appeals to us, it may be hard to pinpoint the source of what produced your liking in that part.  Sure, it may mean something like “freedom” or “joy” of remind you of a memory. But why does it mean a specific emotion to you? This is an example of how something that has no direct connection with a memory could possibly trigger a feeling. This is a magical occurrence. It’s extraordinary that a melody can awaken in you a unique emotion, that others may not react to in the same way. It goes to portray how subtly different our minds are. Furthermore, when we create things out of that feeling we derive from the music- make a story based on the feeling, write a new song, or even play it on an instrument- now you have made something that is unique from the depths of your mind. Your own subconscious interpretation.  
Frequency of frisson was positively correlated with overall Openness to Experience, as well as five of its six sub facets: Fantasy, Aesthetics, Feelings, Ideas, and Values. *This may also mean that extensive feeling, or sensing is related to creativity.

Sensory influx, the visual imagery, nostalgia, all point towards creativity, and many renown creative geniuses draw on their sensitivity to fuel creative processes.

Highly sensitive people tend to be more creative, as the depth of feeling offers scope for exploration. The interpretation and emotion felt greatly corresponds to the creation of ideas, and is similar to how interpretation even creates association between senses, or synesthesia.
Infact, drawing on nostalgia can increase imaginative processes

You might have heard of the term “synesthesia”, where sensory experiences get interconnected. A person with grapheme synesthesia, for example, associates letters and numbers with colors. A person with musical synesthesia sees colors effuse out of musical notes. Some synesthetes taste words, smell numbers, etc. It is also a fact* that Synesthetes don’t necessarily share the same sensory experience-though there are commonalities ( ex: most synesthetes associate either black or white with zero), the difference in perception is linked to the environment of growth, childhood*, and if its occurrence is natural, then synesthesia is developed in childhood or at birth.

A Symptom of synesthesia is also reading sentences that seem personified, as though a stranger with different personalities are narrating them. It is interesting to relate this to how there might be different personas in our own head, and sometimes constantly make commentary on our life! It’s like seeing yourself through different perspectives, except these perspectives have defined forms, which makes it easier to assign little quirks to them. If this helps us sense and perceive the world better, and makes us see through multi-colored glasses, it can be very creatively satisfying to have internal conversations, in a positive and uplifting way. We can be a stranger to our own experience, and wouldn’t a change of view be enlightening?

Synesthesia also, may be linked to creativity and metaphors, * and is in a way a example of consciously coming up with original sensory interconnections, a creative process that becomes part of character.  It's connecting something unrelated and different, and an original combination of connection.

So the rearrangement of feelings, and extent to which people sense and feel can contribute to original creations. It is no surprise that many artists and musicians have synesthesia.

Such experiences, with music, nostalgia and conditions like synesthesia are examples of a how we interpret and sense can consciously contribute to originality.


The bottom line is that synesthesia obtains its roots from childhood, but morphs into something complex enough to blur lines of emotion. The proportion of how things are mixed is unique. That proportion is the starting line for all character, and the proportion can be random and unique.
Thoughts feel so diverse and interwoven, that experiencing different facets of it itself can seem synesthetic. Seeing a neon sky, for instance, may not just bring happiness or excitement, but very specific sentience, and a connection to memory, even if it has never been a part of your life at any point of time. The neon sky could mean regret and eccentricity, and flashes of senses may correspond to it. You may feel the aesthetic of a place to strange degrees, and sometimes a simple scenery can seem “wrong” or “sinister”.


  “Why does the neon sky seem eccentric?” “why are roses connected to a past memory that had nothing to do with roses?”

These questions have some intangible meaning behind them. So, it’s not just that people perceive things differently, it’s that their reality itself, a culmination of perceptions is unique, and so are thoughts. And don’t thoughts and ideals shape character in some way? Don't these interpretations become a part of you? A filter for how you perceive the world?


Some song forms a golden thread link with some intense feeling which is connected to a memory you never knew you possessed (this memory may be fictional even) which is linked to a whole little city in your world.  Everything means differently. And as we think and think, these meanings become fine-tuned, and create emotions, thoughts and perspectives that shape our individuality. The essence is that your character may have obtained its roots from the world, but your proceedings, both on the inside and outside, are truly yours. And gradually, proceedings reflect character. More than the roots. It’s a many layered mind that could seem impossible to strip down.

Memories can be similar, but the sequence of memories and thoughts, will likely not be the same.


Here we gently skim the daunting surface of the philosophical idea of “Fictional realism”. A main idea here is to try and question what the definition of something has to be to be considered real. We say “It was a dream, not reality” But did it not feel real? When we read a book, or a movie, and voraciously delve into fictional landscapes, does it not truly feel like we are integrated into it, or rather, it is integrated into us? In that case, since we are real and it is now a part of us, can it be real too? Or can it be real, simply because it exists in our minds? Love and loathing also exist in our minds, but we regard them as a real thing, pulsating with its repercussions. Do we regard something as real only if it has a scope for action? Or if it’s something we can touch or see? In that case, the world will be limited, and there would be a loss of explanation for what gives rise to those actions. It would be like saying “imagination seeds reality”.

Memories and thoughts can be similar, but the sequences of them, even if  slightly  different can grow to be hugely dissimilar. If we can consciously create things when exposed to sensory information, why can't we consider the possibility of subconscious creation of individual character?

1) Family ***** you up, but at the end of the day it’s up to you how you’ll deal with it.
2) You have to learn how to take care of yourself. Mentally, physically, and spiritually. Nobody’s going to do it for you and nobody can do it but you.
3) Education is very important but bad grades does not equate your intelligence.
4) It is okay to be sad every once in a while. You are allowed to feel vulnerable. The point is being able to pick yourself up afterwards.
5) Appreciate the little things. The smallest gestures of appreciation and love from people around you. It can be as simple as “text me when you get home” and you will see who are the people who matter.
6) You will never be able to fully define yourself. By doing so, you are restricting the idea of change. You are constantly growing–evolving, into a better (or worse) person you were yesterday.
7) Learn to adapt. Adapt to your environment and the people around you but never forget who you really are.
8) Society is weird because you are expected to be yourself but they will shun you if they disapprove.
9) Discrimination of all kind exists. There are thousands of people who suffered/are suffering because of this. As a decent human being, it’s your obligation to treat fellow humans as people.
10) Life is filled with very rough patches. If you are going through hell keep going. Because one day you will look back and be able to say “I’ve been through worse.”
11) There are different kinds of perception of beauty. If you find someone unattractive, don’t be an ******* about it.
12) Intelligence is not equated by beauty or if the woman is wearing makeup or not. They are in no way correlated with each other. Destroy this idea that women cannot have more than one trait.
13) There are different kinds of strength. One can be physically strong and have a fragile heart, another can have the weakest body and have the strongest will.
14) The opposite of love isn’t hate. It’s apathy. Stop the “I don’t give a ****” ******* and treasure the people who matter to you.
15) Soulmates does not necessarily mean romantic partners. It could be your best friend, your sibling, or your parent. This is the person who knows you inside and out and vice versa.
16) Stop hating on others and instead notice the nice things about people. Like you think someone’s haircut looks great, tell ‘em. Makes them happier and it makes you happier.
17) Find your passion, pursue it, but make sure you can make a living out of it. If you’re an artist, learn to market yourself. It is as an occupation just as much as being an accountant.
18) Live in the moment. It’s hard not to dwell into the past or be excited for the future, but you should also focus on the now. You will never be as young or as old as you are right now.”

