pixelated.me

I could have easily written the postcard. Though i'll never truely know if her response would have been so similar.
how odd to find such parallels in the universe.

It made me weep. quietly. for a few seconds. mostly because i felt like it. mostly because at the end of the book i realized that without a doubt you only fall in love once. The tough textured skin, of where the scars she inflicted on me are, will never be soft again. Those scars that i stubbornly, masochistically tore open so many times over the course of a year. Man!, I must have torn them open once for every time she dove into her own debauchery. For every time i read about it.
Well that skin...that tissue...tougher and wiser for wear will never be as untouched, and somehow the next woman who loves me will run her hands over their weathered surface and grin the quiet grin of someone who carries her own scars and knows. She'll have to, it will be only way she can love me.

for the moment though i wonder if in the years that this novel sat on my book shelf, if in the year that that bookshelf was our bookshelf, or in the months that my book shelf was with you, if in that time you ever read it or if i ever told you how much the book moved me as a naive 16 year old romantic?

I am, i fear, afraid, terrified, of what I've craved the most.
one can never fall in love again, for the first time.
first love is naive, there is only the most abstract understanding of how vulnerable you truly are.
first love is for children and fools.
Love, with a capital "l" love like in harsh French movies or a Patrick Marber play,
this is the love of the courageous, the slightly masochistic, the knowingly foolish.
this is the trembling possibility that occupies my mind tonight.

I'm re-reading a book "the hottest state" by ethan hawke (yes that ethan hawke)
it is a book I've loved, for years, it is a book i read before i knew about first love, and it is a book about first love. I remember reading the book, a book that within its first few pages informs the reader that this love story will end in heartbreak, i remember that i used to read it with a palpable anticipation. I would devour each page that unfolded their love story for me.
I didn't know enough then to understand the word "heartbroken" it was an abstract, no more understood than death.
But tonight, as i read it again i realized my heart was gently pounding, perhaps merely tapping against my chest, in awful anticipation. Because when i read this girl, Sarah, i know not only that she will break his heart, hurt him, but i understand why and that makes it all the worse.

and so i am in that spot. somewhere across an ocean is a possibility, one that i would have once dove into, blindly, foolishly, and whole. It is this possibility that scares me. Because i know what it means, and my heart, my battle wearied heart, is cautious, and would like to live in world where there are some guarantees, or at the very least a warranty if things should go wrong.

i don't live in that world. i live in a world where on a good day i decide i will reach out to this possibility and see if she's reaching back.

I am sitting in a white room. on a white bed. with lighting that i can change to either blue, red, green, or a combination of the three with a remote. It’s a hotel in Barcelona.
I’m tired. i spent the day walking around being a tourist. I realize now that i hate being a tourist. i hate going to museums and taking mediocre pictures of things that have already been photographed for $50 photo books under much better lighting conditions. I like having gone though. I like having the recollection of the place. I like saying i have seen such and such painting or sculpture in person, but i don’t feel any more enriched or moved by the situation. 9/10 it all hangs out in short term memory and then fades.
I am tired and i am also suddenly faced with the reality that i don’t know what i am going home to.....(4 and a half hours later) i am going home to find a mechanic. There’s a few things that need fixing

They all sat around the table exchanging transient glances.
just to check that they were all still there. conversation seemed beyond their collective. no one seemed much concerned with it. they all flipped through the pages of 4 year old National Geographic magazines politely provided by the impolite staff at the hip looking cafe. If someone were to walk by...in fact for arguments sake, lets say two separate somebody's were to walk by separated only by a 12 second interval. They would’ve each have walked away with vastly different stories. Where as one would have spied three friends comfortable enough to wear the role of quiet strangers, the second somebody would, if he was the sort to notice details, if he was, say, the sort to notice when his gf had trimmed her hair by only the slightest of trims, if he was that sort of somebody, then he might see, nestled, burrowed neatly in the folds of carefully worn rejection, the unmistakable whimper of unrequited love, on the face of one of the three “friends” sitting at the table in this hip looking café.

