Thoughts for the Chronic Somnambulist

Anyone who knows me will know that I had a friend who comitted suicide over the Christmas holiday. Now, I was not particularly close to this friend but I knew him and he was special to me. Ever since I learned of his death he has not been far from my thoughts and I want to say goodbye my way. This is my eulogy for Dave.

I knew Dave from about the time I was 12. We were in the gifted and talented classes together and I remember him as one of the funniest people I’ve ever known. He was the first person who introduced me to Monty Python & the Holy Grail and he had an obsession about llamas up until the time he was about 15. He was a great musician, a struggling musician who I suppose didn’t want to struggle anymore. Dave had a great big smile unequalled by any smile I’ve ever seen. He was smart and witty and, though I wouldn’t ever have the chance to speak to him, I wish he were still here.

Goodbye Dave. I’m sorry I couldn’t say it in person. But, if it helps at all now, you were one of the best people I knew.  

Circulation
 

“Do you write poetry?” asked my friend.
I believed I did…  
In the shower and in the tub and while watching tv,
While reading, while sleeping, while snoring, while listening, while drinking
And standing and fighting and pacifying and eating.
 

Poetry, I have found, is in your blood and not your heart.
It is pumped through veins, breathes in life and exhales death,
Splatters on a page like vomit on pavement, glorious and relieving all at once!
Yet others look at your handiwork and find it disgusting and unsociable.
 

It is built of cells, some red some white.
It moves, circulates, encompasses, gets clogged up and then stops.
It is made an academic pursuit, riddled with names, categorised, made ugly and complicated,
Yet, after the essay is written, it remains untarnished, it’s meaning still hidden by God, the melody protected by the notes yet to be revealed, its mysteries still lost in words without definition, connotation or pentameter.  
A phenomenon understood by everyone and no one
Like crying and laughing, singing and screaming.
 

Do I write poetry?
My dear friend, no one writes poetry.
Poetry writes you.

One of my new year’s resolutions is to become more like me…or more like what I’m unsure that I might be. Part of this is getting in touch with my inner nerd; that part of me that screams out for binary code and taped-up spectacles, the part of me that has since been suppressed by high school cheerleading, sorority pledges and converse shoes–although some would consider those to be pretty nerdy I love them.

Some of you, my friend Rich included, may be wondering about this name that I have chosen. Am I a sleepwalker, no, fortunately I am not. However, I spend most of my life in a dreamlike daze somewhere between waking and sleeping which I would term as a form of sleepwalking. I love sleep! Like 87% of the world I don’t get enough of it so often the thoughts and experiences I have border somewhere between hither and yon. Often I ask, DID that really happen? Then decide that it must have because I’m not crazy…I think. Reality and life are very distinct in this world in which I find myself. My goal with this blog is to introduce this world to this spacious black hole commonly known as “the net,” to allow it to be sucked down into the inner recesses of nothingness, existing forever but only as fragments of atoms…and even those are being stretched. I hope you find it interesting, funny, sad, alive, alert and enthusiastic but not awake. :]

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