A dream and a song. Neither is happy, but both are necessary.

The Song.

I'm at a party.

It's a dream party, so the house is one to which I've never been owned by someone whom i know (and know well enough to say that they'd never live there).  There are more rooms inside than the outside should allow.

A dream house hosting a dream party.

The halls and doors lead from ballroom to bedroom to rompus to rec. room.  Kitchen to porch to patio to garden to greenhouse; everything is inside and I am here and


And She is here with me.

Or...or, she was and now she is gone.
She has moved to another room.
And I am alone.
 
People are drinking and laughing and I know all of them (though i couldn't name a single face in the crowd) and all around me the party whirls and twirls and I'm looking for only one Girl.

"Where is She?"

Laughter and looks and pointing fingers throw me in circles around this strange, impossible house.

I wander through a bedroom, familiar in every way save for the ways that make it Someone's room.
It is not mine.

This is not my house and I am lost and all I want to do is find Her.

I can't.  She is gone and She has left me at this party to be with another man.  She brought me here and now she is with another Him.

Not Me.  Him.

I sit at the bar (of course this place has a bar for the brokenhearted dreamer) and order my glass of Smooth Defeat, on the Rocks, with a Twist.

Sip.
Sigh.
Sip.
Sigh.
Sip...
Wait.
Who did I come here with?

I came alone.  And She was with Him the whole time.

Two strangers who were friends, circling each other at the same party.
And I sip my drink and smile for her happiness.

And then I wake up.

A weep for my Loss.

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Culture Shock

I am done with the south.

Not literally, of course, but more in line with the figurative 'i am SO done with this place.'

I went throught the initial novelty of being exasperated with the commercialization of what is already a struggling cultural powerhouse 'Mega-Church' demographic. i am not christian, but i respect the ideals set down by this Jesus fellah, but my animosity towards christianity as a social/political entity is unyeilding. Dogma and archaic ideology has been confused with 'morality' and the people who are trying to improve connectivity and broaden minds throughout the world are suffering because of the placement this monster has within our legislative body.

But that's not the point.

I suffered through what is a flagrant demonstration of how appallingly under-educated the lower/working/middle classes are in this country with the same grace you can expect from a nose-in-the-air snob subjected to the 9-5 grind of bottom rung theatre. it's good for us to broaden our understanding of what it is to be american and not simply assume that without a college education someone falls under the category of 'minimum wage surf.' the south is a brilliant crossection of this group, and i fear it flaunts it somewhat.

But this is not the point.

I have come to face my own distaste for obeisity in this country and have found myself surrounded on all sides by the causes and subjects of this epidemic. We are an omnivorous species and it has become that gastro-intestional truth that has allowed corperate science to merrily opportunize on our evolved desire for 'sweet' 'fatty' and 'salty.' Being unhealthy in your approach to diet and excercise one day and then going to abortion clinics to picket line the emotionally vulnerable young women who are making one of the most difficult decisions of their lives and doing so because you say that they 'disrespect the body and life god has given them' makes me want to light my own hair on fire and dance a jaunty jig.

Neither, nor, is this the point.

the point is, dear friends, that i am simply done. all and none of these things are the point because, when it comes right down to it, i feel as if i'm in the wrong damn country sometimes. we are scrambling at every second to find a conflict to win. not resolve, but win. we do not want the war in Afganistan/Iraq/Anydamnwhere to end because then we would have to work our asses off to find another contrived, amoral reason to start one eslewhere. we do not want Jesus or whomever to descend from the heavens to tell us that 'it's all ok, we're done here, let's go to heaven' because the actual reckoning of eternal accountability would call a good number of questionable 'moral truths' into a very stark, "christ, i've been a bit of a dick my whole life, haven't i" light.

i can't help it anymore! i'm ripping at the seams and i don't know what to do about it. all i want to do is pour this bile and disdain out of my head into a bound volume of unbleached, recycled paper, and then never have anyone read it and tuck it away forever(now dan, is that accurate? nobody read it, but then what's the blog for?) (...shutup). these are thoughts, i recognize, that serve only as futile ramblings of an elitist shmuck who doesn't know how to handle the conflict between what he wishes the world were like, and what it IS like.

It has been almost a week since i started writing the previous paragraphs and, returning to this, i am happy to report that i've been granted a full voiced, full bodied discourse with some friends from work and have, by and large, vented a good amount of my frustration that way. The previous tirade is still true to my perspective, i simply do not have the same fervor. give it time, it will come.

i suppose we could look at this as the hyper-sensualized ramblings of a sex-starved-someone looked back upon by his/her/their well laid future self. i have felt the passionate release of my energies and serve myself better for the lost bile...

Ew.

Language and it's uses

I love the english language.

Fair enough to argue, i know no other language with any real literacy/conversational fluency, but there is something about our bastard tongue that excites me.

Perhaps it is that it is so very alive, so constantly bombarded by foreign influence, so susceptible to trends and fashions...and yet so old, and so structured and vastly diverse in uses.

The languages that service the scientific laboratory, the political pulpit, the theatre, the school and the street are all the same, subject to the same origins and the same stories, though some may consider the others more or less valid.

This is irrelevant: perspective does not determine truth.

My love for this language manifests itself most in my writing style, becoming at once the twisting convoluted meandering of a guy who's making it up as he goes along but longs so desperately to have the know-how to truly pontificate like a learned man and the slang laden drivel of a child of the 80's and a citizen of the Aughties.

