Stasis grenade

– This is the last place I’d expect to see a gaming reference.
I guess
It’s been a long time since I played so much
– Out of retirement?
Something like that

The working day is a forced march
Years of repetition have hardened the feet
The body evolved in water management
Muscle fatigue
Pragmatic engagement with people is another kind of task
And during the day I am stopped
A while ago I would call it a blank
I reflect on terminology
How it changes
How the perspective and approach changes and how the language changes with it
I retain more now
Or I retain less
I’ve grown fond of saying and I retain less
Microclimates of behaviours
Brief histories
Brackets of events that come together into form
Combined as a ghost perhaps
A citizen
A visitor
And beside me as I move there is a fence
On the other side, a wolf
Proud
Agile
Keeping pace with me
When I stop it stops
When I sit it sits
I think of how I can romanticise it
Choose a gender
Try and speculate on its purpose
It like so many now is immune to such abstracts
Coping mechanisms
Whatever they are
Then I remember – I am hardly a participant in such definitions
That must be why they change so much
Why they cease
Re-appear
Evolve
The mind naturally pursues creative momentum
A gatekeeper perhaps
A translator for the strangeness
A soldier charged with the reaping of my life at the allotted time
But it is immune to vocation
It is none of these things
Or none that I can prove
A neutral observer; that is as far as I’m permitted to go
The memories of words
Of conversations
Neutrality is their power
Indeed
I can almost feel it happen
Memories inserted, replaced, evolved
Or I only think I feel it
As it has seemed to be always so
A wolf at my birth, impossible for me to remember
Through the streets of my childhood on the way to school
In the train to the city
On the passenger seat of the car
The other side of the door at my back in the office

All these distractions – and the language has changed
The definition of what is a distraction
What is not
It is not the strangeness that distracts me from my life
The strangeness is my life, so much so I have been embracing these last few years
These last, turbulent months
And I begin to try and think of real ways
Pragmatic actions
To leverage that strangeness
To remain there as long as possible
And briefly I remember that the sense of decision
Of choice
Of volition
May be an illusion
And that the illusion may be an illusion

There is no fear left
The more complex it becomes, the more rewarding it seems
The more insulate I become
The more agile my survival skills in leading a normal life
The more reconciled I am accepting the rewards of that life
The more embrasure there is of ambiguity
The more internal the dialect becomes
There are more elements I wish to define, but I am stopped
It is moving in circles and spheres
The direct opposite of pragmatic life
A life in parallel
Yet each totally involved with the other
I come back to the dialect
Internal dialect
And I read back over the nature of becoming insular
These days I speak more than I have ever spoken
To my dear ones
To my father
I crave the dense complexity of human behaviour
Yet for the strangeness there is no language
It is exclusive, private
I remember the words
I guard it greedily
Yet I’m reminded of the natural human desire to be understood
A good desire
Part of what joins us together
I remember my discussion of being tired
Of base-principles of emotional engagement
And of the dense set of complexities that constitute my experience
A lack of the energy required to de-lineate
There’s so much ground-work to cover
Going back to an infinite quantity of individual instances
I’m already lost in those things
More than I could ever count
They’ve already run ahead
Changed
Been destroyed and reborn countless times

This is what my privacy is constructed of
The materials forged in the years and years of disturbance and euphoria
And perhaps I am describing a normal person
Normality, abnormality, are simple abstracts
But by whatever means, there is a necessity to record it
To write it down here
In the countless notebooks littering my room
Documents on file
Notes hastily tapped out on my phone
Memories of conversations
Hours and hours of intimate discourse

I find I speak to my dear ones about the strangest of things
Not entirely sure that they are engaged
One part wishes to be considerate and not to bore them
The other demands that they listen as an engagement of intimacy
Nevertheless
The bulk of it remains hidden away
Away from the awkwardness it generates in figures outside of the strangeness
I observe the citizens
The ghosts
The visitors
Some days they seem to be just as awkward