Riding in Vans with Boys

“There is no need to go on multiplying examples of an impulse that can produce no adequate examples- of a capacity that can’t be objectified without falsification. I’ve written in its defense, and in defense of our denunciation of it, because that is the dialectic of a vocation no less essential for being impossible. All I ask the haters- and I, too, am one- is that they strive to perfect their contempt, even consider bringing it to bear on poems, where it will be deepened, not dispelled, and where, by creating a place for possibility and present absences (like unheard melodies), it might come to resemble love.” Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry

There was a night in the middle of what I consider winter but everyone else probably gleefully describes as spring, when I was in Montreal and thankfully in a very comfortable room, when I felt fully warm and not just warm but excited, really, still so innocently excited about my life, the people in it, and punk. The night before I had seen Omegas, Torment, Mueco, Pox, and Sex Face at Katacombes and it had been a fucking insane, fantastic show. All the bands were great, none of my friends blacked out, and despite the language barrier I made some new friends (somehow still possible at thirty, a miracle unto itself). My boyfriend Kirk and I were sitting at our friend Mood’s house with my best friend Nikki, who had flown up from Miami to spend the weekend there. All of us have different backgrounds: Mood from a Muslim family in Canada, Kirk black and Jewish from LA, Nikki (Catholic-ish) and Columbian, and me (white atheist born in South Africa to communist parents). Despite being from different parts of the world and raised by very different people, here we were, sitting in a room drinking wine because we were friends, and we had become friends because of our interest in punk, or at least our interest in not being a part of the “rest of the world” and its interests. This sounds pedantic right? But it’s not, because I think as we get older and cynical, or as we get into punk and learn how to be critical, we forget the things that brought us here. We sat together in Mood’s room and drank wine and talked about healthy relationships, both sexual and emotional, and eventually left to the bar. Nothing too exciting, nothing wild, nothing scandalous...just three grown ups talking in a warm room.

I was incredibly thankful for that night, mostly just because it felt good to still have that thrill of intimacy with my friends. I think most of my close platonic relationships have been formed through playing music (when I say “punk” let’s extend that definition to mean DIY everything, playing music, setting up shows, touring, etc). To say nothing of the nuanced, incredibly complicated relationships I still maintain with people I’ve been intimate with (there’s some other posts about that) I think the things that I am most thankful about punk are my friends all over the country that I’ve made, some of them turning into life-long lasting friendships. There’s friends of mine who I see every year but we’ve never even lived on the same coast. That’s important to me. A lot of those relationships are with amazing, strong women, but a lot are also with men. Again, this sounds annoyingly chorus-to-choir right? But I read something on the internet the other day (I know…) that said that men didn’t belong in punk, and it made me consider my experiences with men. I thought about that night in Montreal, and about touring in bands with men, and about growing up before I got into punk. It’s a lot to consider.

First, I suppose I should say that as a woman I think we all understand the violence of adolescent. Growing up my dad and I were very close, but he moved far away when I was 13 and then we didn’t see much of each other. All my relationships with men from then on were sexual after that, and were neither fun nor probably healthy. Men scared me, they leered at me, and boys in school were worse. I was an awkward kid, I liked Lord of the Rings and had braces, but I also had boobs. None of those years were particularly fun for me (I’ve written about that before…) but I remember vividly when I started being happy, and finally having friends. It’s when I got into punk and had friends looking out for me (we looked out for each other) and people to hang out with (and avoid the Nazi skin heads together with!) and watch movies in bed and drink beer on the beach with...we weren’t dating, we didn’t date, we were just...friends. I ended up playing music and touring in bands with some of the people I met at 15. We made it through those terrible years together and began other terrible years but at least every year we could still talk together. When I went through a terrible break up almost a decade later at 25 I remember walking down the street in a town hours away from where we grew up and laying on my friends floor, my old bandmate, and both of us listening to the Radioactivity record and crying together. Platonic, lifelong friendships aren’t always sugar and spice, but having friends who you can count on to cry on their floor at 4am is meaningful to me. I doubt any of our parents still have friends like that, if they managed to keep their friends at all.

