Free-Writing IV

10/26/10, 11:53 am-

When I’m walking with my dog at night the world feels so empty and perfect. All those houses with lights on but no activity, no one in the yard, rarely in the windows, just the cool street and the rustle trees and occasionally the sound of a dog barking because we’ve come too close. We pass garbage cans and get a peek at their inner worlds. Old playground pieces, toys, television boxes, an old toilet, sticks from pruning, books, bottles of beer on recycling days along with spaghetti sauce and water, all these things that explain in filthy terms what’s been going on in that house for the past few days. Our lives, boiled down to the bi-products. The moonlight makes it look better, the starlight barely there, and it’s disappointing, genuinely, when someone appears on the street. Cars are okay. Their headlights slice past and invent shadow, illuminate hidden things in the gutter, so long as the car doesn’t stop and give birth to a driver. Drivers give berth, cars give birth.

When I look at a yellow notepad I think about all those days in school, taking notes, reporting the words of a teacher and their plans for us. I never used yellow notepads, though, just looseleaf in binders and then later when I got tired of carrying around binders I would just take a folder around with loose paper in it, and that’s when things got much messier, but I tried to keep them together as much as possible. Then a teacher would spring a trap, a binder check, even though they never warned there would be one. If I knew about it ahead of time I would find an empty binder, or rather a useless one and make it empty, and then sort through the omni-folder to take out everything from that one subject and push it into the binder according to date. The other problem was that half of my notes were drawings. At some point I found it impossible to listen to what a teacher was saying without doodling at the same time, still hearing them, just drawing also, but they could never believe that, didn’t want to, never listened. That was how I distracted myself into paying attention. That was my method. But schools only allow one method, their own method, and anything else looks to them like laziness or disobedience. I was only learning how I knew I could, and I did, my grades were always good, I learned the material, but somehow they needed to see that binder. I guess like a lot of other things it’s because they need to control a certain percentage through behaviours like that, but that’s not fair so they have to apply it to all. Not fair or it’s just easier to do the same thing across the board. And I can totally understand that now, looking back and realizing that my teachers were people with jobs, didn’t exist for us only, and it takes a really rare person to apply individual methods to several hundred students. The problem then isn’t the teacher or the student, it’s something more, because more can be learned, more can be achieved if its specific to the person, so new systems have to be in place, and teachers need to be paid what they deserve, and not over-worked and stressed and be made to fit certain goals without the environment to achieve them. I have no idea how yellow paper turned into this but so it happened and I have to deal with that. This is the brain in action and I’d like to think I’m unique but I’m definitely not, this is just why people sound the way they do when they talk to themselves, because thought processes are interwebbed and forever darting and that’s a symptom of complexity. The problem comes in with a lack of filters. And is it so crazy? Maybe we’re doing this to each other, living in constant censorship, "I don’t want to hear this or that", but we’re all thinking it. It would be interesting to see a world where everyone’s thoughts and spoken words are exactly the same, and maybe it would be more peaceful, but maybe there’d be no use in living anymore, because the mystery is what makes things interesting, the distance between knowing and not knowing, what’s said and what isn’t, just like men and women confuse each other constantly but if we didn’t what’s the point, no more mystery, less laughs, no need to keep on digging. Maybe we need our secrets.

-12:08, 15 mins, approx. 961 words