Such a thing as regret

Say you might have changed some things in the past of your forward/causal/time-specified life. Okay. You regret.

You deeply regret. You ate a poisoned doggy biscuit and then pitiably fall dead the next day. That really sucks. You shouldn't have died.

You say, I don't want to die! I want to live! I want to not have eaten that doggie biscuit! I want to fix this state of affairs.

Well, doggie, you can do it in a number of ways. We can rewind the tape. You'll be dead doggie T minus one day. That's great! Don't eat the biscuit this time. But you do. Because this time you are still hungry. And you still didn't know that biscuit was poisoned. Who would?

No, you want to do it a different way? Okay. You're saying you want to go back and know that this is a poison cake. Sure, do that. But after this turn, you can never reasonably assume that any doggie biscuit won't make you choke. That sucks. Your friends are really bewildered; they ask, why is that dog not eating biscuits all of a sudden? But you've changed. In fact, it's hard to eat anything. You have new knowledge, but you're a different doggie - not as carefree as you were that time you died. Life is something else now entirely. (But is life ever not?)

Not acceptable. You need it all back, and nothing else can change. You need to intervene without engaging the system. Through a wormhole you jump to T minus a day and a half and land on the bad biscuit. With a swipe of the paw, you slide it into a furnace. Hide in the bushes for a day. A naive doggie trots along, sniffs some crumbs and leaves. You never see him again. And you're still dead. But where was the dog whose poor life I just saved? You float toward him. He's licking another biscuit. He doesn't recognize you. He doesn't even act like you, because you act like dead.

Is there such a thing as regret?

(Or time travel?)

Can you ever wish to have known? Can you ever wish to change things? Can you tell that I want to watch Lost again?

i grew up with these

in my childhood we had a few video cassettes. i watched these cassettes repeatedly growing up. i just don't know what my life would be like if this set up were any different. what if i grew up with pocahontas? or the jungle book? or up?

- fantasia
life, nature, growth, magic, death, and most of all, hell.

- alice in wonderland
reality, shattered. i hated that.

- the lion king (i don't actually think we owned this)
death is loss is life.

- pinocchio
love. family.

- superman
heroism.

- the rescuers down under
mice in love, golden eagles, australian accents. and the united nations!

lastly, we had a broken cassette of crusader rabbit that always, always scared the fuck out of me. there are no words to describe it. what the fuck was a rabbit doing on a horse, in knight's armor with a lance? to kill people?

Ways of getting across

I typically get pretty excited about songs with dance beats and bass lines. But this one song I just got too excited about last September. It was a little vindictive, a little disruptive, and it sang to me at that moment because, well, that's what I needed. Not all songs could have done that for me then, and that song might not do that ever again. I understood then what musicians do - they have to understand the field of people. They have to capture them at that moment in the most effective way possible, because music is based in a dimension of time that reeks of transience. 

Visual artists do something a little different, but they are fixated on vision. But what are our eyes and our visual cortices? Take Descartes' spectrum - no one has the same answer for when colors begin or end. I, for one, might never be able to perceive any craft in the way it was intended. If the back of my brain developed a little atypically, I might not even be able to see anything in a way I can even describe to other people.

Writing is different. It is so limited. One has to abide by language and its fickle structures which impose on the mind endless amounts of unnatural conflict, contrasts and equalities. One relies on only the words that humans have been unimaginative enough to invent, and not all humans at that. But with words I can move within a field of ideas that can escape body, time and space. But, then again, maybe I just haven't accessed the skill to do this with anything but words.

- Yann Martel, from The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios

"I would also have to convince him that he had no choice, that this storytelling wasn't a game or something on the same level as watching a movie or talking about politics. He would have to see that everything besides the story was useless, even his desperate existential thoughts that did nothing but frighten him. Only the imaginary must count."

Sleeping

That moment before the singularity of conscious experience dissipates, I'm having a hard time enduring lately. But every night, falling asleep is just enduring this moment. I lie and meander in thoughts until my focus can no longer be singular, but must be surrendered to forces disparate, dissonant and grand. This is what unconsciousness is, after all.

