Try To Make Yourself A Work Of Art.

I don't know how to live.

I come home and my keyboard dongle is missing
so I have to have my laptop sitting right in front of me

looming

and I feel anxious and claustrophobic.

2pm.
Drunk.
r/futurebeats soundtrack.

Somewhat worried that this could be my life.
Fulfilled.

No Drums.

There is a man standing infront of you.
The man is talking.
Listen to the man.

There is a man standing infront of you.
The man is talking.
Listen to the man.

There is a man standing infront of you.
The man is talking.
Listen to the man.

There is a man standing inside of you.
The man is talking.
Listen to the man.

There is a man standing infront of you.
The man is talking.
Listen to the man.

In Somnambulance I wake.

Given the choice.
I would have stayed in that dream.
Forever.

Green Tea Power.

The joy of drinking tea.
Is vastly outweighed by the need to relieve ones self.
Hourly.

Obsfucated Life.

You arrive early to a place where you're meant to be meeting someone/attending something/waiting for something. There are people around you, watching you. They can see the uncomforted look in the jutting of your eyes. They can feel the unfamiliarity in your stance. They can smell the lack of purpose in your perspiration. They glare at you as you stand there, weighing up the 'fight or flight' option in your head. Your evolutionary traits are irrelevant to you though. You have technology on your side now. You are every person standing at the train station staring at their palms. You are every person standing outside a classroom swiping their fingers across a piece of glass. You are every person sitting alone at a bar pressing a button every thirty seconds hoping for something to change. You are alone with your electronic companion.

Sinuous Bookshelf.

He sits at his desk, staring at a book titled 'Indecision,' wondering whether to read it. It sits at the bottom of a pile of other books, which are atop the speaker to the right of the desk. The book on top is George Orwell's ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four,’ which is a friend’s copy that was left in his car and never claimed. The book in between these two books is indistinguishable to him, as it is the top of the book, rather than the spine, which is facing him. Looking at these books, he is reminded of a conversation he had with a friend who had never read ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four.’ It struck him as odd that someone who he knew had a fondness of literature had never read this well renowned novel. However, he thinks to himself, such modern classics as ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ ‘Catch-22’ and ‘The Catcher in the Rye,’ amongst others, are still sitting in his bookcase, unread. The books in his bookcase are stacked on top of each other, rather than beside each other in a normal fashion, so as to fit them all in, which renders the majority indistinguishable. There are still many that he is yet to read, as he had stopped reading lately. Not out of lack of want but of lack of concentration. He wishes he was reading more. There is a book on his floor. Beside his bed there are two books. In his bag there are three books. He continues to borrow books from the library and from friends, and to sometimes purchase them when he has the money, but these scarcely are finished. On his desk there is a book titled ‘The Strange Story of False Teeth.’

The Garden Of Forking Paths.

"One believes that the years pass for one... but they pass for everyone else too. Here we meet, at last, face to face, and what happened before has no meaning now."

- J. L. B.

Flow Coma.

I can't stop shaking
so I put on my woolly jacket and hide under my covers.

I can't stop shaking
so I try my breathing exercises to no avail.

I can't stop shaking
so I hyperventilate and hope to pass out.

I can't stop shaking
so I stand under a hot shower until my skin goes bright red.

I can't stop shaking
so I peel off my wet clothes.

I can't stop shaking
so I go out and get drunk.


Epilogue:
I want to be a person
that doesn't resort to this every time.

And There Will Be The Most Beautiful Silence Never Heard.

Maybe I will shave today.
The last time I shaved.
Was on January 24th 2010.

I want to see.
What lies underneath.
From a time.
Before.
You.

My last remaining self.

How To Study (Super) Effectively.

Set your alarm for 7:30 am. Wake up at 7:30 am to the shrieking sound of an alarm and flail your hand frantically around beside your bed in the hope of hitting the snooze button on your phone. Wake up at 7:35 am and repeat previous exercise. Wake up at 7:40 am, grab your phone and place it under your pillow so that you can press the snooze button more efficiently the next time it goes off. Wake up at 7:44 am anticipating the alarm that is about to go off. Hold your finger over the spot on the phone where the snooze button will be in twenty seconds and wait. Press the snooze button and place the phone back under your pillow. Wake up at 7:50 am and finally feel ready to commit to turning off your alarm. Think that you'll just lay in bed for another minute and then you'll get up. Wake up at 9:42 am.

