I wrote this possibly in 2019 as a treatment for a video for one of my songs off of my record “Quarrel”. I still believe in the vision I had for this record as the many visceral landscapes have not been achieved. But anyway, here is a glimpse of what I envisioned for one of the songs: “The Sea”.,,

They are the children left – descendants of the human race, whom survived the nuclear blast – after the collapse of the global empire.

The nuclear blast destroyed all infrastructure and further poisoned all natural resources, leaving the land and the sea barren.

Affected by the toxic radiation, many living beings died immediately… Those beings whom adapted to the poison, became radioactive mutants, passing this gene onto their offsprings. 

The life expectancy of anything became almost impossible to predict. As after birth, most beings experienced accelerated growth spurts. Aging exponentially in minutes, a baby can become an adult in a week, and if it survived the environment, dies of old age within a month. 

The remaining scientists developed a vaccine which blocked the growth spurts, but they were incapable of completely reversing the mutant gene which affected aging. So the life expectancy for any human is eighteen years, if that. They also were incapable of treating individual mutations; as the gene affected each human differently.

The human survivors live in the deep tunnels of once major hubs, creating underground shanty towns; or they populated caves until the rising tide flooded these temporary cities. The ever rising tide has drowned entire islands. The survivors have returned to an ancient practice of nomadism.

The survivors (ages seven to fifteen):

Gus – because of their mutation they can only communicate through sounds. Their best octaves are those of seagulls: shrieking a soaring through the permanently blood orange sky – which rains acid – and their violent cawing when irritated. They are also twelve feet tall (and still growing), with almost elastic like limbs.

Beau – because of their mutation they absorb matter, and when agitated they become an enormous glowing mass of blue atomic energy. Their vibrations is a magnitude! Electrifying all the relics that they and their siblings find broken. They believe they were once the ruler of the sea: The Blue Whale.

Pen – because of their mutation, they have gill like openings around their neck making breathing the already toxic air difficult. Their hands and feet are webbed and flipper like… They are oval shaped, making walking and running difficult. So on days the children have to run from the acid rain or rising tide, Pen’s siblings take turns carrying them on their backs. Pen believes they could swim as gracefully as a penguin in the Sea.

Elie (offspring of Beau) – because of their mutation their skin can easily create static. They can burn everything, so they cannot wear regular clothing. Because of their mutation they are capable of creating fire, and help keep them and others alive. They believe that in the sea they are an electric eel.

Buccoo – because of their mutation they change color and shape: expressing their urgent emotion in color, and mimicking their environment. Their most impressive and tranquil mimicry is changing into a tree… They recently discovered that their branches (their extended reach) had the ability to create buds which blossoms with various blooms of color. The children read about “Trees” on a tablet they restored. Buccoo believes that in the sea, they can become an entire reef where all can inhabit!

Scenes:

The children are performing a dance battle. Gus break dances at the start of the music. The musical instruments are from the relics, objects of the old world, which the children have collected and recreated to make sounds. When they are not scavenging for better shelter and food, the children perfect their instruments and dance moves. 

With their elastic like neck, Gus interchangeably shrieks up to the blood orange sky, as their dance gracefully soars like a seagull. They end with an infinity pose, while crying their best seagull. 

It is an invitation, as Beau takes Gus’s energy and magnetically recreates their shadow. While Pen’s webbed feet and hands pulsates vibes and sustains this interaction, both Gus and Beau dance like the image frames from the broken cell phones (relics) they restored. 

Needing each other, the children look at each other with an understanding. As they perform the synchronized group part for the dance.

There is an old folk tale which the children discovered on one of the relics. An old folk tale completely possessing them. It was the tale of a mysterious seacreature, called The Douen. 

As it was told, The Douen lured children to the sea. This folk tale of The Douen was older than any of the worlds the children learnt of, as the tale was used as a cautionary example to scare children from venturing into the sea or else The Douen will have you for all of eternity! 

The children were not frighten by The Douen. In fact, they wanted to find this mysterious sea creature, as none of them had ever experienced a “beach”… The sea of the old world was not what they’ve lived with. The children can all swim, but they all could never swim enough to survive the rising tide! 

After they all proclaimed their different stories of encountering The Douen, the children went to sleep searching for The Douen.

The Douen discovers their dreamings and visits their blood orange sky that rains acid. The Douen invites them into its ocean where the children became what they are:

<This is at the climax of the song, nearing the end where the guitar explodes alongside the piano’s garden forming flowers>

Bucco transformed into a reef garden, with ever growing green vegetation, while Elie sporadically electrifies this hiddenness, while Beau gloriously spews blue through their vibrating magnitudes, while Pen swirls, somersaults gracefully through the currents, while Gus keenly looks from above, gently walking barefoot, as they squeal a joy unimaginable.

