THE COSMIC DUST OF WHAT NEVER WAS

On the way back.

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 10:55:28 -0700

On the way back.

"Never love someone who treats you as if you are ordinary"

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 08:17:42 -0700

-Oscar Wilde

No but really.

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 07:10:06 -0700

No but really.

No More Counting Dollars, Only Counting Stars

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 21:33:00 -0700

Let’s give a hand for ordinary top 40 soft rock bands who step up to the plate and release a genuinely beautiful and well put together album. This one is for you, One Republic.

Lately I’ve made a few observations.
1) I keep going to bed later and later each night. The typical thing to say here in this situation is “my mind is too loud for sleep/my thoughts keep me up.” But that’s a lie. They don’t. Actually, I’m mostly brain dead throughout the day. I think about whatever I’m doing at the moment, what I’ll change into when I get out of my silly uniform, what music I’ll listen to on my lunch break, and that’s about it.

2) I keep having these urges to dance everywhere. Today I ran smack-dab into someone that lived on the floor below me while i was footloose’ing my way down the stairs. Sometimes I literally bop around base, hippin’ and hoppin’ and johnny rockin’. What’s up with that?

3) How is it that once you learn about something, suddenly it’s everywhere? Just HOW many films is Rob Corddry really in? All of them, it seems. Which makes a person think, just how many things are around me very single day that I plain don’t notice? I was reading today about Eidetic memory. They say it’s such a burden. But what if they’re just incredibly enlightened due to their ability to account for every second of every memory? Does that lump ‘enlightenment’ in with ‘burdensome’ and how does that bode for the typical belief system? I’ve heard, and experienced, that our minds and body tend to push out bad things. Some suppress. But most just cover the wound with new-ness and we give all the credit to “time” and it’s “healing powers” but really it’s just a defense mechanism to keep us blissful and dazed with the excuse that we learn from our mistakes but by the point we get to re-acting, the pain from it is so dulled that I think we often say to ourselves “well, it wasn’t so bad.” BUT WHAT IF you could remember everything? Would you have a heart attack at the immensity of it all? Would you develop a secondary defense mechanism to make up for the lack of defense mechanism? Jesus. I get dizzy thinking about all of the things I could be missing out on that are right in front of my face. I very barely have just started to grasp a slight understanding of past and future time. I can’t begin to imagine the potency of the present.

3 is a good number. 3 observations is plenty and 3 is one of those numbers that’s almost even. Because 3 turns a mingle into a party. 3 is the first step. And so is this. So is all of this. Always.

Dear Gerard,

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 19:05:00 -0700

Maybe you’re the only one who can tell me how to become a true pro anti-world. See, I’ve had it all wrong the whole time. Hollywood is right. You never go full retard. Because here you are, saving the world and preaching self-sustainment, the comfort in chaos, the undeniable right to question everything. You have savior running through your veins and your skin is soaked with disappointment and overcome’ings, but at the same time, you’re married with a beautiful child. How does the unrested settle down? Because I’ve been sitting over here this whole time, looking at people like you as an example, telling myself there’s no fear in walking the world alone and I believe you believe that. But you managed to believe it and also ignore it because you did the one thing I can’t do— find happiness and calm-ness and other words that end in “ness” and are generally positive. You said that everyone wants to save the world but no one wants to die, and you were wrong. I’d die. I’d do it. I value life, don’t get me wrong. I’m in no way dead-bound. But I’m not going to lie and say that if the news announced in the morning that the world was going to end in approx 30 days that i wouldn’t be happy. Think of the clarity that comes with the absence of consequences!

I digress.

Worth the read. - Imgur

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 08:39:54 -0700

Worth the read. - Imgur

I HAVE TO EXPRESS THIS SOMEWHERE SO...

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 22:33:50 -0700

These past 5 days have been the best days of my life I think so far. I couldn’t even imagine better. Like really. Even if I was a space-being that ate people’s imaginations and then absorbed it’s powers and created Kubric-like dreams, EVEN THEN I couldn’t imagine a better 5 days. That’s all. I just really need to say that, and friends are overrated.

These are just the strangest of days. British-tv-show strange. George-W.-Bush’s-dog-paintings...