Get up and go to the bathroom. Make a half-hearted effort to close the door, but don't worry if it doesn't shut completely. Stand infront of the toilet and relieve yourself. Continue standing there for another two minutes while you attempt to ascertain where you are and what you're doing. Flush the toilet and wash your hands. Head into the kitchen. Search the fridge, cupboard, draws or anything else that could possibly have contents in the hope of finding something edible (and possibly somewhat nutritious) for breakfast. Settle on some stale bread. Put it in the toaster and turn the kettle on. Realise that there's no water in the kettle, and take the kettle off the kettle holder thing and fill it with water. Put the kettle back and press the button again. Get the indeterminate yellow spread out of the fridge and place it on the table, anticipating your toast. Choose the green tea bag over an English breakfast because you like the way that the dry leaves smell. Huff on your tea leaves until the water is boiled. Your toast should be done too. Rush to get your tea done so that you can get to the toast within that ten second window before it goes cold, and forget that green tea needs a bit of cold water with it. Pour a bit out of the mug and fill it with cold water from the tap. Tea in one hand, grab the toast out of the toaster and take it over to the table. Spread whatever it is that's in the container on your toast, and you're ready to go. Unfold the paper. Eat your toast. As you turn the pages of the paper, notice that your toast crumbs are going all over the table. Sweep them onto the floor. By the time you've skimmed over all of the interesting articles, telling yourself that you'll read the world section when you have a but more time, you've finished your toast and realised that you haven't drunk your tea, which is now cold. Pour that cup out and make a new one, which you take to your room.

Get your laptop out of your bed and take it to your desk. Think about restarting it (it's been in a running/sleeping cycle for a few days now), but don't bother about it - that slight hum it makes when it's overworked is somewhat calming. Check Facebook. Check your rss feeds. Check your local newspaper site (even though you just read the paper). Check all of your music news blogs. Check your blog. Check to see if there's anything new worth downloading. Check Facebook again. Close your internet browser. Open up your books. Open up your internet browser and go to your uni page. Open up a tab for Facebook as well. Download the lecture slide that you should have printed out weeks ago when you actually had the lecture, and start reading through them, trying to work out what bits you should write down. Get stumped at a huge mass of words and check Facebook. Drink your tea. Check your whole repertoire of sites again, in the hope that something new might have come up. Finish you tea. Go back to your lecture slides and decide to write nothing about that page. Continue. Go to the kitchen and look in the fridge. You're not hungry, and there isn't anything in there anyway. Boil the kettle again. Go back to your room and get your mug to make yourself another cup of tea. Go back to summarising. Check Facebook again. By now the diuretic effect of your multiple cups of tea should be kicking in, so you head off to the toilet. This time your shut and lock the door. Notice that your urine is more clear than yellow. Finish up and go back to the kitchen. Search the the fridge and cupboard again. Head back to your room, empty handed. Check Facebook. You've spent three hours writing a page or two of summary notes. It's lunch time now (even though you're not hungry).

There's a can of chicken noodle soup in the cupboard. "100% real breast fillets" it claims. Open up the can and pour it into a bowl. It's akin, in both look and smell, to pouring out a can of your dogs vomit. The "100% real breast fillet" chicken turns out to be tiny little chunks of pinkish mush that add so perfectly to that whole vomit-y persona of the soup. Heat it up anyway. After three minutes in the microwave (the recommended time on the can), you taste the soup. It is still cold. After another minute it's still not right. You decide to go for an extra two minutes. About a minute and a half in you hear a popping noise and discover that half of your soup is now lining the walls of the microwave. At least it's hot now. Go back to your room and put on an episode of The Simpsons to eat to. After five minutes you've finished eating, but continue to watch the remaining sixteen minutes of the episode, which you have seen at least twenty times before. When that's over, check Facebook. Now it's time to get back to some serious work.

