Paying Off These Parking Tickets

As I lurched into my car this morning I saw an envelope on the floor of the driver's side. Within it lay a blue and white parking ticket folded up neatly, slightly water damaged from the beach mist. A rush of several thoughts came to mind, but with a sigh I finally said aloud: “FFFFFFFuuck”.

I began to think about the thousands of dollars I owed this city. Debts. The bleak idea of paying off my parking tickets was far easier to bear than the true act of doing so. In a few months, when the bills have stacked, or perhaps when I wake up to a boot on my car and then soon find myself looking up at the sky with anguish, because that was the last possible thing I could've handle that day, I might just begin to shovel out my money. Author, Mark Manson, wrote about the nihilist perspective. He described it as us finding comfort within our individualistic definition of life's insignificance and how on the contrary, it is exceptionally important to keep hope. In Manson's book, Everything is Fucked, he discusses hope and the ways we place value within something, whether it be ethically or emotionally, and how essentially, 'hope' is our own choice. In other words, we are unique in our ability to deem something more, or less, important than our peers, like our personal goals, which give us hope of a before and after story. We are able to see, by the results of our product, how successful we have been, and this success is personal, no one can decide when a work has fulfilled its duty, whether that duty was to help the world, or just help us.

In finding a "purpose", or rather, something we'd like to achieve, life begins to have a meaning, because we have something to work towards. These personal goals are ever changing, we must be mindful of this fact because the ability to change our minds does not equate to failure, or indecisiveness, despite us interpreting it that way, but do not fear. When we commence a project we are met with obstacles, sometimes that obstacle can be ourselves, when we do what feels good rather than what we should do (remember, what we decide is important is solely up to us...we don't have to do anything), and other times the obstacles are out of our control. We may run into health risks that tell us we can no longer work towards being the athlete we always wanted to be. We may live in a city that gets wiped out and flooded by an unprecedented veering river, forced to rebuild from scratch, putting present plans at a standstill. Remarkably, the human desire to survive, not just to survive but to live, forces us to stand up again after falling down 7 times, and this hope, our ability to want to achieve something, will be what drives us hardest. To put it simply: sometimes goals can be unattainable, out of our hands, and when this occurs it is important to be adaptable.

But in reading Manson's book I was not thinking about my goals as much as I was these parking tickets and how they will matter as a before-and-after scheme in my life (I have yet to find any beneficial outcomes). Therefore, I have deemed my debts to San Francisco 'insignificant' for two reasons:

One, this city has so much fucking public transport funding, SFMTA reported a yearly estimate of 90 million dollars in revenue, (which is hardly being used in the right way) that I do not feel the inclination to contribute to its corruption and misuse of my "hard earned tax dollars". Sorry, but the city does not need my money. We don't even know where it goes! The only thing allegedly for certain is that the people giving me the tickets are being compensated with the same money I was forced to cough up. Talk about life being a bitch.

Two, my silly hippy belief on how stupid money is. Currency amounts to something and is nothing. It is little numbers sitting within a virtual world changing from a 4 to a 5 with the swipe of a plastic card. I mean, there are wars happening, does my parking ticket matter to anyone besides myself and the meter maid who's decided they had had enough?

Similarly, I began to think about all of the people I was indebted to, but a different debt, the good kind. In creating a life with purpose it is important to live by a few principles: community, care (meaningfulness), and emotion. With indifference life degenerates. When we have no values or strong beliefs we begin to lack reason or rationality behind our decision making. Imperative to our interpersonal relationships, care and emotion help us create deeper connections and allows us to discover things about ourselves.

I finally learned how to delve deeper, whether that was through conversation, poetry, or personal growth, I began to coax myself out of the protective shell I had once created. I quickly found myself inspired by the people around me just by listening to their journey's and the tribulations they faced while on them. Life had opened up! I was given hope, and because of that I became capable of withdrawing myself from the bleak and cynical perspective I was so wrapped up in. Not to be confused with comparing myself with my peers, instead I realized my problems were my own, and based on my community's success approaching their own struggles, I learned alternative ways to do the same. Reader, the first step to self development is not telling yourself there is something wrong with you that must be erased. You are valuable, you are important as is. Instead it is by the desire to improve a characteristic within us which might have caused someone harm (yourself, or a loved one), and with this desire tough questions need to be asked; about the way we react, how accountable we hold ourselves to our mistakes, and most importantly: 'Am I wrong?'. After mastering this the world expands...and also shrinks.

