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Sunday, November 11, 2012

The Sudden Feeling

"I'm really intrigued: these disasters, these decisions that are wrong from the start, these dead ends that constitute the story of my life, are repeated over and over again. A passionate vocation for happiness, always betrayed and misdirected, ends in a need for total defeat, it is completely foreign to what, in my heart of hearts, I've always known could be mine if it weren't for this constant desire to fail. Who can understand it? We're about to reenter the green tunnel of the menacing, watchful jungle. The stink of wretchedness, of a miserable, indifferent grave, is already in my nostrils."*

             I'm almost twenty seven years old and I have to force myself to clean my room. My car sits dead in the drive way. My scooter has a flat tire. My space heater broke the week it finally got down into the 40s at night. Records are missing sleeves. Emails go unanswered. I made my bed today for the first time in weeks (it does look amazing, highly recommend, filed under simple steps to make you feel better about yourself). I don't know why it's so difficult for me to undergo these easy, little things that are a part of being an adult. That part of my life, the physical part, being a mess doesn't really make me lose sleep at night. It's the avoidance of everything else that's the problem. I've been afraid to make decisions, since I've lost faith in myself over the summer, and I haven't been writing, because I'm afraid to get too close to what's been just below the surface for awhile now. 

"I know where these tortured musings on the irremediable can lead. There's a dryness inside us we shouldn't get too close to. It's better not to know how much of our soul it occupies."*

             I've been looking back on the past few years and realized I waited much too long to do some things and rushed in or completely fucked up most of the others. Anyone that's ever swung out over a river on a rope swing knows that too much hesitation is never a good thing. I've always let go in the last second, before smashing into the black water of the Santa Fe river, but that seems to be the only time I have any guts. This past year I failed to get into grad school and I was too chicken shit to apply to any others. I took it way too personally and now I'm staring down another academic year without credentials. I'm not saying you have to be in school to be somebody, absolutely the fucking contrary. I work in a bar where MFA students repeatedly don't tip me, and personally I think they look way too clean to be actual poets. Most of them, I'm sure, have never seen a rope swing in real life.
            The other thing that deserves a lot of personal literary attention on my part is my total failure of having a healthy relationship. I don't mean that the relationship was a failure, but more to the point that I failed at it. I thought that by this point in my life I would have shut that door and been moving on to the next part of my life, but here I am, back at square one, and it's really no one's fault. I wanted to write an epic tale of woe, all about the miseries of summer and lost love and all of the stuff that's pretty easy to write about honestly, but I didn't. Looking back I'm glad I didn't. I've mostly just felt really confused, about everything. Drinking served its purpose of numbing out a lot of those feelings, and I've been on quite a roll of forgetting and evading, and might still be. I finally came to terms with the fact that it's hard to write when you're afraid of what you might unsettle in yourself. I've crossed that boundary at least. I'll still gladly check out mentally with my friends, because it's fun to be miserable together, even though we call it a party, even though it feels good, but I can wake up in the morning and sit down and deal with it finally. 
 
"I felt the gradual return of my old loyalties to life, to the world that holds endless surprises, to the three or four beings whose voices reach me despite time and my incurable wanderlust."*

           The weather changing has everything to do with everything. Summer's long misery is behind us! Everyone feels something new in the air, and it's both real and imagined. A lot of people, it seems, are ready to do something new. The next step. I feel comforted in the fact that by this time next year, I will be in a new place, doing something mostly different than what I'm doing now. Al Burian writes a lot about fall, and I've been flipping through a lot of Burn Collector lately. It's not a coincidence. Fall has a loneliness that summer doesn't, summer has a melancholy but fall is the time for remembering. The voices that reach me are the voices that I've always looked to my whole life, books I read before I had any friends, and books I bring with me when I travel, and books that will keep me company through our sunny, beautiful winter. 
        This book that I'm reading now (see below) has already effected me more than anything I've read this year. I did finish the Dark Tower series, and fell in love with the characters and story, but I consumed it, I devoured it so fast and just wanted to continue the story. In Mutis' book every sentence is a pleasure. The story is amusing and also at times strangely dark, and the main characters and the often doomed characters around him have insights into true melancholy. Reading it has reminded me of unidentifiable aches, weird pains, and the language of nostalgia. Travel, dreaming, and failure. The articulated, tangible feelings I've been searching for since summer ended. 


*The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, Alvaro Mutis. 

