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[lyrics from the latest song I've written]

hold it inside just to get through this night
hold it inside don’t give up, you don’t have to fight now
no, not now

just keep it together, this composure feels like murder
bottled, held back
but I wonder what I’m keeping in

just give me a sign and I’ll follow you home
past the city lights and all I’ve known
just give me a sign and I’ll head back home
leave these city lights and then we’ll know

it’s simply too much
this beauty, but it’s fallen down
it’s broken now

And I’ll hold them inside all the pieces of broken lives
that I’ve seen

just give me a sign and I’ll follow you home
past the city lights and all I’ve known
just give me a sign and I’ll head back home
leave these city lights and then we’ll know
yeah, then we'll know

Clothed in white

This morning, as the clouds draped the tops of the mountains in a soft and ethereal white, I drove up into the foothills on a wet road through the rain and mist. I went up that road wearing a hideous monster, and I came down wearing something quite different.

Then one of the elders asked me, “These in white robes—who are they, and where did they come from?”
I answered, “Sir, you know.”
And he said, “These are they who have come out of the great tribulation; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore,
‘they are before the throne of God
and serve him day and night in his temple;
and he who sits on the throne will spread his tent over them.
Never again will they hunger; never again will they thirst.
The sun will not beat upon them, nor any scorching heat.
For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd;
he will lead them to springs of living water.
And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.’

Holding it together

I’ve reasoned the emotion out of it and can just speak plainly and unaffected. I can state my feelings as responses on a psychological level and talk about them objectively. I can watch you cry and stare off into space with indifference.

At least, that’s what you see. Inside, I’m barely holding it together, ripped apart by every word we’re having to say and decimated by every tear that rolls down your face. I’m so disturbed and distraught by the fact that I really tried this time for something real and failed that all I can do...is hold it in. The only way I can seem to express this chaos is through utter composure.

Too much

More and more I’m starting to feel that this world is simply too much for me. From injustice to beauty, duty to rebellion, hearing the perfect song, unrealized potential, what I have, what I’ve lost, what I’ll never have — all these things assail me with an unreckonable force. I am an autistic child standing in the drum line of a marching band. It’s too much. I see the things most people choose to ignore and I feel what most people choose to bury. And I have to. Because callousness to those things is more horrific to me than the pain they bring could ever be.

Singular

After so many years of being single, I'm starting to think that going home alone feels more right than it should. Do I like it? Well, that's a different story. But I'm starting to wonder if I can ever see it being any other way. Part of me is happy about this. Part of me is not. I almost don’t remember what life looks like any way but alone, yet I find no comfort in speculating "well, what if it stayed that way?" Though reading novels about zombies until I fall asleep in my recliner and waking up at 4am to stagger to bed does have its own charm...its own bachelor kitsch, I don’t think it will be enough — in the long run.

I tell you what

If one more student comes up to tell me that they are not happy with the grade they got on an essay because they "worked so hard on it," I may end up in prison for verbally assaulting a minor (is that punishable by law?).

Where the hell did these kids learn that if you "do your best" then you should be given whatever it is that you want? I guess I'll take it on as my métier at DU to teach the hard life lesson that "doing your best" is quite often not at all good enough.

Maybe I'll start putting two grades on every paper - one that says for effort: A++ and another of actual grade: C-
Then I can have a fine print disclaimer that reads "for effort grade represents no correlation to reality and, more importantly, counts for absolutely nothing in your final average for the course."

Yeah, that's what I'll do.

Sadness in Joy

A year or so ago, I wrote a piece entitled “Sadness in Joy.” In it, I attempted to explain how even in the most joyous moments in my life an undercurrent of sadness is always present. Today, I read another writer’s way of expressing what I so often feel. Alain de Botton puts it this way:

“A perplexing consequence of fixing our eyes on an ideal is that it may make us sad. The more beautiful something is, the sadder we risk feeling...Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and how incomplete our lives remain.”

The show must go on

I’m starting to hate every smile I fake. Whether for a stranger or for my closest friend, every one hurts a little more. Because on days like today, a smile makes me a liar, a laugh makes me a fraud. But not to worry — it's merely clinical, with its own special section in the DSM-IV I’m sure, that gives multiple steps to the appropriate cure.

Oh, God

Tonight I was listening to Manchester Orchestra's song "Shake It Out" and found the lyrics that brought me home.

I felt the Lord begin to peel off all my skin,
and I felt the wave within reveal the bigger mess that you can't fix.

Oh God, you've got to shake it out, shake it out,
You've got to break it down, break it out.

Allusion

I'm starting to think that holding off is not an option.

And so it seems

You can't resist her.
She's in your bones.
She is your marrow
And your ride home.

You can't avoid her.
She's in the air
In between molecules of
oxygen and carbon dioxide.

Only in dreams
We see what it means.
Reach out our hands.
Hold onto hers.
But when we wake
It's all been erased.
And so it seems
Only in dreams.

You walk up to her,
Ask her to dance.
She says, "Hey, baby, I just might take the chance."
You say, "It's a good thing
That you float in the air.
That way there's no way I will crush your pretty toenails into a thousand pieces."

