Sad Collection of Words.

I read this statement in a lot of thesis projects I see at work and it always strikes me as such a sad collection of words:

 

Results indicated that there was no significant difference between the pre- and posttest findings

 

It is kind of like saying, “This idea I had for my thesis project – and which I spent a year or more of my life researching, testing, and writing about - turned out to not actually be a thing.”

Thank god I'm a writer and therefore free of the tyranny of having to prove that anything I say is correct.

.

.

.

Foxhole.

So I had a massively humbling and totally human moment recently and I’m not sure how I feel about it.

Oh, the editors here at Standardkink have asked me to tell you that due to my ongoing nervous breakdown, this will be less of a “writing” blog for a little while and more of a “holy shit this guy needs some serious therapy” kind of blog.

Anyway, back to that profoundly human moment … I recently got some news that shook me to the very core of my person. In order to better protect the innocent, I’m not really at liberty to tell you much about what happened (it isn’t really my business to share) but suffice to say it will affect me in some way for the rest of my life.

The point here though is that all the fuses in my head melted and I couldn’t remember how to breathe or sit. I’ve done some googling and it appears I had an honest to god panic attack (I’ve only really ever had one once before, but it was nothing like this). I ended up spending the better part of ten hours just walking aimlessly around town. I probably walked twenty-five or thirty miles that day. By the end I had these fat disgusting blisters and my legs felt like jelly. At one point I went home to drink some water and I ended up – no kidding – praying.

I am not a religious person and it isn’t that I’m profoundly opposed to religion and I don’t call myself an atheist (though others might, and they’re free to if it makes them feel better) I’m simply not a religious person. I have trouble not seeing religion as myth; it’s the writer in me.

Yet all that notwithstanding, there I was, on my knees in my little bedroom, hands clasped together, deeply apologetic that I’m in my thirties and had never really prayed before. If God was paying attention he at least didn’t make fun of me. 

So I asked for what I asked for, apologized a lot, made some halfhearted jokes that were probably inappropriate and then said my amen, crossed myself all Catholic-like, felt strange about it, apologized again and then left the apartment quickly, as though leaving an awkward first date.

Clearly there’s something disingenuous about me praying, but I swear, the asking for help part was entirely genuine. Probably as genuine as I have ever been. So what does that mean? Or does it mean anything? Or does it just make me an opportunist and a hypocrite?

Probably those last two, huh?

I guess it goes back to the old adage about how there are no atheists in fox holes. Well, I was in my fox hole dammit and I reached out. Though in my defense, I would have prayed to Voldemort too if I thought it would have helped. I can say though, I appreciate now more than ever how soothing it must be to possess religious faith; to believe that someone supremely powerful is out there and cares about you and your happiness. It was a calming experience and deeply humbling, and I need a little humbling from time to time.

Now the postscript, of course, is that nothing has changed and my prayers have decidedly not been answered (surely God knows how impatient I am!), but that’s not the point of this post. I just felt it was a strange enough experience that it should be remarked upon. So there you have it, I guess, it has been remarked upon.

.

.

.

The Least Funny Limerick Ever.

The Least Funny Limerick Ever


by james bezerra



I miss feeling happy.

Lately I feel kind of crappy.

Perhaps I should eat better food.

Or take a pill to stabilize my mood.

Or stop writing poetry that’s so sappy.

.
.
.

Worried about Me?

So were you worried about me?

I had been posting – like – constantly and then, last week … almost nothing.

You must have been very concerned. You're so sweet.

I’m sure you didn’t know what to do with yourself. Were you able to find some other website on the internet where you could fritter away all of those precious moments of your life?

For my part I was simply very busy at work and sapped of strength and vigor. There was even a night last week when I fell asleep at 8pm. Can you believe that? It’s like I caught a lameness disease or something. Thankfully however, it is not a chronic condition! At least I hope not …

.
.
.

Mending.

Mending
by james bezerra

Here’s how you fix a broken heart:
to get a good start,
go back to the beginning,
back to when it wasn’t hurting.
Learn from what happened between then and now.
Then you should figure out how
to throw all that sour emotion away
and find a brand new way
to make today
a better day than yesterday.

.
.
.

Red.

After all these years my computer still thinks my last name is a misspelling. Red squggle.


.
.

A Week in Review.

As much as I complain – and I know that I complain a lot – it was actually an okay week (emotionally anyway, work totally sucked). It was very strange and sometimes hard, but when it is all said and done, I think that it was good-ish. And good-ish is better than god forsaken awful-ish.

So I suppose that is progress.

.
.
.
.

What I’m Working On.

