This is all verbose juvenile sludge, but its my juvenile sludge, so it goes on the website regardless. Look at my photography or illustration if you want to see someone confident in their work, this is far more vunerable/worse.

What my dreams look like

Homogeneous uniformity 

Like groundhog days or dead horses 

Papal hymns, repeated verses

Isn't it funny?

Escapes wasted

“what has” 

Not what could’ve or should've or would’ve or wouldn't have…

Why bother really, with all future locations?

Suppositions and Propositions and Dispositions 

Bark-in’ general*

Obsession with advancement

Brittle little coverings

Can I not be left-

Bereft of prescience, of foresight

To my myopic deposition?

*bark in general (brittle little coverings), Barking general, as in orders,( obsession with advancement(

Short Story i had to write for English

He sits imprisoned in a foreign land, unknown vegetation under his feet, prickly, with a patronizing hostility, punishing those unaware of what is and what isn't. Men converse in strange tongues, lashing at each other with fricatives and guttural sounds from the deep recesses of their throats, ironically, likely uttering mundane actions, pleasantries, or anything uncharacteristic of the harsh wall of noise emanating from their mouths. The climate is cold, yet with a powerful sun, such that the world is momentarily plunged into an ashen winter depending on the clouds overhead, a nebulous reel of film modifying god's sunnier projections. The boy walks quietly along the white walls that enclose him with a languid expression on his face. He watches the other members of his entrapped clade toiling for as much as he can bear, then tries to dream as much as possible in an attempt to escape from the desolate reality that restrains him.

He has no memory of a prior experience, or from whence he could have come, possessing only the most rudimentary understanding of the local vernacular, enough to express desire for elementary substances: water, food. The other members, despite their suffering, care for him with a pitiful curiosity, and the wardens turn a blind eye to the ghost which encircles the world.

Once, in the boy's scanning of the walls which enclose them, he discovers a particular dark patch on the expanse of usually uniform concrete. Upon closer inspection, the patch comes into focus as a matrix of small painted strokes, and upon even closer inspection, the boy becomes surprised by his ability to comprehend such a random assortment of symbols. They speak of hope and splendor, of sorrow and tragedy, of love and hate, words that feel familiar yet unattributable, like the blurry recollection of a face one might have met, a reflection in water. Fragments of great tomes and scripture, some extensive record of a humanity reduced and flattened to some region of scrawled text, things past. Picking up a charred stick from the ground, he inscribes a reply, and begins the trudge to the glorious goal of slumber.

Over the course of years, they engage in their quiet conversation, leaving messages for the other to read. His correspondent writes of what had been, and he writes of what continues to be. As the boy becomes imbued with the context of history, of himself, he begins to age, flattened time expressing itself within the body, the awakening of some ancient, dormant pathogen. The boy, now the man, becomes more extensive with the length of his replies, the wall covered in miles of symbols, as if some mythological spider had danced around the perimeter with brushes attached to its legs, eventually becoming so densely overlapping that the walls seem to be entirely covered in random noise, only intelligible by those who constructed it.

The man becomes obsessed with discovering the identity of his correspondent with the zeal of an individual who finally tastes what they have missed, severed serene solitude. Denying himself his once prized sleep more and more, hoping to catch them in the act. Only when he finally succumbs to exhaustion does he discover another portion of the wall layered in barely intelligible script, and once he finally musters the ability to remain vigilant throughout the entire course of the night, the replies cease entirely.

The man’s insomnia becomes permanent, try as he might to atone for prior obsessions. As the mind becomes more and more exhausted, he begins to forget the meaning of things, the name of the grass beneath his feet, the food he eats, and finally, most destructively, how to interpret the expansive mass of black carbon before him. Reduced to an infantile state, he finally sleeps once more.

The boy wakes from his slumber confused, no memory of prior experience, or from whence he had come. He settles into a kind of routine, the other members caring for him with a pitiful curiosity despite their suffering, and he begins to explore the perimeter of the gray walls before him. Once, as he walks, the boy spots a lighter patch in the usually uniform wall. Upon closer inspection, the patch comes into focus as a matrix of small carved strokes, and upon even closer inspection, the boy becomes surprised by his ability to comprehend such a random assortment of symbols. He picks up a rock and begins to scratch in a reply…

The walls are covered and uncovered by the shadows of expression, clouds overhead passing through the light of the world, marked and erased by an eternally restless figure.

Excuses, 

Nothing exists in a vacuum, and certainly not me. My character is my own creation- the thoughts, words, and actions said and done to me interpreted in my own patent manner, and yet the subunits of those perceptions are borrowed, their complexities divisible into common, shared elements, inherited genetically, socially, culturally. My grandfathers were awful men, by all stretches of the imagination. Arrogant drunkards, two of them criminals (in the legitimate sense of the word), the third a soldier, and entirely absent in the raising of their children. The worst was my mother’s father, a Hobbesian anarchist: nasty, brutish, and short. As such, she developed a hatred for the virile latino, Ulibarrí’s horse. Quick to anger and quicker to strike, patriarchal, womanizing, the universal constants of the struggling man. And yet, she married its mirror, masqueraded as a different flavor. Absent are the beatings, the confinement, the overt disrespect, but in their place: verbal lashings, a refusal to help pawned off as ‘inability’, and a hidden mistress. The origins of my existence are not love. The label of love was given to the fetishization of a foreign woman and escapism, packaged by gauze, traumatic adhesive, and delivered with an unconscientious acceleration. Of course, can anyone blame my father? Can anyone blame me? When does the child, dominated by its progenitor, make the transition to an autonomous body? Does it ever? Parental determinism extrapolated out from an original sin, the devil's serpent, Quetzalcoatl’s blood. Yet we know it has agency, almost from the very beginning, it utters sentences never heard before, has natural conceptions of fear, or love, unlearned intuition. Or are those yet another form of inherited trait, evolutionary instinct. 

