Some Dandy Bullshit

[tyler-dandy]

A refresh.

Hello, tumblr.

I’m back and I’m doing something new.

[tyler-dandy]

1.15.18

Jean Paul-Sartre looks like Joe Arpaio, a little. At least he does in the low res-technicolor image on the cover of Being and Nothingness. A book I still haven’t read but it sits on my desk and his dead, thickly bespectacled eyes watch me as I sit at my computer loading my wax pen, watching The Office again, texting recklessly. I sat down to write a happy poem, it began: “You don’t like poetry or Morrissey, And I knew you were over me when you said you were over me.” I never finished it. I struggle with the idea that happiness isn’t complex or interesting enough. A friend of mine said he thinks poems are for the writer, not the reader. And he might be right. Crowds at open mics are often filled with glowing faces, illuminated by an iPhone screen as they mouth the words of their own poems during every reading before theirs. I try to speak plainly, I want to think clearly, I strive to have something to offer, I’m reaching out for a connection. And it is for me. At a certain level, it has to be. I don’t think the value of my time should be measured by whether or not my self-reflections are meaningful to someone else. But I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, reader. I’m glad you’re here wherever you are, reader. I hope I can be good enough, reader.

[tyler-dandy]

February 28, 2016. A poem.

If I had to guess I would say you think there’s more to the story. You’re right but want to make the story my inability to explain. Yes, I always have one foot out the door but make no mistake: the other is firmly in; always. The truth is known and told in fragments; always. We speak primarily in graceless speculation and outright fabrications. “I’m good, how are you?" “It didn’t always seem so futile." “I love you." Not to parse words but the harsh and crass verbs  you use to describe that intangible “us” is enough to make me think I’ve never known just what I'm thinking. To say nothing of you. I find myself wanting to despise your point of view. But never you. And know that I know that you’re worth it. When it hurts in this way it really means that it’s working. We could burn cool and idly emit smoke  or burn hot, shine bright, and love all we’re not.

[tyler-dandy]

Playing with shape and space.

[eoreu]

[tyler-dandy]

I'm on page 8. However, the formatting leaves something to be desired. I submitted this as 3 poems but it seems like they kind of just mashed them all into one. I emailed them about it, hopefully they change it but publication is publication.

[tyler-dandy]

Comfort and Discordance

Baseball's weird. So is getting older, the men's rights movement, and being asked to say hi for someone while you're on the phone. I've found myself at a loss for words lately. Sitting with sweaty palms in an awkward silence grasping for something innocuous to talk about. Can you believe how warm it's been lately? I'm writing this because I need to get it out of my system and hurl it into the ether—after all, no one's reading this anyway. My discomfort hasn't been the usual gridlock of wanting someone to like me; not wanting to be exiled for being weird, boring, insensitive, clingy, rude, intrusive, crazy, too loud, too quiet, elitist, childish, uptight, obscene. I'm still searching for the word for what's wrong instead of being in the moment, present in the room with those around me. I can't sit still yet I have no where I want to go. I can't explain the Möbius strip of this feeling because I'm still tracing it's path. I can't believe how cheap gas has gotten. 

[johnmichaelbarnett-deactivated2]

Don’t talk about these people. Let them talk about you, let them say what they want to say and hope the truth will find a way to the surface. Just take the opportunity to improve yourself. God knows you’re not perfect. Practice counterintuitive actions: forgive the unforgiveable, love the poisonous, empathize with the unbelievably psychotic. You’re not exactly sane yourself, you know. Nobody is, and if you can accept that, you can grow. The universe comes predisposed for balance; if you want bad people to feel bad, it’s as easy as doing nothing. Like honestly, it’s hard at first, but in time, it’s as easy as just not lying.

Dan Harmon, You’ll Be Perfect When You’re Dead (via havingchanged)

[tyler-dandy]

Mr. Sprinkles

“Nathaniel, Daddy has to take a ride. I won’t be around to raise you so I need you to know something before I go. You’re special, and this world can be very hard on special things. They’ll pick on you, they’ll hit you, they’ll dump you, diagnose you and develop you. And there will be days when you wish that everyone was like you, so that everything could be easy. But that’s how they think. They spend every day wishing that everyone was the same, and it’s that wish that keeps them from being special. So when they come for you with their knives out, you just smile and forgive them. Because ordinary things say, ‘Hello,’ and ‘Goodbye,’ but nothing that’s special can ever die.”

http://www.vh1.com/video/shows/acceptable-tv/139539/mister-sprinkles-part-1.jhtml

Really dark but really fucking good.

