Gunpowder

If it’d only light…
It’s not like there’re no sparks every day/night.
It’d start easy, fast,
Just that I’m kinda scared to freak out at last.
Freak out…
Oh I’d be launching projectile words,
I’d be set on automatic, make sure you heard
How I think that every idea you’ve got is absurd,
That every day in the house I feel unnerved,
And that I don’t like the way you talk to me anymore.

Bathroom Painting

I’m painting one of our bathrooms. Today I put on the primer coat. Not at all that exciting, especially at first, but then I realized that I have a laptop, which I then realized enabled me access to that one all-important thing: music. I dusted off the black lappy. I hadn’t touched it since it came last week. Didn’t really have a use for it, but I did then. I put my lappy on the tiny dresser (which really only actually has a prayer book in it) next to the bathroom door. I loaded up Grooveshark and got Delta Spirit playing. I aimed the speakers into the bathroom. Perfectly positioned. Two hours of wrist-destroying activity. Gobs of primer splattered onto the walls and I spread them over the bathroom like peanut butter as the sounds of Beirut, Animal Collective, Edward Sharpe, Fleet Foxes, and Songs of Green Pheasant kept the mundane task fun. I might’ve sung along aloud if I wasn’t so shy about my family. Whispering “White Winter Hymnal” under my breath sufficed. I was bored, but this was more than good enough. I’ve painted before, but I never got to choose the music. I like AFI and As I Lay Dying, yea, but it isn’t emotional to me, you see. It couldn’t make me feel good painting. I felt perfectly fine painting the bathroom, now. The fumes didn’t bother me too much at all, and I just felt good for the music. Took a break to eat with the family. My dad looked at me approvingly. He didn’t even say some stupid joke. Just said, “Mario should be the first to eat today. He’s the only one who’s been working.” I felt nice and well-fed afterwards, but there was still a tiny bit of painting left.

Those moments where you know you’ve just made a memory. I’ll remember how the roller brush was not as awesome for painting the ceiling as I though. I’ll remember that one tinge of frustration. I’ll remember the music, the uplifting melodies and gorgeous voices that carried me the whole day, and I’ll remember how my dad fell asleep to it on his bed. I’ll remember where that one streak of white paint came from on my laptop, just two inches from the trackpad where my pinkie must have rested. I’ll remember the mango I ate and how it sat in my stomach as I painted, how I could tell it still tasted sweet. I’ll remember the rest of my family laughing in the living room, maybe getting annoyed at how loud the music was. I’ll remember the music, and I’ll remember that I was actually a little sore.

Grouper-Wind and Snow

One of my most favorite songs ever. Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous

Daily Routine

The day goes by
I’m sedentary,
Self-deprecating,
And the life’s dry.
And then in the night,
The past, future break into my brain,
Burglars leaving little monster thoughts,
Thoughts that taste like flesh,
And thoughts to remind me I’ll never taste it again

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Viernes-Swimmer's Ear

Pay me no mind, I'm just bad rant (really bad)