The Sea

Fragile
Not even a warm stomach
Can bear these cycles
of the starkly rushing wind
exhale in crisp as clear
Bares your skin and pulse your footsteps
What was a cool breeze now penetrates and eviscerate any warmth from your layers
It is a reminder
Winter is coming

Twenty-Eighteen has been both a really challenging and rewarding year. I’m thankful I was able to accomplish the goals I set out for myself. I’m thankful for my family, and the friends in my life who’ve supported me on the journey of coming out with my first EP, QUARREL.

Nothing in this life can and has prepared
any of us for losing anyone…

Especially someone as special

a special existence?

Could a special existence
make more sense?

Even in the randomness?

I have experienced dualism
finding others like him
little bits of his laughter

busting out at my response
at the world as he evaporates
as I get frustrated and breaking
everything my little but always bigger
Brother…

When we were little
he would tease:
“You were adopted!”

“But we look alike…”

He knew it confused me
since I told him in secret:

“We are twins.”

“You know we’re not, right?”
He wanted to make sure I knew…

That out of our two years
days, minutes, seconds
which separated us
was a distance…

The deep down of living
with anyone who could
recognize you?
From a distance?
From a travelled
separation?

“Yeah, but we still are?”

I float around with this question
as he never answered…
Maybe got frustrated with it?
Maybe because he was protecting me…?

I can still hear his background
grinning, hahaing as I try to break
Everything!

Giving licks on every end
because divisive is at the root
of this struggle.

When the call of unity
as the celebrated front
is all about the erasure of screams.

Divisive is at the root of this struggle.

Desperately wanting to forget how this all came to be.
Demanding others to turn the other cheek.
Divisive is at the root of this struggle.

Valuing only answers which falsely supports “supreme.”
Valuing one future, when future is multiplicity.

Listen and hear it:
Future is Multiplicity!
Future is Multiplicity!
Future is Multiplicity!

Like parallel lines:
We’ll meet in infinity…
We’ll meet in infinity…
We’ll meet in infinity…
We’ll meet in infinity.

Divisive is at the root of this struggle.

tHE IdeA that someone
can know you is impossible.

your very name
provokes investigation
if someone wants to know
more than the surface.

I met you in 2012
you wore mismatch Converses
maybe that was meant to be a purpose

I did not care about their purpose
then intentions?
I cared more about knowing.

In a protective way
I still wanted to know more

more than mismatch shoes
paranoid assumptions

the invalid account
for which does not tell
allow anything other
than your perspective
from what is learnt
in what is believed
by our own poison
by what we are told.

Maybe self possessed

sorts for reasons

when looking out

is a measure for not

not fall into this sea

since

flies cover my home

because I’ve died several times?

It must be in itself, within itself?

As a whole other story

one which cannot be edited?

It is a coliseum which does not even exist:

assumed colors

patterns

unrecognizable radius

presumed un-giving

which cannot speak?

A nothingness which means nothing

a line that none of us understand…

I understand as I lay my mess here?

Is that the absorption my body holds

that begs deeply

tide siren sigh

exhausted by hunger: a desire

to see her difficult look

which to me resembles

everything true?

Continue

we can look at each other

with such suspicions

eyes that are sharply rich

with a much effective presence

a dark yellow dance of wanting

maybe this is hope

Still peeking, even while it hurts
still wandering like it is meant to be
when the worse is not even death…

A craving carried in such unknown
can you remember how to stand why?
Such a certain frequency
affecting that every piece of being… ?

Heaven does not want my blasphemous beautiful ass
and I do not want heaven’s pristine bullshit…

Sometimes positivity is not useful, since it does not have anything to do with healing. Neither being positive or negative has anything to do with healing, because for one, healing is active by itself, it is an action of itself. Positive or negative are adjectives, stagnant, inactive, placements, which needs a verb to suggest movement, the verb “being” to fully achieve what they want to mean. Again, useless!! Useless, in terms of healing.

I am reminded of a physical injury which I am still yet to fully recover from. Last September, during a performance, I injured one of my fingers. I remember not feeling anything at the moment when my knuckle smashed into the rim of the drum. I remember the blood however. The blood spurted everywhere, and kept flowing excessively during the entire performance. I kept going and it is possible that the mixture of excitement and nervous adrenaline may have been the reason I felt nothing when the impact occurred. Of course, my finger eventually stopped bleeding, but the pain of it, the pain of the internal injury still has not stopped… Granted, the pain is not as intense as the beginning days of healing, but my point is that it still has not fully recovered.

