indecisive about title, might take down

So we’ve all fallen and the bag of tricks is behind us. And in lieu, we’ve stopped reading, stopped doing k, stopped pretending to be in love. We’ve learned how to police our thoughts to the right extent, and that’s called self-discipline. We’ve learned that the further we look into ourselves the more infinitely complicated things become. The we is the me but not exclusively. 

Something I’ve learned about myself: over my life: I’ve forgotten that I learned un-lying. From ages five to twelve or so, I lied all the time. Maybe it was a projection of my control over the world, an instinct I developed out of my fear of discerning parents, or maybe I just fucking liked it, but I would lie with abandon. I found a video of myself at age five or six where my sister and I were feeding large tarpon fish in Florida off a dock. My mom comes over to us and asks me what type of fish they are. I say that they’re smallmouth bass, and she prods that they are the smallmouth bass, like the ones we see in the freshwater creeks by our house? The question is posed to call my bluff. Without pause, I emphasize that they are smallmouth bass, insinuating that she is the one who’s silly for thinking that bass and smallmouth bass could possibly be the same. I lied voraciously to protect my reputation, to safeguard my six-year-old intellectualism.  Somewhere down the trail I learned thought-policing for my salvation. 

The tarpons have disappeared and I’m plunged into my latest absurdist nightmare. This one takes place in a dream-altered version of the neighborhood I grew up in. It is snowing in some parts and the sky seems to be undulating. Beside me are my parents and grandma, and we seem to have learned that people are turning into zombies. However, the zombies look identical to people, so there is no way to decipher between zombie and person. As a response to this news and in typical me-dream fashion, we all decide we’d like to go to the movies, and we start walking down prospect park west. At this point my grandma decides she’d like to stay with a different group of people and sits down with them in a circle on the street. We go without protest. After the movie (Say Anything), the three of us are separated and I find myself being chased by a zombie and my point of view moves outside my eyes and hovers about seven feet in the air. As I watch myself being chased, I don’t feel afraid, I feel nothing, but right before the dream ended, the zombie turned around and looked at my invisible specter. The fear of this moment, being seen when I thought myself invisible, caused such a horrible rush of fear, that I woke up.