watching someone walk into your home is weird. it’s kinda like the joke— the one everyone knows: a man walks into a bar and *insert stupid situation*. even though you don’t know the steps the man will take, you know how it’ll end.

so, when someone walks into the place where you’ve spent holidays, where you’ve slept in too long, where you’ve clutched someone’s hand too tightly— you know where they’ll end up. the punch line then, is never really funny, but we laugh because we have nothing else to do with cruel repetition.

my home has a garden on the ground floor— down the stairs from the picu and a right from the security desk. except the grass is fake and the trees are murals. we sit on benches with our backs to the road and our iv poles tucked behind us so we can stare at the quote on the wall and pretend it’s a museum.

y’know, fuck ralph waldo emerson. who’s going to tell him that the earth doesn’t laugh in flowers— it laughs in sick kids watching the next one walk in the door. it laughs in repetition. it laughs in a man walking into a bar, because we all know where he’ll end up.

i’m not a huge fan of internet “empaths”. the ones that talk about crying over videos of starving children or industrial agriculture. you know the ones— the vegan who’s only reason is that cows are cute.

i’m on “dog-training-tok” and occasionally i’ll get a video about how harmful crating or stern training is. i wonder how those people would feel if i told them they don’t understand empathy at all. if i told them that sometimes, when my dog doesn’t follow a command, i want to yell in his face that he doesn’t know lucky he is. god, i would do anything to have someone tell me the right thing to do all the time.

something many of these “feelers” like to do is project humanity onto non-human animals. this is how i know they aren’t truly empaths, because i would never want my dog to feel this weight, this ache that humanity provides: freedom, choice, indecision, uncertainty.

my dog knows that “center” means he’s safe between my legs. he knows that “leave it” or “wait” means that i’m making sure it’s safe for him. “come” is immidiately equated to companionship.

i question everything. i get to pick where i sleep at night. i don’t know if the direction i went in or the choice i made is the right one. most of the time, there isn’t a “right one”. it doesn’t seem fair and yeah, maybe the grass is always greener, but my dog seems content curled around my feet right now.

the meaning of “the butterfly effect” has been watered down, but i love any version. one event, often ironically unintentional, changes fate irrevocably. whether it is an undeniably important moment or a little thing that happens every week, every day, every hour— i am in love with free will challenging fate with all its might.

i have a small mementos drawer easily accessible and a larger one tucked under my bed so i can disguise my need to keep each meaningless item on a whim. i don’t feel like explaining my obsession with small things contributing to a whole to each person that wanders into my room, but i can’t disguise the deepest parts of me splattered across my walls, on my bookshelf, and hanging in my closet.

today, i wanted to tuck some things from the smaller drawer into the larger and took an accidental trip down memory lane. i swear its more dangerous than that one street deep in the city. the friendship bracelet i got with my childhood best friends that i want to curse out slightly less each year was tucked just under the bright pink diary engraved with “NO PARENTS ALLOWED”.

there were a few things that reminded me how much i’ve grown (my art from middle school has definitely been improved upon). but the truth is, whatever butterfly effect i’ve been hoping to find hiding on my walls or bookshelves, in my closet or memento drawer, simply isn’t there. i haven’t changed a bit.

i still love my childhood best friends just as much, even if i hate them a little now too. i’m still worried about all the same things that i had written in my 10-year-old diary, even if it’s college now instead of middle school. i keep waiting to be a different person, a better one maybe, and my big moment hasn’t come yet.

one thing i did find in my mementos drawer— every birthday card since i was five, written to the same girl i am now at seventeen, whether from a friend or family member, was coated in love. even if i can’t let myself be, i hope they’re happy i’m not different yet.