I remember being concerned whether the injury would affect and hinder my playing the drums, because I could not bend, flex the finger without experiencing severe pain. I can do it now with at times not much pain, but the skin feels like it would tear apart when I bend my knuckle, because the injury trauma occurred at the joint. I wonder when and if it would fully heal…

I believe the reason this incident reminds me of positivity and negativity is that the healing of my finger has nothing to do with being positive nor negative, but it has a lot to do with time, enduring the painful process of getting well… And getting well never ends as long as you are alive. Who knows what other ailments will develop because this injury has now opened a vulnerability to other painful unrest that is perhaps outside of the normalcy of wear and tear, maybe in addition to wear and tear because I still drum.

I am starting to believe that the reason there is a huge encouragement and push by others to recommend such desires in fruitless statements: be positive, being positive; is that possessively, they do not know what else to say, but then there is the self interest involved in those exertions. Because no one wants to be around sadness. Not even sad people want to be around sadness.

I am a sad person, and I know that I do not actively seek sadness, even though sadness has been my companion for the vast majority of my life. I guess that statement, “misery loves company” is really an untruth, and a true misunderstanding of circumstances, and as well, how we are together and how we are not…

The group I attend every other week had a holiday gathering which was organized by my therapist. My therapist had everyone speak about what they were thankful for, talk about any goals they had achieved or they are working on. This was an incredibly difficult exercise for me to sit through, because I listened and felt the pain and struggles that my fellow fighters are experiencing. I wanted to leave because it made me feel even worse than I already felt, to hear such pain and see the tears, the blood. I said inside, I do not want to hear this, and this is key in my argument. My internal thought of fleeing and statement of, “I do not want to hear this,” is what is happening with the collective suggestion of “be positive,” “being positive.” A very vague remedy for pain, while pain is not uncertain. There is not a vagueness surrounding pain.  So a vague remedy,  just leads me to believe that it is a hot air balloon of self interest. Also, and because it is so vague, it leaves so much room for labeling/defining actions that are by chance ways of healing the hurt as negative.

There is not a formula for healing hurt, at least internal hurt. I have not discovered a structural format for the erasure of hurt. It seems to me that “be positive,” “being positive,” pretends to attempt this almost impossible science. To go back to my finger, because I found that my observations on the healing process of my finger was and is poignant, and if I am going to believe and entertain that there is a science to healing internal hurt, then I think observing how my physical body heals is the best point to start.

Like I said, time was and is crucial. I let my finger do what it needs and is capable of doing at the moment, undisturbed. I let it rest. It is like what a friend told me once when we were discussing this very subject about positivity. And she said that it is like having the flu, you let it run its course. I could not agree more. But, I also recognize that many of us cannot afford this run its course, because we are constantly weighing which is more severe: losing a finger over not having anything to eat? These are both impossible states to be weighed against each other. It just breeds more sickness, and there is nothing positive to breathe about after deciding that, yes, maybe my finger is not that important.

I was also active in helping my finger try to heal. When it was capable of doing basic movement, I did those small attempts. The physical wound had made new skin, and it seemed like the internal hurt that the joint experienced needed to start its process of healing. Whenever I could, I made small flexes. It was almost like I was reminding my finger that it could perform such actions. It was painful, but I endured the painful process of getting well. After a month, I noticed that my finger was improving. But all of this would not be possible without time.

If I were to apply this process of healing for internal hurt, who knows, maybe it would work. It seems more plausible than a vague remedy of a saying.

One of the things I noticed that seems helpful is being listened to without judgement, because like I said, healing takes on ways that may be viewed as negative. I have been trying to heal for a long time, and now what I have noticed in a false adoption is my inability to physically cry, even though in my dreams I am crying and inside I am crying. It is deadening to not be capable of simply crying. But in my act of being positive, I walk around with a smile and I laugh. People like you when you do these things. You can get a job if you are doing these things. Which reminds me of another saying: “Fake it until it is real.” Which just seems to share the sameness of “to be positive.” Except, it is also deadening to fake what you feel internally, and there is nothing healthy or healing about this practice. I understand that there is a consequential backlash to this, but honestly, if I have to fake how things are in order to get the help that I need, then this whole thing is just stupid. Because it is not a game, an equation nor a sum.

