Black Ocean

Looking down at the Earth, I can see it all. All of my cares are in one tiny bundle. All of my aspirations and hopes occupying an insignificant amount of space. The space from ear to ear. The distance from Arizona to Tokyo. Lightyears away from anything resembling insight.
My crew and I have been floating for eight months. All of the food in this mobile home has the same solid consistency and flavorless taste. We were sent up to take pictures of highly ionized atoms. Hold the frame still, point, and click. We document our images, store them on a disk, and relay them to a UV photo lab. When I left home, people in business suits told me that my work would shape the future. My vision spans across the time zones from California to Dublin. Is this the future? As an artist takes a ball of clay and molds it into a masterpeice I am here, watching. What forms is the product of ingenuity and creativity, but the substance remains unchanged. They sent my family a christmas gift basket filled with assorted cheeses and a bottle of Pinot Grigio white wine, and I didn't get a greeting card. After all, a scientist is just an observer. I spent years of my life learning about tools and practicing with instruments. These mechanical aids are nuts and bolts and chips soldered to perfection. Organic and inorganic alike, studying these molecules, these beings, these objects, I've assertained a plethra of facts. A world of tidbits, a cornucopia of trial-based observations fill my head. We are the pioneers of modern solar photography. We are the founders of chromospheric and coronal extreme UV photography. We press the buttons, float, and watch. Sometimes it's really hard for me not to be dissapointed by my line of work. Here I am expecting the answers. Here I am floating in space. But in return for my years behind a desk transcribing the scribblings of educated men, I receive the obvious. There is a reserve tank filled with oxygen in case of emergency on the ship, and that doesn't comfort me. To educate the next generation of spectators I'm drifting in orbit. With each new fact, a new category to place it in. Everything feels like a subsection of another thing. A heading in long list of alternative nomenclatures. I flip through the pages of notes I've taken on my trip and it reads like a thesaurus. The chemical reactions laden with little dots and obscure arrows, they meant everything to me once. Sitting at home you can flip the channel when a show gets boring. In space you have one station, and to make matters worse you really have to pay attention. Just once I'd like to lose responsibilty, lose my intuition and discover a new sensation. Strip mind from body and reduce life to its purest form. Ignoring thought or conscience, I want to experience that new frontier. I remember when education brought me that feeling of comfort and purpose. You wake up in the middle of the night and wonder what happened, what has changed. All of your work reaches its pinnacle and you have nothing to show. My home, my street, my city, and my Earth...it's all just a part of space. A subsection of nothingness is added to the list of things that exist. This ever-changing black ocean of chaos engulfs my ship and my planet. I find meaning once again.