Without punk, I doubt I would have as many relationships with men as I do. I would even argue that there aren’t many aspects of modern American life where men and women interact outside of dating or work (unless you play sports or have like, normal hobbies, which we fucking don’t ok?). Playing in bands with men helped me have positive relationships with men. We would cook dinner at each other’s houses before practice, we would support each other during good shows and bad, and we would laugh (but not too much) at the things we might end up doing after the shows. I have had plenty of terrible experiences with men in the punk scene, because there’s always going to be men that aren’t willing to learn from their behavior or learn about anything other than what they want. But after I was assaulted it wasn’t just my female friends that had my back, but a lot of my close male friends and former bandmates.

These weren't jocks, they were also awkward teenagers that didn’t want to be apart of mainstream America, so instead they got into music. I think it should go without saying that punk provides not just an alternative lifestyle choice for women (I highly doubt I would be getting an MFA in poetry at 30 if I never got into punk...but I sometimes wonder if I would have been a doctor by now) it also provides a space for boys to experiment with gender and sexuality. This, to me, is what makes punk a safe space. But I can’t speak for other people’s experiences, and I don’t want to. I just want to publicly thank all my close friends who have been such a positive force in my life. I can’t imagine where I would be if none of my male friends hadn’t asked me to be in bands with them, or if when I asked them to start one they had blown me off. I also can’t imagine that my boyfriend would be such an emotionally smart, considerate, wonderful partner to me had he never played in bands and had platonic relationships with other women. I still don’t fucking like my dad, but I have plenty of amazing male friends who I see being good partners and good dads and it makes me happy. It’s possible for all of us to be healthy and emotionally and socially responsible, if not always happy.

Some of my best memories continue to be driving somewhere in a van, usually with strangers, on our way to a show or a party. Men are scary...other people are scary...but I have been so lucky to have the privilege of trust with most of the people I meet through punk. I can’t imagine under any circumstance that I would get into a van with six people I don’t know, but with punks, there is an element of trust that the average person would never have. This makes it especially saddening when that trust is violated, as it too often is. And yes, it’s fucking annoying when you’re on tour as a woman and some good looking punk dude asks if you’re the merch girl. There is violence and shitty people and shitty attitudes (especially on the internet, hi). However, like the quote above, it’s possible to criticize something, or stand up for it, or push against its boundaries while still loving it. So let all our criticism be exact, and well worded, and fair, in order to make it better.

Visit from the Goon Squad

I. Books 

"His desire was so small in the end that [he] could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it, and this gave him a feeling of safety and accomplishment, of having dismantled a perilous apparatus that might have crushed them both. [She] was baffled at first, then distraught [...] but eventually a sort of amnesia had overtaken [her]; her rebellion and hurt had melted away, deliquesced into a sweet, eternal sunniness that was terrible in the way that life would be terrible, [he] supposed, without death to give it gravitas and shape. He's presumed at first that her relentless cheer was mocking, another phase in her rebellion, until it came to him that [she] had forgotten how things were between them before [he] began to fold up his desire; she'd forgotten and was happy- had never not been happy- and while all of this bolstered his awe at the gymnastic adaptability of the human mind, it also made him feel that his wife had been brainwashed. By him."* 

        Sometimes in passing people like to drop these tiny bombs on me where they say things like, "oh but you get along with everybody." I know when it's said it's meant well, I'm never really offended, but I always think excitedly, internally, "holy shit they're right!" Then I spiral a little bit, worry about who I'm too nice to, who deserves it, if I'm not critical enough in my personal relationships. I'm not ever too nice, it's just that I might try too hard to like everyone. I mean to say that I tend to gloss over certain things in order to attain a balance- left over from a real shitty divorce (my parents) most likely- where everyone gets along and no one is trying to kill each other. I like playing this part; the middle man, camp counselor, whatever you want to call it. I like plans. I like difficult people. I like to organize, mediate, and all that stuff that probably drives my best friends crazy (but they like me because of their own fucked up problems too). With that being said, I am wild about this book by Jennifer Egan.