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 21:27:58 -0700

These are just the strangest of days. British-tv-show strange. George-W.-Bush’s-dog-paintings strange. The world is strange. Cereal costs more than gas. Some big president guy thinks it’s a good idea to cut education expenses and pay congress 6 figures. Tuesdays have become better than Sundays. The film industry is running out of fairytales to remake and the music industry is telling us that it’s okay to live forever, live forever young until tomorrow when taxes are due. Breakfast is for champions but dinner is for fatasses unless there’s wine involved. People, myself sometimes included, sit around “pinning” things to nonexistent places about all the things they want to make and do and places they want to go and people they want to be. No one does anything anymore, and the ones that do are never around long enough to share the secret.

i love my life, I’m not trying to sound sad. I’m just pointing out things about this part of the world. (Except I do really miss going home.)

I don’t really have a point. I just wanted to say that. And a lot more that I don’t know how to put down just yet. Stay tuned.

Disclaimer

Sun, 09 Dec 2012 18:13:08 -0800

I didn’t have an affair with a married man. Or work a ticket booth. I do live in California but that’s not me.

However, someone did. And that’s what this is about.

It's Time To Begin, Isn't It?

Sun, 09 Dec 2012 18:06:00 -0800

Sometimes I wonder how parenting works. For instance, this all ties in with what I’ll say at their funeral. Does my father love playing piano? Is that his real passion, the thing he’d still do if my mom and I had never happened? He’s never said. He’s done it for his entire life. Maybe that’s saying enough? What was his dream? What was my mothers? She almost went to a magnet school for science before she became pregnant with me. Was it that? Was it building the beautiful home?

The reason I ask is because I want to know what they did that taught me to dream so much. To forget the stars and shoot for the next galaxy over. To never think anything was impossible. Was it their dreams or was it their lack of dreams?

You know, an argument could be made in favor of me being a bad person. People make that argument all the time. I don’t always make the right choices. And life isn’t a tv show. People don’t always give you the opportunity for you to show them the ways you’ve got their back. The lengths you’d go through. The little things you notice about them. I know I’m a good person. My parents taught me that. And I wish I knew how. I want to know so that I can teach other people that.

We all have “walls”. Defenses. And they make us do stupid things. Like run away, or tell people they never mattered when in fact they mattered a whole world-ton. But lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what being an adult means. My life is getting really adult-like. I’m not upset about that. When you’re protecting your country, it’s kind of a given that you’d need to grow up, you have to stand up a little straighter. And when you’re having to fit your whole life into a set of suitcases for the next few years, you have to take a good hard look at what’s important and trim the fat. Had someone (person or nation) asked me to do this a year ago, I’d have scoffed, nervously laughed, and said “stop being gay, dude.” But I accept it now. I don’t know how or why. And I feel like there’s someone to thank for that but I can’t quite put my finger on it. All I know is that people are only impressed for a moment when you tell them you had an affair with a married man, or you used to work a ticket booth where you watched people watching music history, or you lived in california for a while. None of that changes who you are to them though. What does, is when you lead a really happy life. When you’re an example to people that were taught to have dreams. When you realize that dreams change and are able to let go of what isn’t relevant any more. (The jet set life is going to kill you.) That’s when you’re impressive.

I’m so used to saying I’m sad. It’s old hat-habit. But I’m not. And I just wanted to say that. And to Peter Pan: Don’t worry, I’ll never grow up. At least not in the way that’s so bad. I think it will always take a lot of youth to be happy.

And Then There Was One.

Sun, 25 Nov 2012 14:05:15 -0800

The people from my child/teen-hood that I can think of that aren’t engaged/married are people that I don’t think of very often. Which is to say that everyone I really know is tied up in the knot. Except me.

It’s funny because the people I’ve met along the way that have traveled the world, have gone home and then left again, have done the things they knew they were capable of, none of them are even close to married. And I sometimes wonder if the two are more related than I give them credit for.

One one hand, none of us have had time to develop a real relationship. In just 3 shorts years, I’ve changed colleges and states, gone on tour, gotten off tour, gone back on tour, joined the military, moved to California, and started learning foreign languages. I’ve had relationships and I’m currently in a relationship but it would be silly of me not to mention that he’s been living thousands of miles away for the last 58 days and that soon he will be several timezones away and there’s nothing I can do about that. I’ve been in approximately 45 different states in the past couple of years, set up homestead in 3 of the them within the last 11 months, and worked for 15 hours a day. So, maybe the correlation isn’t that they’re small-town and I’m not anymore, maybe it’s that they have time to develop themselves and have a working relationship and I don’t.

