The Wee Democracy

late night with josh

it's quite late, friday night, or saturday morning, whatever your disposition towards labeling days may lead you to decide. me, personally, i like to think that the day's not over until i've gone to sleep, or until the sun has come up, whichever comes first, though usually i'm not strong enough to wait out the latter.

this night feels very odd, and yet, almost wholly appropriate. it is dead silent outside, and all the lights down the street are off. it seems as though this is a post apocolyptic neighborhood, and the only thing that's breaking this imagery is the street lamp on the corner.

you'd think the owner of 100+ dvd's would find something to watch, but i'm not feeling any of that right now. mainly i'm just feeling terribly numb. kind of in limbo, like i should be either doing something, or commit myself to doing nothing. i'm having a problem with commitment.

i don't know who i was relating it to, but sometime in the recent past, i was describing what i feel like when i start drinking. it feels, basically, like i'm playing the video game of josh. some ultra advanced avatar that gives me mechanical power over this meat sack that is my body. i picture krang, that disembodied brain from the teenage mutant ninja turtles cartoon, who inhabited the midriff of a giant android, and held little joysticks with his brainy tentacles. it's a very sensory experience, especially for someone like me who so regularly retreats to the dank recesses of the basement of my mind. feeling that physical freedom allows me to bask in the grooviness of my body.

i know that i told you guys about thinking about myself in the third person a few days ago, and i feel that that warrants some explanation, so that it doesn't come off too narcissistic.

and i'm paraphrasing burian here, although its by no means an original idea, that sometimes you get in the habit of imagining your life as a really long arthouse neo-realism film, with a sometimes killer soundtrack and some great nudity, but mostly its filled with some really pretentious sleeping sequences, stupid dialogue, awkward silences, and some really mortifying masturbation scenes. i think of that bit in trainspotting, the movie, where renton narrates his life in the club in the third person.

josh imagines his life as a black comedy, and hopes that in the end, there will be some edifying climax, some life altering decision to be made, and order will be imposed, peace will reign, and all will live happily ever after. however, we've got to get past those really long drawn out sad parts, first.

so, i've got myself thinking about myself from a distance already, within this cinematic framework, and then i stamp it with my own brand of insecurity, which takes me even further out of myself, and into the my ideas of the perceptions of other people of me. get it? i find myself thinking about what other people are thinking about me. it gets quite tiresome, easy.

but really, as i stated before, all this does is serve to distance me even further from myself, until i get lost in what i think other people are thinking about me, and i barely have any idea about what i think about myself.

which leads me to questions regarding my identity. identity these days is so wrapped up in easy to define categories: a person is what they do, where they live, where they went to school, who they're with, all these things that are wrapped up in other people's perceptions. so that's why i've been trying to change the whole pattern of third person thinking.

when i was in NY, i made it a point, when i caught myself thinking like that, like say, if i thought, he (being me) feels really sad right now, and just wants to be left alone, i would stop, go back, and think I feel really sad right now...blah blah blah. i'm trying to own my persona, and iron out my own perception of my identity.

however, it is still quite cool to think about your life in a cinematic sense, if you're doing it for some aesthetic reason. like, if i was riding the bus, looking out the window, and i could imagine the framing of my face, my beautiful face, and the soundtrack of whatever i was listening to playing over the shot. that's cool. and it's not part of the narrative structure, so it carries no psychological impact.

i'm trying to see how i got to this point in my train of thought, and i'm guessing that times like this, when it is so dead outside, there's nothing on tv, and you can't even muster up the initiative for a late night jerk before bed, the whole life-as-cinema thing takes a turn for the ultimate pretention in neo-realism. and i'm not about pretension, so for me, it kind of hit a brick wall.



feeling: my eyes are getting heavy...very heavy.
thinking of: sleeping with better posture
song of the day: sleepwalk - santo and johnny