say something

there are times when i get possessed by this strange, horrifying desire to become famous.  paint my skin in neon colours and go stand in the middle of a busy intersection.  write a pulitzer-worthy novel.  change the world with the tip of a fucking pen.  it’s something akin to what it might feel like if my insides were suddenly turned to carbonation and i sat through an earthquake.  POP.  a thousand tiny bubbles of chris splatter the walls of this shambly dorm and drip down isaac’s stunned face (see the little bubbles in his sideburns? oh how cute teeheheheheeee).

i want to know where that feeling comes from.  warpaint my face and hunt it with a knife, or club, or just rip into that need with my teeth and scream through the blood and howl, consuming that evil demon.

i remember.  when i was sixteen, i would lock my door, draw the blinds, quiet the lights and just shut the hell up.  i would lie on my floor, on my back, crucified to my floor, flattened by the peace that enveloped that room.  the yellow steamy dust dropping in through the window, diced by my blinds (they were green.  GREEN), and just listen.  shut the fuck up and listen, and disappear into my carpet, leave the arcing plane of this world just for one precious hour and become a part of this giant symphony that is LIVING BREATHING PLANET EARTH.

i lost that this afternoon.  i was possessed by that demon of success.  of loudness.  of pride.  of fame.

shhhhh…

quiet.  cut your hair.  grow a beard.  sit back in a rocking chair with the light off.  listen to the wind in the trees, the sound of gentle entropy, the sound of your skin rubbing away to dust, the sound of new cells growing in their place.  i am slowly dying, and it is quiet.

-chris

i am a naturalist.  trees are my friends, animals are my consort (i’d like to think so anyway), and i feel divinely inspired to always be preserving, saving, loving, helping everything.  so i set goals to help myself do that.  i want to become a farmer someday.  i want to love nature through the rolling folds of a cabbage field.  i want to dig my hands into the soil and cultivate it, lead the seeds like little children into becoming flowered purple heads.  and then i want to eat the fruit that the ground has given me and live off of it.  i want to give to nature, give it my sweat and toil and care, and then eat its fruit like a “thank you.”  i want to be a fisherman.  i want to stand on a boat rocking in a black midnight sea and get drenched in a 20 foot swell washing over the side of the boat.  i want to pluck fish from the waters the same way a farmer plucks a cabbage head from the dirt, nod to the mighty ocean (“thank you”) and bite into my food.  i want to throw my leftovers to the seagulls who followed my boat from shore.  i want to come home to a tiny little house in the woods.  a house made from the bark of the forest.  i want to kiss my wife and feel her pregnant stomach.  and i want to never worry.  never ever ever ever ever worry, because the God i saw in the fields, in the sprouting heads of cabbage, in the roaring ocean winds, in the goggled eyes of a fish is taking care of me.  and i will say “thank you” to him every night, wether i be sick, poor, destitute, homeless or ravaged.  i will be full of joy and peace knowing i am living under his Eye, and that his Eye is always on my balding head.

so why worry about the future?  why be dead set on accomplishing these goals?  i want to be more patient with time.  i want to let the world revolve towards me, instead of chasing after the horizon which never comes any closer.  i sit bent in a pew of a dark and empty church, and i hear His voice saying, “patience.  patience.  do not worry.”  and so i will not worry, and i will not hurry.  there is so much to learn yet, before i can be the farmer or the fisherman.

Someday, i will grow a magnificent beard.  but not today.  SOON.

-chris