stir the embers
2005-04-24 ~ 11:57 p.m.

i wonder what it is... a bit of irony, a bit of fun with the peons... never quite sure. why every time i tune in and turn up this radio station that my beloved REM is playing. never crooning about the end of the world or disturbances at the heron house... no. always one of two. losing my religion or orange crush.

today as i lounged in bed somberly (take or leave the 'm') ... i thought again about time travel. backspacing your way through life. thought again about where i would go. what i would change.

i never fixate on the later years. the years when i recgonized that control was not mine to steer. never those. and why not the younger years. the years before my mind fractured itself under the guilt of a lost childhood. not even those years. why the fuck not i wonder? but not really.

if i were to go back. to be able to change one thing. it would be one day. just one day. where we would have all stayed home. and i was neither young nor old. just one day. and somehow that would make all the difference in the later years. sort of like i dismissed the younger years as dismissable...and i suppose i did, have. but everything after...and i do mean everything. every fucking minute after would somehow cosmically right itself and this life wouldn't exist on any plane, on any continuum, on any string or super-string theory.

it ought to make you wonder about the puppet master. all that talk of strings.

so i sit here, and i have already cued up the other REM songs. the ones the radio doesn't play for me. because even the radio knows i suppose.

"...consider this..."

you know...i recall the very first time i ever saw this video. back in the days when mtv still played videos and the sky just must have been a different shade of blue.

i remember going to buy my "out of time" t-shirt in lufkin, at the mall.

i am letting "belong" play on my own playlist now. will switch to live and the connells soon. all in the course of a wandering mind and idle fingers.

and it drifts to not one woman, not one woman halted in her very breath. i won't let it linger there, i send it on...on it's way. let the years and time pour over me, wash over me...wash me away.

the thought crossed my mind last night, sometime before we were throwing darts and cheating our way through a hastened game just to get the hell out...away from the patrons and frat boys and cheapened women and smoke ... and i wondered idly how mnay people have actually entertained the idea (even for a small, brief moment) that they were the anti-christ. i do not know the answer. but i think it a strange and shared thought.

i am not sure exactly when it was that i lost their idea of religion and claimed my own.

but this is not an entry about religion, or about the way REM always has to fucking play on the radio just to mess with my head.

no, this is an entry about nothing really. just started typing and didn't stop for a small while.

live is ready to go. not secret samdhi or throwing copper or v, always mental jewelry.

when i was home i went for my visit, the one i always make. i usually go first thing, but i didn't this time. i went the next day and i stood on the fence and i glared. and somehow i knew that i have changed. not a lot, and not enough to make a difference. but somehow i am braver than i was even a year ago. i stood there and then swung a leg over and straddled the fucking fence and dared the past to come and get me. come and fucking get me.

i have never even walked the edge before. but this time i could have strode straight through and walked out ... yes, walked out on the fucking water. i felt like i could have.

i wanted to.

i went back later to see if i could do it again, a repeat performance of fence climbing and sneering. and i did. i took pictures to replace the ones i lost in the hard drive crash. i found something there. something that almost makes me wish i could go back to those younger years and make a few small adjustments. but i need to know a little more before i stir that up i suppose.

anyway...

"brothers unaware" is one of my favorite songs. this entire album is just golden.

i started to read back through what i have here so far because i lost my train of thought... but i obviously missed the train from the beginning.

you see... some days, some nights, some lives... my soul feels restless and pissed off. like i am already a ghost and don't have time for naked cavorting in yards and playing jokes.

i thought for a while last night that i had confused fiction and reality. that my books had spilled over. got stuck on the name frank. but now i remember he is very real. mr. texas ranger man.

funny how things just float through us sometimes.

..."you must learn to swim all over again..."

i am a little irritable lately. i can think of a million reasons why. nothing sticks to me. jives me as truth.

when you come up for air, gasping...you will almost certainly always find that your hands are empty. but i catch myself wondering what would happen if you kept your fists clenched and left your head under the water. what would happen then.

blinking cursors dictate the beating of a heart. instruct the waves of the mind and currents of air. and nothing flows smoothly. but it all still flows.

right out of me. and into nothing.

..."10,000 years devoted to nothing but tomorrow and yesterday..."

she said "cursed" and i smiled a very private smile.

catch you on the other side.

later.

)(*

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