6- Demolition

I held a contest on my blog this week. I don't know if I could feel any more malaise towards the endeavor now. It didn't get much attention. At least, not as much as I had hoped. I'll pretend to not care by making the font all bland and dull colored. That usually works.

Anyway if you didn't check it out please feel free to see what all the fuss wasn’t about.

CONTEST THINGIE

Basically the deal is participants want to know what I did last weekend. I wrote out a five options and asked my readers to guess from among them, discerning fact from fiction.

But really who cares? Or better yet, forget "care". The real question remains how do you know what's real?

The contest was rigged. I could have done all or none of those five stories. I could have made the whole thing up. Five products of my imagination.

That brings up another point, what here is really part of my imagination and what is real? How do you know that anything I write here is real? Am I real? How much of the grit is behind the masque and how much on it?

The more I divulge on this blog the thinner and thinner my mask gets. I used to imagine that questions would flood in trying to find out who's behind the mask. Surprisingly, no one asked. In the real world everyone knows who I am. People who know you can see right through you, can see right through your masks.

But throughout this endeavor I have learned that people who don't know who you are don't bother to look behind the masks. They don't care. Batman, Spiderman… they came onto the scene and no one clamored to find out who they were, it only mattered what they did.

And that's where I come in. What have I done? Perhaps by donning the mask I have unmasked you all. Perhaps in getting as many readers as I do, (a few hundred hits a week, I'll be honest) who don't ask who I am, don't clamor for the juicy details, don't bat an eye at the existence of a 20 year old despondent Drop Out who feels the need to live his life sheided by a masked identity. No, not one mask. Many.

Maybe all the Poetry is a Mask. Maybe the IM conversations, the salacious details, the crappy drawings, the easter eggs… all masques? And maybe, just maybe, maybe ya'll don't notice because you're all too wrapped up in masks of your own to see the veils of those around you.

Business Casual Fridays, Pencil Thin Supermodels, No Down Payments and Low APR, Global Warming, Rising Gas Prices, WMDs in Iraq

Masks. Deceptions. Lies. The shifting sands we build our lives around, leaving vulnerable the unsheltered the emptinesses within our hearts.

There can be no peace without inner peace.

What did I do last weekend?
Ah, what does it matter? I'm a sad kid
-coping with being kicked out of college,
-being fired from every job he's ever loved,
-grappling with the murder of his step-father not long after moving to California,
-struggling with the equivocatations and abandonment of a fluidic woman,
-surviving the torturous wiles of a job in the jungles of a cubicle wasteland,
-with a housemate who is trying to kill me,
-nursing a serious case of the midwinter blues.

I put up these masks because I still can't bear to look at myself in the mirror. All I can stomach are pieces and fragments at a time… this last weekend there were five shards of glass, each with its own narcissistic glean. I can't tell you which one is real. But I can throw out a sixth option, now that I can see through the divining portal of time.

Last weekend I wrote 5 short stories. 5 small insights into my life. 5 introspections making it that much easier to take off the whole mask, when the time is right.

We all become who we are.
I'm a man in a mask.
Who the hell are you?