Monday, September 10, 2012

Nights At Home

"The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments. His life happened, he said, when he sat staring at a blank wall, thinking about dinner...I almost believed him when he said such things. He said we do this all the time, all of us, we become ourselves beneath the running thoughts and dim images, wondering idly when we'll die. This is how we live and think whether we know it or not. These are the unsorted thoughts we have looking out the train window, small dull smears of meditative panic."*
                   I did read the new Roberto Bolano book** like I said I would. I never got around to writing about it...maybe I couldn't make the time but also the story didn't leave me with much except the image of the German tourist walking down the beach during a cloudy day, lost within his own vacation. This summer has felt like that, a little at least, to me. Rain for weeks on end, waking up to darkness and going back to sleep until the afternoon, going to work with wet shoes, coming home with damp hair. I didn't leave town enough maybe. I visited my mom in NC and we kayaked around a lake, a mountain storm has just passed and the water split dark and glassy under us, and I felt happy, to be thinking about nothing in the middle of all those mountain colors. I came home and finished my summer class and kept working. I should have stayed up there longer.
                   A few of us went to the beach the other day and that might be the last time in the ocean until spring. The water will stay warm a little longer but I doubt I'll have the time. On our way home the rain was so bad Adrien couldn't see the road. Everything in front of us just looked white, and I worried that if we died on our way home, somewhere in between Gainesville and Palatka, that I had totally wasted not just my summer but the last four or so years of my life. I keep hearing all these internet-worthy catch phrases about "doing what you love before it's too late" but I think there's something to be said for doing what you need to do too. Also, even at 26, I'm still unsure of what I really love. I like that I'm unsure. As far as I'm concerned, I've got fucking options. I'm just going to keep walking the fence until then, a little bit of staring out into the ocean and a lot of working my ass off until four in the morning. I'm not sure I have or even deserve the luxury of doing exactly what I want, and I know for a fact that most people never even get a chance. 
                   Of a few things I am at least certain. Not the future, not my next step, but at least the little things that make me happy. Don DeLillo is right, staring out the windows of trains at passing landscapes is absolutely one of them. Punk music still makes me inexplicably happy; I can still walk into a room of people I don't know, in a terrible mood, drunk or getting there, hungover or totally sober, and suddenly there is music and I feel better. Sometimes better than better! Sometimes even excited, or I start thinking, "hey, the world isn't so bad, I should fall in love! I should write a book! I should write more songs, I could write NEW songs!" And along down that line of thinking until the spell wears off. I also like sitting in my room tonight, with the windows open, finally signaling that the long, terribly humid summer might finally be over, and I can put on a record and go through my books, and think about my life and it's not so bad.

*Don DeLillo, Point Omega
** the new Roberto Bolano book is Third Reich



                   

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Are there other world's than this?

"Now he could, and too often did, scan through the thousand pictures, a record of his life, in minutes. All he had to do was keep his finger on the leftward arrow. It was too easy. It was not good. It kept him in a dangerous stasis of nostalgia and regret and horror."*


             I've been in and out of the world lately. Two jobs and I went back to school and a stack of books that I'll never let get any smaller. I think more than any of my obligations or responsibilities the Dark Tower books have distracted me the most. I like Roland. He's my kind of guy. He describes himself in the first book as being, "the last of that green and warm-hued world" which has long since moved on. Yet he's still out there searching...hunting down his ghosts and (I haven't gotten to the end yet) the Dark Tower. Stephen King admits to modeling Roland's character off Clint Eastwood from The Good the Bad and the Ugly, and you get that wide-screen, dusty western feel from the books. The lonesome hero. The search. We all know the story, but The Dark Tower adds an element of nostalgia and also magic that those westerns  were missing. Roland talks about destiny and I listen, although I have no idea what mine is, or even if I believe in it. There's also the sense of decay in the books that I feel all around me, the sense of winding-down, that the world's moved on and moving away. 
              Dave Eggers just came out with a new book, A Hologram for the King, which struck me as uncannily similar in the sense that it is also about a world that moved on, and left a protagonist wandering around a different desert (in Saudi Arabia). The New York Times book review described it as kind of a "Death of an American Salesman" and it left me feeling like there isn't much to look forward to, as a country, because we've been totally sold out. Not just sold out by the government, but by each other, capitalism, a big bold ETC. We're just at the end now. A winding down. Watched in conjunction with the new HBO series Newsroom, you get the feeling that other people are picking up on it too. The lack of American imagination has become the lack of progress, which makes us a wasteland not just for artists but for everyone. In A Hologram for the King the main character describes watching the last NASA launch, it's heartbreaking, and its terribly similar to what Aaron Sorkin writes about America on Newsroom (bottom line, we're getting played, hard, by a lot of different people). 