After checking Facebook again, try and start reading/writing again. However, find yourself wondering what new things might have happened in the wonderful world of Facebook, so go back and see the same news feed as you did thirty seconds ago (which incidentally happens to be the same as it was the last ten thousand times you checked, somehow). Look at the time in the top right corner of your Macbook and see that it's already three in the afternoon. Look at the amount of work that you've done since you tried to get up eight hours ago, and wonder how you're ever going to manage a nine to five. At this stage you start to get quite anxious about your lack of studying. Get angry at yourself and write something depressing/witty/interesting about studying as a status update. But don't post it, because you don't want to seem like an attention whore. Go back to staring at your lecture notes in the hope that they'll magically summarise themselves in your book. Check Facebook.

When you look up at the time again, it's nearly five. Now it's seven. Now it's ten o'clock. Somehow you managed to go sit down in the kitchen and eat dinner during this time. Look down at your book and see a handfull of pages filled top to bottom with rushed cursive writing. Try and read over it, but don't recall learning, or even writing, any of it. Try and think about what is is that you're actually meant to be studying, but you can't remember. Look out your window and see darkness. Think about how you're going to get up early tomorrow. Think about how you're actually going to focus on studying, and not just muck around doing pointless shit on the internet. Think about how you're actually going to take in whatever it is you're trying to learn. Think about how it will all be so much easier tomorrow. Put on an episode of whatever new show came out today. Put on an episode of a show you've already watched a few times before. Try and get back to studying. Give up after two minutes of reading. Read a bunch of random stuff on the internet. Explore reddit for two hours. It's now time for bed.

Get into bed and set your alarm for seven. You'll get up properly tomorrow morning, you tell yourself. For sure. It's always easier tomorrow.

*As an added bonus, write a 1500 word blog post about your how awesome you are at studying, while you should be studying, the day before you have two exams.

Anti-American Graffiti.

Anti-American Graffiti. by Ziggomatic_v17

Water Under The Bridge.

I'm sitting at the kitchen bench eating Nutella out of the jar and reading about the sentencing of the guy who threw his daughter off of the West Gate Bridge and wondering why a life sentence means that he can get out of jail at age seventy-three and whether he'll be in the same jail as the guy who drove his three kids into the lake that I drive past every time I go up to my holiday house and see the three white crosses that always remind me of the stupid dickheads who go around in their stupid cars and go and wrap themselves around a tree where their friends will later huddle around and cry and tell the news cameras how everyone should think twice before drinking and driving which is something that I've always felt strongly about but I let a friend drive me home from a party the other day even though he had been drinking and I wonder why I'm always such a fucking hypocrite.

Why Midnight Walked But Didn't Ring Her Bell.

When I get off the train I notice that there is a man wearing a school bag, but it’s obvious that he doesn’t attend that school, nor would he have had in the last forty years. He turns to walk in the same direction that I will, but I have already made a conscious effort to follow him anyway. It’s hard to stay far enough behind him since we’re walking through tall grass and the water on the grass is getting into my shoes and I’m taking long strides. As I get closer, I fear that he can hear my footsteps behind him in the mulching of the grass. He slows down and takes out his phone. He stops and I pass him, unable to slow down further without garnering suspicion. I keep walking, and as I come to divert into the underpass, I turn my head slightly to glance back at him, and see that he is still standing there, the back-light of his phone screen illuminating his face, blank and inattentive. I consider waiting at the other side of the underpass, but it's dark and that would just be too creepy, I think to myself, so I walk on. I walk past a car that hasn’t moved in so long that it has spider webs attached from the base of the car to the road, anchoring it to the black sea of asphalt. I walk past a crying baby standing at a window looking quite distraught, so I smile and wave to it, only to see the mother appear behind it giving me a look of absolute disgust, and I wonder who is the victim in this scenario. I walk past a house where I always have to be attentive as to what I’m doing so as not to be talking to myself, as there is usually a women sitting in a chair on her front veranda smoking, but she isn’t there tonight. I walk and think about how my heart has been hurting all day, and how my left arm has felt less dexterous than it’s right counterpart, and I wonder if I am having a heart attack. I try to think of the time.

EZ Boogie.

