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.
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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.
**
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
inception
I just came from a slam poetry reading for the first time. It evoked far more than I imagined it could, and now I can feel the last wisps of creativity leaving me as I desperately try to weave that aura into something that can live. Poetry has never been my thing. It was always someone else's thing, someone else's thing I stole for a while and put back on the nightstand. I wish I could write lines like those that were uttered tonight, and I wish I could instill the images somehow so that I can regurgitate them back to silent applause, but I'd always know that they were stolen, so I don't lay my greedy fingers on them in the first place. But if I could come up with those images on my own I'd share them a thousand times over. Someone wanted to ask if these poets get tired of reading the same thing over and over, but as long as the image is comprehensible and imagination and understanding are in play like Kant promised then everything would be just as alive as when the ink first bled to the other side of the page, maybe they could become even more so when they tumble out of the dark hollows of the mouths that first whispered them to sisters lying on old comforters, and still more when they are first shouted to the unblinking eyes of strangers sitting on wooden chairs while unintelligible salty drops form inside the under folds of their eyelids. And maybe I can steal that fire like Prometheus did even if just for a pirated copy's worth before it degrades into the next cliché of my ever ever growing list of things I've loved to death, each buried under the crinkling pages and pages that never see light.
**
**
Friday, February 18, 2011
pit stop
So this is the first week I've had to adjust to a new schedule...with vast amounts of free time. I guess I've been lucky enough to come across a few events that filled it up better. However, I can't help but feel like this newfound euphoria of unfilled slots will wear off soon. Like the second month of summer, a lack of structure has always bored, frustrated, and slightly terrified me. There is, of course, work that has been neglected, work I almost can't bear to face because of how abandoned I've left them.
That's the thing--when you're racing along a road threatening to reach a million forks, it's okay if a few projects bounce out of the back trunk. But now that some forks have closed, and I'm forced to step out and examine a flat tire, all I can see are the empty spaces where my baggage used to be, the barely visible dots of my belongings that litter the road I've conquered, and the long, stretching, gray snake of a line beyond me. As I stand under a dry, heated sun, I begin to fear the last hundreds of miles might not have counted at all.
**
That's the thing--when you're racing along a road threatening to reach a million forks, it's okay if a few projects bounce out of the back trunk. But now that some forks have closed, and I'm forced to step out and examine a flat tire, all I can see are the empty spaces where my baggage used to be, the barely visible dots of my belongings that litter the road I've conquered, and the long, stretching, gray snake of a line beyond me. As I stand under a dry, heated sun, I begin to fear the last hundreds of miles might not have counted at all.
**
Thursday, February 10, 2011
fight after flight
I am about to be at the breaking point. This week just keeps getting bigger and bigger. The difference between life's previous swift punches and today's--is that in the former case I had felt helpless and passive, and I had saved myself only by licking my wounds after the fact with people who were there for me (suffice to say I'm so very grateful for this). However, in today's dealings, I've decided to take a decidedly more active approach. This injustice I will fight for. I'm so sick of the same people sensing passivity on my part and drawing whatever damn implications they want and forming underhanded moves from it. The things is, the consequences might pan out the same way as if I had done nothing at all. However, I've tasted the thrill of standing my ground when it comes to territory I thought I've already won, and defending it tonight felt maddening, but also empowering, and, dare I say it? Enlivening. Agency feels just as good as another's soothing caresses and well intentioned words. Better I've found it now, I suppose, before dust can settle, than finding myself in some post-war situation, where pieces flutter and litter all around, while the camera pans towards me, sitting on the ground, not having bothered to stand up at all.
**
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