The very nature of value.

 I am often tired of my circumstances. I feel if I am an artist my masterpiece is being carved by smashing my head against a marble slab. 

This self destructive compulsion is never fulfilled, there is only more scars.

That is how I feel most days… but I have learned a lot about some basic truths. Though most of them are painful or at the very least were painful. Like maybe quitting is the right choice sometimes.

I have tried my hand at painting, sculpting and game design. I have written poems, novellas and paint toy soldiers. I have attempted this with the ideas that most systems and disciplines are related to each other.

Yet, the only things I show a natural talent for are not playing guitar, or writing songs… it is writing and painting toy solders.

I don’t know why that is except the internal commentary inside my brain is chipping away at my self trying to find what is (if anything) eternal.

What am I? A spectator in something greater’s reality.

What is mine? What ever is put in front of me with consent.

Two anecdotes about my brother M a smart guy who has been through a lot and caused as much trauma as he has had inflicted on his soul.

When I Was fifteen my dad said “let’s have an arm punching contest between you and your younger brother.”  M was thirteen and already taller than me. He hit like a truck and I didn’t want to do it but I also did not want to yield. M punched another siblings arms till you could see the shape of his arm bone through the transparent bruises on the seven year olds arms. This is my family.

I agreed and the arm punching began it did not last long I melted down saying he hit my collarbone (when he had not done so). Kicking and screaming laying on the ground in real pain from the canon throwing arms of my younger brother. And my dad and brother stared down at me like Beatrice Kiddo in kill bill when she stepped on Eli drivers last eye.

The next anecdote is with the same brother. I played a game of chess with him till we were down to our kings but I also had a pawn. He kept saying “it’s a draw. You can’t win.”. We kept playing tension filling the room. And I checkmated him. He stood up shaking his head. “I am never playing again.” He said bitterly… and as far as I know he never has.

I was and am sensitive. I told him recently when I last saw him… “do you remember that time you put a gun to my head and said do you want to play Russian roulette?” (It was a small caliber revolver… but it was less than a foot away from my brain).

He looked scared when I brought it up. He is crippled up from a back injury. Like my sense of self was taken from me by my diagnosis… so was his cannon ball throwing days taken from him.

Once I was baby sitting my nephew Johnathen and my younger brothers were not M. And he said he was going to beat to death a neighbor kid for leaving him at school in the parking lot. I tried to get him to calm down he threw the table my three or four year old nephew was sitting at over and across the room a few feet. Telling me he would beat me to death if I ever did that again. I sat there with my hands up saying simply I won’t.

I got A and B on my standardized tests when I graduated from high school. I did good on the standardized tests.

I was home schooled and my parents both barely graduated high school. My dad was held back for not having enough credits to graduate. When I taught myself how to do algebra he didn’t know how to check it to see if I was correct. So we got my uncle too. I had got them all right.

I been thinking about things a lot lately. All these little traumas… I want to review books on here and let go but I am still processing… the sheer amount of bullshit I have seen in one life.

When I was activly psychotic (hallucinating and hearing voices). I would bum smokes off my neighbor Carlos and talk about life. He heard some of my anecdotes and said “back when I used to raid pits to fight… you would take the runt of the litter and tape it’s mouth shut and let the other dogs maw it so they could get a taste for blood. I think that’s what your parents did with you.”