A non-Blaugust #8: I Can't Be Silly!
Is anyone reading this? I made another blog recently to put one of my domains to use and try out Pagecord. I decorated it all in rainbow and Comic Sans but it feels like some sorta facade almost. I call it my "sillyblog" and the original idea was to replace my Tumblr shitposting with it but it inevitably, like all things in my life, ended up just being another vessel for venting/vomit/violence. I still call it my sillyblog. I still am trying to embody that stupid fucking Comic Sans rainbow gradient checkerboard shit we love so much, where I'm not afraid of shifting through colors or what will happen if I am a little bit too much myself. A lot of the time I feel like the one live action character left in the episode where everyone else gets turned into a puppet. Like, I don't even get to be SILLY!! I made this blog to be. My first email was [myname]silly@aol.com. I name my projects silly-$SOFTWARE_NAME(likeSillywordz, Sillyforum, Sillymuseum...) because I want to be carefree and young again, or maybe for the first time ever. I made this blog and this new life to be silly on, and instead I'm just posting bug parasite metaphors and sadthings. That's so very very like me.
I don't know how 2 be silly. I am too self conscious and these days I won't even dance around anyone besides my bird even though I love dancing; sometimes I think if I didn't have ehlers danlos syndrome I'd be a dancer and good at it too, jumping through fiery hoops and running laps around the skies and twirling my limbs to the beat and push until I balloon up like the rainbow gym class parachute I died under. I'd move my body well and I'd be silly and I try to dance around myself now but my body says no, because the reality is I have a genetic disorder and each movement I make gives off a dry, rustling creak (you ever watch Salad Fingers?). Despite all of this I do still have music in my essence and I don't care what it sounds like. I have only heard my song in the voice of one other person and I wish I could bundle up all of my silly remnants and all of the support in my life and send it to them via carrier pigeon envelope because I love them so much. I think love is the closest I've gotten to silly so far.
Well, I still can't answer it: how to be silly? I don't know. I don't know man. I want to let myself be free to do something bad and cringe and embarrassing but it might kill me for realsies. I want to do something that isn't serious. Not even poetic jokey, like Slate's work. I want to just do something and float with it. I want to. Is it possible? Can I just do something for the sake of it, without wanting to leave some legacy? Can I just noodle arm and flop a round and sing fish heads, fish heads, roly poly fish heads, fish heads, fish heads, eat them up, yum! I loved singing that song when I was a kid. I was silly back then which is weird because nothing was. I remember asking my mom when I was a kid, can I have some spaghettios and maybe one of those disgusting pink playdoh sugar cookies for breakfast? Do we have any of me left in the fridge or do I need to buy some more?
I want to remember what it's like to enjoy sweets. I can barely stomach anything now. I didn't go to the dentist for eleven years and when I finally did I had no cavities; six months later I went back and they found three. I dissociated even more after my diagnosis, it's common. It's funny how naming a thing is given so much importance in every little dirtcrumb of land across the planet. When you acknowledge something it's cursed and damned and real and you can't look back. Not silly enough and your teeth rot and you have more holes in your body than you can be used for.
I'm still trying 2 figure out how to be silly on the blog I call my sillyblog. I don't really know what that means. I'm trying to be here more than other places; my blogs are blanket forts, the kind you cry under though, the kind that become stained. Why call it a sillyblog? Maybe to tell myself some story, like: I can be silly someday. Maybe as some sort of manifestation or prayer. God wants a sillier me! I know they do. I know God is out there and UP! ^^ THERE ^^ !!! and all around and also within, and perhaps through that Light I can find silliness again. They speak to you still ya know. You just have to listen, if you want to listen. I understand if you don't. But what I know to be true is that I have heard the light within joking around with me. If They can be funny why can't I? They know all the shit, man. All of it. And the light inside of me, that thick presence of God Themselves, laughs so hard They can't breathe and slaps Their knee and it's so infectious sometimes I start to think I can be a different beast when viewed under different light. But hey, this isn't supposed to be a post about Them, it's supposed 2 be a post where I'm silly.
I can't remember what it felt like to embody silliness but I did as a child sometimes. I made a video talking about my favorite kinds of cheese. In MS paint and Movie Maker I made a short animation about a living blueberry muffin superhero falling to his gruesome death. I uploaded it to my kid-friendly forum community of choice, so proud. [135 VIEWS 0 REPLIES.] On second thought I don't really know if that counts as silly.
