Fleeing the Mind Police

Hello. I am writing from another end, another screen hoping to reach the place where shit can actually make sense. Forcing sense and meaning into words, daily ritual and practice. Shit shit shit. I am tired of shit. and I gripe a cloud blog my shit i’m tired of. because i am young restless, 21, and tired of giving a fuck, only giving a fuck, only ponk, only fake, only lies. only visages. only staying at home all day just to see my mom happy„ just to see the do jump and wag her tail. Just to not give a fuckin shit. Only to have memories and feelings hit me like bricks you only barely miss. I feel like not much does not mean much. and were programming, hoping, and cramming and not really learning. capturing, glimmering, and chasing, but avoiding the questions, not finding answers. Told they are looked up within us. Told they emerge through spiritual guides, transcendental moments of self actualization. Not just the bullshit psychology. Is there a condition for being lonely, anxious, and afraid? I am paranoid of the love I thought I once felt, the love I made myself live for. The love that will break you down, make me feel like dissolving into an empty desert. Empty. I avoid remembering only to remember. I try to recapture the voice of reason, of affect, waning, deeper and deeper and all it was was feelings.

Feelings I should not try to hopeless relive and capture, like a movie playing in my mind, squeezing the air out of my chest, t ears running, head spinning, all the affect was too much and overwhelming, I told them I could not do it anymore. Afterwards, they let me sit outside and smoke a cigarette. Not that smoking cigarettes meant anything, it was just what you did to pass time. Could give less a piss about the cigs you smoke, what you wore, or who you were with. I am stuck on some temporal delusion of how his hip felt, how he looked on my couch or before he fell asleep. feigning love and sadness, mixed up into a tornado of fragments. fragments of what I thought was and never will be myself. reliving to capture my own fatalistic and hopeless revisions.

Nino, eres problematico
Sin Verguenza!
Te odio, tus manos, dedos qubrados, espino quebrado
La cascara de un hombre, pero no, estos palabras no son sufficiente para decribir su mente tan cerrado, conrazon cerrado. Limitado en so
Limited to one point of view, your possible end, demise, what became of a single white young male who transferred himself from Detroit, to Santa Ana, to Long Beach. From my bed, to the pub, to the streets, I can see you wandering, sad and empty at nights. My visions of you are never without the uneasiness deep within your soul, the inconsistencies of your promises. Lies and paranoia; your reality is your delusion. I think you dig a hole of yourself, filling your world with characters, figures, and whatever works for you. Yet, no amount of clever or even thoughtful effort seems enough to fill the void. What my therapist describes as a “walking accident”, how many other lost souls transplant themselves to the edges of gentrifying cities, in the curbs and street corners of black and brown folk? Your reality is unique, hard to swallow, difficult to imagine, which is why I always felt that there was more to you than what you presented, what you avoided, shielded, “defended” and simply kept out of the picture, regardless of our level of intimacy and trust. I am told that I have a good deal of “clarity” of the situation, but sister, this is only after much pain, lonliness, and sorrow, have I come to fully realize my full strength and your full and deep levels of bullshit.

You phone is disconnected, dead, etc. etc. etc. Words embeded into digital memory, haunted and retraced into hearts of regret.

Another sad story of a girl from Los Angeles. A hollow empty shell, façade, refuge, where mother make alters and children paint messages on walls. Running away from dark images of ourselves, hunger, money, pain. Buying another bottle, cigarette, lipstick, coffee, piece of pan dulce or chips Los Angeles. The city where you only have to look up at the sky to understand the full scope of it’s desolation. Cars, trains, busses, skateboards, bikes, lines, lines, and lines zooming bye to nowhere and somewhere. We catch ourselves in reminders, prayers, and hopefulness in each step, guided by immigrant myths, catholic prayers, and collective ancient spirits. Only blood brown sisters wipe our tears and understand our sacred silent laughter.
Clouded faded skies, eyes, glimpses of waste and madness.

I hate you because you can hide behind words
Fortress and mazes out of your bag of tricks
Setting up forts, freezing scenes, dissecting form
Build it up, but I just want to knock it down.
Creation, lies of fame, poetry for your own gain.
Fool in readers eyes, symbolism, ponderous metaphor
Or yourself, you call the shore
Sailing in the many seas
On and off, going as you please.
Move where you want, do what you like
Setting it in module module, enter formula
Setting up theories like weapons,
Hurling your tales, igniting dreams, lost desires drunk in vast deserts
Is it living or only a sign?
Keep on reading, get the name of the design.
What is more dangerous than meaningless poetry?
Write your own school, liberated your words
While millions of illiterate, poor oppressed children
Privledge in the creation
Only hip hop liberates the streets
What other words can let people eat

exacaping the mind police

free writing on the walls

pasted for your pleasure

wake up to your own music of freedom

all forming our own ways of loving

silence consumes the city

making her show her strength in early empty mornings

she sighs at possiblities

shinning, we breathe and continue to take in

undisrupted corners

The greatest irony of all this is that I was a second year….

Vileana De La Rosa, “Re-Claiming, Re-thinking the Public Space” for Comp. Lit. 132

Dear Vileana,

You’ve put quite a bit of work into this essay and the sources you draw on are well-chosen. But I see a number of difficulties with the essay.

First, your theses are not well organized or clearly stated. I take it your main points are:
1. the anti-institutional message of the Truisms and other texts by Jenny Holzer;
2. her ability to critique commodity culture by using techniques and space normally controlled by commercial media;
3. her ability to undercut commodity culture by mimicking its message and forms of expression;
4. the relation of Holzer’s work with street art.
But it’s taken an effort to extract these ideas from your paper. You should have used these points to organize the paper and thus build an argument.

Then you seem unable to construct sentences that are syntactically adequate. There are so many faulty, incoherent sentences, or rather, strings of phrases, that it would take hours to rewrite the paper. If I had seen this paper earlier I would not have accepted it but asked you to rewrite it with help from LARC (Learning and Resource Center).
This is paper is just not acceptable in an upper-division literature-history course, especially from a Comp. Lit. major.
Essay Grade: C-

Your report on ch. 1 of T.J.Clark’s book shows the same inability to write. I would be glad to go over it with you if you want to make an appointment (but I’ll only be available until Thursday, June 17. Let me know if you can come to my office an afternoon at about 3.) If you had submitted this summary when it was due I would have been aware of your writing difficulties earlier and could have discussed them with you, but the paper came in very late, as you know.
Report grade: D

You did better on the exam, in part because I did not scrutinize the style since I realized that the writing was bound to be hasty. You caught the point of the first question (Clark’s treatment of the “spectacle” of Paris) quite well.
Exam grade: B/C = B-

You’ve been absent an excessive number of times and sometimes disrupted the class by coming in late or leaving early.  You never contributed to discussions in the class. I overlooked this attitude, hoping that you knew the material and were pursuing your work independently. But it’s evident to me now that you have real problems in formulating your ideas. You do seem genuinely interested in issues dealt with in the course and willing to explore them, but you have not mastered the skills to deal with these in written form.

It’s too bad that, as a senior, you will have no chance to take further undergraduate courses here. You could profit a great deal by a couple of addition writing classes. You should be aware that your writing ability is not adequate for a career track that might require it, and if you are aiming for such a career I’d advise you to remedy that.

Course: C

Alex Gelley