Old Katherine Kimberly had a sty near her eye
it was a bleeding abhorrent electric
dream spilling out her sanity
the sty was not just any regular sty
it was a satyr placed there by cruel forever
just because
why not

old KATHERINE KIMBERLY had a
mute cousin who came over for tea
when K.K was feeling down, he wanted to be a comedian
but this wouldn't work out for obvious reasons.
old Katherine Kimberly
had a recurring nightmare involving the world around her inverting it's layout, a backwards realm with backwards chairs and backwards backs
everyone looking like they suffered a dramatic accident
spine snapped but still walking
she was the outcast with her even shoulders and
delicate form but there it was that sty by her eye
wouldn't quit not even with sleep.
She went to see a doctor about the nightmares he prescribed a miracle
didn't work
so she went to church
met some wiry bald-spot
evangelic addict figure who
gave her mysterious bagged-and-untagged drugs
(those didn't work either)
nothing would help.. Kimberly came to the conclusion that the sty and the dreams were correlated in some spiritual, cursed sort of way.
Nobody could see it they promised

"No! no! you look fine, everything is in order god knows what you're on about Kim"

but she scratched and scratched for hours in her bedroom and looked in the faded mirror with microscopic detail and sure enough it was/gone??
since when??
she could feel it there, she was no hypochondriac it was alive and feeding off her still
that HORRIBLE THING!
some months now or maybe more it had always weighed her down but now gone
or never there...?
IMPOSSIBLE!
this wasn't over, old Katherine Kimberly would tear this ****** apart on a sub-atomic level and make sure it would never haunt her in any respect from "this day forth!" she said poetically,
wearing a conservatively fashioned dress with green flowers on it
and green grass, too.

She took to the New York subway on a Wednesday, the time was.......2pm
and she was headed to the drycleaners but not the one closest her apartment, the people that ran that one were pushy and irritating.
She was going to "Maude's" she and Maude had lovely conversations about the Gardener who lived one floor up from her who sometimes allowed a small hello from his lips on the way up, off of work.
She liked what he liked
or at least she imagined that to be true
but then again we all do that
it's a bad habit
he could be a total *******, she thought.
Old Katherine Kimberly walked in and opened the backroom there was Maude listening to Brian Eno
(Cindy Tells me/HERE COME THE WARM JETS/1974)

"THE RICH GIRLS ARE WEEPING"

Maude heard K.K come in and swiveled around in her office chair with the one off-kilter wheel which she didn't do a very good job of fixing.
"Well I don't shop at Ikea, its no wonder why, Kat"

"This sty! I know it looks like it's gone, but it isn't, do you still have any of that herbal remedy stuff you told me about earlier?"

"yeah, yeah.. the stuff you refused take way back when?"

"I admit I was being stupid, I just need help, I'm out of options and I'm kind of on a bad trip right now, see? some ghoul at the church gave me these pretty pink pills, said they were from mars and that they could cure anything! O Maude I was desperate and now I'm hallucinating all sorts of wack. I'm afraid I won't come back from this! I dunno what to do Maude! I dunno what to do!"

"Relaxxxx poor doll, you're always getting caught up in messes like this. It's like I said! you gotta settle down with that Rupert, he seems like a genuine guy, real caring, real. I'll help you, I have that herbal medicine in my car I will be right back"

Maude left hastily with a pat on K.K's shoulders as she went
K.K was going cuckoo
she suddenly felt that on a very metaphysical level her atoms were remembering this drug
always
and that when she died, eventually..some innocent child would be reconstituted with her atoms
to live with this for all time
and to be forcefully admitted into a psychiatric ward
pleading for lobotomy!

"What is this? what did I take? does that Kubrick-looking ****** use this often? how is he even tethered to reality?" she was dizzy, good thing she was sitting down..

Maude came back, shaking her head in sympathetic disapproval
"Jeez.. you've gone down the rabbit hole as far as ailment is concerned, that's for sure"

"What do you mean..?" Katherine Kimberly kept her feet grounded to the carpet as to not sway reality to a snowglobe catastrophe.

"Well you say the sty has something to do with the nightmares, or vice-versa, so you took drugs from a complete stranger! only made things worse, I'm sure.. and now you've come to me"

"That's true" K.K agreed
"Why do this to yourself?"
"I've been lost, out of tune, completely washed.."
(((((())))(((((()(((((((((())))(())))))))))()()()))))((­(())))))))))
she was going to continue, but felt like vomiting

She lept from her seat and hunted for a bathroom,
A vicious tabla bleached her brain
with supernatural viscosity
her body played like a cosmic instrument
for a higher being in a higher realm.
Next, the frantic sitar which reminded K.K of July and
the humid balcony marijuana, Ravi Shankar melodically spinning in her living room.
This was a much different experience.. as made clear by her
convulsions
the viper's final dose of venom

"The great spirit lifted his hand without much ado, and split apart Flower Mountain's ten million layers." - from Elder Ting Stands Motionless. (Blue Cliff Record)

"-******* that ******* from the church
why I ever listened to him-
-I feel like I am afloat atop the world able to see the stars as vibrant eyes! but I'm wavering without a sense of gravity. I am at once motionless and spinning!-"

A lot more trouble than it was worth,
O the wisdom of consequence!
K.K, poor doll, lucid consciousness
and an acute awareness for her disposition in this Universe
and all alternate universes for that matter.
(Including the version of her that decided against taking those pink pills from that pink-cheeked man, Stanley Kubrick lookalike ******* probably only posing as a religious man, they never met in one reality, they ****** in another. In one he is god! he is the only god! and in one she is god! anything better than this reality now! her lungs foaming up with death)

