[insertcatchytitle.]

whhhhaaaatttt.

fuckit.

smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.

You go up there, and you are judged on your work. Not someone else’s work. You’re not reading a play by Shakespeare. You’re doing a poem about you, written by you, in your own hand, and you’re up there reading it in your own voice. If you can stand up to that, I mean, what is a boardroom really gonna do? You know that they have fragile natures, just like you do, you know? You know that somewhere inside of them, some book under their bed, or somewhere in a box in their mom’s garage somewhere, there’s a poem about how they were sad some time… Everybody writes poems. Everybody has tried to be a poet at one time in their life, and because of that, you kind of know people, and so no one is as scary.

—

Edward Garcia on the benefits of slam poetry other than winning.

From Words in Your Face by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz

(via fuckyeahslampoems)

part 2/2 <3

part 1/2 <3

I miss these gaiz.

What is Love? THE RETURN

Dun-dun-dun-DUN!

So, just about a year ago I had posted this loooonnnng blog about love and its meaning. Now, if I still had that writing in text or I had not deleted my old tumblr, I could have reposted it. Interestingly enough, that had been my most “famous” entry. I could only guess that is because tumblr is for the forever alone crowd. And this is true. Mostly. 

In short, I had concluded that love is a subjective notion. What may appear as love to one is most assuredly different to another. The way to measure the variety is simple enough to be summed up into one question:

With a one word limit, what is love to you?

The difference in answers is staggering. They range from absolutely auspicious (happiness, joy) to positively pessimistic (difficult, stupid) to just fucking weird (abundance, vagina). 

Another key point I came up with (in other words, made up) is the amount of control one has in love. Contrary to popular belief, YOU decide whom you love. It’s not a fire that consumes you without a viable, safe way out. It’s not a disease without a cure (although I hear masturbating works).

The mind is kind of retarded. Okay, it’s fucking retarded. You can easily trick it into believing something. For example, a really, really good liar never admits to lying because he purposely makes his lies into truths to himself no matter how wrong he is. He lies so much, he thinks they’re true.

Those initial feelings, those “butterflies” appear because you propagate them to. You want to say you “love” someone so much, you eventually do love them. And this becomes truth.

So what in the hell do I have to add to that? I mean, it’s basically a cop out answer since there is no definite definition of love. Seriously, what the fuck?

It’s fascinating to look back at all of this and see how much I’ve changed. When asked the question above, a year ago I would have said, “Love is strength.” Now the one word I’d give is “Sacrifice.”

But where does that leave us? Simple. Love changes. As it is different for every individual, love changes for people over time. If I compared the feelings of when I first fell in love, to the last time I could say I did, they’re dramatically different. Falling in love with different people means different experiences and different reasons as to why you feel the way you do.

As Chuck Klosterman put:

“We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifetime. It’s easy. The first girl I ever loved was someone I knew in sixth grade. Her name was Missy; we talked about horses. The last girl I love will be someone I haven’t even met yet, probably. They all count. But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like. These are the most important people in your life, and you’ll meet maybe four or five of these people over the span of 80 years. But there’s still one more tier to all this; there is always one person you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of these loveable qualities are self-destructive and unreasonable. The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, and they’re often just the person you happen to meet the first time you really, really, want to love someone.”

(I don’t know why I put that. It almost goes against what I’ve just wrote. Oh well, fuck you for judging.)

One thing is for certain when it comes to all experiences with love, however:

When one says he or she loves another, a choice is being made. A deep, strong decision that shakes the inter weavings of your life to its core. And yeah, it’s scary. But it’s a good scary.

Untitled Story 1

I like to write stories. Really entertaining (or at least I think so) and ultimately useless stories. Why?

Because I fucking can.

People like to say that clothes make the man, but nobody honestly believes this is true. I mean, why would they? Fabric is merely fabric; wool is simply wool. I think a better (but perhaps less practical) cliche would be ‘clothes make the mannequin.’