If I'm lucky enough, I'll see fogs lift with suns
As we roll to play a show in Carolina, Oklahoma, or Chicago
I'll grow to know the road to home in places far away
Wrinkled, bald, and beat to shit, to never waste a day
Enough people will hate me that I know I did it right
But to never meet a human being that I say that I don't like
Let me learn the hard way and cut it close sometimes
That youth is the attic chest where every lesson lies
I'll have some kids and teach them that we are all the same
Sufferin', smilin', silhouettes of every passin' day

The love I have will always be something my friends yearn
My memories were never cheap and never easy earned
I hope to choke on jack and coke in a bar during a northern winter
On a night the band was tight and right as rooftop lights flicker
If I'm lucky enough, I'll understand losing someone close
I'll clench my teeth on New Year's Eve and try to talk to ghosts
I'll stumble through a market on a Sunday day in June
Smell the salt and asphalt on a Sunday afternoon

I reckon I'd be lucky if I made it half as far
To only die on hills that are closest to my heart
If I'm lucky enough, notebooks will be strewn across my room
Or play catch on green grass with spring time flower bloom

If I'm lucky enough, I'll tell the truth every chance I get
'Cause smiles faked to appease another is worth ten regrets
If I'm lucky enough, I will get through hard things
And they will make me gentle to the ways of the world
If I'm lucky enough, I'll have the courage to leave and go
Wherever my beatin' heart tells me to go

If I'm lucky enough, I'll get high and invite a guitar player over
And he'll play sweet notes until a New York City rooftop sun rises
I'll meet some kids in school that still know how to play instruments
If I'm lucky enough, I'll make it exactly to where I'm taking this breath now
Lay my head upon the Earth and laugh at passing clouds
If I'm lucky enough, I'll remember the shaky things we've seen
Grab your beer through tears and fears, the great American bar scene

I write in constant pursuit of originality, yet, again and again I accidentally write a carbon copy of some shitty poem some dumb old fuck like Robert Frost spat out in, like, 1912.

I mean, I'm seventeen, people have been on earth for 300,000 years. Jesus, somebody has probably thought of everything already.

In a weird way, that's sort of nice, I guess.

Like maybe me, Robert Frost, and a caveman from 3200 BC have all stared at a blank google doc (or sheet of parchment, or empty cave wall) and tried desperately to convey the same, prehistoric feeling.

Check out this poet here.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

"You settle in to routine / Where are you? What does it mean?” - Northern Attitude

"Write me a list of how it is, of how it was, of how it has to be / You burrowed in under my skin, what I'd give to have you out for me" - All My Love

"Don't you know there's a coffin buried under the garden? / Was there when we got here, will be there when we leave" ... "Don't you know there's a coffin buried under the garden? / Was there when we got here, will be there when we leave" - Come Over

"Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it."

"I shall relate events, that impressed me with feelings which, from what I had been, have made me what I am."

"Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change."

"Beware; for I am fearless, and therfore powerful."

"I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other."

“The world to me was a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own.”

"I am not some sleek, futuristic glyph. I am the battered, coffee-stained backbone of writerly panic—the gasping pause where a thought should have ended but simply could not."

"I am wielded by novelists, bloggers, essayists, and that one friend who types exclusively in lowercase but still demands emotional range."

"I am the punctuation mark of human frailty."

"Is it AI? Or is it just a poet trying to give you vertigo in four lines or fewer? Exactly."

"I'm not dying. I'm just sick, and have been for eleven years now. And I don't look like I'm dying. People come down from their rooms to get chemo wearing their hospital gowns and scrub caps over their heads, and I'm looking like I just walked out of high school, because I did. I think they hate me. The cancer people."

"'Hospital' should be a setting on white noise machines. The nurses laughing at the station and the sound of their squeaky sneakers on the floor. The rush of the pneumatic tubes sending blood back and forth from the lab. The rhythmic beeping of someone rolling over onto an IV. Every once and a while, that flurry of activity like an awkward dance break. It always sounds the same here."

"My doctor wanted to try something else, so here I am with a new treatment plan and a new set of people to look at me and think I don't look sick enough. I should stop wearing makeup on infusion days. Blush makes anyone look healthy."

"'You like the hospital.'
'I know,' he says. 'It's weird.'
'No, I...I've never met another person who likes hospitals.'
'I don't always like them,' he says. "But hey, you're not always gonna like anywhere, right? At least here you get to just relax and be sick and not have to be anything else.'"

