On Unstructured Time – A Review

Readers with an astute obsession for patterns and numbers should know that this time of year is rough for me.

I have trouble talking about it still. Not the idea of it. Just the practical thing that comes after it. The “good part,” well. Maybe just the “better” part.

Thanks to school, I hadn’t had much time to do any thinking or talking that wasn’t directly related to work, aside from the 3 minutes of silent contemplation after I threw up in the sink on the morning of the 29th.

Even now I’m fidgeting with writing. I have thoughts that are locked tighter than freshly boiled jam jars. But, in my desperation for some off-time, I walked home Friday.

It’s not a short trek, from Bed-Stuy to Flatbush and it’s not a particularly fun one either. You’re not surrounded by oddities or nature. Just your contemplative reflection in the glass windows of bodegas and closed coffee shops.

I had an image* in my head the whole way home of an older version of me sitting with his legs dangling off a defunct rail car holding a bag containing 900 mils of water and a carnival goldfish. I was kicking the rhythm of whatever was playing on my headphones on the cargo car’s steel hull.

The image was pulled back on all sides making it ironically fisheyed. And I was seeing myself from the bridge where I initially found the locked trainyard in February. Then it had been a year and six months.

Now it’s been two.

I always like to joke that there’s a best side of me. It’s the side that has been on here, that has been writing, that has been out there, trying to see this damn world.

But that me is a side effect of structure. It’s part of a world made predictable. It’s when I find myself infinitely overlapping with the line of best fit.

But me in more control? Me with the capability to affect the world because the world lost track of time and has to make up a plan on the fly, that me? That’s the me I am right now.

The pensive sad kind of me who is locked in his head until he intervenes.

The kind of me that doesn’t randomly puke in a classroom sink, because he isn’t holding anything in to puke. He’s gaseous, formless, and as he fills the container he’s in with his miasma, becoming nebulous and un-line-like, he lets it all go. There’s nothing pent up inside because there is no particular inside. There's just the cloud of particulates. There's just me.

Sometimes I’m the focused line. Sometimes I’m the gaseous cloud. I’m standard deviation’s worst nightmare.

I used to tell people, “this is not me at my best.” “I’m a different person when I’m collected.” “You should see me when I’m on top of things.” But I don’t think that’s right.

I don’t think I should think like that anymore. Because, sometimes I need to be this. This sad indie boy. Sometimes I need the lack of structure so I can vent and remove impurities. And sometimes I need to be the focused do-gooder. The one who seems unstoppably confident and unshakably charming.

Sure, there could be a middle ground. A third side to me where my data points towards a trend, but isn’t too sealed to keep things locked in. But I haven’t had that yet. I’m stuck wobbling in extremes, but not mania. Just. Two sides of one coin.

Both sides show me. Show a real me. Show who I am. And I’m cool with that. Because both sides have to be. And sure, that might make me inconsistent. But, at least I can be consistently me.

Thanks for reading. Have a great week, and let's all just be glad August is finally over.

*No, I have never simultaneously held a carnival goldfish and sat on the roof of an abandoned train car. I plead the fifth on doing either one separately.