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Thursday, May 19, 2011

Unknown Pleasures

"Memory is not what the heart desires."*

I drove into Melbourne going South on A1A, listening to Joy Division on accident. I wanted to play the Mind Spiders record but it was somewhere behind my seat, just out of reach, and I was too stubborn to pull over on the way down from Gainesville. Just needed to finish this one last thing, I kept telling myself, and then it's all over. I'll probably never come back here again. Suddenly the song seemed just right.
I lived in Melbourne for four years with my mom after we moved down from St. Augustine. I'm still friends with my three best friends from high school, but I don't come into town if I don't have to. I had to come down to help my mom pack up the house, which she sold last week, and now she's moving to Asheville. Lucky her. Last night I packed up my room. I threw out everything I could. Boxes and boxes of pictures of people I don't know anymore. Fliers for shows I barely remember. Notes from girls in high school, and notes from boys I wanted to kiss. The term overwhelmingly depressing doesn't begin to scratch the surface. The most unsettling things uncovered though were my own writings, which for some reason my mom kept. Folders and folders of short stories, poems, essays, and then the journals, at least a dozen of them. All so totally pathetic and foolish. I thought I understood solitude and depression at seventeen, what a joke. I should have been out on the beach kissing boys and hanging out, I should have been huffing glue and fucking up way more than I did. Didn't I know what was in store for me? Once all the promise ran out? DIDN'T I? All the stories are sort of banal and all the private thoughts from the journals are so pathetic, and I felt a shudder of foreshadowing as I read through them; will these thoughts I'm writing now look the same in twenty years? I'll admit to being hopelessly self-centered and a little too romantic at times, but I'd like to think I've gotten wildly smarter in the past seven years (seven years since high school, holy shit it burns) but I began to feel vibrations of doubt...do I remain the foolish kid I know I was? Terrifying. I won't think about it anymore this morning.

So now my mom has me packing up her books. Boxes and boxes of books. It's going to take me all 24 hours of today, since every few books I stop and start reading. I can't pick up the Mark Twain, Melville, Marquez, Salinger, Zadie Smith books without sneaking in a few pages. Every book marks a memory just like the pictures I threw out upstairs. Every chapter a chapter, if it's not too easy a metaphor. I told my mom over coffee this morning, "friends and punk shows make up half of my best memories, but these books make up the other half." So my mom may be moving out of this place that's suppose to be my hometown, but I know where to visit ghosts if I need to.

*Lord of the Rings, Fellowship of the Ring

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Know When to Hold Em

"A poet can endure anything. Which amounts to saying that a human being can endure anything. But that's not true: there are obviously limits to what a human being can endure. Really endure. A poet, on the other hand, can endure anything. We grew up with this conviction. The opening assertion is true, but that way lie ruin, madness, and death."*


I. The last time I thought about this quote was over a month ago, I was driving home from Orlando by myself. I'd pretty much do anything to avoid driving by myself, because that's when everything comes bubbling up. I can create distractions for a little while- Lord of the Rings on tape, K Country on the radio, NPR, phone calls, but in the end somehow I always find myself alone, driving in silence. It's all I can handle, and at the same time it's all I can handle. I think about friends I've abused, relationships I've trashed, jobs I've fucked up, places I've abandoned. It seems like hell, but the thing that pains me most is the thought that it isn't enough, because I know at the end of the day it isn't enough just to think about the small crimes we've committed. I know somehow it isn't enough just to think hard on anything, the real pain isn't there, the real fucked up parts aren't committed solely to my head, they belong to other people now, and other places.

III. A woman was found in her apartment surrounded by fan mail. She had been dead for over a year and no one noticed. There's something enticingly fucked up about someone dying among boxes of people saying they loved her. Such an obvious metaphor. It freaks me out for other reasons. I'm upset that someone can be loved and still die alone in their apartment. It hurts somewhere in the soft part of my brain to know that you can achieve some sort of happy status and still wind up alone, and I don't mean solitude which is invasive but I mean alone which is tangible.

IV. So what's the point of trying at all? I mean trying like, doing something important, or doing something good, whatever that means to you. I've been having a lot of conversations. I've been reading a lot of books. I haven't figured it out, only gone to sleep more and more nervous. The original Bolaño quote is about what we can take, as in what we think we can take (or maybe what we think we're missing) and it comes back to the reason why anyone gets out of bed in the morning. So I think after a couple weeks of sitting on this the only thing I've come up with is having sincere relationships with people. I don't necessarily mean romantic relationships, although sometimes I think they manage to be the best kind. I only mean that as I've gotten older, i.e. thought more about the things I'm doing, better relationships have had more meaning to me. The only things I can consider important in the past few months are the relationships I've cultivated- and also the fact that I've earned them. It feels good to be able to call a friend for coffee in the morning. Period. It doesn't matter what the underlying context for your friendships is (right?). I remind myself that I am one of the lucky few that can meet up with someone when I need to. I guess that's what keeps me going most of the time.

V. Here's the link to the article. http://www.boingboing.net/2011/05/03/rip-yvette-vickers-c.html

VI. I promise the next blog post will be about Kenny Rogers. Just wait.

*Roberto Bolaño, Enrique Martîn. From Last Evenings on Earth