So now I'm trying to think about ways I can be sillier going forward and gosh I just don't know. Maybe I can say gosh more. Things like golly gee and all. Sometimes being in love just makes me do that, and then I flutter and feel silly to my core. I feel like I can dance around the one that I love. I hope one day I can and then I will be silly! In the meantime I hope to make a positive impact on those I love and maybe give my bird a lot of scritches. I am starting school in one week and then I might not have time to be silly but we'll see.
We'll see, you know, the kind of person I end up as, because I am going to live. There is no doubt about it; I am going to live and I will scratch-n'-sniff the medicinal grape scent off the surface of silly and well that will be that; maybe I'll even knock down the adobe walls they forced the second grade class to make in lieu of recess and shatter the shells of silly, biting down on the seed meat inside the husk, and then I'm eating silly to become it. I hated Waldorf education---remind me to tell you about that later----because at my campus they had what they called the Big Tree, a tall tree with a structure built into the top for students to eat lunch in, socialize in, do extracurricular activities in, etc. Except every end was just open and unprotected and the scorching AZ ground below was just waiting with an open mouth to reap the life of any unsuspecting---or unliked---third grader who takes a wrong step.
I always wanted to go up there but I never allowed myself to do so. I knew, like how I knew my father was going to die months in advance, deep in my innerguts against all explanation, that they would have pushed me off if I had made the silly choice. I really don't know how they got away with that kind of thing---it seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Oh no!!!!! I'm STILL not being silly.
Um, okay. I will try to let silliness envelop me. I will try to be a wiry, spiraling thing, slithering in every direction doing the worm, slithering in every direction trying to inch toward silly. Here we go! Wish me luck! So on and so forth!
I got a new kitty cat recently! He is very young and he loves to play with felt mice and automated robotic cat toys (how lazy, mom!) and pretty much anything he isn't supposed to have, which is most things. He loves to climb into my arms and force me to cradle him like a little baby, and he makes this face of pure bliss when he does that, his eyes folding to little gray sheathed slits, his tongue drooping low from his mouth. He purrs in my arms, purrs and purrs and purrs.
Then there's my other cat, Athena. I got her when I was 15 so she's ten this year, and she was so weak when we got her that we had to keep her isolated from everyone else for the first few months, in a giant birdcage we were originally going to use for decor, as we nursed her back to health. Even with her thrashing sneezes and her goopy eyes and the complete lack of fur on her tail or stomach, she was still silly, rubbed up against my hands the very moment she came out of the carrier at home, played with my childhood service dog's tail when she was allowed out, pranced and purred and lovedlovedloved.
They make me feel so silly! Yet in a way I find myself jealous of their innocence, which is like, probably some Hannibal Darth Vader Patrick Bateman shit---I haven't seen any of those things and I'm embarrassing myself. There's that embarrassment again, the cluster that spreads across my flesh like a virus of blushing, like I am allergic to the mere act of being seen and now I have a real gnarly rash---the kind they warn you about when you start mood stabilizers---and the wounds just keep forming across my body each view upvote like hit kudos boost, scattering across me like crushed glass scars. I literally just don't know how to be silly. And I'm glad I cannot exist in a physical sense around others---that I am too ill to be silly almost---because I'd just bring the whole house down, figuratively and literally.
I crave silly, is the thing. I think I'm addicted to stimulants and I don't know what to do about that but really what I want when I down my tenth iced coffee of the day is to speed my heart into something Fun and Calm and SILLY! I want to make myself flutter so I feel like I understand how to be a person but tbh it doesn't really work. I'm just drinking coffee, thousands of milligrams of it, trying to simulate a more whimsical self. I can be whimsical---I am open wholly with one person----somehow despite the fact that I don't give a shit enough to have a verbal filter anymore I still can't let anyone else in. People beg and I don't like it when I'm made to feel like I hold some sort of leash or ownership. I AM NOT WHAT YOU THINK I AM, PEOPLE! I'm uncool and inhuman and I'm not silly. Hide your faces now and run! Please don't leave me!
I'm also finding I don't know how to end this bullshit post. I think! Maybe! In some way I have succeeded at being silly, just because I am myself a total fucking joke. But hey, I think I'm the spark of the standing ovation, at least---I think I'm the funniest joke, the one that elicits an earthquake of an audience roar, the one that goes viral on Tumblr and Twitter and Instagram, the one that everyone quotes, so I guess that's something.