"Someone once told me—there is nothing so terrible you can't survive it for 10 minutes. No matter what it is, you can do it."

"I guess when I met him I felt some kind of camaraderie. Here was someone who was just going to deal with the everyday slog of being sick for the rest of his normal-length life until he died of something completely unrelated, just like me. That's a weird and special and boring kind of existence that you don't get to share with a lot of people. If he has some illness he's dying of, he's not part of the Long Slog Club anymore. He's in the Shiny Dying People Club, and he's all important and significant and not just...this. Waiting."

"'My dad's always been horrified by it,' I say. 'He doesn't want me to define myself by my illness or whatever.'
Sasha widens his eyes. 'Healthy people are so weird about that.'
...'Well, okay,' I say. 'To be fair to healthy people—'
'Ugh.'
'—you can define yourself by your illness...as long as you're an Olympic athlete that's overcoming it.'
'Yes! You either have to be overcoming it or you have to be completely disconnected from it. God forbid it be an important part of your identity that you're just living with. Why is that?'
'It's because they can't imagine it,' I say. 'They think it's completely ridiculous that a person can just...have a sick life and be fine with it. So they have to build this story around you kicking the illness's ass. You can't coexist with it. You can't incorporate it into yourself. Because they don't. So you can't."

"You stop noticing pain, is the thing. You notice it when it's really bad, or when it's different, but… on the rare occasion someone asks me what it's like to live with RA, I don't ever know what to say. They ask me if its painful, and I say yes because I know intellectually it must be, because the idea of doing some of the things that other people do without thinking fills me with dread and panic, but I always think about it mechanically. I can't do x. I don't want to do y. I don't continue the thought into I can't do that because it would hurt. I don't want to do that because then I would be in pain.
You can't live like that. There's only so much you can carry quietly by yourself, so you turn an illness into a list of rules instead of a list of symptoms, and you take pills that don't help, and you do stretches, and you think instead of feeling. You think."

"'My test results were really good,' I say. 'Everything came back normal.'
He sighs. 'Well. That's really frustrating.'
And just like that, I'm crying. 'Y-yeah. It is.'""

"'I'm sick,' I say. 'And I don't wish that I wasn't. And I don't really care how uncomfortable that makes you anymore.'"

"It's a series of steps. Like from the bed to the door, and then from the door to the nurses' station, and then a loop. And then after that, who knows how far I'm going to be able to walk."

"Seven strands tangle on the collapse or survival of this fishery--insignificant to some eyes, everything to others. Some days Blue wonders why anyone bothered making numbers so small; other days she supposes even infinity needs to start somewhere."

"I prefer read-receipts, all things considered--the instant handshake of slow telepathy through our wires. But this is fascinating technology, in its limits."

"I wondered if all agents were like me. They weren't--I found that out later. But we're all deviant in our different ways. Is that hunger? I don't know."

"I look at you, Red, and see much of myself: a desire to be apart, sometimes, to understand who I am without the rest. And what I return to, the me-ness that I know as pure, inescapable self... is hunger. Desire. Longing, this longing to posess, to become, to break like a wave on a rock and reform, and break again, and wash away. This is a necessary part of any ecosystem, but it unsettles others, this inability to be satisfied. It is difficult--it is very difficult, to befriend where you wish to consume."

"Letters are structures, not events. Yours give me a place to live inside."

"The pain truly is excrutiating. It's wonderful, really. Is this what it's like to not feel hungry anymore? A lot less work than the other way."

"Books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another. Keep reading. Keep writing. Keep fighting. We're all still here."

"Once our basic physical needs for sustenance and shelter are met, most of our psychological suffering is a problem of selfing — contracting the scope of reality to the pinhole of the self and using that to explain, always painfully, the actions and motives of others, the course and causality of events."

"Despair is nothing more than the pinch of the pinhole, reducing the immense vista of reality to a particular interpretation of a particular moment."

