Bildungsroman

Stream of Conciousness

I asked Ben the Coffee Pot chef once, "Ben, give me five words. Five words from the top of you head. Right now."

ambiguous - paper - unicorn - boiled peas - cocaine

So with Ben's five words I began a stream of consciousness essay. That is when you write what cones to your mind a you jot it down, without a re-edit. It doesn't have to make sense, no story line needed, etc. My essay turned out to be like a dream or like a poem. So just go with the imagery. 

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My Stream of Consciousness Essay

Blue doors of aspen opened a field. A feudal field of behemoths roaming. Each animal with their own name. Names like Lust, Sloth and Jealous. But they didn’t stop at seven. The seven fathers kept overgrazing, they kept breeding younger more bellicose behemoths. They were called legion, for how many they numbered. 

Squinting my eyes, the animals unfocused into ambiguous dots and their pigment blanded to unfocused white. Snow they became. Snowflakes, made of spiral notebook paper with torn fringes, meandered their way towards no direction in particular. Each unique in childlike design dusted her navy knit beanie, brown locks flowing like a stream from under its broadly weaved strands of yarn. Blue eyes piercing the night brighter than snow glare or a glitter path of a gibbous moon’s birth. Like the one that sunk the USS Indianapolis. She was elusive as a snowflake in a drift. A caliber of woman that is as fictional as the mythological unicorn or the biblical leviathan. 

The gibbous moon collapsed under its own tension. Strafing ships with light like Japanese zeros and torpedos into the horizon of mountains. Peaks that rise out of the sea beneath my hiking boots. Boots that I’ve never seen. Four winds chase the moon that shrinks. Snowflakes follow and the tide recedes from under those peculiar boots. Blue Eyes eludes with the crashing moon to a rocky mountain unknown to me. 

And I am alone. Again. Standing still. 

A lab of yellow mixed with mutt named Ode drops a flounder on my left. A Snoopy fishing pole becomes tangible in my right palm, its line sunken into self-illuminated cresting waves. A tug comes swift. Dragged along rocks and coral, my palms desire to release but they cannot. 

Dragging becomes submerging becomes drowning.

A chaotic struggle to breathe again. Below the crests, Death is there wadding by a slender-spined porcupine fish in a household fish bowl. His name was Gob. Death, dressed as Uncle Sam, spooned boiled peas into his fleshless jawbone. He looked downtrodden, more than usual. He hasn’t been the same since his wife passed. Monoceros was so lovely. And there they waited as my last breath lost the ability to sustain. 

Pain is what I felt.

And then, as that breath ceased to exist and vision deadened to color and structure, came another breath. One as pure as new life. One single breathe of sentience. Death grinned and Gob grimaced. With all my strength I plunged un-deviated to the bottom of the darkness. The darkness from the culmination of all seven seas. I dove swift. Past the Indianapolis, past sunken ships of forgotten epochs, past orthodontic circus clowns on tricycles and Johnny Depp nose sucking lines of cocaine on the clear pane of a glass bottom boat. 

At the bleakest of bleak was a hatch, only made known by a rising fulfilled moon cresting the great sea’s trench. A whole moon submerged making silhouettes of sea creatures. The hatch was blocky with a metal loop waiting to be pulled. Mighting it open I felt the suction of the hatch. Water spilled into the sky as I crossed the transcendental threshold. Surfacing upside-down by the shore of a shallow spring-fed stream. Raising my sopping body from the water, my wet clothes became dry. Dry as the soil. Dust in the sky was thick with gold, infused with the pigment of a western sun. 

And there she was. 

Picking figs from a summer aspen tree and barefoot on a flat semicircle stone. She graced the loveliest red polka-dotted dress that I have ever known. With a barefooted hop into thick blades of the greenest grass, she moves to the stream’s shore. She moves to me. “I see you.” I muttered, for she has captured me with a blue gaze. She answers me with grace in her diction and outstretched open palm, “Would you like to dance?”

021 Raisin Bran and Vanilla Yogurt [Part Three]

So we protect our hearts.

