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A Ghost Is Born (2004)

This easiest thing to do is not think about it.

You go about your day, eatsleepbreathe, function in all the necessary capacities. Surround yourself with people because it takes away all the pressure of even having to think at all. Go to class, go to meetings, plug in the iPod, study, focus, play video games, make a to-do list, anything that separates you from your mind, you from your thoughts, stops you from having even a second of time to yourself to think about whatever you can, because that’s when it’s the worst.

The fact is, doing this is easier now than it ever has been, and you couldn’t be more grateful for it. These days, with everything so instant, so immediate, so RIGHT-NOW-IN-140-CHARACTERS, so AT-YOUR-FINGERTIPS, everybody and everything locked in a maniacal race against time that resets and continues in an uneasy cadence and permeates every single aspect of society [and all those other aspects that you didn’t even know or want to know existed], every person jockeying for position on a course that only has room for a limited number – the loudest, the meanest, the biggest bully – of credible witnesses; these days, it’s easy to escape from your own thoughts. To slip out when your subconscious isn’t looking. Drown yourself, saturate yourself in everything your immediate surroundings have to offer these days, and you won’t come up for days [if you come up at all], gasping for breath just like when you were a mischievous kid with no responsibilities and you tried to hold your breath for half a second too long.

The fact is, so many people do this every day that no one would even question you. Everyone is so caught up in their own escape, you can get lost in the wavepool of random consciousness that invades the Twitterverse (do people think in under 140 characters? Account for spaces and punctuation?), the Facebook news feed, the blogosphere [each with its own pretty, neatly packaged name, each with its own “user-friendly” and unique way of capturing your mind and wringing its eager neck] and never come out. These days, you’re called trendy. Hip. With it. Caught up with the times. Tech-savvy. Ahead of the curve. Modern. Futuristic. Open-minded [ha!].

The fact is, none of these are symptoms of an open mind. The fact is, an open mind is not what you’re craving. The fact is, hard as you try, as much as you wish, you can’t close your mind off from yourself forever.

You wake up every day, just you and your thoughts, as pure as Mother Theresa could have possibly imagined it. Shower/shave/change, no breakfast, stumble out the door and all you’ve had to think about today was everything you tried to get away from yesterday. Mornings are the worst, leaving you a blank slate ready to absorb the attacks of a thought process that won’t get the hint. Headphones in, walk to class [is any song worth singing if it doesn’t help?], but when you get there it’s a beautiful, clean, pure, hour-and-a-half all to yourself to think, to write, to dream, to imagine being anywhere other than where you are, and the thought creeps back in before you can convince yourself that calculus actually makes sense. That archaeology will ever mean anything to you. That writing a formulaic philosophy paper can be innovative and original. That management classes aren’t just teaching you to be heartless, but demanding your soul along with it.

Just when you think you are as busy as you possibly could be, that you couldn’t fit another idea into your head, it comes back. You can’t think selectively, not in the early hours of the morning or the late hours of the night [which overlap and interchange faster than you can wrap your head around, if you ever took those hours and tried].

Have you ever wanted to just stop thinking? Lobotomize. Check out. Take it or leave it, shut down without a restart option, burn and burn until you can’t go on any longer. Would be easier, yes, to not care, to not think, to let things slide off you like they don’t mean a thing. Waterproof, but every-thing proof. Impervious.

“Once I leave work every day, I want to stop thinking for the day,” your mother said nonchalantly. She was talking over NPR’s background static as you drove through the city listening to the mountains of issues facing multi-cultural couples in Iraq, how Shiites and Sunnis would rather cast out a child for inter-marriage rather than support the union. How religious and cultural affiliation can mean more than the closest family bond. How, if these people could, they would completely erase the memory of their child who married someone who was unacceptable. How these families wished they could stop thinking about it, but they can’t.

“But momma,” you respond almost incredulously, knowing that it can’t have been what she meant. “There’re so many things in the world to think about.”

If everyone had that many things in their head, they would surely snap like the rubber band whizzing at your left eye from across the room. You can’t turn it off, even as you try every second of every day to overexpose yourself to the world. With all these things to think about, it must be easy to shut out anything you don’t want to hear. Got to be. It’s the simplest thing, just going about your day as if nothing ever happened. Every day, it’s so simple to ignore everything you want to. A peace of mind.

The hardest thing to do is not think about it.

War (1983)

Sunday slips away.

You wake up in the morning and try to piece everything together before it’s just gone forever, POOF, like the week never even happened in your own head. Like the weekend never happened, even in your own mind. Like last night may not have been real after all, and we’re all just playing along with our own memories of what could have occurred.

It’s one of those days that you need in order to stay sane, a recap day, something to steady you before the week grinds together again. It lasts forever but you need it more and more and more until you can’t stop getting enough enough sundaysundaySUNDAY and it’s midnight and you couldn’t name one thing that you actually did or accomplished today, but you NEEDED it. It’s steady as you go, there for you always when you expect it, leaving you wanting more and less at the same time like a schizophrenic at a circus. What did I just say? Did that make sense? Did I REALLY do that last night? We went where?? With THEM?!...