The older we get the better we get at coping. We know what to expect when things go awry, and we get better at finding solutions faster. Problems get harder, we get stronger...smarter.

I'll pay off these parking tickets someday...but today the problem is that I want to do it tomorrow. As the famous pirate Jack Sparrow once said:

"The problem is not the problem, the problem is your problem with the problem...savvy?"

Stonerisms

Part 1.

I remember things when the weather hits my skin a certain way.

I remember a children's art museum. I got finger puppets.

I remember the snow, a swamp porch I have never stepped foot on.

Whether the weather reminds me of Christmas in Hillsborough, where my young friends were like sisters, we held hands, it still stands that thought is provoked by the way the wind smells in the middle of July.

Part 2.

Yeehaw--I am so fucking high.

Quiet Please

We fill the voids of silence with sounds that can be called words, called conversation. To me it just sounds like noise.

If the tail end of my sentence falls with the intonation of gentility and quiet, I expect to receive just that. Introspection is peaceful, and often my mind can get clouded and begin a silent meditation and when it is interrupted with more speech, more words, I lose the thought. There is a version of me which exists only within my head and it's calm there, the peaceful place within my own body: a temple. This mind palace has halls and corridors which I explore with a trailing hand, grazing the walls with curiosity, peaking around each corner with anticipation. Something stops me from opening the next door...

"And where did you grow up?"

I pull the answer from a different part of my brain and try not to outwardly sigh. Respond. Talking again, having a conversation and I find my face forcing a smile, my hands moving enthusiastically, my chest breathing out what sounds like a laugh. I finally catch up to my body and fill in the gaps. Instead of seeing myself from an internal perspective...the inside looking out, I take up the space where the external version of me exists. Here I begin to see through my eyes and not from the side stage of my peripherals. It's like I'm split into two: the intangible and the visceral. Within is where I find comfort, yet I simultaneously desire the mere pleasure of losing myself within someone else.

Lingering Emotions

Sometimes things don't pan out the way we anticipated, even when things are seemingly perfect. We are spinning on this Earth just to live, breathe, eat, sleep, and give.

To Y/N:

I miss you and us. I feel resentment because your life seems to have worked out for the best. It angers me because you reveal a sense of complacency which I wish were empathy instead. I know perhaps you are demonstrating your remorse in other ways: offering to buy lunch, beers, small gestures which may also just be within your nature to enact. I feel as though, however, you want your cake and to eat it too. If I give away the part of myself you desire, I feel like I will further lose myself to you, and the idea is that I should be learning to find myself within...myself. On the contrary, I feel like not doing so results in the same. The same guilt I used to feel arises within me: that by sparing my body I am harming your well being. That by sparing my body I am not demonstrating reciprocation of your "love", of your "care". As I write this I understand the delusion behind infatuation and the way it forces us to blame ourselves for the insurmountable. I feel I have not been honest with myself, or you. I apologize for being bitter and mean, I take longer to process my emotions. I love you. We will be friends forever, and I do adore your talent and charm. Thank you.

Laughter lingers before me, but my hands do not reach to grasp the origins of it. They simply hang by my side, sans intention, removing themselves from before me and slowly inching to bind together behind my back. Tied down by my own mental discourse, but I am not its slave and will not fall victim to it. This plume which writes words that I control is absolute. I put letters together, form my own thoughts, these thoughts slip like the ends of sentences slipping from my grip. Phrases are not written in reverse, as I read and write this I release this emotion onto the page and bid it farewell. I stand propped on one leg, the other foot crooked like a flamingo. Hands shake, but write more freely as I admit what provokes my sadness.

Rebirth. You are here.

Life’s Shitty First Drafts

Things do not change; we change.