Last week I needed a sweater, which is always a problem. I don’t understand how to buy things; I always choke in the clutch. But in this instance I made (what seemed like) a brilliant decision: I walked into a Gap store and immediately purchased every garment the most eye-catching mannequin happened to be wearing. I actively became the human incarnation of an inhuman model, primarily because (a) I assume that the kind of people who dress mannequins spend a lot of time considering what looked fucking cool, (b) this eliminated decision-making, and (c) I am somewhat mannequin-shaped. What I bought, I suppose, is an outfit, which is something I’d never done before.

Now, this outfit basically has three pieces: (1) a powder blue sweater that looks like something I would wear if I became an oversensitive hipster living in North Carolina, (2) a collared dress shirt that you’re supposed to untuck on purpose, and (3) new jeans that are designed to resemble semi-old jeans.

I wore these items the very next day; the moment I looked into the bathroom mirror, I could tell it would be a controversial move. I looked totally fucking different in every fucking context.

“Who is this person?” I thought to myself. “I’ve never seen this person before.”

It suddenly dawned on me that I could disappear into a witness protection program simply by combining a blue sweater with an untucked dress shirt.

I start walking to work, and I can tell that everything about my life is instantly weirder. I feel like a mannequin. And this feeling is fascinating, because I have no idea how a mannequin is supposed to feel; without even trying, I’m instantaneously projecting onto myself my fictionalized assumption about how it feels to be an inanimate object.

As I take the elevator up to my work place, I anticipate that everyone in the office will have an immediate reaction to my sweater. I am absolutely correct.

“This is a stunning development,” says a fact-checker.

“Are you in love?” asks a woman I barely know.

“I am going to make my boyfriend buy that dress shirt,” claims an assistant.

On the whole, it seems, my ‘mannequin appropriation project’ is testing especially well with female audiences.

Men around the office are supportive, but somehow more skeptical.

“What happened to you?” asks a man I often eat lunch with. “Are you supposed to be an indie rocker now?”

I cannot overstate the cultural impact of untucking one’s dress shirt while wearing a sweater; if you haven’t tried this, you totally should.

“This is probably a good direction for you,” my lunch companion continues,”but this overt untucking is going to erode your outsider appeal. Plus, now you’ll have to listen to Dashboard Confessional all afternoon.”

“But this isn’t a statement about social class or personal iconography,” I say in response. “Don’t you get it? I’m a mannequin now. I bought these clothes off a mannequin, so I’ve become that mannequin. It’s like I’ve turned into a new person by turning into a nonperson, which is, like … oh, I don’t know — maybe this offers some kind of interesting insight on consumerism and vanity and what dictates who we really are.”

“Oh, really,” said my friend flatly.

And in an alternative reality, this is where he would have said, “Well, clothes make the mannequin.”

But that’s not what he said, because — in this reality — that is not a cliche that people say.

So we just went to lunch, and I spilled gravy on my Carolina sweater, because I am alive.

Thank you, sir. You are one of my inspirations as an aspiring poet.

Though I obviously have no proof of this, the one aspect of life that seems clear to me is that good people do whatever they believe is the right thing to do. Being virtuous is hard. The idea of doing good things simply because you’re good seems like a zero-sum game; I’m not even sure those actions would still qualify as ‘good,’ since they’d merely be a function of normal behavior. Regardless of what kind of god you believe in—a loving god, a vengeful god, a capricious god, a snooty beret-wearing French god, or whatever—one has to assume that you can’t be penalized for doing the things you believe to be truly righteous and just. Certainly, this creates some pretty glaring problems: Hitler may have thought he was serving God. Stalin may have thought he was serving God (or something vaguely similar). I’m certain Osama bin Laden was positive he was serving God. It’s not hard to fathom that all of those maniacs were certain that what they were doing was right. Meanwhile, I constantly do things that I know are wrong; they’re not on the same scale as incinerating Jews or blowing up skyscrapers, but my motivations might be worse. I have looked directly into the eyes of a woman I loved and told her lies for no reason. This act did not kill 20 million Russian peasants, but it might be more ‘diabolical’ in a literal sense. If I died and found out I was going to hell and Stalin was in heaven, I would note the irony, but I couldn’t complain. I don’t make the fucking rules.

Wait, am I really doing this again?
ohmygawd. 

<3