GLOBE-O-VOOTY/
GUIDE-O/
ME SOFTLY/
GET THIS THREY-WAY/
OUT FROM MY MIND/
(That's VOUT language for you, there. Slim Gaillard's timeless bop language)

after puking up the rest of her morning meal
she wiped her mouth dry with her sleeve and
reunited w/ Maude who handed K.K that herbal
music
and wished her well

"Look, I know it's none of my bussiness.. but if I were in your shoes, I'd make some changes.. that's all I'm gonna say about THAT"

so Katherine Kimberly went home, she wept
wept about her disposition
about her mistakes
about that inoperable mental sty which was more than a sty
parasitically latched onto her for ages
she wept about how boring people were
how after all this protest and bloodshed
we're just the same as before if not less intellectual!
this fever dream of a day hath made her realize
that she SHOULD make a change.
Hell, Maude was right, sometimes insufferable (tho not as much as others)
She couldn't keep doing this, whatever this was.

The herbal medicine was contained in some cutesy vial
a kind of amber-shade
thick liquid.
Just in the fashion of Lewis Caroll she
drank up her prayer potion, with the sensation that the room was expanding around her, shrunk down to the pathetic dreamer once again,
and so she tried to sleep this desperate sickness off.

One floor up, Rupert thought about whether or not he should *******, he decided to make some coffee instead, continuing where he left off on a new-age book about hypnotism.

The current day is May 1st, 2024. I believe I might have found Brianna. And she’s gone. . .

About eight years ago from this date, I would have my first encounter with this mysterious girl. With all of this having taken course over such a long amount of time, a lot of the details are blurry compared to how solidified they used to be to me. But, back to the first encounter, although encounter sounds more like a passive aggressive frightening experience, I’m not sure what other word I might use to describe it. Maybe it was a chance meeting or divine intervention, but encounter gets the meaning across a bit more fluently, as every time I would find this girl I would be in total shock, utter disarray, and my heart would beat so fast I’d feel as though a heart attack was right around the corner.

The first time I ever met her was through a dream. . .

I can’t remember what this particular dream was. I’m not exactly sure what happened in it, why I found it so profound, or how it even got me to begin thinking about this girl. All I know was that it got my attention and I began to pay attention to this idea, this one night miracle where I first met this mysterious woman.

The night I had that dream, I’m pretty sure I thought nothing of it. Who doesn’t have a dream every so often where they’ve met their true love, their other half, their once in a lifetime love of their life? I’ve always been a bit of a hopeless romantic and I’ve always known that this was one of my deeply ingrained character traits. From my first ever year in school in first grade, I had a very large crush on this girl, Ashley Amaya, and I remember wanting so badly to be her crush as well. I even remember a moment from school when I saw a spider crawling towards her and me while walking across a paved walkway to get to our next class, and I leapt towards it and crushed it, despite having a massive fear of the little demons at the time. But, I did it to impress her!

All that to say, the first dream wasn’t extraordinary, and instead it was just another more than usual somber morning when I woke up only to realize the beautiful woman I had just met was probably a mixture of something I ate and some tv show I’d probably seen the afternoon before. Time would go by, the memory of that first dream fading to the farthest recess of my mind with only a hint of any remote recognition still reminiscing in the deepest abyss of my head.

But, this is when what started out as a dream began to become a bit more substantial. This is when Brianna began to plague my mind.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I began to have recurring dreams of being in love with this mysterious woman. She began to become more familiar in a very inconvenient and unreliable way which was of course through the remembering of my dreams. In the beginning stages, I’d only ever catch glimpses of her face and the reset was usually a silhouette or a very rushed moment. The rushed moments were hard to describe but they were full of light, always this wonderful warm yellow light and though they were rushed, time also slowed down significantly in a perplexing way that I still can’t really understand to this day.

I’d see her dark brown hair flowing and filtering the light into these tiny and magnificent rays making a twinkling in what was usually a dark atmosphere. I’d catch the corner of her mouth turning ever so slightly into a warm beautiful smile as she looked away, something else in the vicinity stealing her attention for the moment. There were intense feelings of joy and tranquility and there was a warmth about the situation I could only hope to ever feel in the true cold and lightless world we all collectively call home. Something about her was so intensely special, and the fact that I even got to share a dream with her was the highest privilege I could’ve ever received.

As time would go on, I’d continue to have these dreams. She always stayed the same, with her long dark brownish red hair flowing ever so gracefully. It got to the point that when I would have these dreams, I would’ve preferred to not wake up, just so I could spend more time with her.

Over a year would go by. At this point in life I was still just in high school and still brand new to learning life in the real world compared to the sheltered view I used to have. I had just gotten a job at the local Home Depot as a cashier, literally a few weeks after I got my license since my parents were unwilling to pay for gas for me (as good parents should do!) I was still figuring out life with my friend groups and trying to balance the reality of starting to become more mature and take on more responsibilities while still trying to cling to my childhood of digging holes and bashing legos against the wall with my brothers! It was an odd time, which I guess many can easily familiarize themselves with the timeframe as we’ve all at one point been teenagers.

One of the biggest things in my life I remember being a bit troublesome though, was all my friends I had made and my groups of people I had become so entangled with. With going through these changes, I had some friends that were still absolute children at heart and some friends who were practically ready for college! I had loads of moments through those years where these friends I had grown up with would start to feel like strangers and I’d begin to not really feel as though I had a social place to call my own.

Work was a new outlet, and I actually used to love talking to people as a cashier, ringing up their items, and learning the social norm of small talk that would amount to nothing less than an afterthought. I made a lot of friends with people who were retired and with college kids who seemed to be the coolest bunch around, who knew how to live life and have fun doing it. It was such a variety of friends where I’d talk to Tina about her granddaughter or Jim about his retirement and stock options and then I’d go up to Isaiah and he’d tell me about all the dates he’d been on or all the party stories of him and his friends living life to the fullest. It was a pretty great time in my life though, because one thing especially it taught me was how to be social, though this process would still take years and years to fully develop until I was in my early 20’s to be fully confident in my ability to put it on and be charismatic if need be. The reason I mention so much about this job though, was there was still a deep  and unrecognized subconsciously aware desire in me to meet the one.

Home Depot of all places was the first time I saw her. In person. . .

I remember it was a day much like the rest of them. After having struck up some conversation with our customers and being a little groggy from waking up at the crack of dawn for the early shift, it was time for me to finally get some lunch. While taking my usually route from the front of the hardware store I stopped at my usual coworkers stations to say hi or make a passive joke as I strolled happily on my way.

