humanity (mine or otherwise), some questions

i am home again, matt caplin


i do not know if i should cook steak, or eat noodles and tuna out of a can. __for a while there, i was scared to come home to an empty house, but this is no longer the case. i don't mind it anymore now.

it's not a matter of cynicism, what' i'm about to say, i want to say this: i believe that hard work makes you as good as you'll get, but the problem is how good you'll get. that's what bothers me, the ceilings. in music school, i remember, much was made of this. inherent gifts. a subject i'm not at ease with. it's common knowledge, i am uncomfortable with finality. things that are capable of definitive completion. over. done. bye. the end. it makes little sense to me, in this world of grey and half-tones and possiblies and fine-lines to find things that... are. study, fine, no problem, go your hardest, 18 hours a day if you must, you still won't beat the kid that 'gets it'. 100 free throws, the scale of b-flat minor over and over till your fingers bleed, whatever, you won't catch 'that' cat. not the natural. they exist outside of the rules of hard work. (though sometimes they're naturals and they work hard too - god help us if they do).

i get older and... i see it more and more. people who just 'know'. __hours pass. read and reading. soo much so it's hard to write, i'm too focussed on it. all these things there are to know in the world. and all those people who somehow know them. and you. and your books/free-throws/b-flat minor scale.

and sadness too. when i come home to an empty house is the only time i sense a little of it. a certain... brittleness to my days. puddles leftovers weeks later, well after the sun's come out. surprised to find them, we stare, how'd it miss you we think. but there it is. in a shady corner, one cold, reflective, thin as a penny puddle of water. a fossil of winter. a discarded fragment of a cloud. silence incarnate. sits, wise and endangered. one scale of the loch-ness monster.

but we try anyway. that's my point. somehow. gotta pass the time i suppose. can't spend all day listening to music and chatting online. sooner or later, you gotta face the fact you're mediocre and make a go at being amongst the best of the mediocre. if you like what you're doing then that should be satisfaction enough... maybe. life was always going to be a course in humility. this much we learned from trees. their silence told us that. they bow to you when you walk. drop their ripest for your malformed, yellow-stained teeth.

one day soo much will be made clear. one day i'll lie in a hospital bed and breathing will be painful and my eyes will blur occasionally. i will mumble words to myself incoherently and what's left of my family will determine i'm mad. (those who haven't concluded at that just yet). and i'll be fed pills for breakfast lunch and, and the white ceiling will look like stars to me. when people touch me, my red blood cells will shout_ m a g i c ! _and i'll float in-and-out of six-thousand senses of myself. one moment i will be a dream i once had of being stabbed in a savanna, another, when i was 12, with Eman crabbing at Seacliff. the next moment i will be Estragon waiting for Godot, or a kid sitting on the train staring at the printed-score of 2 Elegies for Piano by Bela Bartok, confused and thrilllled. all that. but people will see the crazy-man with the ragged skin and the patchy hair. mumbling Schoenberg flowers, tulips are best but when i said it she laughed at dandelions, forgive us those many whoever all who looked twice, failing's all i did best tried tried tried all these stars look there, that one is a macaroon my mother liked those best in Africa there was lightning in Haifa too, love death all in between time between bookends oh Moses Baha'u'llah Jesus-or-his-Mother Luther, where art thou? outside it will be summer. i will die in summer, summer will be the death of me, my hair follicles and peritoneum tell me as much now.

delirium , isn't it madness just being hello human now? (what does that mean 'hello human now'?, i don't even know, saying hello always seemed soo hard and soo first-things-first and scary at times and sad at others and perfectly ordinary in every way othertimes, what's more human than hello and to be so now is ... i suppose all we've got. (or hope to have).

how time turns its back... , i am not ready for this to be memory. (and all the while crammed in not-old-enough-to-be-cool libraries reading god-knows-what taking notes and memorizing and freaking (my skin inside) out, the principle to be extracted from this case is:

oblivion is not just to be reserved for the future.

i used to dance to forget this. play the piano. make love. i used to sit at coffee shops for hours. scribble in notebooks. think outside of myself.

but what is this now?


and when the drugs start to wear off i spasm. i don't like to tell anybody about that. just... kinda here and there. jitters. find myself standing in the middle of her room staring at the fan unable to walk back to bed. couldn't make a decision not between life or death or banana-bread.

if you want consolation, remember that Odysseus starts the Odyssey sitting on a beach crying softly to himself because a sorceress has him strapped won't let him get off the island he's too good for sex and conversation and in any case, i hear it ain't so bad having a man around. (light bulbs need changing and spiders need killing anywhere you are). __Orestes heard they were comin' for him he took off running like Forrest Gump didn't look back till he got to Athens - a band of cacophonous banshees howling at ladybugs and rotten peaches under trees trying to find a scent of him. ceilings everywhere i guess, made of father's wishes and mother's expectations and societal misalignment and incorrectly diagnosed whatever-this-week-disorder and eating sausages and depression for lunch and a blueberry muffin and bulimia as a snack. bottle of rum and another silent art-house flick for dinner. dancing like an epileptic fit by yourself standing on your coffee table (every inch counts, gotta climb beyond it, this damned ceiling by whatever-any-other-name-iz-still-a-biatch).

or just sit and read. read words into hours - funny i always thought hours were made of moments now i know i was wrong they're made of words and paper and underlined passages and references and some parts of time are made up of walking to bathrooms and drink fountains and idle chatter in walking to and fro



look here. a puddle out of place. i'm sure it's cold, looks cold.

look at the time. an hour that passes without a chapter being read is like time not existing.

once upon a time i was human... a failure therefore. and partially okay with that notion and its consequence).