Day Eighteen: Pyro / mANIC

So I've been lighting candles every night since I've been here. There are truckloads of them in the basement and I just light them and blow them out, on again, off again. I like the smoke and the fire more than the burning. I dip my fingers into the molten wax and let it crust over my fingerprints. Love isn't right, but it's the first word to come to mind.

Why is this so important? Because I haven't been able to light candles in a long, long time. NAU doesn't allow me to, and my mom didn't allow me to when I lived with her. They're afraid I'll burn down buildings.

When I was younger I used to light a match and watch the fire ebb into the wick. Inhale the sulfur, toy with the heat. I would switch off the light and lie on the floor and talk to God and just be calm.

My mom made me throw the candles out or something. It's been a long time. I can't even remember how much it meant to me.

Anyway, light candles now wouldn't be important if my candles didn't have personalities. The blue one is new and she is arrogant and clean. The red one is angry but now that she's melted down a lot she's mellowed out a bit. The green one is a filthy bum that needs to work. The orange one, that has four wicks is kind and boring and unoriginal. The three or four that melted into puddles and went out are just a blur now.

I've been feeling this way toward my candles since I've gotten them, but only now realized how I felt. Subconscious inversed reflections. These thoughts are associated with the mental phenomenon synthesia. It does that to you.

When I was younger, I thought my synthesia was making me crazy. I didn't know what it was. I used to think my dishes had gotten dirty on purpose to punish me and make me clean them. I used to think the clock was causing me to suffer, mocking how much time I had left to live. I smashed that clock in with my bare fist and swung the rest against the wall. I bled a little. The next day, I walked down to the ditch and tied it to a pole.

So I'm a little abnormal.

Something

Current mood: I am Jack's Listening Skillz

http://www.wikihow.com/Be-a-Good-Listener

After reading this article about how to be a good listener, I really wanted to practice. This desire came out of nowhere, maybe because the article is slanted to make you feel like an inadequate listener.

So I took a walk at midnight, contemplating the mistakes of the day. To be honest, today was amazing, but I stepped out of line a lot. I'm quite the screw-up.

The walk calmed my nerves. I saw a dumpster and leafed through it and found a metal case for catching tennis balls. Awesome. I took it and walked on and saw an old man dumpster diving in another dumpster across the parking lot.

I decided to talk to him, to tell him there were probably other good things in the first dumpster, to be a nice guy. I've been working on being more polite too. He told me that he was looking for scrap metal to sell and then started talking about how he couldn't get enough money on a small senior citizens check.

I thought, Perfect! Even though he's a stranger, I can practice my listening and polite skills. The man went on to say that people from the East Coast had invaded Arizona, stripped us of our natural resources and destroyed this state.

Then he suddenly changed the subject. He started talking about the materials to make cars and how Henry Ford made good cars, but GM made shitty cars because they imported their metal from some evil factory in Germany, meaning GM is Nazi owned. (His assumption, not mine).

Then he suddenly changed the subject. He started talking to me about how stupid women are, especially the ones on the bus because they all believe that sex is money and that they don't have jobs or cars because they are on the bus. The man told me how he likes to start conversations with women about their jobs and then laughs when they tell him they have cars and houses. He asks them "what would you do if an asteroid the size of Jupiter was heading toward a collision course towards the Earth?"
I decided to use my listening skills and asked, "Well, what would YOU do?"
He snorted and said, "Well, I've tried to talk to people about the UFO, but no one listens."
"Wait, what?"

Then he suddenly changed the subject. He told me that Hitler was crazy and evil and that killing the Jews was still okay, because they were criminals. He told me that some Egyptian Pharaoh predicted the Holocaust, so did Buddha, so did Jesus. He told me that the Jews were killed because they HAD to be with God. It was destiny.

Then he suddenly changed the subject. He said something about how NASA is imperialistic and Nazi owned, and the rockets are made of sand and aluminum and that's why they blow up so much, because the Nazi's couldn't make good machines.

Then he suddenly changed the subject. He told me everyone on Earth is stupid. Why? Because if you asked them what 2x4 is they will answer 8. He told me it's actually 3. Using my listening skills, I asked him to explain. He pointed to a car tire. "360º, right? Well, that's natural and consistent so you don't multiply, you DIVIDE. You divide by three because that's human nature, and you get 90º."

Then he suddenly changed the subject. He told me human beings only care about sex and they are evil and perverted.
But at this point it was almost too hard to keep from laughing, and I was feeling stupidly uncomfortable. So I kept looking for an exit. I told him, "Wow, that's a lot to think about, but what time is it? Midnight? Oh, wow, I gotta go. It was nice talking to you, Mr. . ."
He said, "My name? Well, you know my uncle, don't you?"
"No, who's your uncle?"
"King Basha. He's a Pharaoh and he owns Bashas." He babbled off a lot of grammar and geography and then told me, "That makes me King Lasbahs."
I said, "Goodnight, King Lasbahs. I will talk to you later."
He screamed after me, "People evolved from monkies, and you wonder what aliens look like and why they don't talk to assholes!"

So maybe that was not the best way to practice my listening skills.
The funniest thing is, I couldn't shake the feeling that maybe he wasn't the crazy one, and it was I with the skewed sense of perception. I'm left with a lot more questions than answers, except for one definitive truth, which I choose not to share.