I can’t exactly remember why, but I had the need to talk to one of my managers, and it was something I needed a response for by the end of the day, so I figured before I clocked out for lunch, I’d get that little task out of the way. But, on the way back to my manager’s office, which was this little 10 foot hallway with doors on either side, one leading to a bank of sorts, and the other side hosting two doorways to offices, I was stopped in my tracks. Right next to the old clock-in machine were two seats where you’d usually sit and wait if the manager’s doors were closed so you could catch them as they walked out. They were also the seats I had sat in when waiting to get an interview for this first job of mine, where I nervously and anxiously awaited the outcome so many years ago.

In one of those broken down, flat cushioned little seats was a girl so beautiful, I literally lost my breath at the sight of her. I knew immediately who she was. She was the girl from my dreams I had been having over the course of that past year or so. Recently through my dreams, I had learned a very crucial detail about her and that was that her name was Brianna, and there sitting right before me within a few steps walk was the girl.

I froze. I made eye contact. And I immediately turned around and walked away. How I wish beyond wishing I would’ve said hi now. . .

Seeing that my manager was currently in the process of onboarding her as a new employee, I decided to take up my little question with my manager a bit later and I went to lunch. While walking into our break room, I ran into one of my new co-workers who I had become pretty good friends with. His name was Brad Brad.

At this point in time, I had more of an idea and more of a recognition of the fact that these recurring dreams of mine were something special, though I hardly let anyone know because of how embarrassing and odd it was. I mean, who would go around blindly telling people about some chick that they’d been dreaming of that they were totally in love with?? (Definitely not me eight years late. . . ) But with Brad Brad, I trusted him and had told him about the story a few days prior to running into her.

Not knowing her name and only having seen her face, I walked up to my friend and asked him about the new possible employee. He immediately knew who I was referring to her as he had seen her just a bit ago and apparently gotten to know her slightly! I asked him if her name was Brianna, being almost definitively sure that that was her name, and just wanting to check to see if I was either certifiably insane, or possibly blessed with this odder than life knowledge.

Brad immediately confirmed her name was Brianna and asked if I had spoken with her, and this immediately had me out of breath, terrified of how the girl from my dreams was truly true and realer than life. I don’t remember exactly how the rest of the conversation went down, though I can safely assume I was blabbering like a lunatic and telling him every single detail of every single dream I had had of her before. I walked out to get lunch knowing that I’d finally become acquainted with Brianna over time in the work atmosphere which was a relief to me, knowing how social I was at work while in comparison to how introverted and quiet I was at school. Life was looking to good to be true.

Brianna, didn’t get the job.

A few days would go by and my excitement to go to work was through the roof. Never before had I had so eagerly gotten in my car, driven to work, and immediately clocked in in hopes of seeing this new girl around the work place. A week would go by and my thoughts of her were still as excited as ever, but I began to realize that there was still training, a full on hiring process, and that it would most likely take time for things to get in motion. A few weeks would go by and then a month and an unsettling worry began to haunt me as I started to wonder if she didn’t actually get the job.

I started going around asking all of my fellow co-workers if they knew her or if they had any ideas of if we were hiring anyone new. I became obsessed with what we called the, “war board,” which was a schedule of all cashiers’ schedules for the day, what departments they would work in and so forth so on. But, I never saw Brianna’s name pop up, and I began to realize that I might have missed my one and only chance of getting to talk to Brianna.

As time progressed I finally decided it was time to talk to Brad about this new girl since he had been the only one I had talked to about her, and this is when the strangest thing ever happened. Brad had absolutely no idea who I was talking about. He could tell I was obsessed with the idea though and he saw how persistent I was that I had had the conversation with him before, and he even sympathetically lied to me about knowing her just to appease my insanity by saying,

“Ohhhh yeahhhhhhhhh! I remember who you’re talking about!”

I was crushed that the only person who knew her didn’t remember her and at the time I’m unsure of why I didn’t ask my manager to see if they knew who I was talking about. Maybe it was embarrassment or the thought of not being able to see other potential employee’s information that scared me. Either way, I wish I had asked more and been more determined in finding information on what had happened to Brianna.

Months and months on end would go by and the fascination with work would disappear as I got older. I’d check the war board on a pretty consistent basis always hoping that by some miracle, Brianna would show up to work for the day! And even though we eventually would go on to hire an incredible Brianna that I’d become such dear friends with, she wasn’t the same one.

I remember how I used to day dream about Brianna walking into the store and how I would recognize her and how we’d instantly fall in love. Especially on those hot hot Summer days when I was stuck in the garden department with nothing but my thoughts and a dream. As life began to progress though, I realized I didn’t want to only dream about Brianna. . . but I wanted to find her! What good was all my wallowing around if I didn’t make any active attempts to find her!

Thus began, the searching for Brianna. What might just be an everlasting one. . .

I began to take a reality check on this recurring girl who haunted my every thought and when wondering on how I would find a girl from my literal dreams, I thought maybe the first best place to look would be there! Literally in my dreams. I took on an idea I had borrowed from the movie Inception where first thing in the morning, if you try to remember your dreams you’d have a better chance of seeing more details.

Doing more research into this line of thought, I read about dream journals and how some people keep entries of their nightly subconscious activities in order to become better at what’s called lucid dreaming, where basically, you have full and utter control of the dream and realize that you’re in it while still sleeping. My dream journal over time would start to slowly fill and fill with some pretty crazy stories and hilarious dreams. Actually, I wonder if I still have it. If I can find it, I’ll drought down one of my entries here for you to read. . . whoever “you” might be.

I won’t lie when I say I found it in about one minute. It was sitting on my desk right next to me. Oddly enough, my first journal entry is far further in this story than I thought as it was written on October 9th, 2022 (thank God I wrote down dates!) Here goes my first entry.

10-09-22 (#1)

My first dream, I remember being at Home Depot, working while pushing carts. I was very sick and delusional and the atmosphere was rainy and dark. All I could feel was gloom and sadness. There was no one to help me which added to the exhaustion. A customer managed to break 3 carts in half and I had to try and fix them, but I couldn’t. The feeling of wanting to go home was very strong.

10-09-22 (#2)

This time I was in a small class with two other men. It was our first day and our professor was already making us write books worth of homework. But, she soon assigned us Minecraft assignments and the rest of the class was devoted to playing Minecraft. A mixture of falling while playing the game repeatedly occurred and was frightening, yet exhilarating and fun.

