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Writtin' Thread

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fatty:
I picked a song to accompany this post. I think this is better than reading in silence. Maybe I should do this for all my posts. You might get to sample some of my music tastes.
Fat Freddy's Drop - Ray Ray

I noticed that a number of my favourite albums have a song towards the end that have a few minutes in the middle of a song where the music peters out and it’s just silent. It is an experience which echoes other period of reflection and introspection.


You’ve been listening to this album, letting the music sink into your subconscious. It plays in the background of your thoughts or attention directed elsewhere. Then you realise that the actual music has stopped, and for longer than usual period. The echoes of the music you can still hear, but then they get softer and suddenly you realised how loud the silence is. Of course it’s not actually silence; it is punctured by background noises which you didn’t hear before. Time slows. Soon it is creeping forward like glass sliding down its own surface, pulled by gravity.

By this point, the memory of the music is almost gone, it’s bouncing around but you can’t quite piece it together. Then it returns. Within moments, you are swept back up into the music like no time had passed.


I find travelling home on the train a similar experience. I guess this a very personal response to travel and it is also reflected in other situations.


After a busy day of moving yourself, going places and doing things, you’re now resigned to being moved down an arbitrary route at an arbitrary pace. There is nothing new to look at, nothing surprising or unfamiliar. The comfort of home is in the distance, but you can’t hurry towards it, you can merely sit and wait till you get there.

Maybe the chaos of the day is still bouncing around your head. Even here you can not get a break from the noise and movement, turning thoughts over an over idly until you fall asleep. Other days, you might use music to drown out everything else, something with a strong bass and fast moving, to shut out the rest of the world.

When all the chaotic thoughts die down, collapse from exhaustion much like your body feels like doing, and when the music slows or bores you, you start to hear the loud silence.

You realise that the background noises are deafening. The whir of the air conditioning, the bumpy click-clack of the train over the tracks and the rattle of carriages are cacophonous. Your ears aren’t the only sense being bombarded. The smell of food, McDonalds, coffee, old newspapers, pee, and sweat lingers. The vinyl seat is slightly sticky; the plastic and chrome surfaces are suspiciously smooth. A draft moves around your legs. At each stop inertia pulls you back and forward, the cold dry voice comes over the loudspeaker, and the automatic doors beep as they close.

Don’t concentrate on the landscape; it’s drab and dark, the backs of houses and shops behind chain-link fences. Don’t count the stops, it just makes you realise how many of them there are. Don’t count the minutes, each one slides past slower if you do.

This is when your thoughts turn to the ups and downs of the busy day; you take stock and put things back in perspective. If you were driving or moving yourself, you would have current events and occasions to be concentrating on. When these are gone, you have to listen to the silence for a brief moment.

Suddenly, it’s your stop, you stand up; move quickly into the cold air and off home. Dinner is on your mind and your heavy feet hurry to bring you there. And you’re swept back into the speed of life, barely remembering the trip.

Cartilage Head:
 I'm pretty out of it right now, and I am going to try to sum up my most recent wacky-dream.

Basics

Too tired to stand, too tired to sit, too tired to lay. Golden boy throwing pennies in your direction, cackling through reddened lips and crooked teeth. Sitting still, can't concentrate. TV blares cartoons, news station, history channel, mouse advertisement? No roof on the hallway, stretching to the playground. We get soaked on our way to the car. Car is vomit colored, purple and green, then yellow and blue and violet. We get asked to make the centerpiece, we choose a piece of bread. She begs us to please please please pay attention and I just smile and think and sleep and wake and wander down the hall to the office, to the mail room. Fake plants and chairs. She screams that she wants us gone and so we go. We came home. We get soaked on our way to anywhere.

Mobius_Logic:
poetry! yes!

    

I want to go to the arboretum

our best features are things we've stolen
from books we liked, send away this heartless generation,
it's photographers are depressing me, i want to get my fingers
dirty and colorful and paint your face so thick
that you can only smile when you really mean it

last night i dreamed we had to send a cat to hell
we buried it by the school and you couldn't stop crying and
i think this says a lot about why we keep some photographs
for so long till they've faded to white again and it's like
a picture of heaven or the ceiling of a hospital

i will only love you until you tell me all of your secrets
and then you will burst at the seams and a thousand tiny birds
will come forth from inside and carry
what is left of your soul to beautiful places
where everyone is afraid to talk too loudly
and i will spend the rest of my life looking for them

i think our lives are mostly lost if we never go
insane i drive past cemeteries and imagine
a thousand decomposing grandmothers and lovers
crying quietly and i lay down on the back seat
and give up on enlightenment and ever having clean skin
and trying to find the heart beat of a thousand tiny birds

newborns make the best poets but accountants understand
god the best, I am a horrible card player because I'm much
too scared to loose anything and I look at the kings and queens
and I wondered how many fractured souls are hiding in the corners
of castles and i go to the beach and count
all of the fatherless princes swallowing gun powder
let us die pointless heroes

we have become creased like the favorite pages of our favorite
books and there are days where none of my pens work
and the paint is heavy on all of our faces and the man in the back
of the bus was giving away cigarettes last night and he used to be
six years old and so did I but sometimes it's hard to remember and sometimes
I just go over the numbers in my head like an alcoholic accountant

and sometimes when i sleep i dream i'm in a space as big as
the house my parents got married in and there are trees everywhere
and you can't hear the cars on the freeway for all the singing of all the tiny birds

Patatat:

--- Quote from: Leinad on 26 Aug 2008, 18:35 ---Hmm, that is actually a nice bit of work right there. I like the general flow and the tempo, while different, is nice. It is something of a used up story line, featured in a lot of writing, but I guess it is pretty damn relevant these days, so it can be excused.

The whole idea of "soldier returns home to family who don't understand" but with a twist, a twist of "no one really cares" is different, in that I haven't read too much of that, and I like this piece. Sure it is depressing, but I have had friends go away, and I can relate to the "this place hasn't skipped a beat with me gone". I noticed that too, people always say they miss people, but humans have a way of separating those feelings from everyday life and moving on, prioritizing and just keep rolling. Sad, and I think you captured that very nicely.

Also the mom caring, crying, writing to her son, but the son still taking his life, that is another interesting element. It suggests that in Iraq he brewed a sense of detachment, not a sense of "no one cares for me." I think a lot of people think "they'll regret it when I am gone" but he knows for a fact at least one person will, yet he takes his life anyways. Maybe this was influenced by his girlfriend leaving him? He feels that women don't really love him, simply use him as a depository for their affection, possibly explaining why he disregarded that his mother wouldn't want him gone, would miss him? He says he felt bad about that, but not bad enough to stay alive, apparently.

All in all it seems like you captured a lot of different emotions in a compact piece of work, good job!

--- End quote ---

Thank you! I just started kind of writing, I am happy with how it turned out. I think it could of been a lot better if I actually sat there, and planned it out more.

WriterofAllWrongs:
Proximity Dilemma

A coppertop tired of powering the system
It melts to release these signals
what are run through in the auxiliary channel
overandoverandoverandover
for lack of a computational comprehension
in hopes of boiling down the components
to more compatible lines of digits and faux-phonics
The mechanical dismay in beeps and chirps
For lack of a more articulate form of noise
sounds a subtle alarm to primary
in morse code: ALERT POWER DOWN IMMINENT STOP
That tap dance hits hard on the main monitor
whose facility for interaction drops sharply to keep up the quota
Steam is emanating from the core
The circuitous mess of copper wires and input/output
Shorting in minor faculties and losing the cognizance
and the sensory and the basic orientation
Directional analysis shows basic solitary stations
All umpteen thousand yards away

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