I left mexico feb 7th 2007. Since then i have been in Belfast, NI, Madrid, Spain, Alcala, Spain (in an area known as Andalucia) and will soon board a train for Barcelona.
In all this time i have tried to remain me whilst allowing for the newness of my surroundings to affect me.
It has been interesting but unsettling. Hence my title. I expected to find time to write, be creative and so far it has been everything i didn’t expect. I have rediscovered photography but have found little reason to work on my novel/script. Even when you try not to have expectations you inevitably have them. Something about this “lost” feeling has left me in the arms of some old habits. Meditating on past relationships. I have an odd fascination with the “anniversaries” of things. Even “not so pleasant” things. from the end of things or the beginnings of things that ended to the really trivial at times. for example: realizing that it’d been a year since....i saw U2 play in mexico which i actually realized because i missed a friends birthday that fell on near date. Which i suppose is ironic. But tonight i found myself thinking of feb 28th. The day that i was meant to leave madrid for mexico ( a departure that has now been delayed a bit) feb 28th is also the day i left mexico for nyc in 2006 and became acquainted with an american girl with piercing eyes and one hell of a smile who would tear me to shreds and from which i would learn to rebuild myself. She wrote two days ago to say hi. It seems...misplaced. like the hi between to old friends whom have lost touch. That is not the case with us. I can’t help but wonder what it is that she wants from me. It should be irrelevant. But in this slightly displaced state sitting in a living room in the old world i find that i do care. It is in part vanity but also curiosity..but none the less what a year it has been. I really do loath that even now these...women from my past can reach forth into my today and stir things up a bit. Frankly it doesn’t seem fair and i’d like to lodge a complaint with the proper ministry office.

so what is love?
energy certainly.
but is it created in the instant that two people fall in love?
Is it, perhaps, just the uncovering of something that was always there?
the romantic in me would like to believe that.
or perhaps more pragmatically if energy changes form then is it merely the love we had for someone or something else changing form?
I can’t say for sure but someone recently pondered the question of “where does the love go?”
and to her i would say nowhere.
the love doesn't go anywhere. it's all just choices people make, one after the other until they turn into the narrative of a life. the love just gets cast to the back of the closet like and old pair of boots you once loved but that you can't wear anymore because they make your feet hurt. They are old and brown and have lost their shape.

a bloke named...._______
It's like watching a monkey who's figured out that picking his nose will make the tourist at the zoo laugh.
It's always the same joke...the same hahaha made up lyrics...the same joke of fucking up the songs...the same slightly lost puppy look aimed towards the girl he fancies at the parties...
In the end i feel like punching him in his grin just to shut him up.

You could be happy and I won't know
But you weren't happy the day I watched you go
And all the things that I wish I had not said
Are played in loops til it's madness in my head

Is it too late to remind you how we were
Not our last days of silent screaming blur
Most of what I remember makes me sure
I should've stopped you from walking out the door

You could be happy I hope you are
You made me happier than I'd been by far
Somehow everything I own smells of you - (this line in particular breaks my heart...)
And for the tiniest moment it's all not true

Do the things that you always wanted to
Without me there to hold you back don't think just do (i pasted this and for the first time i really heard it)

More than anything I want to see you girl
Take a glorious bite out of the whole world

(....i would not be able to write a single drop of my novel/script if not for this song. that’s actually not true..but this song helps enormously )

2:14 am.
it’s funny how sometimes you stumble upon things.
things you’d let go of, things you’d taught yourself to fear.
and instead of fear they provide a small bit of peace.
I wish i could elaborate but the truth is that i am writing this post for me. not for the one or two persons that may read this blog. just for me.
Life it seems needs its bits of chaos.
I’ve had mine.
and understood others.
and in the end i suppose some bit of love survives the madness and that comforts the many thousand bits of me that will never stop being a romantic.
so tonight i am grateful for vanilla.
In it’s classic grace it has a strength that chocolate could never have.
and yes i know this makes no sense to anyone.

.... well except to “you”

Tried but failed
wandering through the hall
grasping at door knobs
looking for ideas

i need something to pretend is mine.
I need a bit of genius to plagiarize
or an unoriginal idea to dress up in newness

I wrestle with this pen.
made up of keys on a keyboard
and a sheet of paper on a pixel based display.

I've tried but failed
i've had many triumphs but none have survived reality.
they were doing fine in my head.
i should have remembered to close the door behind me when i left.

some days
some times
months later
it still hurts.
and what’s worse, it sneaks up on me.

I've turned on comments. I'd be curious to see what people say.