Which is good. We should. But how do we have committed community during this time of uncertainty? Can we foster a type of community without the commitment or is that just a facade of masked insecurities?

So we end up lonely. 

This is not kind of lonely you find in a social context. There are plenty of people around. You have lots of friends. Good friends but temporary friends. This is the kind of lonely when you are in a crowded room. Lonely, sitting on a porch swing with just your ambitions and zero direction on how to fulfill them. Swinging. Swinging. Swinging softly...with your feet off the ground.

The kind of lonely when you are doing life by yourself. 

So here we were, friends at the breakfast table. Laughing but hesitant to commit to one another to laugh another day. In a caper with one another. We dance without any vows. No wedding. No promises. No slick dancing floor. No lasting growth. 

For all I know we are just incidentally friends. Aristotle said that that incidental friends aren’t easily acquired, friendship in it’s truest form can’t be incidental, “for things that are only incidentally connected are not often coupled together.”

Is the warrior quintet friends just as incidentally as the light currently bounding from wall to surface and surface to squirrel?

And all of this, the culmination of these questions, theories, observations, and that damn fat squirrel, boils down to: Should I even have friends?

Which reminds me of when Warrior Grayson and I discuss books of the bible like Ecclesiastes or Revelations. When we read these books it seems like there is no reason to do anything, because ultimately it amounts to nothing. Solomon shows us that nothing matters, Grayson would say. I’m eventually going to die and the world is going to explode. Why do anything?

I finished my Raisin Bran with vanilla yogurt instead of milk, which is heavenly and I highly recommend it. I busied myself with packing and cleaning for the day’s activities. The Warrior Dash was becoming the priority of the day, just as we knew it would. Holly compliments me on the morning music choice. She was probably trying to make up for the negative comment she gave me on my music choices on the drive up to Dallas. I gave her a hard time for the comment, really just for fun and lively banter, however, I probably should have made that more known to her.

There has to be more than just useful friends, I thought. There must be more than pleasant friends; something more to the reason of why the Bible has Revelations and Ecclesiastes; something greater than death and more than the earth singing the drudge of kaboom. 

I would like to believe in a reoccurring dream that I keep having. A reverie where I am committed to someone for a greater purpose than just my pleasure or my utility. Where I am committed and live in community. Something that is essentially good and continues to be good.

My greek friend’s third friendship was one that is called the good. A friendship where loving is more the essence of friendship than being loved. Selfless love. 

He called it perfect friendship, often saying that people in this friendship are good people individually in virtue and in character and mutually wish well upon each other and desire what is good for one another above their on interests. These friends are not incidental. They choose one another - they commit to one another.

Vows. Promises. Slick dance floors. Lasting growth. Sinatra. 

Aristotle asserts that the friendship of the good can both be pleasurable and useful but it is something greater than that. Except useful and pleasurable are grounded within selflessness.

It can be pleasurable and it can be useful but those are particulars of the form good. It’s beginning to sound like Plato’s divided line theory. 

“Such a friendship is as, might be expected, permanent” because “their friendship lasts as long as they are good - and goodness is an enduring thing.”

Because goodness is an enduring thing.

What I am talking about is a belief in a Meta-Narrative. The reason that every little nuance of our actions and lives become meaningful; story. The transcending story that God is making something Good and we are apart of that, every soul of every age. God is making something Good through us. However, we can make something very bad of it, if we aren't intentional enough.

Lasting. Enduring. Good.
And this renders every friendship meaningful.

What great hope. This is what I want my marriage to look like. This reciprocating ‘love more than you are loved’ thing. A committed community resounding in meaningful caper with my wife and children. I am often worried that I will forget this principle by retreating into my habits of selfishness. I am often praying that I don’t surrender my love to just myself.

Hope. It’s rising like the flood waters of the photosynthesized light and smooth music. 

The aged music fits the aged home. It’s the kind of house that Billie Holiday can stretch her arms in. I daydream about doing life in a home such as this, a wife and children living that life with me. Spending a sunday morning in laughter and lively play. 

In that daydream, when given the chance - when moments of committed love and life long companion’s caper occur - the music will push itself into every inch of the home. Filling the home like the leafy light of that sunday morning.