But I wonder if one day I will struggle on a different bed to retain this tight, mindful integrity that may no longer wake me the next day. I will be fighting then, but I'm sweating the stresses of that fight on my bed right now. I can't sleep if I don't want to ever sleep.

I started sleeping on my chest earlier this year, no doubt in my mind to substitute for a different weight. When I wake up with my heart racing, I know there has to be a healthier way to sleep. Sleeping on my back, there is no weight to make me feel my heartbeat change. These days, I lie with two hands over my heart and, like the months during which I suffocated my lungs and compacted my chest, I do this by instinct. What an ordeal.

Microaggressions

When I graduated from high school, they told us that a lot of people were going to mention where we came from. So far, I've been reminded in certain ways. I say, "Yeah, yeah," I say, and try to mess up the paint they splashed on my face.

I am rooting for my Queens hometown in some made up contest of neighborhoods. "Says the guy who went to Thatplace."

"Hey, David. You went to Thatplace?" "Yeah..." "Fucker. Kid on my floor did, too."

"Where did you go to school?" "Just around here." "Where?" "It's on the Upper West Side." "Yeah, like which school?" "It's called Thatplace?" She goes off on how she tutors these kids from there and their curriculum is so intense, almost like where she grew up and the curriculum was also intense, even if just by American standards because she's not from this country.

"Oh, you went to Thatplace." "Yeah, I switched schools in middle school..." "Did you know this guy...?" I've forgotten. We're talking about education in low-income communities. I talked about how I switched out of public school. "Well, you know, not everyone has access to those opportunities." He goes off on statistics, his experiences at a public school Fewblocksover, and how Teachingorg is going to finally fix how different that is for someone like me. My mouth is not agape, but I'm fighting off a wrinkle in my eyebrows.

"I can't believe you're a private school kid." I'm not worried about that. This is the stuff they must have been talking about.

This is too much.

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I feel like

Every song I put up here will attain a significance more profound than I realize at this moment. I'm going to hear it again, and it's going to sound like today. I can almost hear it now, but in the future. Auditory fates.

Peace of mind

I met the mayor of a city once. He was a gallant, ambitious man. He was convicted in his views on urban welfare, interesting for his dramatic stories of political heroism, and just admirable overall. He fought things, like drugs and poverty and corruption. When you hear him speak there's no end of feeling, the kind that moves you to believing that cities are places where people are degraded and are revived, and that this is a man who cares for their fundamental human redemption. We all sat there and we were wowed.

He wasn't mayor when I heard him, actually, but our school practically had a love affair with him. My history teacher invited him to class after his first talk in the auditorium, just to have him tell us stories. So our tables in a circle around this leader among men, but boys really, we were rapt in attention. That's how I remember it. I sat on the lip of this curl, next to my teacher who giggled at every quip he made. The boys in the middle in front of him were tilting their chairs, but their mouths were agape. I sat there because my friend sat there with me, or I with him. We didn't tilt our chairs. We also kept our coats on and tied our ties tight, because there was little room to get comfortable when the trains were cold in the morning and they will be again when it's dark. But our teacher told us to take our coats off for the mayor.

He must have talked about serious things. I didn't pay much attention in history class then, because learning this stuff felt stifling. When he was done, a lot of kids had real questions about things that he might do to fix things in the future, but when they were done and we were unraveling, my friend asked what use were these political goods if the overpopulated human race could do with some depopulating. Oh, don't do that, I thought, I just want to leave. Our classmates pretended not to hear him and gathered their books.

This mayor courted him earnestly and privately, as if he had stepped up to share his thoughts. He entreated my friend not to be cynical, and to believe that every human being has a right to peace and happiness.

We remained friends for a while. I never saw him outside of school, and I heard publicly that he didn't make it back for the next semester. By then I had found belonging in my studies and my love for poetry. I made other friends, I dated, and I still talked to our counselor sometimes, as we misfits both once did.

In two years, he passed away. He had become depressed and took too many pills. Some of us went to his funeral, although his family didn't really know who we were. His mother cried so hard. We were asked eventually to leave, and on my way out I saw his face. In his note, he wrote that he was at peace. I know that and I know we all deserve that, but I wonder who thinks about it when we fix problems and fight fights and say things.

We find out there are more things than we can handle. Rest in peace, my friend. I know you live.