[tyler-dandy]

“Manic”

I'm all anxiety and endless nicotine withdrawals, watching the sunrise through broken blinds while I sober up then sleeping through the best of my intentions. I'd rather stay inside in the same clothes I wore yesterday than inhale the dust that fills the dry, Arizona air and turns to mud in the inevitable sweat rivulets. And I sing sad, half-written songs to myself that I'll never finish because depression is a poor mentor but sometimes it hurts too much to care and sometimes a blank screen and the empty beer bottles that gather on the armrest of my ugly love-seat are all I have to talk to. All these paroxysms of guilt and self-loathing form a circle or many overlapping like an indecipherable Venn diagram of my asymptotical approach to self-actualization. And fuck your opinion of what I do with my life: I'll love and weep and fuck everything up and follow my bliss until my synapse-souls stop firing. I could pretend I'm not scared, I could pretend to be what our ad-libbed abnegating society thinks is normal and therefore good but what's the difference between that and having never been at all? Does anyone else think the same thoughts I do? Does anyone else notice the ground shake as I step?

[tyler-dandy]

[tyler-dandy]

"I may be drunk, but"

such a sorry qualifier, never preceding anything profound. It's just an apology,  followed by an error in judgement: “I think I'm in love.”  A feeling like airplane take off pelvic uneasiness or something even more terrifying or tantalizing.  And I'm trying so hard just to be decent, keep a strong face, and maintain a safe distance.  I'm thin skinned and often miscomprehended, an apprehensive shut-in, and well meaning misanthrope. Like a young, pigeon-toed Henry David Thoreau.  Delusions of grandeur aside, I'm used to losing  so I'll err on the side of caution  too often. I sit at stoplights and count the beats of the branches blowing in their wind like the finger of a lazy conductor or a languid Adam reaching out for a bearded God. And I remember the mix of warm breezes and cool, conditioned air through the lens of road trips, field trips, and long drives talking about how we'd rather live anywhere but here. And if I die before I wake, and if there is a god,  and if there’s expressed interest in taking my soul  then it seems appropriate that I should, I guess, let him/her/it/them have it/him/me/us. By now,  my mind works through polycontractions, contrarianism, and contradictions. And I still think I'dn’t’ve any of these problems if I could have left after just one drink.

[tyler-dandy]

“Storytelling reveals the truth without making the mistake of defining it.”

[tyler-dandy]

Unemployment

I woke up again with no job and decided it was best to go back to sleep. I got home from a friend’s place at around 5 this morning to find my Dad eating fried eggs and toast in the kitchen, already starting his day. He said good night, I said good morning and I collapsed into bed. The sun is starting to set now and I haven’t heard back on the tentative job offer waiting on word from my background check. Though I told Justin, the HR guy, what they’d find in the interview. Two felony charges: drug possession and drug paraphernalia. Before you jump to conclusions about how edgy and dangerous and sexy I am: it was just pot. Sorry to disappoint. I’m in a deferred prosecution program—read as: I pay $15 dollars a week to have someone watch me piss in a cup, which is only a little more expensive than downtown—and until I finish this “treatment” program the charges stand on my record. Pro-tip: if you’re picked up with weed in Arizona just take the misdemeanor or you’ll find yourself quite unemployable.

So what did I do with my day? What did I accomplish with this free time I’ve been afforded? A couple hundred words in that novel I’m always talking about, a little bit of Starcraft II, I masturbated a couple times.

I was going to be so much more than this.

[tyler-dandy]

"I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

[tyler-dandy]

"Futilitarianism"

I don't know my dog's opinion of me only that he wags his tail whenever I speak. Who knows what breadth of judgments  or assessments lie behind that brindle brow and panting tongue. Or what he thinks I think of him when I pretend to throw a ball and expect him to run  after a ghost; exploiting his schema of endless throw and retrieve. It's only out of trust that he turns and starts down the stairs  before returning to his seated pose and fixed stare. I must seem a liar, even to him. What he must know about me that I have hidden from myself. But what does it matter,  all the things I don't know or notice or care to see? When he doesn't seem to doubt himself,  his tail often still wagging as I try to scold him, to convince his innocence there's more to life than games. But maybe he's right, and I'm just not brave enough to admit the futility of taking life so seriously. I like to believe there's sympathy, an inkling, in his presenting me what I wish to throw away or can't let go. What does it really matter to us on Earth if the planet is flat, round, or pear-shaped? If the universe is infinitely expanding or truly infinite, if there are parallel worlds to ours that we'll never reach, or happier versions of ourselves we'll be happier never to meet. All these hopeless what-if's raise hackles and hell in my life, while the most obvious thing of all has never even occurred to him, I'm sure. If this joy will ever end or if there's any point to retrieving the ball, again.

[tyler-dandy]

“Dream is not that which you see while sleeping it is something that does not let you sleep.” ― A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Wings of Fire: An Autobiography “If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets.” ― Haruki Murakam