Leaving the house, I thought to myself as I turned the iPod off, "at least we had this time together."

Maybe that time, those friendships, wasn't a waste after all. Even if I never saw those warrior again, or that squirrel, those friendships were never a waste.

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Continued from: 
Part 1
Part 2

 

021 Raisin Bran and Vanilla Yogurt [Part Two]

 “For it would surely be ridiculous to wish wine well; if one wishes anything for it, it is that it may keep, so that one may have it oneself.”

-Aristotle

021 Raisin Bran and Vanilla Yogurt [Continued]

Blaeeck. 

 I slapped a dollop of creamy vanilla yogurt down into the bowl Raisin Bran flakes spotted with dried grapes. Aristotle, I thought with my waking brain kicking into gear, Aristotle would have mentioned something like that. I combed through my cereal and I combed my memory.

 Usually, what happens when individuals are painfully withdrawing from one another is a type of trivial relationship. A sort of utilitarian friendship. Not always, but it can easlily become one.

Utility. That rings a proverbial bell.

My old greek friend, a bit of a thinker that guy, told me about how friendships can look different, can be different. His philosophy was that friendships can be categorized into three breeds of mutual bonds that individuals can have with one another. 

First, the Friendship of Utility. 

u·til·i·ty [yoo-til-i-tee] noun, plural -ties, adjective
–noun
        1. the state or quality of being useful; usefulness.
        2. something useful; a useful thing.
        3. a public service, as a telephone or electric-light system, a streetcar or
            railroad line, or the like.
        4. Often, utilities. a useful or advantageous factor or feature.
        5. Economics. the capacity of a commodity or a service to satisfy some
             human want.

–adjective
        1. (of domestic animals) raised or kept as a potentially profitable product
            rather than for show or as pets: utility breeds; utility livestock.
        2. designed chiefly for use or service rather than beauty, high quality, or
            the like: a utility vehicle; utility furniture.

Aristotle told me once that the friendship of utility looks like a couple who do not love one another for their character but for some good in which they can benefit from. Those who love for the sake of utility, love for the sake of what is good for themselves.

Utility is what it looks like when people have friends to say that they have friends. What it looks like when you socially network to gain status, get electoral votes to gain the power of public office, or when you ask people to join a business venture under their “line” in the pyramid. When boys marry so they have someone to take the kids to school in the mornings or to satisfy the economics of their sexuality. Please refer to Figure A for further representation. 

Fig. A
You (like boats) + someone (has a boat) = friends

This utility is for service rather than beauty. That’s the key phrase here. Friendships of utility are those that are kept for profit. Service that profits me.

It can be more complex, of course. It can be layered into a friendship with particular aspects of the mutual bond being that of utility. Individuals can be blindly unaware of their motives of utility.

Interestingly, Aristotle speculates that utility friendships exist chiefly between the old and the young. The old at there elderly age pursue not the pleasant but the useful and the young desire what is beneficial to their future and their current state of pleasure.

Pleasure. Thats the second type of mutual bond that individuals can have with one another. Its just like utility except that the added element is that the two enjoy each other. Friendships of pleasure love one another for the sake of what is pleasant to themselves. 

pleas·ure |ˈple zh ər|
noun–
1. a feeling of happy satisfaction and enjoyment : she smiled with pleasure at being praised.
    • enjoyment and entertainment, contrasted with things done out of necessity : she had not traveled for pleasure for a long time.
    • an event or activity from which one derives enjoyment : the car makes driving in the city a pleasure.
    • sensual gratification.

Young lovers are like this, so my old greek friend has illustrated to me, mutually exchanging services; date to the movies, arm candy, drinking buddy, bed buddy, spelunking buddy. 

Accordingly, mutually exchanging pleasure; flirting friend, sailing friend, Battlestar Galatica nerd friend, etc. Selfishness is the bottom line of these friendships; self-interested egocentrism.

There are more flakes than raisins in this batch of Raisin Bran. Disappointing. Very Disappointing.

