skinnytie.com

Much in the same way a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder with Cheese is made with what is technically an all beef patty but is in actuality some sort of strange beef-ish distortion of man’s idea of what it is to hate, so too is this website technically a blog. One may argue the value of the chopped, reprocessed and undoubtedly out of date content presented here and I think that one would be wholly justified in doing so. Not only because it is like one to make these sort of well-formed fourth-wall penetrating observations but also because one tends to wear nice clothes, really did knock it out of the park at last week’s meeting and has an almost supernatural ability to make the right decisions in terms of delicate soaps. Here’s to you, one, and your taste in classical music!

It would seem, however, that those bone-dry days of skinnytie.com being just plain outdated are over.

You see, this morning something hit me. Not unlike John Bollata would on the walk home from middle school, this something hit me square in the face with the kind of force you’d expect to get from a stuck bull or a pissed off jackhammer set to motherfucker and plugged directly into the grid. Instead of gripping my backpack, choking back a few cups of the salty business and running like hell until my legs hurt more than my face, however, this particular something inspired me to stand up. I mean this both literally and figurativly here. I mean, I got out of bed and stood there, but something inside stood up with me.

I’ve had what I’ve been referring to as writer’s block for a few years now. The last peice I wrote with any furvor was a screenplay in early 2006, and even that was forced. I’ve been in this weird haze and until recently was almost completely unaware. It turned out to be a bit more complicated than writer’s block, though. I considered the idea that, perhaps, I was no longer capable of idea creation. This was an issue seeing as I am largely useless otherwise. Seriously; I have very little else to offer the world at large. If it requires tools larger than a soldering iron, any type of business sense or the ability to sell something to someone I am very much like the mechanism in nature that makes a platypus lay eggs: maybe interesting up front, but pointless and not entirely useful in the larger context. It has always been my ability to generate creative ideas and express them via creative media that has given me anything even resembling success.

The gaping stints of inactivity on this site directly reflect my ability to write. My ability to write directly reflects my ability to create and my ability to create directly reflects my current state of value – self or otherwise.

When I was a kid my brain would do this thing whereupon entering a room I had been in previously, from an unfamiliar angle, the room would seem completely alien to me. Only after a few moments of landmark recognition and processing would the whole thing sort of snap into relation and make sense to me. I had long thought that this was something I had grown out of but am convinced now that it is a feature of my particular lot in our collective attempt to lick the salt off of the human experience and this haze I mentioned has been keeping me from it. You see, I think that I’d established a sort of buffer – a cache for a level of variance I should not have been ok with but for some reason forced myself into. If shit didn’t make sense immediately – if that room didn’t resemble itself from an unfamiliar angle – I’d just overwrite the experience with the understanding that it was and that I should just know it and move on. This sort of fault accommodation is a dire and unfortunate thing, I assure you.

So back to the facial fuckery this morning. The sun just starts to crest my windowsill and I open my eyes. I look at Lex beside me and am rattled at what the light is doing with her shapes. As though by way of some sort of automated mechanism my mind immediately labels the situation as “girlfriend in bed” and turns off the magic of the whole thing; in less than a few seconds the part of my mind that reminds me I have to get out of bed and be in early today has moved on from “girlfriend in bed“, having logged it, and is urging me to get into the shower. I just sit there, though. I sit there staring.

It must have been twenty or thirty minutes of staring – the kind of staring that gets people arrested, I should think, as I was waging some sort of personal perceptive war inside and it had to have looked like the I-want-to-wear-your-skin-like-an-overcoat look by the way my muscles started to ache.

Then it happened; it hit me. Just like the strange angle room when I was a kid, everything just snapped into place.

It’s as though I have lived my life, for years, under the assumption that I am me and what I am doing makes sense, but only because I understood that this was the way it was supposed to be and I was following at least some of the rules I was expected to follow. After the snap, it feels now as though I recognize this room and I am absolutely positive that my landmark was that girl and her shapes.

This is not to say that I haven’t spent years living a real life with real decisions, real actions and real consequences – I absolutely have – I just don’t think I’ve been myself for a lot of it. Me, I write. I draw and make music and fucking create.

I am Loved. That feeling was my focal point and the rest of my infantile attempt to make sense of the prescriptivist persistant reality outside of my own flippant intellectual groping bent to respect that.

So, I’ve either had some sort of beautiful-girl-induced moment of absolute clarity that will direct my future actions henceforth or what sounds a lot like a localized intercranial saccular aneurysm.