I, naturally, attempt to distance myself from those who came before me. The pendulum’s swing, the Hegelian reaction, the third law pair. I lack the previously necessary adaptations of fiery passion, obstinate stubbornness, abrasives generated for the purpose of increasing friction, barely holding on. My disposition: agreeable, at times to the point of sheepishness. My appearance: softer. My romantic and sexual preferences on the periphery of the northern American zeitgeist, and certainly that of conservative-catholic-hispanics. Through the media I consume, I have attempted to find alternative role models for a more positive sort of masculinity, reading, watching and listening to all manner of different perspectives on what it means to be a man. In mere moments I encounter more varieties of opinion through the modern shifting kaleidoscope of information than my ancestors might have experienced in lifetimes. Hence the problem. Infinity  equivalently comprehensible to 0 within the human psyche, indeterminate forms, the internet's firehose overexposing mental connections to null, to paralysis. What remains then, is the constant, generational influences. My relationships are consistently short flivers of sensationalism, antiquated biases are replaced with modern misconception. Youthful revolution exactly that, cyclical motion.

As I begin to grow into my body, to graduate from an androgynous, amorphous, state into a more clearly defined figure, the distrust remains, but directed at the self, insecurity, generationally sharpened to a point. Muscular definition derived from a late interest in athletics alien to skin and bone, the use of my anatomy upon another giving the sensation of self-violation. Introspection, like invasion.

These are the rivets of my armor, personal reasons, explanations and validations that construct my overdominant adaptations, useful only within the environment for which they were created. Your tone of silent anger, your tact, your political machinations of discontent were entirely alien forces. You are older than me, yes, but even if we were equal in age you would be still , wisdom a function of lived experience. Similar upbringings, but you have not hidden behind failure. 

The genesis of our argument was inconsequential, but I augmented its impact to an extreme degree, expecting reciprocal retaliation, as if I was playing an adversarial game. You looked upon me, a bitch unwilling to engage in the “playful” melodrama of her pups, an older brother doing schoolwork. For all my attempted auto-interrogation, I have only attempted to externalize the blame, to translate it upon another medium, avoiding personal responsibility at all costs. Even this admission is yet another way to accomplish the above,  selfish abuse to absolve a conscience. Such a ritual occurs periodically, the indulgent desire for reconciliation, a mind so egotistical that it believes acknowledgement of its own wrongdoing as ultimately effective, and the acknowledgement of the acknowledgement even more so. 

Objectivity and art

Objectivity and art (which I define to be synonymous with human expression), are two concepts that seem to be fundamentally and diametrically opposed. Any sort of quantitative observation relating to human expression feels so incredibly reductionist. A singular piece of art contains so many multitudes and traces of the artists lived experience and ideas and thoughts and provocations and preconceptions that taking it and flattening everything to mathematical dimensions seems almost disrespectful of the individual's life. Even if one is to construct a critique that contains manifold parameters and variables and seeks to place the art in a broader societal context while including details regarding the experience of the author, no matter how large the network of equations, no matter how high order the polynomial, the network can still be evaluated at a point. It is implicitly defined in terms of societal expressions, not those of the artist. And so what one accomplishes by the action of critique, and perhaps more basically, the action of consumption, is killing the author's intent. Additionally, when one attempts to objectify any particular form of human expression, I think you have to make an assumption and the assumption is that all art is inherently communicative, that all art, regardless of the intention of the author, presents some sort of narrative. Even if the author is aware of it and actively tries to subvert it, that of course in itself is narrative. Even if the author had no intention of creating it, even if the author of the work simply decided to do it for pleasure, or to de-stress or as a silent protest , even if all those things happen, the art is still communicative by the very action of consumption. So in that sense art is not necessarily a noun, but a verb that takes place between an entity and an individual that interprets it. And so from the critical perspective, this flattening and subsequent expansion into a societal context is inherent to the action of art itself. When I create, I find it difficult to take this line of reasoning into consideration as I do so very much for selfish reasons, not necessarily with  the intention of communication. A lot of my work is still-lifes and studies of pre-existing objects. I am attempting to replicate the real world on paper purely for the enjoyment of seeing my own ability to render, to cast light and shadow with graphite and charcoal, not necessarily to elucidate some broader perspective on who I am or what I think. But what I have to take into account is that those who might look at my work, the others complicit in my art, do not derive the same emotional response that I do. There is an inherent disconnect between creation and consumption, even if the two are inextricably linked. Is my more selfish attitude towards creation even justified, my lived experience is infinitesimal compared to the broader artistic canon? Is the distinction even necessary?. Every work contains elements of every other work, but such a universal argument defines subjectivity. Thus the limits again become defined as the moments of creation and interpretation, objectification occurring during the latter. How effectively does this work congeal the diffusion of collective consciousness into defined forms and figures, in mathematical terms, by what factor is the entropy reduced?