Aristotle once explained to me that when the bloom of youth is passing the friendship sometimes passes too. So the lover, when he finds no utility or pleasure in the beloved, moves on; friendship over. Please refer to Figure B. The beloved then has no utility or pleasure either when the lover is not servicing. The greater part of the relationship depends on emotion and aims at pleasure therefore, they fall in and out of love as their emotions and pleasures change. 

Fig. B
You (like boats) + someone (has a boat) - boat  ≠  friends

How quickly can these friendships can cease to exist, as dry sand slipping out of my opened hand on a windy day in Chicago. “The useful is not permanent but always changing,” the Greek would say. “It existed only for the ends in question.” 

Blaaeeeecckkk. Cereal needs more yogurt. For. Sure.

What kind of friendships exist between the warrior quintet? Are we using each other for utilities sake or the sake of pleasure? In what ways am I being selfishly gratified:

A) By the attention Katie gives to my complaints?
B) Jameson’s laughs at my halfwitted puns?
C) Grayson’s company to a restaurant or coffee shop?
D) The status/ego boast of having an model friend like Holly?
E) The girl, whose name I've forgotten, and the couch bed that I had slept on the night before?

Pleasure and utility look a lot alike, don’t they? They resemble the miserly face of inconsideration. Selfishness is not my avocation. It is my occupation. 

However, in the stage of life where change is happening if you like it or not, we have this distance that we put between each other. Two individuals who could explore the opportunity of paving a life together must limit their interaction because the future is moving somewhere that neither of them can predict. Friend groups go on trips, have planned and unplanned activities, watch movies, have game nights, all the while thinking this wont last forever. It may be my ambition to travel the world and be Indiana Jones and one friend may be an accountant and work in Houston.

Distance decay is what we know will happen. The longer and the farther we are away the less of a friendship will exist. How can it not be friendships for pleasure of utility?

We might change, become not as pleasant. Friendship ends. 

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Continued Monday in Part Three.
Continued from Raisin Bran and Vanilla Yogurt [Part One] 

021 Raisin Bran and Vanilla Yogurt [Part One]

Another short story chapter from a writing project. Leave critques please. That is why I do this blog. This was the first chapter I wrote for this project, it needs help. 

 

“For it would surely be ridiculous to wish wine well; if one wishes anything for it, it is that it may keep, so that one may have it oneself.”

-Aristotle

021 Raisin Bran and Vanilla Yogurt

There is something restful about an old house. Something somnolent that exists in the space between raw tangibility and pure thought. In particular, something that doesn't occur in my apartment or in those newly built homes down by my parents house. What I mean by this poetic interpretation, is that old homes don’t need to pretend to be something that it is not. They are simply what they were built to be. KB homes and apartments try to emulate the coziness of historical dwellings. 

Perhaps it’s the filtered light of photosynthesis with its incident angles of light bounding from one aged brick surface to another. It’s a soft, slightly leafy green light - at least to my indifferent color confused eyes - quietly flooding an old home on a sleepy sunday morning. Somnolent light for a somnolent morning.

A small coed collection of friends and I had stayed overnight in Dallas to participate in an event called the Warrior Dash. The dash really is a 5k race where participants clad in exaggerated costumes endure an obstacle course of moats, ropes, mud and flames. When muddied participants cross that finish line, clothing and viking headgear sopping, they are rewarded with beer and turkey legs. It’s really an all-American fixture of our society, if you didn’t know. 

The group of eager warriors, a quintet including myself, spent the evening before the race with a friend of one of the warriors. It was her house, built in Highland Park during the roaring 20’s, that was being flooded with that leafy photosynthesized light. 

We had drove in the night before the dash. Tired, I hadn’t slept more than three hours in the past thirty-six, I managed to be social and participate in conversations as they were born and as they died. However, by the end of the night, I had successfully took four naps in various locations in the Highland Park area while the group wined and dined on the eve of the dash. I awoke at critical points of the evening to add frivolous commentary on group discussions and activities.

“The answer is forty-two,”
“Okay...why forty-two, Jake?”
“It’s the ultimate answer to life, the universe and…everything.” 