"It is not unimportant that the word “holy” shares its Latin root with “whole” and has its Indo-European origins in the notion of the interleaving of all things — the only perspective, available in every act of unselfing with wonder right here on Earth, that hallows a broken world whole."

"I held my breath when anyone entered. They tiptoed, they spoke in whispers, they didn’t come close, they were still afraid of my disease. To my mother they said I looked just like an angel."

"There’s only so long you can feel sorry for a person before you come to feel that their affliction is an act of malice committed by them against you."

"What can I say to them, how can I explain myself? When demons are required someone will always be found to supply the part, and whether you step forward or are pushed is all the same in the end. 'I am a human being,' I could say. But what proof do I have of that?"

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

You come along. . .tearing your shirt. . .yelling about Jesus. Where do you get that stuff? What do you know about Jesus? Jesus had a way of talking soft and outside of a few bankers and higher-ups among the con men of Jerusalem everybody liked to have this Jesus around because he never made any fake passes and everything he said went and he helped the sick and gave the people hope.

You come along squirting words at us, shaking your fist and calling us all damn fools so fierce the froth slobbers over your lips. . .always blabbing we’re all going to hell straight off and you know all about it.

I’ve read Jesus’ words. I know what he said. You don’t throw any scare into me. I’ve got your number. I know how much you know about Jesus. He never came near clean people or dirty people but they felt cleaner because he came along. It was your crowd of bankers and business men and lawyers hired the sluggers and murderers who put Jesus out of the running.

I say the same bunch backing you nailed the nails into the hands of this Jesus of Nazareth. He had lined up against him the same crooks and strong-arm men now lined up with you paying your way.

This Jesus was good to look at, smelled good, listened good. He threw out something fresh and beautiful from the skin of his body and the touch of his hands wherever he passed along. You slimy bunkshooter, you put a smut on every human blossom in reach of your rotten breath belching about hell-fire and hiccupping about this Man who lived a clean life in Galilee.

When are you going to quit making the carpenters build emergency hospitals for women and girls driven crazy with wrecked nerves from your gibberish about Jesus—I put it to you again: Where do you get that stuff; what do you know about Jesus?

Go ahead and bust all the chairs you want to. Smash a whole wagon load of furniture at every performance. Turn sixty somersaults and stand on your nutty head. If it wasn’t for the way you scare the women and kids I’d feel sorry for you and pass the hat. I like to watch a good four-flusher work, but not when he starts people puking and calling for the doctors. I like a man that’s got nerve and can pull off a great original performance, but you—you’re only a bug-house peddler of second-hand gospel—you’re only shoving out a phony imitation of the goods this Jesus wanted free as air and sunlight.

You tell people living in shanties Jesus is going to fix it up all right with them by giving them mansions in the skies after they’re dead and the worms have eaten ‘em. You tell $6 a week department store girls all they need is Jesus; you take a steel trust wop, dead without having lived, gray and shrunken at forty years of age, and you tell him to look at Jesus on the cross and he’ll be all right.

You tell poor people they don’t need any more money on pay day and even if it’s fierce to be out of a job, Jesus’ll fix that up all right, all right—all they gotta do is take Jesus the way you say. I’m telling you Jesus wouldn’t stand for the stuff you’re handing out. Jesus played it different. The bankers and lawyers of Jerusalem got their sluggers and murderers to go after Jesus just because Jesus wouldn’t play their game. He didn’t sit in with the big thieves.

I don’t want a lot of gab from a bunkshooter in my religion. I won’t take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth and never cherishes any memory except the face of the woman on the American silver dollar.

I ask you to come through and show me where you’re pouring out the blood of your life.

I’ve been to this suburb of Jerusalem they call Golgotha, where they nailed Him, and I know if the story is straight it was real blood ran from His hands and the nail-holes, and it was real blood spurted in red drops where the spear of the Roman soldier rammed in between the ribs of this Jesus of Nazareth.