Though my timeline of the dream journal and me beginning to write it might be skewed in this story I’ve been telling, as you can see from October 9th’s dreams of the year 2022, it was in fact something I started to do. There were quite a few pages from this journal missing and I can’t recall if they were pages of old homework from school and the notebook was one I self-recycled or not. But, I thought I had started writing these way earlier in my life. Maybe one day, I’ll write up all of these dreams into some sort of official funny document, but as of right now, they’ll all stay in that book. It might honestly be for the better!

Either way, it’s obviously apparent that I became obsessed with this idea of Brianna and I began to play my life events in my head over and over again, and this might have been harmful to me later on, but at the early stages of these occurrences, I was very much into reading. Being the introvert that I was in school, and having no access to a smart device, I used to read so so so many books all the time! My best friend in high school wasn’t any other student really but the faculty and staff, specifically our school librarian Mrs. Hogue.

Every time I’d walk into that library which was probably like twice a week, she’d see me and know it was time for me to become obsessed with a new story or spend the next however many months of my life engrossed in a series. I absolutely loved Mrs. Hogue and while she was very strict with all the other obnoxious kids, she loved me too. We used to talk about life and such and the day I graduated, she was one of the people I made sure of to talk to her and wish her a goodbye to.

Anyways, this obsession with writing and reading of mine was one that really flourished during high school due to these circumstances. It feels rather odd writing now when I haven’t gone about it aside from formal essays and school work since specifically 2018.

2018 was the year that I decided to run with a lot of these creative concepts my mind had created over Brianna and turn them into an actual book with full on character development, a family for Brianna, a place to live and friendships and occupations of all sorts! This is why I mentioned just earlier that this might’ve been more harmful to me, because, sometimes I can’t remember with Brianna what’s memories and what’s a figment of my imagination developed by a creative and passionate former younger writer of myself.

Either way, at this point in my life you could tell I was so devoted to the idea of Brianna being a real person, and this one specific idea plagued me like no other.

The idea was that Brianna was also dreaming of me and that we could only communicate through our collective dreams.

This idea for a young hopeless romantic was intensely alluring and from this idea became the now published and only book of mine, “The Fracture of Reality.” In this book, there’s two main characters named Ian and Brianna. Ian oddly enough matches almost identically all my physical and intellectual traits, some of the only differences being him having a place of his own, a pretty successful job and a bit more muscle, almost as though he were a version of myself I hope to one day be.

Brianna, well, she was and is the Brianna that I know.

The premise of this book was, well how should I put it? Better yet, I’ll just plug in the summary from the back of the book I wrote many years ago!

“Dreams and reality are relatively similar terms. Dreams describe and amplify events that occur in reality whereas reality can capture what little glimpses of the dreams remain. But, it never occurred to me that the two could blur together. Only when it was too late did I start to realize that reality was fracturing…”

Although this summary doesn’t really expound on what the book was about, only now do I find it so profound that I established this saying, this line of thought while I was still younger. I’ll write to you now that the basic premise of the story was a bit of a thriller! Ian begins to have these dreams where he meets and speaks to this mysterious tranquil and beautiful girl. He starts to fall in love with her as he slowly begins to realize that she is in fact real and having dreams of him also. But, with his dreams comes the slow beginning of his down fall where his dreams start to predict horrific events that will occur relatively soon. Along with the dreams comes the mental breaking down of his sanity with a deadly progression exponentially on it’s way to happen far too soon. Through the connecting of his dreams, he needs to find Brianna who he hopes when finding her, will stop the terrifying decline of his conscious nature.

In the end, and [insert spoiler warning here hehe], Ian finally meets up with Brianna only to have one of his dreams predict a horrible event of him and her being hunted by some men that Brianna had gotten in bad with during her youthfully naïve years. The story ends with Brianna and Ian in a cottage after Ian in real life has been shot. The story ends with Ian being unsure as to whether or not his dream reality is real life, or if his reality with the pain of the bullet in him is the truth. Brianna tells him that it doesn’t matter, and tries to convince him that the current peaceful reality that they’re currently in? That that moment and that present feeling is real, and that’s what really truly matters.

Look at me, doing a synopsis of my own books six years later! Writing this book and creating my dream journal and doing research was really the first phase of my obsession with Brianna. The older I’d get though, the more it’d become real to me. I’m unsure as to whether the past eight years of my life has made this idea so authentically real to me, but now I see this all as fact rather than speculation and a possible decline in my sanity that I used to be subconsciously aware of.

More years would progress in my life and would lead to the graduation of my high school and the starting up of college at my community college. There, I’d me one of my best friends which will most likely be my best friend for life KJ, but it was also a time of maturing and shying away from the ideas of Brianna as much. Rather than focusing on the idea of her, instead I got so busy with work at Home Depot, balancing friendships at community college, and still trying to socialize with my family that I hardly thought of her.

But, circumstances would change and even though I went a while without thinking about her, she was always there. When I began my first semester at Columbia State and accidentally sat next to this absolutely beautiful girl named, you guessed it, “Brianna,” I thought that she was her! Only to find out like literally two days into the semesters that she was married, whoops! But I still became friends with her and weird stuff like that would occur every so often, but at this point in time, life was changing so rapidly and my mind was always so distracted that Brianna began to fade.

I’d still have my occasional dreams and when those hit, it’d be more difficult than it used to be. The feeling of wanting to stay in those dreams was so strong and so hard to swallow when I woke up and realized it’d only been in my head.

With school starting though, my priorities changed a lot in life! My job was the least of my concerns at Home Depot and I’d more often than not skip all of my shifts as it always drained me of all my energy having to socialize with a bunch of people I didn’t care for or care about. All the small talk became irritating and whenever I was there, I guess I had come to associate that little hardware store with the idea of loss and gloom. I mean, if my dream journal didn’t speak enough for itself, I think it’s because I missed out on my one and only chance to actually talk to Brianna.

My new priorities were to make as many friends as possible and to turn this new page in life and that’s exactly what I did! I was incredibly social and went out of my way to introduce myself to total strangers just to try and escape the old Mike and pursue a new version of him.

It wouldn’t take long for Brianna to come back to me though.

Nobody that tells you how quickly life goes by can truly explain the depths of what that means and you sort of need to experience it yourself, and with the pandemic of Covid-19 happening around 2020, those two years at community school and the two years at MTSU would go by like a wisp of air. Like a breath, **** the time went by. Sure there was quite a bit of stuff that happened throughout that time, like me beginning to fall in love with creating content through YouTube about Minecraft, getting internships and freelance work for my degree as a Graphic Designer where I won competitions and published my art in many places and had the opportunities to be in a crazy high end internship.