At my group’s holiday gathering, a fellow fighter was totally choking up and holding back her tears. You could see that she was; it was clear that she was trying to be strong. Another fighter got up and walked over to her and just genuinely hugged her. The tears flowed freely, and another fighter got up and gave her tissues. These little acts were powerful and may not have include a self interest. Most important, it made this fighter feel less alone and stronger in the process of healing. Crying is important in the process of healing. Yes it does involve enduring a deep pain to cry, but it is like with my finger enduring the physical pain of basic movement which actively helped. The brain is a muscle and actively doing activities helps, but the mind is totally under-discovered for each and every individual. Is not that what makes us unique? So if the mind is in pain, then the entire body is dying.

Another facet of “be positive,” “being positive,” positivity that is stifling and deadening is when your experience of pain is being compared to another’s. The thought that comparisons would present movement that is healing is a lie, a complete lie, which discounts both you and the person you are being compared to, to their experience.

I did not realize that the experience of severe pain was measured on a quantitative benchmark… I did not realize that the experience of pain was an item. This is where comparisons of something that is internally felt becomes deadly. There is firstly the assumption of an imbalanced model for pain, which seems to only happen when considering Capitalism.  That you are better off than that person, a dynamic that is based on so many fallacious illusions, hate, and is just hurtful.

It is a hurtful, fallacious illusion equating your experience of what may seem like the bottom to you, to what you project as worst than or the bottom of bottoms for someone else. And this does not have anything to do with having a Zen thought. The idea of bottom suggests that you are dead, while you are still alive. Being dead inside and walking around alive is a horrible feeling. There is nothing positive about such a state. So how then, feeling good about your bottom is positive just because it looks better than the bottom of someone else’s plight?

Bottom does not invite the possibility of healing, because it is supposedly fathomable. Bottom presents no movement, no process, while living to heal is unfathomable, which makes this idea of bottom incongruous. If we are to entertain this thought dynamic that, “at least I am not this person whose bottom is worst than mine,” then we have no idea about compassion, empathy or even sympathy.

As I said, this comparison discounts both your individual experience of pain/hurt, and as well the other person’s, who you think their bottom is worst than yours, when they may not even feel like they are at their bottom. This process of comparing then becomes an insult for both individuals’ dignity, because this has nothing to do, or even comes close to addressing the real reasons. It does not even allow another perspective, but it however supports an ideal of self interest in the most negative of ways.

I am wearisome of positivity… There is a place and time for positivity and as well negativity, but not all the time, and honestly we have not achieved that thought of positivity collectively to even celebrate/adopt its notions. Most and many people are not capable of experiencing both mutually. So since positivity has not been defined “correctly” in a process that is helpful, in its role during the process of healing, it then becomes a typical band-aid: unrealistic, un-pragmatic, un-exerting any empirical evidence as a real scientific methodology for healing hurt.

What seems real, pragmatic for me while trying to heal, what I have discovered for myself is having TIME. Time to learn how to cry, to endure the feelings that are living inside, to understand them. To have TIME to learn new ways of coping, since some wounds are more severe than others. I am not undermining resiliency, but resiliency is very individual. It is even individual when you consider your body, and how it heals.

As for instance, going back to my finger, this was not the first time I have had an injury because of some activity, but this was a serious wound that I could not even go get checked out. It has taken a long time for just the skin to grow again, and stretch over, for the wound to close itself up. During this time, while skin was trying to reach each other, where the gash divided them, I worried that the wound would never close, but it did. It just took the understanding that time was necessary for the separated skin to really heal and grow again.

The word “radical,” and its wide-spread usage and thought really bothers me. There is nothing radical about exposing a premise for its shit, that has been consistently been challenged, and has been shown that the existing argument (premise) to be shit. If not hateful, if not just completely ridiculous … How is it radical then, when it is known that the well implanted whatever (shit), which brought this product (premise,shit) is exclusive and has been dismantled in thought (solely, but continues as a prosit… Infinity!), demonstrated that the previous way was an array of how useless the “scheme” was/is to begin with?

Am I an item?

Maybe radical is synonymous to what a grunt would mean, like branding a FB or whatever social media post with radicalism? And even then, the question is whose grunt gets to be synonymous syntactically and in the patterns of an invariant (both as a constant and a supposed anomalous reaction)?  The young, the not so young, the dead? Even though it is catchy to say and attach “radical” or any other word that has not been manipulated into the wider world of catchy flavor? Maybe, “attacking previous shit” is a better branding/label thought on how reactionary human behavior is, and how much shit we have to account for, being “human, humanistic!” throughout history (some only recently joined the bandwagon group, and are now supposedly recognized as “human”)?

Maybe the word “discovery” is more useful as a word for such circumstances? Less catchy (likely, honest? An open air that discovery founds and may involve “I” since it already exist), but more relative and with more crunch!