Yes, frivolous indeed.

After giggling ourselves to sleep as if we were thirteen, we drifted into a slumber on a couch bed and air mattress in the home’s living room. I don’t remember having a single thought on my mind as I laid there, just the overwhelming feeling of rest. 

•  •  •

By morning, warrior Holly and warrior Katie’s air mattress deflated under their slumbering bodies to just half of its air capacity. This made it hard to see the girls at first glance from my difficult perspective over warrior Grayson’s thick body laying next to me. Since I am the smallest of the three guys of the group, I had to sleep in the middle. We were all submerged in a sea of rest, good as it could be. 

Rest. I was long distant from that idea, that mindset, and that action. 

The morning began with soft stirring, everyone wondering about with their personal waking duties and routines. Breakfast was lethargically being prepared as I jotted down some notes about the leafy light, or whatever color it really was. 

Jameson quietly hovered over the window, scientifically observing a pair of acrobatic squirrels in a constant caper in the yard.  

caper ¹|ˈkāpər|
verb 
skip or dance about in a lively or playful way: children were capering about the room.
noun
1 a playful skipping movement : she did a little caper.
2 informal an activity or escapade, typically one that is illicit or ridiculous.
• an amusing or far-fetched story, esp. one presented on film or stage : a cop caper about intergalactic drug dealers. 

“That is a fat squirrel.” Warrior Jameson made his first observation. His reports continued, only to offer breaks in the silence. However, a soft hush was welcomed that morning. 

Jameson aimlessly wanders away from the window. I replace him, standing motionless except for my shifting eyes. Observation: People socialize with their eyes, conversing with what’s caught in their line of sight. 

I am avoiding the fat squirrel. I do not want to have a conversation with him on this early morning. He proves only to be a distraction from the glorious bounding light. My gaze is wanting to speak with the refracting light and the bricks that the light is incidentally bombarding. I assume the squirrel is a he because he is fat. Sitcoms like the Honeymooners and the Flintstones have scientifically proven that the male, in a healthy American marriage, is always the fat one. Sexist American media, I think to myself. And additionally, what kinds of colors does the plumb squirrel see? 

By this time, I realize that the plump squirrel has, in fact, distracted me. 

The music fits the mood. I started a Billie Holiday playlist on the iPod playing throughout the house. It started on “Crazy He Calls Me” and ended on “Them There Eyes” with “Sophisticated Lady” elegantly strutting her graceful self somewhere in between.

Breakfast wasn’t much more than orange juice, Raisin Bran, and vanilla yogurt. A feast for a college student like myself that has been keeping a strict diet of peanut butter and Ritz crackers every morning. This is not a complaint, mind you. I love peanut butter. Jameson once bought me a over-sized commercial container of PeterPan peanut butter as a gift. Look up peanut butter in the thesaurus and you’ll find ‘best gift’ and ‘you rocked my pants off for giving this as a gift’. 

As the quintet ate, crunching flakes of corn loudly but acceptably, I couldn’t stop thinking about the awkwardness of the circumstance. 

We fractured cast of individuals; one about to graduate, one moving for an internship, one still in school, one considering traveling for a job, and one who just doesn’t know. We were all together but separated, unable from ever being truly bounded together. We were eating Raisin Bran at the very same table, but we were all distinctly somewhere else. Distinctly not ‘the very same’.

When the future is unsettled, individuals withdrawal their commitment from one another. Commitment and community are coupled. They are engaged in a dance together, like a bride and bridegroom twirling on their wedding reception’s glossy dance floor. Betrothed together with promises to never forsake one another. Waltzing to Sinatra.

Blaeeck.

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Continued tomorrow in Part Two. 

Sometimes There is a Bean in Your Ear

My best friend Grayson is heading off to Europe for the majority of 2012. This is a short tribute to him.

03 Sometimes There’s a Bean in Your Ear

My friend Grayson is a storyteller. It’s what he does best. Using his hands, he can draw you in and with vocal inflections he keep your attention. If you want someone to center a group, Grayson is your man.  