So I will admit it, I have been a moody little bitch lately. Luckily for those of you who actually know me, I don’t do things like – you know – genuinely express emotion, so you may not have noticed. Seriously, unless you read this blog (or maybe my Facebook updates) you would probably think that I am just a happy-dappy dandy. And you know what? A lot of the time I am, but that’s because I compartmentalize so well. I really do! I am airtight! I’m like a submarine of emotion. I have been reading a little about it on the internet though and – according to medical professionals, and stuff – this is not actually a good thing.

I want to say that I will try to not be that way, but I worry that I might be lying. I’m really not sure how else to get through the day. I mean, how do you get through a day of work when all you want to do is lay down and go to sleep until your life gets better? The only way that I know how to do it is to lock down those feelings and keep going. I’m sure that shrinks have a word for this.

Today is not that bad. But I am very much confused, emotionally right now. There is a lot going on in a lot of different area of my life and I just don’t know what to think about any of it. This is unusual for me. I really have spent a lot of my life (recently anyway) being super-focused on forward movement.

Right now though I just feel like I’m unsure what direction to head in. That is strange for me.

So by this point I’m sure that you have stopped reading this post because of how extremely boring and self-indulgent it is. So since it is just me here and I like the sound of my own words, I will carry on.

Basically I am in a soul-searching kind of place right now. Sure this is all residual break up stuff, but what better time to self-evaluate than a time like this? My biggest concern right now is that I will likely end up being single for a very long time. I always assumed that I was good at being in a relationship because I was basically always in one. This recent break up really damaged me in some fundamental ways and it has called into question a lot of the basic assumptions that I have always made about myself as a person. I think back on some of the stuff that was said and I read over some of the worst text messages (which I saved because I am a masochist or something) and I realize that a lot of the things she said about me are probably true. And these were not nice things.

And so now I am looking back at my life through this new lens and I’m realizing how awful I have been. There were times when I have been a terrible friend and a despicable boyfriend and an even more tragically bad husband. None of the things I’m realizing are over-the-top, they are all pretty small and subtle and low-key kinds of awful, but they seem to add up to a kind of wrenched and ugly whole and I’m not happy about it. But at the same time, I am trying to take ownership of it all.

Now I will pause here for a second and say that, yes, I know that there are people in the world way worse than me and that I am making a big deal out of what are, for the most part, pretty run-of-the-mill life experiences. However that does not make me feel any better about myself.

To sum it all up, I just feel like I have lost the plot of my life. I still have a lot of pain that I am trying to process and I am trying to do it on the go and I am trying to really enjoy the small moments of happy that life affords me right now and I am trying to figure out if there is a way to have people in my life in a meaningful way without completely poisoning them. Right now it seems like that is a pretty tall order, because I just feel like I’m toxic.

So anyway, that’s what I’m working on.


.
.
.
.

Our Big Cadillac.

Most of the email that I get lately is spam. I think that I ended up on some list that got sold recently.

I have the email alert on my phone set to vibrate, so there’s a little party in my pants pocket every time that I get an email and I get so excited to see what new email treasure I have received from the world. Lately though, it always turns out to be something about how I have won a laptop or how I might have unclaimed government money due to me or how I can make $50k a year working part-time from home.

So when I feel that tickle in my pocket and reach on in there, I am invariably disappointed, because part of my brain always thinks that you have finally decided to write me and tell me that you want to run off together. How we should steal a convertible Cadillac and drive across this big country of ours and fall in love while the sun sets over the great plains. How we should eat at roadside diners and always only order whatever that day’s special is. How we will sleep curled up together in the big leather backseat of our big, stolen American automobile. How you will whisper in my ear that this is your best moment in all of your life.

But sadly, you never send me that email. So I am always disappointed.


.
.
.

Not Lost in Space Even a Little.

So this is a bit of a non-sequitur, but I just realized that I will never wake up and not know what planet I’m on. One day in the future, when faster-than-light speed has been perfected or when they get Star Trek style transporters up and running, it will be possible and easy to hop back and forth from one world to the next. Likely even, a good bachelor party cut a swath across entire solar systems, but I will not be a part of that. And neither will you dear reader. And I am sad for us both.

.
.
.
.
.
.
..

I Can't Sleep. Because I'm a Failure.

I can’t sleep.
So here we are. Just you and me dear blog, the two of us in the middle of the night while the rest of the world is in bed, all decent and law-abiding and well-rested.

A little bit ago I was in bed and Violet was drifting off to sleep and I whispered to her that I couldn’t sleep and she said that she would tell me a story (sometimes I tell her stories when she is trying to go to sleep) and her story was this:

“Once there was a boy named Jamie and his brain was broken and so he couldn’t sleep.”

