A Fraud Like All the Rest

I stare at the ceiling fan as its rich wooden blades cut through the emptiness of 3 a.m. dark. My eyes, too alert for this time of barely morning, follow a single slat as it whirls around and around, silently pushing the cool air against my warm skin. On my mind is you and how you should not be on my mind. The thing about the mind is, tho, it never stops. They will tell you to discipline and train it and that if you can you are a more evolved human than the others. For whatever that’s worth, I’m not sure I can really say but I can be dramatic and at the same time detached sometimes. Perhaps evolution for an artist is the development of the ability to be analytical as well as feeling, to penetrate a thing while at the same time keeping your distance far away and high above the trees from it.

Or maybe that’s just me and I’m a fraud like all the rest. You can feel that way even when you wish you wouldn’t. Like even the truest bits of you are somehow flawed, not to be trusted. We are not educated properly in this society. We are taught to believe blindly, never question anything, and develop a hefty sense of self-doubt, fear of the unknown, and loathing of any kind of thing that may challenge the status quo. We are indoctrinated, spoken at, drilled and filled with distortions. We learn to carve our lives out around those distortions and then wonder how on earth we lost ourselves, let slide past us our own humanity like a tangle of green weeds rushing down a river, uprooted and lost for good.

Mind you it is not quite even 3:30 a.m. and I’ve been gnawing upon the existential dread I feed myself for Christ knows why. I try to calm myself. I imagine your hands on me. I imagine being much more deeply beautiful than I am and then wonder why everything needs to be so fucking beautiful all the time. Why we expect human creatures, with all their ridiculous anxiety and ugly moods and sickly needs, to be extraordinary even as we are just trying to order a decent coffee and duck past the one guy in accounting who always has a snide remark and nothing of any interest to say to anybody so he says everything he thinks of as he thinks it because he thinks his lofty title entitles him. Life is regular more often than not but nobody can stomach the thought of that so we make the small things tremendously big and turn the simple fix into a week long lecture series. If we could just let life be as ordinary as it is perhaps we could spare ourselves a healthy ton of exhaustion.

Meanwhile, where was I again? Oh, yes. The blades are spinning as they slice closer and closer to the golden razor’s edge of dawn. My body is still and my heart is beating softly beneath the blankets as the blackness which is draped in front of me turns the slightest bit rich navy blue. And I will rise soon and hope to be able to write something worth sharing. Anything. And all the while, you will haunt me. Tease me out of myself. You will stir in my soul like a tricky, sparkling magic and dare me to be more than I should ever dare, in a world as doomed and foolish as this one, to be.