Today I saw someone I used to like with this beautiful girl, and my first thought was: “go f—- yourself.” Haha. I promise I don’t have such violent thoughts often, but when I do, it’s usually only reserved for those I have fell for. I really hate how romance is so tightly linked with all these negative emotions: possessiveness, jealousy, rage. Moreover, they usually last longer than the pure flighty air of romantic desire, so that it seems utterly irrational to have such thoughts. How can you hate something you no longer love? Shouldn’t one be gone the same time the other has been let go? What makes us hold on to the bad when the good has already escaped us? Vengeance is always so easy to breed…and goodwill so hard.
**
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Monday, March 21, 2011
tax season
Another obligatory entry about home, where no catastrophes are in sight, but somehow rough grains underneath your feet work their way inside your skin anyway. It's taxing. That's all I can say to sum it up. Actually, I can (and have) summed it up in a million ways, maybe even too much. But why throw away something that gives you so much material each time? As a writer, the electricity-laced air is practically my bread and butter.
I can't explain any of these million ways to anyone else. Because people understand concrete, time-measured events. And I understand only the things that are never said--the truest revealed intentions (or so I've been taught). More importantly, I understand the things that are never said to outsiders. No one practices the art of hiding dirty laundry quite as well as the one who rules this house. On this point we are vastly different--say it out loud! i always rush to campaign. there can never be enough words. words! words?
Still, I can't tell if this is an innate difference or simply the symptoms of youthful rebellion. Raw, bleeding, and fresh from the slaughterhouse, stamped with a 'best-if-used-by' date. Maybe not far from now, all the tinged blood will dry and all the meaty substance will expire. Maybe someday we'll merge in our ways of insidiousness, and my daughter will write the same lines as I do tonight, while the house drowns in things unsaid. What will I think then? Will half my life, and all my trusted words, have been in vain?
**
I can't explain any of these million ways to anyone else. Because people understand concrete, time-measured events. And I understand only the things that are never said--the truest revealed intentions (or so I've been taught). More importantly, I understand the things that are never said to outsiders. No one practices the art of hiding dirty laundry quite as well as the one who rules this house. On this point we are vastly different--say it out loud! i always rush to campaign. there can never be enough words. words! words?
Still, I can't tell if this is an innate difference or simply the symptoms of youthful rebellion. Raw, bleeding, and fresh from the slaughterhouse, stamped with a 'best-if-used-by' date. Maybe not far from now, all the tinged blood will dry and all the meaty substance will expire. Maybe someday we'll merge in our ways of insidiousness, and my daughter will write the same lines as I do tonight, while the house drowns in things unsaid. What will I think then? Will half my life, and all my trusted words, have been in vain?
**
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
opening night
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
Kurt Vonnegut (Mother Night)
This theme keeps coming up today, the idea that we all put up a “theatrical” self to everyone, except when we’re alone. I don’t think this makes the “selves” we present to others any less authentic though. Because, really, what are we like when we are by ourselves? Utterly boring and filled with incoherent and (mostly) insignificant thoughts, if nothing else, an audience forces us to organize into distinguishable objects, rather than lumps of raw material. We are only art after we go on stage.
**
Kurt Vonnegut (Mother Night)
This theme keeps coming up today, the idea that we all put up a “theatrical” self to everyone, except when we’re alone. I don’t think this makes the “selves” we present to others any less authentic though. Because, really, what are we like when we are by ourselves? Utterly boring and filled with incoherent and (mostly) insignificant thoughts, if nothing else, an audience forces us to organize into distinguishable objects, rather than lumps of raw material. We are only art after we go on stage.
**
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
yin yang mentality
So there's this sexual pathology called sacrificial ethos, where you engage in something terrible and ominous like sadomasochism or unprotected sex with an HIV positive person, in order to serve yourself up like a lamb for slaughter, chasing pain for pain, negativity for negativity, and death for death.
Maybe they're walking the line between living and dying, I say. Maybe they only desire it for the foreclosed (but still remembered) possibility of pleasure. Without contrast, there is no meaning, I insist.
There doesn't have to be meaning, you say. No need for meaning for wanting pain. They want it to want it, no need to ground it, no rhyme to it, and no reason for it. You rattle this off like a rap song that rattles the conservatives in Alabama.
There is no shadow if there is no light! I shout inside my head as the rattle enters deeper layers of my gray matter. Because we are rational creatures tethered to animal passions, so we are doomed for imperfection, and will always fall from grace, and always have dark and light, and will always try to understand that which we cannot. So we need paradoxes of meaning and meaninglessness, so shadow alone is not an option, so your nihilism will never come to be. Retreat, with your serpent and its clinking tail! Your rattles will not get to me.
**
Maybe they're walking the line between living and dying, I say. Maybe they only desire it for the foreclosed (but still remembered) possibility of pleasure. Without contrast, there is no meaning, I insist.
There doesn't have to be meaning, you say. No need for meaning for wanting pain. They want it to want it, no need to ground it, no rhyme to it, and no reason for it. You rattle this off like a rap song that rattles the conservatives in Alabama.
There is no shadow if there is no light! I shout inside my head as the rattle enters deeper layers of my gray matter. Because we are rational creatures tethered to animal passions, so we are doomed for imperfection, and will always fall from grace, and always have dark and light, and will always try to understand that which we cannot. So we need paradoxes of meaning and meaninglessness, so shadow alone is not an option, so your nihilism will never come to be. Retreat, with your serpent and its clinking tail! Your rattles will not get to me.
**