Was it awesome?

Sundays slip away just like the days you’re recovering from. The whole [we met up with them then we went there then all I remember is the taste of whiskey] then it’s five o’clock and I might have to actually do homework now? The day disappears quicker than your memory can recover. Gotta get everything out and rehashed before it’s gone forever.

It slips away like the ice that turns your drink from a warm glass of a beautiful poison to a frosted chalice holding the key to how exquisite your night will be, melting away like all your most hilarious inhibitions. It slips away like the slow-burning end of that cigarette paper in your hand, delicately balanced between two fingers like you were born to hold it - what is it about holding fire that is so attractive to the human race (whatever doesn’t kill me let’s me live another day)? – and as it reaches its conclusion it’s gone forever along with every thought you just had. Paper to ashes, memories to dust. You write because those words don’t float away into the early morning skies.

It slips away like the dregs of a relationship, dragging along until its conclusion, good til the last drop [thought slightly diluted] and then it’s over, start the cycle again, let’s go now, everything back to basics. There and gone, week begins, over and over andoverandoveruntilforever(andever). You've burned up a thousand Sundays in your twenty years, fifty-two each time you buy a new calendar, 104 every two years, 1,040 Sundays spent in any way imaginable and counting until ashes ashes we all fall down.

Sometimes Sunday is just a test of your will, if you can will yourself to do all the work you put off over the weekend. But early March, not a cloud in the sky and it’s fifty degrees, and you expected to do work? Not a chance. So it lingers on, the day wasting away in the best way possible, in the worst way possible, in any way at all as long as it's wasted.

And wasn't that the whole problem in the first place?

Let's begin again.

ed. note: This is one half of a blog-off with Lauren Rodrigue about the topic Sunday. Check out hers next at http://lrodrigue.wordpress.com/

Innervisions (1973)

It's that feeling you get.

That one, right below the surface, that's simmering there waiting for something to push it up to a boil. That one that sizzles in the background, white noise in the world's ambience, and you can't shut it off no matter how many things you throw at it. The nervous tic that won't go away even though you haven't actively thought about it all day.

It's like you're walking down the street wearing your massive, head-swallowing headphones (preferably Beats by Dr. Dre) and you can't hear anything but the swell of a carefully (or not) crafted song, rising into your head like smoke filtering into your brain until it fills your consciousness and you can't escape (not that you'd want to) and it consumes you until in one instant - maybe a stumble over a curb, or a nudge from someone who SIMPLY CANNOT WALK BEHIND YOU ONE SECOND LONGER, or a catastrophic explosion that happens to catch your eye - everything snaps back to reality and you start to get that feeling again. Twitch.

It's like you're a series of tectonic plates, shifting around and trying to keep the magma at bay so that it doesn't erupt and ooze a molten goo all over your perfectly crafted Monday. You do a good job 98% of the time, but every once in a while your plates collide and you accidentally knock over buildings and wreak havoc and general mishap and mayhem and hullabaloo. That comparison is simultaneously topical, relevant, and completely uncalled for, but you can't help it because that's just how the story goes.

It's like when you're in a maze in a corn field and it's October. There's no frost, but you still feel a little bitten by the wind, but it's the good kind of bite, the kind that reminds you a whole year just went by. You know this maze can't be that big because IT'S MADE FOR KIDS GODDAMMIT WHERE'S THE EXIT but you still feel a bit lost anyway. You're going this way, and you're pretty sure that's the way out, because you started way back there and this thing can't go on forever can it but oh wait there's another turn and now we are facing a different way entirely and oh my god are we really lost and are you positive this isn't a dead end and you get that feeling again.

It's like how Atmosphere said it, it's the caffeine, the nicotine, but it's none of those things at all, is it. It's just that little somethin' right when you don't need it.

It's like you're talking all day but you can't get all the words to make sense. You know exactly what you mean but when you say it you are met with blank, empty stares that morph quickly - a little too quickly - into looks of sympathy for the poor fool who just doesn't get it. Here you are, with the entire English language and part of the Spanish one and a few random Greek and Latin and Elvish words at your disposal, and you can't find the right one to say and all of a sudden you are terrified that you might run out of words. You think all day about the best way to phrase it, the emphasis, the meaning behind it, the right word out of all the words in the history of word word word word but still nothing makes sense and you know they aren't going to listen and the background noise gets louder and someone turned the heat on in here and this isn't what I wanted to say and it sounded way better in my head and wait wait now I forget and through all of this I hope in the end it doesn't drive me

This is the beginning (2010)

Of something excellent. Let's celebrate the inauguration of this blog by celebrating Syracuse basketball's first Number 1 ranking in my lifetime. The velocirautins has spoken.