And I have watched him develop in his art form. He’s grown in confidence, the stories got more elaborate with every telling. The pace more embellished, the meter more efficient and the meaning more evident. 

He often tells a story about a bean. 

In elementary school Grayson would get bored. Very bored. “Bored out of my mind” bored, as he would say using his hands to enunciate his cabeza. 

The boredom would come out of frustration born from being visually vexed from sitting in a room all day with a sunny blue sky out the window. It is the frustration of a child not maximizing fun. Because of this he would pull a ‘Ferris Bueller’, a feigned upset stomach claim accompanied with clammy hands, accomplished by the method of breathing on them. 

Winning favor with the nurse, he would go home early. Home to eat his sack lunch in his bed and just in time for The Price is Right.

 In his fourth grade math period during the early fall semester the teacher, Mrs. Ludden, had the students multiplying with pinto beans. 

“Don’t ask me, I have no idea how that is effective mathematics.” Grayson would remark with the most sincere of sarcasm's. No offense to Mrs. Ludden, of course. 
“Nonetheless, I was bored out of my mind.” Again, annunciating his curly haired head with his hand gestures.

So what does he do? Naturally, he sticks the dried pinto bean in your ear. Over and over. And over again. Stick the bean in and pull it out. Until the cycle was broken.

“It got stuck in my ear!” Sometimes there is a bean in your ear and it wont come loose.  

“And with my genius fourth grade mind, I’m like, okay I’ll stick my finger in there and get around it, so I shove my finger into my ear and effectively push that pinto bean farther down into my ear canal.” Using his index finger to point into his ear drum and pretend to harshly press his hand into his head.

Grayson then freaks out. Wouldn’t you? His first thought: My dad is going to murder me. 
“Why would I tell my father that his son just got a pinto bean stuck in his ear? I’m not that dense.”

 A hand shoots up into the air from behind a desk with pinto beans scattered across it, the one with one less bean than the other desks. “Mrs. Ludden? I need to go to the nurse?”

Upset stomach. 
Clammy hands. 

 He goes to the nurse’s office and he goes home. The Price is Right was not on his mind that morning. “Come on down” couldn’t be heard through that pinto bean greasing over in Grayson’s ear. 

For the better part of that year, Grayson had that pinto bean stuck in his ear. He was terrified that anyone would know, particularly his parents. And with his fourth grade mind, he convinced himself that doctors didn’t have the proper instruments for removing a bean in his ear. “Apparently, they didn’t teach that in medical school.” So the bean was to stay there. 

So for the better part of the year, Grayson suffered ear aches and head aches; both aches were bean aches. 

 “They were some of the worst pains that I have had in my entire life. But I just couldn’t tell my parents about it because I was scared of getting in trouble, or them thinking their son was an idiot or the horrible procedure the doctor would have to do to me to get this pinto bean our of my ear.”

On the last day of fourth grade, Mrs. Ludden had the children corralled singing songs while she played guitar [she was of the hippie sort of fourth grade teacher]. Grayson was moving his jaw around to entertain himself. Bored-out-of-mind syndrome, you know?

In a moment, the pinto bean–in all of its wax glory–flings from his ear. Clinking its way down into the floor. 

Grayson didn’t know what to do. His childlike elation had him flabbergasted. He was free of the thing he was so used to paining him. The apostle Paul had a thorn…Grayson had a bean. 

“It had been there for such a long time that I had gotten used to living with it.”

He came to his senses and snatched the bean from the floor before anyone noticed that a 7 month old bean had squirmed out of his ear. All this time it had became a fixture of his body and now there was an empty ear canal. He wasn’t sure what to do. Walking home from the school he threw the bean aside into the grass. It was then that he noticed that the greasy pinto bean had split into two halves. Grayson still wonders if it had started to sprout. 

During the next decade he wouldn’t tell too many people right away. Call it boyhood pride, perhaps. Fueled by the fear that someone might know that he made a silly mistake, Grayson suffered his pinto bean. 

Curious how we have our pinto beans that we hide away from our peers. We act as if there is no suffering but the truth is that sometimes there’s a bean in your ear.