I don’t want to write it. I have to write some bio of myself for a Palma newsletter since I’m in the top 10% of the class and I don’t want to write it. All anyone ever wants to read in those things is how Palma formed the student into a young man with ambition and thirst for knowledge. How spiritual, moral, physical, intellectual growth is all owed to the school. I hardly have to write anything at all. People will fill in all the fucking blanks themselves. They’ll ooh and ahh at bullshit they wrote themselves, not me. Then people will forget it. No one will keep a copy except for anyone else’s family who has sons that have to write in. It’s a stupidly transient piece of shit. How impermanent it is is astonishing. How little anyone will remember it is just stupid. The parents want it written out and printed and maybe they’ll hang it up and feed their goddamn egos in one more way. I don’t want to write at all. It’s true that I haven’t been present and I never even want to be present in this house. The only times I ever am are times I hate and times when I need to. There’s never anytime when I want to and it really pays. The only reason I ever want to be present at all is because I have that need as a human to exist in an active manner. That existence is bullshit here, though. Everyone complains. I hate that the most. I hate how much everyone complains when we go out to church or wherever. I hate how everyone just has this insatiable need to prove themselves all the goddamn time, and I wouldn’t mind except that they’re all so fucking loud when they do it. It’s dumb whenever anyone argues in this stupid house. They butt heads about how the fucking refrigerator works. Of all the things to raise your voice about, they choose the dumbest. They get fucking butthurt and sore and start playing their guilt-trips whenever they feel the slightest part of losing, least dad does it. Maybe my problem is only him about how stupid arguments get here, but he does it loud enough and in a belligerent enough way that it makes everyone here stupid. It’s like he’s a goddamn troll by nature and everyone else just gets stupid by association. I’m being a bitch, too. All I have to do is write this goddamn thing and then be done with it. I think my problem is that I’ve already wanted to be done for such a fucking long time. It’s not so much that I hate flaunting. I share poems with anyone I think would appreciate them. The problem I have is that it feels like a waste of time to brag about shit I really haven’t invested in at all. I kinda hate the fact that I won the giant trophy. I like that it was for English, at least. That’s actually fun. I hate that it’s so grandiose, I guess. That I can’t do anything BUT flaunt it. I disliked that people I’ve never met kept on walking up and congratulating me. I think it made me nervous. Why did they feel that because I won some great trophy and everything that they can talk to me like I’d known them for years? I’m not explaining that right. I just hated that kind of attention. Why do I have such a problem with being recognized and praised as smart? I take it as an insult sometimes. I don’t know why I’ve always kind of cringed at being called smart. I think it’s because I add more to it than is there (like all crazy people). I feel like people calling me smart means that I can only regurgitate facts, write down things in a “pretty” way, and I don’t know. I hate the word for some reason. I remember when I was a little kid, I used to be obsessed with being smart. I think it changed a lot towards jr. high. I stopped wanting to be “smart” in the way people kept on using the word. It always applied to grades I didn’t care about. Dad used to yell if I didn’t get good grades. For some reason, my stupid psychology took the lesson as smart being undesirable. Maybe if I wasn’t smart, people would just leave me alone and stop yelling so goddamn much about “family obligation”. As if it was SO important to the family that I take part in some bullshit academic decathalon or get perfect straight A’s because a B+ was struggling in class and a B average would always end up a C unless I would actually try in the class (which I never was, apparently) and a C is an F. I’m being a bitch. I hate that I’m lazy and so pissy and I hate how aggravated I get with them. I hate how bored I have been with everything in the past five years and I hate how I’m still bored and I hate how there’s still two months ‘till I’m not so bored anymore. I need to get out and I need to write more, for myself at least. I need to stop biting my nails and I need to stop being such a bitch.

Barometer

Don't take me down now.
I feel nice with her, away.
Our eyes look drunk, sway,
Our bodies float
Slowly, like a boat.
The side has a blue stripe running along
With little scars of unpainted wood here and there.
The wind picked up, and so did the sea,
So now the boat swings, swaggers, drunk,
Like the eyes of two kids
Probably kissing a little too passionately.

The Infinite Void

I really need some effective way of archiving ideas and such. SO many nice and clear ideas get lost way too often. Songs get thought up near completion in my head, but I don't have a good and consistent way of getting them down. Totally awesome revision ideas for Novel are being eaten up by forgetfulness. It's difficult to write things down as ideas because I get frustrated that way. They're not complete, so as soon as I put them on paper, they don't look anywhere near as attractive. I don't have a recorder, and recording things randomly on a street or something seems a bit pretentious, not to mention even more lo-fi than writing song ideas down. Now, a lot of times, I just have a super foggy memory. Things get remembered eventually or off of some random act, but for the most part, I take a magical shower and think of stuff that would be awesome, I dress and forget it all. Maybe I should stop getting dressed.
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Song I was listening to for this post. Pretty violins and gorgeous voice, yo