I walk down my street.
And notice something is different.
I tell myself it's nothing.
I tell myself that I'm just drunk.
From the six-pack of beer.
I drank before I left.
While we watched X-Files.
But I realise there's a tree missing.
And the street suddenly feels open.
And I feel exposed.
So I walk to the other side.

I'm going to a gig.
At a pub where the beer is expensive.
It usually costs me.
At least fifty.
Or a hundred dollars.
To be able to enjoy myself.
When I go out.
But I haven't worked in a while.
So I started at home.

I've tried before.
But I just can't.
Have a good time.
Without being intoxicated.
It makes me more self-conscious.
Than usual.
To try to have fun.
So I get drunk.
And this makes me feel.
Like I think.
Normal people must feel.
All of the time.

Fake Emotion.

Night Of Broken Glass.

Watching a 40-something year old man chew on glass to make music.
I wonder what he does in his real life.
Does he have a job?
A family?
I imagine his wife.
Cleaning up the glass he smashes.
And spits out.
Maybe his kids tell their friends about him.
But they don't believe it.

He smashes a sheet of glass over his head.
Everybody claps.
The people around me all look the same.
I look the same.
I wonder why they didn't stamp hands when we paid.
How can they tell us apart?

There's a guy wearing the same clothes as me.
Once I showed up at a friends place to go to a gig.
And we were wearing the exact same clothes.
A red-checkered shirt.
Tight-ish black jeans.
Black volleys.
(This seems to be the sum of my outfits now.
[insert colour]-checkered shirt, those jeans and shoes.)
We both had a good laugh.
And then played Mario Golf.
But he got changed before we left.
To my protests.

I think I would be considered a hipster.
If I had friends.
Who were hipsters.
Or even.
If I just had friends.
I realised that I stopped drinking cider.
Because it became popular.

We're sitting on the floor.
It's concrete.
And my coccyx hurts.
We walked for an hour and a half to get here.
And we'll have to walk for an hour and a half.
To get back.
I'm too worried about leaving my bike outside.
In areas like this.

It was BYO.
But I wasn't informed of this.
Someone is smoking inside.

Talking Heads.

What do people talk about?
If I see you on the street.
What do I say?
Do I ask how you are?
Because at some stage.
That has become a mere greeting.
Not warranting a response.
I say "how's it going?"
And at the same time.
You say "how's it going?"
And we both walk on.
Neither one acknowledging the question.
If it even is a question.
Anymore.

What do people talk about?
If we met at a bar.
Or a gig.
I've only ever had conversations.
When I'm drunk.
So I don't remember.
What it is.
That I talk about.
But apparently.
I can do this quite well.
So I wonder.
Why it is.
That I can't talk to people.
When I'm sober.

Left Blank.

There's beef jerky in my bed.
I smell it when I wake up.

I get high and walk home.
Past the foodies where.
I wish I could go in.
And get some chips.
But I feel too self-conscious.
And when I'm self-conscious.
I tend to exaggerate whatever it is.
That I'm self-conscious about.
So I keep walking.

I'm drunk.
And there's a post on reddit.
About a bukkake.
In Melbourne.
The hotel room number is posted.
And I wonder what sort of people.
Might show up.
I wasn't even aware.
That they go on.
Outside of porn.
Or Japan.

I put on The Simpsons.
To fall asleep to.
Even though I know.
That I will just pass out anyway.

Acid In The Style Of David Tudor.

When I drive, I sometimes wonder why there are so many other cars on the road. I feel as though I have a valid excuse for being there, but no one else does. Then I relise that these people are all living a different life to mine, that they all experience the world independently. They each have something different that they are driving towards, something completely unrelated to me.

I took acid for the first time on Grand Final day last year - the draw. The last ten minutes of that game was possibly the most emotional period I've ever experienced. By the end of the game, I had bunched myself up on a chair, holding my knees infront of me. I was shaking, biting my fists and sweating uncontrollably. I noticed afterwards that my hands were bleeding and that I had been crying the whole time, and that at some stage I had put my hood and sunglasses on.

We went for a walk down to the shops to get some dinner - this was the first time venturing outside and something was definitely different to RL. Given the result of the footy, I expected there to be riots in the streets, drunken idiots roaming around 'fuckin shit up'. It was eerily quiet. There were a few people walking around, going about their night, but other than that there was nothing much of anything happening. We proceeded to the supermarket.