Only in dreams.

Tough

The Krav Maga training center that I go to is in Five Points, which is a bit of a rough neighborhood. Developers are trying their best to gentrify the area, but I don’t think that’s working just yet. As soon as a new row of fancy mod townhouses are finished, they get tagged with graffiti. Homelessness, drugs, and drunks are still quite prevalent there.

Tonight as I was leaving Krav, I saw a black cat trotting across the road, and I wondered if cats have it as rough in Five Points as the people do. He was a pretty big cat, and he had a bit of a swagger to his gait, which made me think there might be a reason he’s the only cat I’ve ever seen roaming around there.

Once

Falling slowly, eyes that know me
and I can't go back.

“Burn the ships, man. Burn the ships. Don’t look back.”

Those were some lyrics in one of the songs by a band I went to see play tonight. That is what I want to do. Burn the ships. I feel like I’m starting on a new life — a new way of seeing and a new way of living. And I no longer want to go back to who I was or what I did before. But, given the opportunity, I will. I want to take away the means by which to return to that life. I want to burn the ships and never look back.

Farther

Now I'm empty, now I'm spent. And I don't believe in this. I don't fucking believe in this. But it doesn't scare me to write it. I have failed.

God forgive me.

You know I dreamed about you for twenty-nine years before I saw you.

You’re on your way. I can see it now. Because you swam the depths and found the creatures there that no one wants to see. But they didn’t kill you, and I hope that makes you not afraid anymore.

You know I dreamed about you, I missed you for twenty-nine years.

Of the many joys of being a teacher

I’ve been grading papers ad infinitum, and I have to share one of the gems I have come across. Writing about the War in Iraq, one of my students states, “Many people think that penetrative war, which is a policy stated in the Busch Doctrine, is a new strategic phase.” I had no idea this doctrine was named after beer and was about sex.

And yesterday, I had a student come into class about 45 minutes late. She came up to my desk, looking a bit haggard, and said, “I’m sorry I’ve been getting here late and that I’ve missed a few classes lately...” and I was expecting to hear that she was having health problems or that she had some family issues going on or something. But no. She then said, “I’ve been sleeping through my alarm.” Usually in such a situation, my natural and immediate response is, “It’s ok,” but I had no idea what to say to this. I just looked at her with more than a glimmer of incredulity in my eyes and said nothing.

“Nothing is fucked, Dude. Come on, you’re being very un-Dude.”

I need a Walter Sobchak in my life right now to be the calming voice of reason or just to simply put things in perspective by saying, “Fuck it, Dude. Let’s go bowling.” The turbulence started in my personal life, and all of a sudden work has gotten completely out of hand too. Miscommunications, disrespect, and a feeling like I’m screwing up when little of it is really my fault. (Those are the problems at work, not personal ones.) I need this quarter to end so these students will leave me the hell alone and so I can have time to re-evaluate why exactly I do what I do.

Options

I feel like I have two options at this point: 1) Let her consume me and my thoughts to the point of obsession until she’s mine, feeling that unrequited longing the old poets wrote about. 2) Kill it off. Kill the feelings and thoughts and memories and hopes until there’s nothing left. No memory. No regret. Nothing.

Options rephrased: 1) Drink and find something meaningless to fill the void. 2) The death of what I’ve struggled for years to believe in again — the very thing I found in her.

Or maybe, just maybe, I can put these thoughts aside and keep living knowing that even if this is as good as it gets, then I've got it pretty good.

You're a door without a key, a field without a fence
You made a holy fool of me, and I've thanked you ever since
And if she comes circling back, we'll end where we'd begun
Like two pennies on the train track the train crushed into one

Or if I'm a crown without a king, if I'm a broken, open seed
If I come without a thing, then I come with all I need
No boat out in the blue, no place to rest your head
The trap I set for you seems to have caught my leg instead

Raymond K. Hessel. 1320 SE Benning, apartment A

In the movie Fight Club, there is a scene where Tyler Durden drags a convenience store clerk into the alley out behind the store by gunpoint and makes the man get down on his knees. Tyler stands behind the man with the gun to his head as he goes through the man’s wallet. He finds an old student ID the man has and asks him what he had been going to school for. The clerk says, “Biology, mostly.” Tyler then asks him “What did you want to be?” The clerk responds, “a veterinarian.” Tyler then tells the man that he is going to keep his driver’s license so he will have his home address. He says that in six weeks, he’s going to check up on him, and if the man is not back in school on his way to becoming a veterinarian, then he’s going to kill him.

After some thinking and talking with friends, that is what I realized I want to be. I want to be an agent in people’s lives who changes things. I want to inspire people to live better than they did before. No, I probably won’t take such a drastic approach as holding a gun to their heads. Hopefully, I could persuade people through more positive means. But, as I’ve learned through my own experience, you have to be on the edge of losing everything before you can learn to appreciate anything.

I don’t know what a job like that looks like, but if you do – and you’re hiring – let me know.

Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessel's life.