But the amount of time, was just literally gone. I was too busy. Brianna became an afterthought.

That is, until fairly recently. To drop some dates for you, I created my first official youtube channel on September 18th, 2019 and published my first video four years ago a day after I made the channel. At first, my channel of Minecraft specific content was created both to prove to my brothers that I could create content as incredible as the youtubers we watched, but it was also just in hopes of turning it into an actual career since it was something I genuinely was okay at. Having had architecture for for years in high school Minecraft felt like a more creative and liberating way to express those abilities and live them out in an actual environment I had created. But also, Minecraft was an excuse for me to turn off my mind.

Covid and the pandemic was sort of the greatest thing to ever happen to me, because it gave me so much time to think and play this wonderful game. I know I mentioned above how I didn’t think about Brianna that much, and that part is true, but when I had those dry moments of playing Minecraft and grinding out some simple tasks of literally just breaking and placing blocks, my mind would wander to her. I used to choose the most essentially mind numbing tasks of mining for hours upon hours which only consisted of holding down a button and occasionally moving your character around to mine some more. But though the task was completely and utterly boring, my mind was active as ever thinking and wondering about Brianna.

Finding these quiet moments in life were far and few between, but I began to cherish them. All the moments from day dreaming while mowing the lawn and sweating to death in the 100 degree sun, to sitting in my car after a long first four hours at Home Depot while staring at a semi-vacant parking lot, to even just the long walks across my enormous campus at MTSU or the long walk from parking spots I chose purposefully to be super far away from my campus at Columbia State. These moments while rare, gave me a chance to keep Brianna at least in the back light of all the real life moments I was constantly distracted and thrown around with.

But, going back to Minecraft when I got into youtube, this changed everything.

I went from having at least some spare moments to having literally no moments at all. The only time I would rest was when I had experienced such bad burn out from trying to do everything everywhere all at once, and between that and the occasional sleep I would get, my mind had no time to think. I still can easily get into that workaholic mind set sometimes and it’s a dangerous one to be in, but I’ve gotten better as I’ve figured out why I believe I fell into that mindset in the first place.

The reason was to escape Brianna’s grasp.

As I went through school hanging out with friends and making new one’s internationally through the development of an ever expanding youtube channel, I had just about no time for anything. The only time I had to stop and think was my 10 minute drive to get food and even in those moments, I had no time to think, because I was too busy driving trying not to get killed by crazy drivers.

Three years of school went by before I finally said that enough was enough. With school being as difficult as it was, I decided to “retire” from my newfound love of youtube because in all honesty, it was driving me mad. My retirement video from Minecraft came out on December 5th, 2022. I stepped away from the never ending grind and set out to enjoy life and the little moments that life offered.

The only problem with this was that my mind began to ponder Brianna once again.

At this time in my life, after retiring I was actually working for a famous youtuber named PrestonPlayz. It was a random freelance job and for the past year or so I had been jumping from freelance to freelance work with little regards to cost and payments real life had always waiting around the corner for me.

This would make me end up ultimately getting a job back at Home Depot for a few months to pay off debts I had incurred from being financially stupid and buying stuff I didn’t really need. But, between all the financial problems and weird life situations I had so much more time to think about Brianna. The dreams of her still occurred every so often but the frequency at which they had started to occur was less and less. Maybe this was all due to me reaching a new level of maturity, but I’m still not entirely sure what caused it. Maybe it was the distraction of a busy workaholic life or the hopes to find someone, really anyone that was a girl that would love me that I could love back.

But, like I said my mind began to think about her more and more. I began to see her in my thoughts like I had years ago previously and it almost felt like I was back sliding into some weird territory I had just grown oblivious to with the amount of time that had passed. Either way, that was my life. A jumbled mess of thoughts and ideas all scattered in a brain far too busy to stop and breathe coming to the new age of silence and habit.

With my mind able to breathe, I thought of her again. . . and then I saw her again. . .

I can’t remember the exact day or time of year, but on one of these days of my “retirement” I was driving home after having just gotten some taco bell. (I was obsessed with the place back then) Driving up my street, I saw a girl with long dark curly hair and bright pink clothes, what might have even been pajama pants on her, walking up my street! I didn’t think much of it until I looked into my sider mirror and saw her face and saw that it was the one and only, Brianna.

Brianna was walking up my street right next to my house. In person. Alive and breathing.

I panicked and jumped out of my car with my taco bell nearly crashing to the ground as I roared into park in my driveway with my car. With bare feet, since I used to drive with no shoes when I went to fast food place, I dove onto an aggregate driveway and started running down it, knowing that there was no way on earth I was missing my chance to finally talk to her. I had nothing but time that day, and I was overly excited to finally introduce myself in person

But when I turned around, Brianna was gone. She’d simply vanished into thin air? I still don’t know how or why, but she was gone. . . possibly gone forever. . .

This experience drove my efforts to find her to another level of passion as I began to research through many google forums and sites and social media platforms praying to God that I’d be able to find her. It didn’t matter if I had to cross the entire ocean to get to her, I was going to find Brianna, no matter what.

I started to revisit old ground and went to the Home Depot I had worked at, asking the new manager there if he could search records and being able to find her that way. I found old coworkers I used to work with and asked around trying to find any trail or any lead and couldn’t find a single thing. I even managed to find Brad Brad’s Instagram and messaged him only for him to have literally no idea what I was talking about, go figure.

With nothing working and having literally no idea on what else I could do, I began to passionately work on a project called, “The Bri of My Dreams.” What this basically was was an ARG or alternate reality game which was a puzzle game I setup for my prior youtube community to solve and have fun with. But, it was more than that. It was the telling of the story of Brianna in a way that I could hopefully publicize and gain some popularity on so that maybe instead of me finding Brianna, she’d be able to rather find me! So, I started working on it behind the scenes unbeknownst to anyone in my community that I was going to use this new found passion project to hopefully find her, but also to bring me back to youtube content creation.

To this day, I’m still not sure why I wanted to go back to youtube. Well I know some underlying reasons, that being tied loosely to Brianna, but now many months later still being at it, I’m unsure as to the real reason why I still create stuff on there.

Either way, after creating an entire animated short film with a script and what I consider to be one of my greatest projects of all time, “The Bri of My Dreams” project was finalized and ready to publish. I put it out there hoping that it was only a matter of time before I finally heard from her.