Or maybe it’s that they’re scared. or trapped. or young. or in love. Either way, it’s a damn epidemic. And this is the circus big-top feeling to all the things magazines write about. “Are you the third wheel? Are you tired of being the single friend?” Well, no. I’m not a third wheel and I’m not the single friend. It’s bigger. I’m the last one unmarried and though I stand by my decision to travel and explore and have one night stands, I’m still left wondering if I’m missing out on something. If they know something I don’t. Because at the end of the day, no one’s blogging about freaking out about being in a happy relationship (for however long it lasts).

What I do know, if anything at all, is that the time will come for me one day. Just not today. Or tomorrow. Or anytime while I’m still living with a microwave and a suitcase and several thousand miles between me and everything I care about.

"The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive...."

Sun, 21 Oct 2012 21:44:42 -0700

“The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly — you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.”

- Eckhart Tolle (via astralnavigations)

Photo

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 15:34:01 -0700

Dear Future Child Pt 1

Sat, 13 Oct 2012 17:43:31 -0700

Dear Future Child,

I hope you’re a boy and I hope your name is Oliver. Now that that’s out the way, I wanted to tell you a few things. I figured I’d put them here so I wouldn’t forget.

Tear my house apart. There will be times when you want to jump on the bed, when you want to listen to a record I hate, when you want to push everything off the shelves. I know I had those times. Whether it was manic panic or belligerent happiness, I had them. But you know, I stopped myself. I just giggled and rocked back and forth and held it all in because what a mess it would make. And you know who would have had to clean it up? Me. I wasn’t havin’ that. But do it. Please it do it. I think there will be a day 15 years from that moment when you’ll wish you had done it. Ashton Kutcher taught us that life was a butterfly and you never know what you might change. Don’t get me wrong. I’ll be pissed you tore my house apart. I’ll be pissed you came home late. I’ll be pissed you called me a bitch when I know I was being one. But I can promise you one thing: I will always understand that it takes a million bad memories to make a life worth living. I will want the best for you but I won’t dilute myself into thinking that the best is my hand over your eyes for all the scary parts. I watched the Exorcist when my parents were still picking out my school outfits for me. Your grandparents are pretty cool.

Til I think of something else,

Cody.

Conventional Weapons

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 10:31:38 -0700

Just when you think you’re ready to hop off that horse and set up camp, someone gives you a conventional weapon.

The other night, I ended up telling an old friend what I tell other people: that he’s dead. He might as well be. Dramatics aside, I haven’t even a remote insight to if he’s even living most days. Without Facebook, I’d never actually know. He very well could be dead. It certainly is easier to believe it to be true. I was mad about everything. I’m not anymore. This is the calmest I’ve been since before I left for Basic Training. I have my flare-ups, don’t get me wrong. Like two nights ago. I wanted to sink my teeth into flesh, to make new bridges just to burn them, to swing my legs over the side and giggle as I watched the casualties. To use sex as a weapon. But I didn’t. I locked my doors, I stayed inside, I went to sleep. And in the morning I was well again. The worst that I did was tell you that you were as good as dead. That’s something I can live with.

But I start thinking: we could stay here for a while. Me and my other me’s. We could stay inside and gain higher ground and win. Be happy. I have an amazing relationship with a man who has more patience than the moon as it waits for the sun to finish. He’s stellar. And he tries so very hard to understand why sometimes my doors are locked, why sometimes I just can’t pick up the phone. But even he can only take so much. So the control thing was an option. But then.

Someone releases a conventional weapon. Something they’re ashamed of. A soundtrack to a dark time that they’ve come to love but don’t know if the rest of the world will love it back. Sometimes you have to find funny in the heartbreak. But can you be distant from that heartbreak and still find the funny, or do you have to understand it on a personal level? Would you have had to be there for it’s unveiling? Doesn’t matter really. It’s out there. And that’s what I realized I couldn’t stay inside. There’s no point in being ashamed of whoever else I can be. There’s no point in embracing it, either, but there’s a hell of point in putting it out there and hoping that everyone else can laugh with you, become fond of it in a haphazard sort of way, laugh just a little bit when you finally step on and break the eggshell but it’s okay because all the pieces are still right there. They’re not going anywhere.