Inside, the supermarket looked too bright, daunting; so I decided to wait outside. Standing there, watching people walk past doing their own thing, I found myself experiencing not life, but a scene from a play. All of these people were walking onto a set, which entailed my whole field of view, and were acting out their own part in this play. I felt as though they were doing this all for me. Cars drove past, people walked in groups talking about other people, someone kicked a bin, two guys started pushing each other around until a girl broke them up, people walked in and out of the supermarket. I was watching people act out life around me. All that life was was these fragments of moments. Nothing mattered what came before, and nothing would matter about what was going to happen afterwards. These were just people on a set. These were just actors. All that mattered was what was happening at that very moment, what I could see. I was an observer to life, my life.

What a wank.

March.

It's been a year now, so I decided to cut-up something I wrote a while back to make a new narrative out of it.
I don't particularly like doing this depressive stuff, it's just basic emotional drivel; but it seems an adequate enough time.

This was the worst night of my life.


It’s going to rain, she said,
so I went into the bathroom to cry.

I feel as though I can hide away inside,
but instead I walked back with her.

When I got home,
and we sat at the table eating, not talking.

I put my hand on her lap,
there was none.

I thought about just getting up and leaving,
in my underwear, in the rain.

She just sat there, cold,
so I brought my big black coat.

I always felt safe in that coat,
but she moved it away.


She had a shower,
I drank tea and cried.

I sat there for hours,
but I never told anyone what was wrong.

She hardly talked to me,
I said ok.

I made her toast,
I had a mental breakdown.

A shadowy figure,
trying to elicit some sympathy.

I spent the next few hours thinking of,
but I didn’t want her to think that anything was wrong.


In bed,
she didn’t talk to me.

It was raining,
lying next to her.

She fell asleep,
and I didn’t join her.

I researched depression and anxiety disorders,
and I was left awake.

I went out into the back yard,
I didn’t have the strength to try anything.

Hood over my head, hands in the pockets,
I turned away and moved myself right to the edge of the bed.


When she woke up,
I didn’t leave my room for three days.

I booked myself into therapy,
and she didn’t even see me to the door.

I said goodbye,
I should have gone home.

I barely kept it together on the train,
and cried.

I asked her what was wrong,
I could only think in extremes.

In the end,
she told me that she had switched off her feelings for me.


No one can see me.

Best Foot Forward.

Peeling off skin from between my toes.
I think I have tinea.
The skin is white.
Dead.

Maybe if I peel off enough.
My foot will disappear.

Seward II

This is an experiment with cut-ups.

On the walls it looks as though something is empty.
The white blocks make it apparent that I don’t want anyone.
The seat next to me is trying to push through.
The wall is beside me, will devour me.

The theatre checks her Facebook.
They talk about things that secretly I do.

I wonder when it fills up, and no one sits down.
I sit there, but, illuminate the room, around me.
The girl in front of me, around me, and I am alone.
I have to sit with all of these people pushing closer and closer.

There are four hundred people I can never be a part of.

Things We Lost In The Fire.

The last night or two I've been having dreams about water. Strangely, I can remember them. I searched for the meaning of water in dreams, but a lot of the sites that came up seem like complete bullshit. I don't trust much on the internet. These seemed to make sense though: overwhelming emotional stress/difficulties in emotional situations.

First dream:
I’m at a festival, and it’s been raining the whole time. For some reason, I’m being driven around in a vehicle. I don’t really know what it is only that I’m looking out of a window as I slowly progress past various places. We stop at a Go-Kart track, which is completely submerged, but there are people who are somehow driving around the track, through the water. I decide to try my hand at driving, but end up sinking underwater and not going anywhere. Someone buys a sausage in bread and gives half to me, half to someone else.

Second dream:
I’m in a phone box, and it’s raining. The water is rising around us, and we can’t get out. Inside is fine, but outside the water is rising up the clear glass walls. We decide to have sex, but I’m too ashamed that someone might see. After a while, we do it anyway.