Human beings look for patterns. Our way of surviving the sensory overload that is everyday life is to look for familiar patterns. Patters in behavior, situations, people, etc.
I am at the moment in the same spot on the planet i was in a year ago. The same rooms, the same breath taking view. The pattern is familiar and yet the machine doing the computation is different. I am that “different” machine.
In the past year i have undergone more growth and change than ever before in my life. I am grateful for it and i think as time goes by i can wear these scars proudly. But tonight for just a few moments i wish i could have changed without loosing what i thought i had. Maybe all that really means is that i hope to think i have it again. For now i’ll take comfort in conversations with a girl from St. Louis and identifying with a misplaced Argentine girl in Mexico City.

it’s 2:30 am and i find myself pondering the nature of being a writer. to be far more truthful i find myself pondering my own nature. my tendencies, my subtle ways of hurting myself to feel alive. It is ironic that on the one hand i loathe the more obvious forms of self destructive tendencies i’ve observed in others. My siblings my ex-gf and yet tonight as i inched as close to putting the figurative needle back into my arm as i possible could without actually doing so i realized that i do it on purpose. I push these internal limits to see where that will take me. i allow myself to loath that part of me that wants to know the things that will only make it worse. I need more realism in my own life. I am dangerously close to falling back into a hole of vicarious living that almost killed me. I am struggling with a romantic in me that either needs to be falling in love or broken hearted. I crave that rush of connection. It has been a very long year indeed.

having just watched an inconvenient truth i find myself culpable of the greatest of oversights; being lazy, unaware. of thinking the problems too great and hoping someone else fixes them. I live in a small neighborhood in one the most polluted and over populated cities in the world. Mexico City. The neighborhood is La Condesa, Mexico Cities Soho to make a rough and somewhat crude analogy. It is a place that has become overcrowded with parked cars on weekends from the hundreds of people that come their to spend there free time lunching and dining amongst the many restaurants that have sprouted up. It’s a place that has exactly two public trash cans both outside of two 7-11’s. two trash cans for an entire neighborhood of people consuming. The predictable outcome is that the streets are often littered with paper and half eaten fruits or worse small plastic bags full of trash stuffed into the hollow bits of tree’s or street lamps. I’ve often thought to myself something should be done. but i allow my cynicism about my country, the corruption, mediocrity and self centered-ness that seems an innate trait in my country men to take over. So i just go on, every day. Hoping that someone else will take action, and that one day i might find a public trash can in which to discard of my apple core, or star-bucks cup. I am guilty of expecting it to just happen when perhaps everyone else is expecting the same. I feel compelled to figure out something of the system that governs my little speck of dust on this ball of earth and perhaps effect some small change so that some other me in la Condesa is pleasantly surprised one day to find he has a trash can in which to properly dispose of his trash.

I am up. I tell myself it is in part because i was in LA for two weeks and i’m on west coast time.
but somewhere i know there’s another reason.
a reason born out of nostalgia for a girl with blue eyes.
brought on by photos of another girl with green eyes...i know how awful silly that sounds. but perhaps as a woman i once loved said.. i am a silly man.
and i think that’s ok.

in any scientific test you need a control element. Some constant controllable variable in order to make sure that what you are testing isn’t being influenced by anything else.
In my case i just now realized that Starbucks is the controlled environment. It’s the same. Here or NYC. the general feel of the place is the same. Same green and earth tone design. Same light wood furniture. Same coffee. The only thing that varies is the customers and the people working here. And sitting at this particular Starbucks on this particular Sunday writing my script as the 5’ oclock throng of people comes in i find myself surrounded by people i’d just as soon have vanish. This doesn’t happen to me at Starbucks in NYC, Vancouver, LA...the people that go there tend to be creatives like myself looking for a good cup of coffee and a place to plop down their laptops and go about the business of being creative. But here....it’s all these preppy fuckers with their girlfriends and their seemingly never ending stream of banal conversation. They are all drinking pink colored frapuccinos. or there hunched over in front of a plethora of Dells, Thinkpads, Gateways, and other similarly loathsome PC laptops working on spreadsheets or chatting it up on skype with these enormous tele-marketer style headphones with mics. And all of the men have cell phones clipped to their belts like some slightly pudgy parody of an out of costume batman who’s kept the utility belt. It is now officially too full of people i can’t stomach to be surrounded by. Off i go.

honestly. i wonder.
is there such a thing as truth.
honesty.
sincerity?
love.
i really thought i’d figured it out.
but you see my exgf has this blog.
which i shouldnt read but i do.
because a part of me is desperate to understand something more.
and the only conclusion i’ve come to is.
she didn’t have a clue who she was.
and as such i was with a question mark for 5 years.
how can that be. how can you have a relationship with question mark? with a “maybe this is who i am.”
it scares me.
and this alone part scares me.