Back on the horse I go.

Like Now, For Instance.

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 20:36:00 -0700

My first real post back into the blogging world should be intriguing, should have depth, should come with a clever opener that no one cares about because no one even reads this anyway. But instead, it comes with me sitting in my desk chair, feeling empty because for the first night in ages I haven’t had language homework, wondering what the hell to say because there comes a point when you have so much to say that you can’t really say anything at all.

Let’s start with time. I’ve been taking a lot of time off from, well, everything lately. From friends, from blogging, from any form of life outside of obsessively searching for cheap air fare for holidays and learning foreign languages. Several times in my life I’ve looked at some of my decisions and gone “damn bitch you crazy” (because also in my mind, I am ghetto az phuk) and I decided not to be that way anymore. Simple. But that takes a lot of concentration, to get control over your life again and stop doing bad things on a whim just because they’re momentarily entertaining. I spend most of my time working out and trying not to strangle my Persian professors out of frustration. It leaves little time for shit bitch crazy.

But I think about Justin every day. I think about Hannah too. But mostly I think about how funny it is that Hannah got obese. And I think about how much I miss Justin. About the awkward way “my best friend” rolls off my tongue when I mention him because I know it isn’t true anymore. Never will be true again. Because he wasn’t built for effort. He just wasn’t.

In my time, I’ve ruined a lot of good people. I hate to even claim that much power but I think it’d be even more insulting to say it wasn’t my fault. My goal is to stop that. I know this is one of probably 3 other “self improvement declarations” on this blog, but this is for real. This time I mean it. And now it’s real. It’s written. and it’s on the internet. So I have something to hold myself accountable for. No longer is it just a thought that if it fails, I can just pretend I never thought it. Not anymore.

Photo

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 13:46:00 -0700

Trading Hemispheres

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 12:34:19 -0700

At the end of the day, there’s another day.

Every so often, you hear a pretty song, a sad song, a song that cuts you, and you hear it you hear it you hear it. And you make it into whatever you want it to be about. You know the lyrics. They don’t mean anything to you. The song is telling you to trade hemispheres, that someone is giving up, that the world isn’t changing. And all you hear is “we can be on opposite sides of the world and I’ll still love you”, “come break apart my breakdown”, “things are changing and it’s now”.

Every so often, that happens with life too. You have this pretty little life, this good job, this boisterous laugh. and you do it, you do it, you do it. It’s everything your parents pictured for you. But you’re falling against the bathroom door and your days are telling you to turn the car around but you’re using the sink basin to pull yourself up because no, this isn’t how the picture is drawn. Goddamnit the ink isn’t even dry.

Now, about me. I’m smelling the collar of your sweater. I’m talking about the way you look at me like I’m made of gold, like you just discovered I’m edible, like I just cured your beloved mother’s cancer but how you talk to me like I’m the child who hasn’t learned how to count yet and i keep opening my eyes before you’re done counting 1, 2, 3. (Ha. I found you. You’re right there. You’re standing right there. Oh? You told me to count to 5? 1, 2, 5. I did that right.)

Now, about updates.

I keep trying to start over in the small ways. Get rid of everyone who knows me. Find some people that don’t. I keep thinking this is a new concept. But everyone that I consider close now, has only been so for less than a year. Everyone’s new. How does that math work?

I’m defending your country. I’m on the intelligence frontlines for anti-terrorism. I am your children’s future. I’m only asking for the ability to be able to love once and real. Like a 17 year old. Like the new world deserves.

Unashamedly Inspired by Shadow Days.

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 12:29:35 -0700

When you’re walking down a gravel path after the summerkickballtotheface just kissed you for the first time.

When you’re eating Indian food in a color parade on the wrong side of the world.

When you’re crying against the back of the bathroom door because you can’t go home. Go back. Go anywhere at all that isn’t sideways.

When you’re nose to nose in a dark room with a broken fireplace with a boy with insanely soft hands.

Reboot.

Photo

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 19:02:52 -0700