Third dream:
I’m working in an office block, or more specifically just one floor space which is raised above a mass of water. All around the walls are made of glass, and I can see that we are surrounded by water. There is no door leading outside. There is a big office at the end of the room – that’s where my boss is. There are a few other smaller offices that are walled off, but everything is made of glass, so I can see into them. I can also see into my boss’s office. I’m working in one of the smaller offices when my boss calls me into her office. She yells at me because I’m doing something wrong. I go back to my office and try again. She calls me back in and yells at me again. I return to my office and look out at the water. There’s a crack in my window.

I think I'd like to remember more dreams.

I Fulcrum.

My tongue is too big for my mouth, and when I talk for an extended period of time, I get a slight lisp.

You told me that this was one of the top five things about me.

I can't accept compliments.

Sometime I wonder what the other things were.

Then I remember.

Obviously nothing.

This Unfolds.

A helicopter flew overhead and I looked out the window for any sign of it, thinking how strange it would be to see it fall into the middle of the street, the rotors still whirring eerily slow after it came to an abrupt halt. I turned back to my book, searching for the line that I left off at, only to realise that I couldn’t recall anything written on that page. In fact, I thought as I flipped back through the book, I couldn’t remember reading anything at all. The words I was scouring over seemed somewhat distant, the names foreign. I picked up my phone to check the time – it was three-twenty. It had been over two hours ago that I had decided to go to bed, or rather to turn off my laptop in the hope of overcoming the need to incessantly check the three or four websites I spend most of my time on; and I was no more tired. I could still see the blinking light of the laptop, placed at arms reach from my head. I was always afraid to turn it off, afraid that I might miss something – anything, so I only ever closed the lid. I decided for the third time that night to open up the laptop, and searched for helicopter crashes. An hour later, I realised that I was trawling through news stories and articles from the previous day, wondering if anything new had happened since I last checked. I thought how stupid what I was doing was, and tried to put the computer away, only to open it up and do the same thing again. At five o’clock, I thought about watching porn, in the hope that some release may put me to sleep; but my lack of any semblance of a sex drive caused me to feel sick at the very thought. My mind was incapable of sexual desire. I thought about when the last time I masturbated was, but couldn’t remember. I turned the computer off, completely.

The room was dark. The light from the street lamp outside my window shone through the slats in the blinds and directly onto my face, but the room was dark. Without the light of the computer screen, or even the blinking light of the laptop, there was only darkness. I moved my head and rolled over, wondering why I always ended up waking up on my back, regardless of what position I slept in, or the fact that I couldn’t fall asleep that way. I knew that if I started thinking about it that I would never get to sleep, so I tried to stop myself. That never worked. I thought about going to sleep and never waking up. When I was young, I was afraid to go to sleep because you would never know if you had died during the night. I had panic attacks lying in bed at night, waiting. Whenever I woke up, it was always a relief to know that I was still alive; but that relief was soon replaced by the weight of anxiety about the impending night. I got angry because I knew that my mind was running away with thoughts again, so I tried to stop myself. My therapist advised me to do breathing exercises when I needed to relax or clear my head, but I found that this sometimes didn’t work out too well. I would clear my head of normal everyday thoughts, only for them to be replaced with those that I was most trying to avoid. Even considering doing breathing exercises lead these thoughts to automatically enter my mind. I knew then that I was not going to be sleeping anytime soon.

It was getting light outside, so I decided that I might go for a run to clear my head, and possibly make myself tired. By the time I got out the door it was a little after seven, and there were people already out driving to work, their headlights on. Seeing this, I was overcome with a wave of self-conscious anxiety and decided against it. I told myself that I would go for a run tomorrow – when no one was around, before realising that tomorrow was today. I went back to bed feeling more depressed than before, partly because I couldn’t bring myself to run in front of even a few early morning commuters, but mostly because I had squandered another night on nothing. Another day had gone by and I was no better for it. Nearly twelve hours had passed since I’d had contact with another person, twelve hours that I had spent alone and awake, and I could not recall a single thing, productive or otherwise, that I had done. I lay down, turned my computer back on, and lined up a few episodes of The Simpsons in a playlist.

I fell asleep, and didn’t die.