                I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the national crisis of imagination or tolerance, passing moments of panic maybe, but instead spend my time reading and getting lost in fantasy novels where the great times have past, the heroes are already gone. Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, the Dark Tower Series- all worlds where the heroes are long dead and the battles are over, until the next story starts anyway (and who among us doesn't secretly wish for their chance to be a hero, for Aragorn or Roland to ride up on their horse and say, time to fight? It's my favorite daydream) I only thought it was interesting, and worth writing down, that this similar feeling that "the world's moved on, and I with it" (courtesy of Roland) is seeping into other stories and coming from other writers. 
                 
                I've got looks of other books to write about. And soon.


*Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

two poems

"In this language, you can't chit-chat
holding a highball in your hand, can't
even be polite. Once the sentence starts its course,
all your grief and failure come clear at last."*
Sometimes, Garrison Keillor doesn't add anything at the end of the writer's almanac. He just copies out the poem, and it seems to be enough for the day. I've never put poetry quotes on this blog, but I'm going to tonight, and I think at least one of them should be saved at the end, so that those words stay on longer than mine.
I know how to be lonely. I like to remind myself of that. When I wake up alone, and I know exactly what to do. In my new house, I even have the added bonus of closeness, and I can walk wherever I need to go. I can be alone and think. Walking sets the pace, creates the meter for your thoughts. I-know-how-to-be-lonely. Even after being in bands, I never learned anything about timing, but I hear it in my head just the same.
On Sunday I stretched out and walked to find the New York Times, not that I needed the information, but just for the luxury of sitting down in the sun and reading it front to cover (AND the magazine) in its entirety. Just like a cat in the sun, literally bathing in something, I don't know what, the ability to just not be interrupted maybe. Some friends and I walked down the Hawthorne Trail to the graveyard and kicked stones around. The oak trees were black against the sky, just like in a movie, and so were we when walking back to town. A good walk with friends goes a long way. Then the simple pleasure of cooking, and being close in a kitchen together, before everyone went their own ways before bed.
The past couple of days have been less fun. Nikki said, "when you're lonely it feels like everyone else is happy." I have great fears that all my self-righteousness and introspection will get me is nowhere, and the rest of the world will go on without me, happily (and worse still, that I might deserve it!). I stop to take a look around, so to speak, and end up alone in a room with the lights off and the door shut. I've been panicking a little. Pacing around my room, picking up different books. Unfocused. Still doing a lot of walking though, and even in the rain today I caught the words bubbling up, and then I sat on my balcony and tried to arrange them. I've been unable to write for a few months. Writing in this doesn't count. I mean really writing, and not just for my graduate school applications.
I just wrote two pretty lousy poems. Still, the fact that I got them down at all made me cry. The unimaginable pleasure, to just sit down and write! That's the pay off in the end, for thinking, and for walking.

"Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things."**

*Bill Holm, from The Icelandic Language
**Mary Oliver, from Wild Geese

Thursday, January 12, 2012

thoughts not worth thinking

"This was the interior work of his current life. He thought about himself and then cursed himself- his thoughts were not worth thinking. He was negligible and deserved no pity. He wanted only to help the people he loved, right? But he wasn't doing that, either. He was growing harder to penetrate. A half-dozen inexplicable injustices and you're a cynic. Ten premature deaths and you went crazy or barren. You couldn't care the same way each time; a certain point it was just absurd. The words dead inside presented themselves to him occasionally, but was that it, was that him? He cared, and deeply, about so many things, didn't he?"

