A dark room, a blanket, and Joy Division's album "Unknown Pleasures" playing just loud enough to become the only ambient noise.

Straight up distraction rarely works for me, because distraction is usually my problem to begin with. When my brain "veers off track" it usually picks up speed rather than slowing down and I can't just jump back on track until I've gotten a handle on the train. The truth is, the immediate problem that sent my mind off the rails is only the proximate cause. The dark stuff my head shovels into the furnace keeps the train flying down the wrong track: insecurities, anxieties, fears, the ghosts of failures past. I need to recognize those fuels and feel their role in my fraught mindset, which I can do by leaning a little into the gloomy bits of my unconscious. Hence, Joy Division. The blanket and the dark room just cozy and quiet me. It's the album that does the trick.

It's hard to separate Ian Curtis's voice from what happened to him. It's an ethereal, haunting baritone that intones just as often as it sings, and it shades every track. "Disorder" is his inimitable epileptic dancing among the confusion and chaos ("I've got the spirit, but lose the feeling - feeling - feeling - feeling -feeling...") "Day of the Lords" begins the brooding, strong, slow and heavy that starts to get me centered and calmer. He keeps asking, "When will it end?" with frustration, yes, but it's been a slow and weary burn that I can attune with. Uneven and dissonant bass combine with his odd voice on the next track, moving toward trance, and thereafter the brooding is on. Listening in the dark beneath the blanket and typically behind on sleep, I'm usually slipping in and out of consciousness somewhere between "New Dawn Fades," "She's Lost Control," and "Shadowplay."

Forty-five minutes does the full album; 25 minutes is enough on a casually chaotic day. Problems are not gone when I finish listening, but they're mine, and I can own them and my mood and mind and be whole again.

-Ray Bradbury

This quote is important to me because I personally use writing as an outlet for when life gets too hard or stressful or even too boring. It allows me to escape into a world of my own creation in my time of need. I think it's important for everyone to have some kind of world to escape into, some kind of happy place. Desite the light of life, the real world can easily became an endless repetitive circle of work, school, and misery just by its very nature. Being forced to stay in that state of mind, being forced to constantly focus on and relive all your problems, that's enough to destroy a person.

Some say that people that spend a lot of time in their heads are crazy.

I say, the truly insane people are the ones who don't.

At the top of every bar lies the expensive whiskey. The heavy stuff. The hangover maker and heartbreak curer. You don't bring down that bottle to celebrate, you bring it down to grieve.

For the girl that never texted back.

For the friends you drifted from.

For the parents you lost.

For the dream you didn't achieve.

For the grandkids that forgot you.

This is the only job for that bottle of whiskey. Until then, it waits. For heartbreak will surely come again.

she couldn't stomach it anymore;

not the storms 

nor the black eyes

nor the cries of carved mouths in driftwood.

she couldn't wait

for someone to grab her hand

and take her somewhere good.

she was tired, for lack of a better word:

tired of everything and anything

in the dark of the ocean.

so she took her own hand

and cupped it to her chest, folded in

like paper

or water lilies 

in half. 

and she tucked herself away that night,

into a bed 

wider than the water

and blankets

colder than the sea.

she tucked her heart

into exactly twelve pockets,

and threw away what didn't fit.

she was alone,

and at once so full of everything-

as if that lonesome night

she had swallowed the world entire.