Henry David Thoreau

What happened to us? Maybe it was a YP (your problem) and not a MP (my problem), but it could have also been that we simply outgrew each other.

I'm talking to you Marissa, Ike, Holly, Angel (one and two), Valerie, and Raymond, Charles, Elizabeth, and Justin, Zeke, (reader you aren't required to read or retain each name listed) Kaleb, Alice, Jean...

But maybe it's not that we have outgrown one another, and instead it is my self involvement that was a causal factor for our demise. The prioritization of my own happiness, enjoyment, or peace has led me on a long, lonely, nomadic path. We all had things in common, we once bonded, and might still do so, but to me keeping a friend is truly hard. I can't bring myself to blame adulthood (despite wanting to), or believe that the wages of aging and increasing responsibilities help contribute to our shitty friendship patterns. Frankly, I have not decided whether I love people or hate them, an opinion which is synchronized with my own internal self love/loathing. I can be cynical, I can be lighthearted and gentle, cruel or kind; I am capable of personifying all these traits: things I have learned from living and creating so many different friendships. We tend to unintentionally absorb characteristics from the world around us.

At the most pivotal moment of my life I made a choice which led to a lot of pain. At the time I did not foresee what the cause of my actions would be, but in two years flat I would begin to observe the results of a life I had obliviously built. By the same hand which writes this blog I fell victim to its alcoholic escapism and retrophiliac nature as the blow would make its way from the table into my nose and Janis Joplin's remastered version of Kosmic Blues played loudly in my ears. I let myself slip into the hands of two equally damaged and jarring individuals, being shaped into a sharp edged, kinda pudgy, awkward mold who stood there like a naked monkey: afraid and itching. Shifting my weight from one misshapen foot to the other, I restlessly lay myself into my grave each night, only to wake up with the moon again. How many years has it been?

Ten years of wanting somebody to love me. That movie love, "I got your back, call me anytime" love, mind reader love, tea on the back porch love love. Back then I just wanted someone to love me...enough. I thought I had finally achieved that, in some demented way, those two friends of mine were as sad and lost as me, but we were each lost in such different ways. I was battling crippling substance abuse which caused depression and guilt, we all were, but tack on our personal issues and a global pandemic: we were living in the shittiest self victimizing rom-com rock drama and we could not decide who the lead actor was. As a result, I just began to hate all my friends, as a projection of my own self loathing, but it made things easier. No one could tell, however, I silently suffered, like an animal of prey, falling more deeply into a toxic relationship with myself. I hear that blaming people for our own shortcomings is a sign of a lack of accountability and bitterness. I forgive You. I forgive me. I have chosen to let go and forget that feeling and shed the rotten skin which I was gifted, taken from a place of rotten souls, (as I write these words I know it's only for the sake of their poetic justice).

And yet, I waited...still longing to be loved back. I still long to be loved. I still long to be longed for, longed for by You, whoever that is at the moment of me publishing this. My mind whispers: "You cannot welcome love in if it does not exist within you." I love the Earth. In a nihilistic manner I am skeptic of my love for my parents, but I do love them. I love myself, and that sometimes comes with preconditions. My predispositions on self-love arise when I am alone, (sometimes not even then--I too often desire not being alone). I feel happiest when I am alone with tasks to occupy the space and time. I want to be in a room surrounded by people but I am tired. That's all. I am tired. Tired. Tired. Tired. Tired. Tired. I have written the word so many times it's begun to look like tried, losing its meaning.

This part of life sucks, with a capital S, and from what I gather, it gets slightly easier...to deal, but not less tiring. I wish I could be a tree, a plant, an animal, a blade of grass, something that only existed to exist. After all, our sole purpose is to nourish the land, despite the fact that we fail at this time and time again, however, we are not very different from the natural world. When we are all dead and gone the mychorrhizal fungi will envelop our brains, suck out the knowledge, transform it into nutrients, and give life back once more. Until one day "we" (nature not humanoids) are reborn from the same Earth we died upon. I guess when I put it that way we are a lot more like animals than previously perceived.

I vow to make the most of my regrets, never smothering my sorrow, but tending to it and cherishing it until it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

"...and the blue bird carries the sky on its back."