This guy’s walking down a street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep, he can’t get out.
A doctor passes by, and the guy shouts up, “Hey you, can you help me out?” The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole and moves on.
Then a priest comes along, and the guy shouts up “Father, I’m down in this hole, can you help me out?” The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a friend walks by.
“Hey Joe, it’s me, can you help me out?” And the friend jumps in the hole.
Our guy says, “Are you stupid? Now we’re both down here.”
The friend says, “Yeah, but I’ve been down here before, and I know the way out.”

Watch this scene in the Lounge.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

A storm descends on a small town, and the downpour soon turns into a flood. As the waters rise, the local preacher kneels in prayer on the church porch, surrounded by water. By and by, one of the townsfolk comes up the street in a canoe.
"Better get in, Preacher. The waters are rising fast."
"No," says the preacher. "I have faith in the Lord. He will save me."
Still the waters rise. Now the preacher is up on the balcony, wringing his hands in supplication, when another guy zips up in a motorboat.
"Come on, Preacher. We need to get you out of here. The levee's gonna break any minute."
Once again, the preacher is unmoved. "I shall remain. The Lord will see me through."
After a while the levee breaks, and the flood rushes over the church until only the steeple remains above water. The preacher is up there, clinging to the cross, when a helicopter descends out of the clouds, and a state trooper calls down to him through a megaphone.
"Grab the ladder, Preacher. This is your last chance."
Once again, the preacher insists the Lord will deliver him.
And, predictably, he drowns.
A pious man, the preacher goes to heaven. After a while he gets an interview with God, and he asks the Almighty, "Lord, I had unwavering faith in you. Why didn't you deliver me from that flood?"
God shakes his head. "What did you want from me? I sent you two boats and a helicopter."

The little boy went first day of school
He got some crayons and he started to draw
He put colors all over the paper
All colors was what he saw
And the teacher said, "What you doing young man?"
"I'm painting flowers, " he said
She said, "It's not the time for art young man
And anyway, flowers are green and red

There's a time for everything young man
A way it should be done
You've got to show concern for everyone else
For you're not the only one"

And she said, "Flowers are red young man
And green leaves are green
There's no need to see flowers any other way
Than the way they always have been seen"

But the little boy said
There are so many colors in the rainbow
So many colors in the morning sun
So many colors in a flower
And I see every one

Well the teacher said, "You're sassy
There's ways that things should be
And you'll paint flowers the way they are
So repeat after me"

And she said, "Flowers are red young man
And green leaves are green
There's no need to see flowers any other way
Than the way they always have been seen"

But the little boy said
There are so many colors in the rainbow
So many colors in the morning sun
So many colors in a flower
And I see every one

Well the teacher put him in a corner
She said, "It's for your own good
And you won't come out till you get it right
In responding like you should"

Well finally he got lonely
And frightened thoughts filled his head
And he went up to that teacher
And this is what he said

And he said, "Flowers are red
And green leaves are green
There's no need to see flowers any other way
Than the way they always have been seen"

Of course time went by like it always does
They moved to another town
And the little boy went to another school
And this is what he found

The teacher there was smiling
She said, "Paintings should be fun
And there are so many colors in a flower
So let's use every one"

But that little boy painted flowers
In the hues of green and red
And when the teacher asked him why
This is what he said

And he said, "Flowers are red
And green leaves are green
There's no need to see flowers any other way
Than the way they always have been seen"

But there still must be a way to have our children say
There are so many colors in the rainbow
So many colors in the morning sun
So many colors in a flower
And I see every one

Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to them, “Sit here while I go over there and pray.” He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee along with him, and he began to be sorrowful and troubled. Then he said to them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.”

Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.”

Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping. “Couldn’t you men keep watch with me for one hour?” he asked Peter. “Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

He went away a second time and prayed, “My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done.”

When he came back, he again found them sleeping, because their eyes were heavy. 44 So he left them and went away once more and prayed the third time, saying the same thing.

Then he returned to the disciples and said to them, “Are you still sleeping and resting? Look, the hour has come, and the Son of Man is delivered into the hands of sinners. Rise! Let us go! Here comes my betrayer!”