I went to a show to see a band I like a lot. I think everyone else would like them too, but they've become an example of A while everyone else wants so badly to like B. The shortsightedness of friends irritates me. I feel like a fence walker and then I start acting like I'm living off lemons and salt, too sour for my own good. I ride my bike home in moonlight, cruising under big oak trees at three in the morning and I started getting worked up over snobbery, weighed down by wanting everyone just to lighten up a little. If I expressed these thoughts I'd sound like an insane person to rational society, "YOU LIKE JAPANESE HARDCORE BUT YOU CAN'T APPRECIATE CURRENT AMERICAN HARDCORE? IDIOTS! POSERS!" you know, the kind of person people don't make eye contact with on street corners. I know I have friends out there who know what I'm saying. They'd say, don't spend so much time thinking about other people. I wish I could stop too. Dan's been my partner in suffering lately, and he told me pretty simply, "you can't change how people act, only how you react to them." I know. I've gotten better and I still have a lot of work to do. Sometimes when I feel overwhelmed I drink to the point of oblivion, or sometimes I stay at home for hours, reading comic books or currently- listening to American Gods on tape. The rest of the time? I can honestly say I know how to enjoy myself. I like being alone, I also like going out, but I like walking both sides of the line (the one I refuse to draw in the sand).
I bought a movie the other day at Video Rodeo because I used to watch it A LOT and I can't rent movies from there anymore anyway (a rough estimate of how much I owe them is more than I'll make in tips tonight). I watched it last night with red wine and a good friend and I felt a little embaressed at how sad the movie was. I remembered, with an air of real dissappointment in myself, that I used to love movies like this. I stopped because every time I loved something like a movie, or a really great record, I'd want to talk about it, and no one would pay any attention. So I gave up. I started watching romantic comedies (which I do genuinely like) and action movies and the jokes I could make about that were better than the actual comments I'd make about "better" movies et. all. Somewhere along the line I really started liking all the crappy blockbuster movies I watched and cared less and less about the good ones, especially if I had to listen to anyone talk about them. Currently, everyone keeps getting me to go see Melancholia at the Hippodrome, but I'd really rather go see Shark Night in 3D. I don't know how that shift happened exactly, but I like my tastes now. Just last night though, I got reminded of that itching feeling, that intense discomfort to tell everyone about the movie, how they just have to see it, really watch it, and really pay attention. I feel like that way still when I read books, even mainstream comics like Grant Morrison's Superman, and especially things like the first chapter of the new Eggers' book- I can't just enjoy it, I need everyone else to see it too.
Maybe at the bar tonight I can shift conversations away from Tim Tebow and more toward Alejandro Inarritu, but if I can't, hey, I'll put on ESPN with the sound off and turn up Sisters of Mercy on the stereo. Lead a horse to water, and all that.


*Dave Eggers, Chapter One (from his forthcoming novel, title unknown, release date unknown. Chapter One can be found in McSweeney's quarterly no. 38)

Sunday, January 1, 2012

not enough in the end

"Even those wild memories of his mad youth left him unmoved, just as during his last debauch he had exhausted his quota of salaciousness and all he had left left was the marvelous gift of being able to remember it without bitterness or repentance."*

I like New Years. A lot of American holidays (yes I'm biased because I am geographically deficient) carry a certain amount of nostalgia but New Years Eve happens to be one of the holidays in which it is totally acceptable to talk about it. Every night at the end of the year people make lists about what they'd like to do differently in the forthcoming year, but all of the lists are tainted by what they've done wrong in the year before. Personally, I'd like to not be an asshole or do anymore dumb shit in 2012, but I'm only saying that because I know I've done enough of it
this past year.
We want to do better because we've done so much wrong. I don't want to sound cynical because I like wallowing in it, so to speak. I hate the sting of nostalgia but it's easily accessible for me. After all, this blog is named after a novel dedicated to nostalgia. I rode my bike home tonight through the growing fog (the night, has been- perfect) and I missed a few people so bad that it hurt. Really missed them. You, you might be reading this and think, "me? surely not me," but really, I mean you. I think about people I'd really never want to talk to again, but I miss them. I could blame it on Time but I know at the end of the day I'm just as responsible for pushing certain people away from me. No, that's the sweet version.
The bad version is that I've been a horrible person to people that put their trust and their hopes on me, and I couldn't be the girl they wanted me to be. I don't just mean boys, that sounds like the right answer but it's not (and they should take some of the blame of putting all of their hopes on me because that is, after all, a product of the Patriarchy which is too big of a footnote to include here) but I also mean my mom who wanted me to go to graduate school and my dad who wanted me to go to law school and my friends from out of state who expected my band to tour and my bosses who expected me to stick around all summer even when I wasn't making money (everyone seems upset when I go off and do my own thing, and I know at some point I'll stick around, I promise).
I want 2011 to end with a big, wet, warm apology to everyone that has been disappointed in me, but I don't know if it would matter at this point. I rode my bike home thinking about the friends I can't call anymore, not just from my own volition but also just from Time and Distance, and I wish I could wake up tomorrow in the new year and be able to. The shitty thing is, is that I won't be able to pick up the phone and make it better. Sure, tomorrow morning I'm going to go meet my dad out by the highway. We're going to drink a beer and he's going to ask me what I'm doing, but he sure as hell won't ask me if I'm happy. Just the same, happy new year to you, wherever you are.

*One Hundred Years of Solitude, pg. 341