Hardly anyone noticed I’d returned to youtube, let alone my project failing horribly as only close friends I knew even attempted the puzzles.

My final efforts produced literally no results, and well, this brings me to about right now, this moment that I’m actually writing this all down on May 1st 2024 at 4:21 p.m CDT. For the past few hours I’ve written down all of this while listening to The Caretaker album on youtube, a depressing soundtrack meant to represent the stages of alzheimer's.

This morning while sitting around doing nothing really, I looked up Brianna one last time, despite me telling myself I would be done with her after my ARG project. I found a girl, about the same age as me that matched the name and the description. Her father’s name was funnily enough the same as my own, Michael.

What I found about her and her father were obituary statements.

I’m unsure if it’s okay or morally right to even think that might’ve been her, but something I noticed when doing research about Brianna in my earlier days. . . For some odd reason there’s a lot of young beautiful Briannas who unfortunately die in their early 20’s. It’s an odd and horrifying fact I’ve come to know over the past few years through my odder than odd research.

But, this case I found today? Well the exact date this Brianna died on correlated almost exactly when my dreams stopped of her.

I don’t dream of Brianna anymore. I haven’t for years. . .

I think the reason I’m writing this, is my own way of finally saying goodbye. Wherever she is, I hope she’s okay. I hope she’s well. But as for me, life continues to go on and it’s finally time after these past eight years to finally say. . .

Goodbye Brianna. I’ll miss you. . .

<•>

Good Acts are like Good Poems

"Good acts are like good poems.
One may easily get their drift,
but they are not rationally understood"
Albert  Einstein

Ach, mein guter Kumpel!
Ach, mein bester Freund!

how could I not have known,
the syncopation, the synchronization,
between what I write, and the impetuous impetus within,
that caustic sense that burns words
from my chest
directly onto the paper
are more than correlated,
even causation-ally related
after all, you, naturally, the master of relativity

but you know me Al,^
I, the quibbler from  NYC*
have to have a slightly different take,
in my gemeinschaft city of eight million strangers,
we always must have eight million and one
opinions

true dat, when I am on the fifth or sixth stanza,
realizing got no clue what the poem is rambling about,
but it sounds so good, lovely, pretty words,
why ***** it up with scientific rationality?

but good acts are easy, uber understood,
rationally we live to survive and
do what we to
make the species survive, common sense triumphs,
disguised as sacrifice, forgetting to roll the dice,
doing what comes like a good poem,
and what needs doing or writing
is so intuitively obvious,
just love poetry,
a global necessity

so check out Houston in two thousand and seventeen

here's hoping life in heaven ain't boring  
know that you've seen, peeked, peaked,
at the theory of everything,

resolving the contradictions
between general laws of physics
and those pesky tiny quantum mechanicals,
even solving that 'other' equation

GA = GP

I wrote this in the dark.
Because the last poem stripped
from the book binding and ripped
from my chest was not valued at
the utility company's worth; a two-hundred dollar bill is not easily disbursed when each
poem nets zero cents per word.

A candlestick will
dematerialize faster than
a wax seal on parchment -
one that establishes the epoch of
Civil Rights -
this is a correlated falsehood
of fixed rents in a gentrified neighborhood.

The plus-side of *******
the poor to cater to the wealthy
is that when the new occupants
move in, and the stainless steel
refrigerator is moved in, the empty
box is placed at the curb, and with
the right imagination it can easily
become a home for two.

You blew dust in eyes so I couldn't see what I was doing
the mistakes I was making
you were pulling the strings and my movements correlated
I was following the choreography you scripted
I didn't realise the life I wasn't living
until you let go of those strings and I collapsed
I was the puppet you were puppeteering

Exists
All the time
Everywhere
Maybe not in your mind
All the time.
It strikes at unprecedented moments
and it hurts as if sand paper was rubbing against your lungs
You are deeply hurt
and shut your brain off temporarily
your mouth may not be correlated with the nervous system.
You say things you will regret.
The overwhelming feeling of not being good enough
washes over you, your life, your existence
like an enormous wave eroding away a mountain of self-esteem
that took you so long to accumulate.

Beautiful women and beautiful girls,
Your hips were made to rule the world
To knock it off center with one switch in your step
The power you possess many people forget
Including yourself, other women and too many times men
We build ourselves up, they try to break us down again
I just got one question for them:
What happened to chivalry?
To women of the 21st century
You were their heart always worn on their sleeve
And a man that cheated but he didn't leave
To many young girls you were nothing more
Than a broken frame on a kitchen floor
Mixed with their mothers tears
Because that's the only form that their fathers appeared...

Tear down the walls that make your word night
And look to the sun and make darkness into light
All you need in your life is a beautiful smile
Only to know that you're worthwhile
You're so much more than your *** and your *******
You are defined by your intellect
You are not the measurements that lyricists impose
You are not correlated with the amount of skin you show.
But rather when you show what you know.

Beautiful Women and Beautiful Girls
Your hips are made to rule the world.
Challenge the world with your beautiful mind
Words of wisdom as numerous as stars that shine.

you serenaded a soul with words my ears have never comprehended,
overused the concept of love, wringing the word out until it was left dry, there was a hope in me that the author in you would display himself for me as well, that your stanzas correlated to the feeling between us.
i was searching for the words in your mouth, my hands sinking in like a dentist on a mission, hoping to pry out the sudden surprise of a few letters from between your teeth, something to make me feel like there were still things to discovered, that you were not going to be like the others, but everything fit wrong, like when i had not worn my retainer in a week.

Would you still love me if I wasn’t classed as
“more to love”?

If I wouldn’t count as
“plus-size”,

If I didn’t have to shift through racks of clothes looking for the ones labelled
“L”?

If there was no
softness
to me,
if the curves of my hips were interrupted by
bones
jutting out,
if I was angular enough for you to
cut yourself
on, if I was
thin
enough to be
pretty?

Would you still love me if you knew that
every chip you fed to me,
every chocolate you bought for me,
everything you ever saw me eat was being
written down
and
calculated?

Would you still love me if every time you heard the shower running, you’d know that I’d weighed myself just before getting in
every
single
time?

Would you still love me if you walked in on me
clawing
at the back of my own throat in a
desperate
attempt to bring up
everything
but the conversation about how I wasn’t eating right?

If my skin got worse,

If you could taste how hungry I was every time
you kissed me,

If the only way to hold me was catching me
off-guard,

If when you pulled me on top of you, I
immediately
stood up because I knew I was
too heavy
for your
fragile hands and
perfect ribs?