And then Violet fell asleep and I was left staring at the shadow of the ceiling fan, just ma and my broken brain.

The truth is that I have been having a lot of trouble sleeping lately and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist of a psychiatrist to figure out that it started about the time I started getting rejected from grad schools. The truth of the matter dear blog is that I didn’t get in anywhere and the fact has had a pretty profound effect on me. I knew the odds going in but a part of me really did think that I would get in somewhere. Someplace. But alas, it was not too be. And I have had to spend a lot of time thinking about it lately. And that’s okay. We all need these kind of set backs from time to time but shit, I occasionally feel like my entire life is a long chain of these sort of setbacks. I mean really, how much character am I supposed to build here?

But I am not going to bitch and moan, at least not too much. I have very little interest in feeling sorry for myself. Well, except for the day I got rejected from Brown. Brown was my Ivy League wet dream and I really really really wanted to get in there. That particular day I was perfectly fine with feeling sorry for myself. But that mostly only lasted the day.

It is pretty late right now and I have always found that this is the time of the day when people either lie the most of are the most honest and so right now I will be honest. The real kicker in all this isn’t the wholesale rejection (of me) by the American creative writing establishment, it is the fact that I was soooooo looking forward to grad school because it was going to be a two year break. And I really needed the break. It was going to be two years to just write. I have never had that in my life. Almost every word that I have ever written has been written in the margins of my life. It usually meant staying up late of getting up early or writing on my lunch breaks. I was looking forward to taking all of this energy that I use to work full-time and go to school full-time and just throwing it at the writing. I wanted, for once, to be prolific. And prolific I would have been.

I coulda been a contender!

Anywho, that’s enough of that.

The reality is that I have another nine weeks of school to get through and then my life will slow to just work and life and I think that I will apply to other schools in the Fall when applications open up again. I figure that I owe it to myself to give it one more shot at this whole being educated thing. In the in between time I have a play to finish and a screenplay to finish and a novel to finish and another one to finally edit. And I have enough short work to self-publish a collection print-on-demand style. Also I’m going to have to come up with two really good pieces of writing for applications in the Fall.

I thought that my last ones were good, but apparently they weren’t good enough.

Though now that I am getting some perspective on the whole MFA Creative Writing thing I think that there is a case to be made that I don’t really write like other people and so maybe I don’t fall into the boxes that these kind of programs want a writer to fall into. Or is that just self-aggrandizing? Maybe it is but – you know – leave me the hell alone about it. I’m a failure! You really want to kick me while I’m down.

It is going to be a little while before I get totally clear of the mental wreckage and fall-out that is rejection on this massive a scale, but when I get really sad about it, I think back to a piece that I read in The Onion when I first moved to LA. It was just a little help wanted box listing the demeaning things that they made their interns do and at the bottom of the box it said, “Creative Writing MFAs need not even apply. Seriously.”

Now I am not now, nor have I ever been, one of those people who thinks that things happen for a reason. I don’t believe that there is a grand design and I don’t actually believe in destiny and if there is a god he/she had better damn well be paying attention to things far more important than me. I say all this just to make the point; don’t worry too much about me. I land on my feet faster and better than most people and I have way more experience at it than most. Also, I’m basically a specially formulated kind of awesome. So I will be fine.

And I will keep you posted.

Sorry if this entry is a little ramble-y, but I’m pretty tired.
.
.
.
.
.
.

The Good that Won’t Come Out.

Please enjoy these lyrics to the Rilo Kiley song.

Let's get together and talk about the modern age
All of our friends were gathered there
With their pets, just talking shit
About how we're all so upset about the disappearing ground
As we watch it melt

It's all of the good that won't come out of us
And how eventually our hands will just turn to dust
If we keep shaking them
Standing here on this frozen lake

I do this thing where I think I'm real sick
But I won't go to the doctor to find out about it
Because they make you stay real still
In a real small space
As they chart up your insides and put them on display

They'd see all of it, all of me, all of it

All of the good that won't come out of me
And all the stupid lies I hide behind
It's such a big mistake
Lying here in your warm embrace

Oh, you're almost home
I've been waiting for you to come in
Dancing around in your old suits
Going crazy in your room again
I think I'll go out and embarrass myself
By getting drunk and falling down in the street
You say I choose sadness
That it never once has chosen me
Maybe you're right

Let's talk about all our friends who lost the war
And all the novels that have yet to be written about them

It's all of the good that won't come out of them
And all the stupid lies they hide behind
It's such a big mistake
Standing here on this frozen lake

It's all of the good that won't come out of me
And how eventually my mouth will just turn to dust
If I don't tell you quick
Standing here on this frozen lake

.
.
.
.