The Passenger

My midnight-purple, repaired daily, flaming shit of a car is making its way across a stretch of highway in a fog as thick as steel. The voice to my right is shaterring my concentration, and for what? This passenger, this parasite yammers on about the world's most important crisis. His world's social crisis...
"Should I tell J that I fucked her best friend? I know it was a shitty thing to do, but she will probably forgive me."
If God can forgive than I'm sure she can, I say. If I tell the priest in a box my sins than God will consider the slate clean and my soul purified. This is one of our great myths. Our great faith in honesty is the best policy. Honesty has nothing to do with God's choice for heaven and hell. After all, he'll know whether you mean it or not.
The road gradually winds to the right. I switch to the brights.
"I was just so drunk and we were in a fight and I wasn't thinking clearly. I really screwed this up. I think I have this subconscious desire to end my relationships when they get too serious."
And our lives are just that simple. You have to keep a positive attitude, I say. Just tell the truth and I'm sure she will respect you for it. And maybe God subconsciously ends our lives when they get too serious. When we start listening to every word, hearing every sentence, and implying every meaning to our heap of social propaganda. One man says something to another to spite his girlfriend, the other replies to appease his own selfish search for faith. Me and this passenger, this parasite...we speak different languages.
The road gets narrow and the fog grows thicker. The patter of rain against the rattling hood is all I can hear.
"This all started when I went to school. I could have avoided this if I just stayed at home and went to community college."
And If I stayed home I wouldn't be driving this car, telling you what you want to hear. God's consciousness is redundancy to its greatest extent. If he isn't aware of the death that results from faith, then he isn't aware of much at all. The thoughts flow in and are driven off course by fragments of ignorance.
The window beside me begins to shake against powerful gusts of wind. I move my face closer to the windshield in hopes of getting a better view of the road.
"I just don't know what I'm doing here anymore. I don't know if J is right one."
Picking the right one. Is that any different from picking the right TV station or choosing the right telephone service? I was never able to commit to a religion, I was never able to commit to a person. Everything around me changes so fast. To the left trees and darkness fly by at 84 miles an hour. To the right I lose track of what this passenger, this parasite is saying. At 84 miles an hour I can physically feel the sickness. My head is infected and it is spreading to every pore on my body. His whiny voice, his worthless problems, his meaningless speech...I've heard it before. I've heard it all before. When you've heard everything their is to tell, what is left? Who is going to help me with my meaningless quest for reassurance?
"Are you listening to me?"
I say yes. I really mean no. But he would never tell the difference. He was never there for me.
Staring blankly into the face of my passenger, my all-knowing, devout parasite, the car slows drastically against the potential energy of a highway divider. Spinning and flipping in the air like an Olympic ice skater, my flaming piece of shit hurtles the four foot slab of cement and slides against the grass alongside the highway. The fog moves in penetrating the cracks of the windshield and begins to fill the capsized interior. I can see the driverside wheel still spinning, the marks in the dirt where my car slid, the stretch of highway, the stretch of space, the distance we've travelled to get here. And he is still in the car, seatbelt buckled, staring into my face. I'd like to think he had his first experience that day, he learned to walk. With a shard of glass through my neck the words come as quick as thoughts. To him they resemble shrill whimpers of agony, a sound he won't forget. We speak a different language, but I think he understands me now. My quick and desperate inhalations cease as I choke down the pool of blood containing my face. The spatters of life sustaining liquid smack against the back of my throat and each drop burns worse than any kind of searing flesh. My panic turns to relief as I go numb and unconscious. I stray away from the accident and return to my friends playing kickball underneath the bridge in Brooklyn. I was eight years old and all there is to know is still a mystery to me. No sins to confess, and no man to appease. All I have to do is kick the ball and run. Run like my life depended on it. My soul taking shape in this incredible child. Run like my life was about to begin.
"Hey Dan you're up"
I smile. I kick the ball and run like hell.

Motivation...pure and harmonious

Today is a beautiful day. My mind is working on overdrive recently and despite the fact that I feel detached from the whole process, I'm starting to like it. There were days when I would wake up and question my sanity, but today is not one of those days. If only it happened like in the movies.
Cue the hero and his golden locks.
Cue his incredible entrance with sunshine gleaming through the castle walls and a pile of his enemies strewn about the still raging battlefield.
I woke up to the sound of my mother's voice on the answering machine. Well, it's really just a mechanical representation of my mother's voice. "Are you awake yet? Im picking you up at 12:30 so get up."
Cue my lack of motivation.
Cue my morning wood.
Out of bed and into the car. Out of the car and into the classroom. Out of the classroom and onto the bus where my day truly starts. To pass the time in-between classes I read books. Today, I finished Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk. I then proceded to read 150 pages of Lullaby, by Chuck Palahniuk as well, before realizing that my life had just been altered in a significant way. (This seems to happen to me quite a bit these days. But from what I've learned, the more you say it, think it, and write it the more likely it is to be true) My thought process is the most intimate thing about me. The closest I can ever come to expressing my thoughts only scratches the surface of everything there is to tell. But I can do my best to try and put it in writing for other people to enjoy, or hate, or mock, or whatever it is you do with egocentric dribble. At times I would wish the neurons of my whatever lobe could just exhaust and break down for just a few moments of mental silence. But the inability to percieve and mentally dictate each moment of time and space is a mental breakdown in itself. It's sort of a gift and an affliction all at the same time.
Cue the slow child in the back of the room miraculously answering his first algebra question correctly, only to stand up and expose himself to a classroom of adolescents.
I don't see the conscious mind as a curse. The great plague of mankind is not conscious thought, it is conscious apathy. It is an extremely simple concept that has been in question for ages. People are not using their brains for anything more constructive than marketing scams and political propaganda nowadays. If everyone pooled their efforts into one common goal there is no doubt in my head that this goal could be achieved. But the folly of man is a tragedy waiting to happen, again, and again, and again. Existence, human existence in particular, favors entropy.
Cue Juliet's bloody corpse.
Cue Romeo's rigor mortis.
The only thing I've got going for me is my writing, so here I am. What comes out on the paper are refelections of people I've met, experiences I've had, and the things I've learned. Even at my most desperate and vulnerable times, I can still be true to myself by just picking a pen and a piece paper. So I'm gonna run with it until my hand turns purple, or until I decide I need a new hobby.
Cue my inkless pen.
Cue our hero going back to sleep.

-For Chuck Palahniuk. With every sentence, an inspiration.