Would you still love me if you’d have been the one to hear
“She can’t have an
eating disorder,
people with
eating disorders
aren’t fat”?

If at
every meal
you’d become acutely aware that my father’s side of the family was watching me eat,
just to see if I was,

If I went from hearing
“Wow, you look great, you’ve lost so much weight now”
to
“Oh my God, are you sick?”,

If I was still fourteen and thought that the
numbers on that scale
were directly correlated with how
happy
I could be?

Would you still love me if you knew me at fifteen?

James, you make my eyebrows feel so heavy.
To think: if I never find the one and one make too many empty glasses were broken in the mud-
dled my words when she asked for the time for bed –
All during my morning constitutional.
Take your ***** on the Mount and your Sin of the Farter
Because I know there’s nothing behind the artist except falling towers and furniture-sellers.
But can the deaf still listen?
Or should I care what’s inside a box I can never open?
And how many carriages will follow my coffin
And who will be my wormeaten neighbors
And which tongue will be employed to engrave the epitaph
And topped by what symbol or none?
 
In the beginning the first two words began to breed
And each generation issued reduplication
Evolving vestigial verbiage and new punctuation
All the way down to a young Poet-Hero-Creator:
Use illusory contours to paint the gravity between heavenly bodies, and use
The shared human experience of multistable perception to imply the gestalt of Dublin
(and be sure to use that German term).
We are the artificers of meaning.
 
Item: the location of the key.
Cat: things I should be thinking about but am not.
Item: the *** organs of strangers and acquaintances.
Category: things I should not be thinking about but am.
Item: the autobiographical component of Shakespeare’s later works.
Cat: things I need you to know that I think about.
Item: the possibility that my presence is not nearly as commanding as I’d formerly assumed.
Item: the increasing inebriatory similarities between myself and my father.
Item: the fear of losing my memory of Mother’s face,
as directly correlated to the expanding passage of time.
Cat: things I need you to think I don’t think about, at all.
 
Picture a symphony.
Hold the moment when the lights first fall and the cacophony of tuning
Floods into a single, synthesized vibrating tone. After the silence and before the song.
Write what you hear.
Write the chords in semiotic rhyme; transcribe harmony as memory:
Sing lived and unlived love and stride through on inkblot feet.
Now add the missing notes.

An empty page. The insufferable debate.
An infernal task? The everlasting trait?
A blank check? A clean slate?
The inkwell pond.  Pen and nib. Rod and bait.

Over-caffeinated.
Under-appreciated.
Anger encapsulated by the shortness of my replies.
I'm exasperated by the amount of attempts and all the tries.


Code Scrambled. Wires crossed. Software and hardware not integrated.
Emotions and objects being wrongly correlated.
Places and faces being traded.
Thoughts and feelings segregated.
Process of progress imitated.
Utterly inundated.
Brain cells being immolated
So that my mind and my soul can become assimilated.  
Self-worth: Underestimated.
These points are not to be debated.

Swoon confused with brood.
A smiling clown dances around the center ring.
Inside he's centering his self around the latitude and longitude of
The highest hilltops of Mt. Pisspoorattitude.
Without the slightest shred of gratitude towards any good deed done for him past the 5 minutes of thank you that he spouts off at the peak of the mountain.
If at first you don't succeed, just cry and cry again.

The concept rocket pulls the cap off the the pen sprocket
Ink spews everywhere. A shiny black geyser erupts from the rig.
Men shouting back and forth to one another. There's no way to contain it. We've sprung a leak, the oil is in our water. The oil is our blood.
Erasing, no, smearing. No control. No Z's either. Analog ****-ups.
Chasing my tail, driving the same circuit.
Racing as Yoshi with a broken control stick

I've had a hell of a time on Uncle Sam's dime.
I disappeared behind the words written on my mirror long ago.
Am I a wreck or is this the requiem of my dreams?

I am an accumulation of stories,
An amalgamation of myself and others,
Shared experiences lessening cultural differences,
Secrets and fears;
My own and those I hold near.
Joy and Sorrow;
What I say today may not hold true Tomorrow,
I am not constant
I am ever-changing,
Adjusting, evolving, ameliorating,
Tomorrow, I am the people I met Today
And part of the person I left behind Yesterday
What I am is Who I am,
A correlated concept, every day an elevated stand.

It is not to think, as much as to shape this process i have made of silence.

Hush now.

It can never be okay, and the illusion is in your need to relate, because you correlated once, but it will never be the same.

It is chasing dragons for the same fate that you strayed from.

Its rubber bands, and band-aids for the game.

Check mate.

Check your mates for tics.

It is whats inside that itches for escape.

It is the day to day lies displayed from your hate.

Its whatever the ******* place your mind in.

Be this way, go that way, get out of the way, just stay ..

Right there

In yesterday, but i am late, and dreaming of the place i belong.

If seeing is believing than it shouldn't be too long.

Visualizing the realizing of what wouldn't have gone over so well, before the crash that befell my Orwellian signal from a well, wished for a hell dismissed in simple mindedness.

I am still unsure if it is a death wish, or a romantic kiss in the darkness, i inflict, as its burnt out of moonlit dominance in a prominence that smashed on the hull of my ship, full of not giving a ****, as the light shifts around my presence.

My open hand is out but the other grips the severance package, of the stacking junk mail.

Dispel the formal, and embrace your former self, in unblinded wealth, accepting what you always felt, for the first time.

It is all ******* gone, and its mine.

All mine.

Standing on the corpses of my kind, i cry..

In happiness.

Its nothing.

I am one of many.

Gone.

Idiosyncrasies.
Convincing oneself that two very uncorrelated happenings,
phenomenons, even, are correlated.
See, like the dry skin around my mouth appeared the day we met.
It lasted throughout the summer and is clearing up, now.
Now that we are all clear.

Or, perhaps, there's been a mind-fog face-fog correlation sans
romantic relationship.
In that case, I've been blind.
Blind as a bat.
I mis-read, mistook, misinterpreted my own dry skin.

It's almost like,
at least it can be compared to the time when I went to the Urgent Care because there was a rash on my back and the doctor said it was shingles.
In some of the same breaths he also mentioned that usually only old people get it.
And, he said, he said people who are stressed, too.
And I said, "but I'm not stressed."

And then I thought, am I?

"try a few more," i encourage
i’m doing a breathing exercise
with a young multiple GSW
"you ain’t no doctor
and i’ll stop when i wanna ******* stop"
an amiable attitude
directly correlated
with multiple GSW