My writing is without polish, sure, i'm working on getting better, but i am a practiced speaker and i feel confident in my ability to articulate myself vocally as well as verbally (not mutually exclusive, but not always intrinsically bound, either). that said/written/articulated, i have been, more recently than ever, been accosted by my peers and co-workers for the way i use our language.

I'm getting made fun of for how i talk.

Really?

Are we still in grade school?

Does it offend you so much that i'm not afraid to use such words as 'existential' and 'mono-culture' in a series of sentences that make sense? does it offend you further that i choose to NOT garnish my conversation with references to racism, sexism, homophobia, religious extremism; the likes of which all contribute rather heftily to our international personae as inbred, under-educated fatsacks who would just as soon press a button to heat up their hungry man microwaveable meals as return an entire region of the middle east to the bloody stone age?

Perhaps it's more stuff like that that offends you.

I'm sorry, then, that i offend. Let it never be said that Dan Stevens wasn't one to try the amicable approach to social discourse...see, there i did it again: showing off for the Internet.

//

I'm writing more and more. I can't stop the outpour of words, which is nothing new, but now i have a structure, a story, a world to work within and it's working.

It may be contrived and cliched, but it's my contrived, cliched world and i'm happy with it.

An apology to women

I am a decently sympathetic soul.

I can appreciate the ideas behind what it means to be deeply religious or spiritual (i have been and am still a little of both, after all). Intellectually i can even appreciate the comfort behind bigotry and fear based cultural relations. I have experienced the tumult of teenager-dom in America, so i don't completely discount the rancorous outcry from toady's youth over...everything. I am capable, i think, of appreciating the origin and reasoning behind almost any perspective or attitude, even if i vehemently disagree with the conclusions drawn from that attitude.

That said, i am terrified to try to write from the perspective of a woman. You people terrify me.

I understand that a woman's perspective is not entirely defined by the fact that she is female. We are no more exclusively defined by our gender identity than we are our political view, or religious practice, or ethnic origin; i get that. what i experience the most discomfort with is that there are, quite simply put, marked differences between the perspective offered the two sexes due in no small part to do with things entirely owing to genetics and biology and not personality.

this is a truism that i have never been entirely comfortable admitting outloud. i think that is to do with my fear of castration and effigy mutilation. not because i fear that i actually AM sexist, simply that i will be percieved as such. this, ladies and gentlemen, is the curse of socially indoctrinated guilt.

it's certainly not that i think that women are the only creatures subject to cycles of hormonal highs and lows; the ebb and flow of our natural similarity to the lunar cycle. i've come to recognize that i have a monthly cycle that takes quite a prominent place in how i deal with the situations set before me. i have good days, bad days, and days somewhere in between, and i'm coming to recognize the schedule in which they operate.

but how the hell do i write for a synthetic organizm who identifies as female, was designed as a fascimile of a ten year old girl, is now over twenty years old and wants to rebuild herself in the image of the woman she feels she has become? how do you adress that kind of distinct shift from girlhood to womanhood without making more about the person (for this A.I. is a person, no doubt) making the augmentation than the...augmentations themselves?

help me, friends. women, women everywhere, and i'unno how they think.

Lyrics to songs i'll write once i learn how to write music

I remember then, a while before,
I sideswiped a Chevy four door
In a town so very precious for
The blonde bombshell borne in Pigeon Forge,

My timings terrible they tell me,
And i hate to admit i agree,
Though i remember at twenty three
Being a touch more true to my capacity to gracefully structure a line...

Don't ask this broken brain the time or day,
Or expect a named remembered please,
But lets shake hands and friendlies stay,
As we exchange our brainy pedigree!

(Chourus)
A nerd, a nerd, you've fallen on a nerd,
though in this day and age, the title is absurd,
Neither of the two of we could ever disagree that
We've stumbled mightily and serindipadly into Valley
Valley of Nerd and Bard and Thinking corners,
Where the mighty thoughtful Jacky Horner
Did pull out before my unbelieving eye
An idea like a plum from this existential quandary pie.

So follow me well fast behind my oft loquacious find
for you and i have but hours to get our minds in lind
Before the party starts and the music plays
And the air takes on its hazey ways
And we all take a moment to kindly realize
That the friends and the family before our eyes
Are those we can value to a degree quite absurd,
Because ever single one of us, ever daughters son and sister
Every waistcoat and bowler cap and ugg boot wearing mister
is an un abashed and un relenting...

Nerd!

(Chourus)

where the hell am i?

Pigeon Forge, is where.

I'm in some strange limbo for the high school social network dropout. That kid that was e'er on the outskirts of social clamouring during adolescence? Me. Choice and circumstance always saw me an observer as apposed to a participant in the ever twining network of connectivity and gossip that constitutes the majority of a person's life when they're in school (primary and higher). I just never caught the appeal, and always found the practice of engrossing oneself in the life of another person for the sake of opportunistic voyeurism a little distasteful (he posted on his blog. hypocrisy strikes again!).

that is this place. we're all gossping, partying children again. but now we don't have a curfew, we don't have homework, and our parents are so bloody far out of the picture that we might as well be in never never land.

it's exhausting. the investment we lay in our personae building, the charmless way we attack each other through each other, the barely masked animosities we hold to ideas or principles at conflict...it's exhausting.

i have these next three days (monday, tuesday, and wednesday) to recover before i'm back to work. wish me luck.