        I am fully aware of the criticism surrounding this book, but I can gloss over some of the criticism and focus on what's really amazing. Do I need to explain? Have I become one of those people that asks rhetorical questions? Fuck no. I bet if you didn't like the book it's because of some of the last chapters (I sort of skimmed them, not really my style but I think it took some guts, you'd have to read the book to know what I'm referring to). Cool, write about it for your professors while you get your MFA but I'm working 40 hours a week at a bar. I just want to say that the book freaked me out more than anything I've read in awhile and that's saying a lot (the next two books freaked me out too actually). To me, the best parts of the book were about how people loose touch with one another, destroy each other, forget about themselves, and betray their own instincts, all because of time passing and their own very small, innocent decisions that amount to tragedy- their own or someone else's. The redeeming quality of the book was that most of the characters go on. They just keep fucking up or eking out whatever shitty life they're trying to live, a few are redeemed (debatable) but it seems very realistic that no matter how you fuck up your life, it's just going to keep happening.That might not be a saving grace, but it's true. Characters in the book that you felt sure were going to "make it" just totally fell apart, by I guess my own standards. The book made me question my own ideas about growing up, about marriage, about a career, about what was important. I'm not even sure I had appropriate responses to parts of the book. Still, I'm glad I read the book when I did. 

"Ana Iris once asked me if I loved him and I told her about the lights in my old home on the capital, how they flickered and you never knew if they would go out or not. You put down your things and you waited and couldn't do anything really until the lights decided. This, I told her, is how I feel."**

        I think it's important for everyone to be intolerant of men whining about women, in every medium- music, books, poetry, tumblr, you name it. I don't mean whining in the sense of showing emotion, everyone deserves their own allotment of feelings, even self-centered miserable ones (goodness knows I've hammed it up a little on my own) but there's a fine line between "I have these feelings I want or need to share" and "this girl broke my heart and I didn't deserve it and she's a bad person" blah blah blah bullshit. Too often men get to use art as a cover up for their own bullshit, their own mistakes, and a mysterious girl gets the blame. I would say oh, about 90% of pop punk. However, This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz doesn't fall into that trap.

       The collection of short stories, mostly centered around the same character (a sort of shadowy reflection of the author) completely fucking up relationships for his whole life. He really takes the blame, and not in a passive aggressive way, but with really tangible self-loathing that I found myself relating to (there was an old Gomek lyric, "four years of youth wasted/fucking up relationships/and several houses"). Dead pan depression, sometimes witty, mostly just sad, and I kept waiting for the characters to stop, to just...stop being so fucked up to one another, but they don't. That's real life I guess. The quote above is from one of the singular chapters with a female perspective, but that doesn't mean the other women in the book aren't given incredible dimension. The mother in most of the stories is the strongest character (the one really deserving of respect and never getting it) but the woman in this chapter, who is sort of patiently waiting for things to work out or fall apart, that really resonated with me most. I used to think that, like anything else, when you fall in love you could control it, wrestle with it, rail against it...I think I know now that when you fall in love you just have to allow it to happen, take a deep breath and see how thing's turn out. Sadly, for almost every character in this book, nothing works out, things fall apart, and the main character ends up alone. Refreshingly though, he knows it's his fault. These are the accounts of all the ways he betrayed his partners, and also himself. He says at the end, "that's about it. In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace- and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start  is all we ever get."

"'A writer needs four things to achieve greatness Pasquale: desire, disappointment, and the sea.' 'That's only three.' Alvis finished the wine. 'You have to do disappointment twice.'"***

        Another book about betrayal, complicated human interaction, and the degrading and redemptive qualities of time. Not quite as depressing as the first two. Inspired me to actually stay up last night and write these book reviews though. Don't judge it by the cover (literally awful, didn't pick it up several times from three different book stores) it's actually captivating and quite funny. 

       I read it in the van on my way up to Richmond with Mauser. I don't mind being cramped with seven people for ten hours if I have a good book to read, so if you find yourself on any long trips this summer it would be a good book to have. I don't have beach reads. I have van reads. 

*A Visit From The Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan

**This is How You Lose Her, Junot Diaz 

***Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walter 

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

that life that is slowly waking

"In the depths on your green eyes, you loafer, I can clearly see the land of laziness. I can see golden hills where you will bask. I can see the sofas of your many-houred snoozes. I can see heaps of notebooks you will never cover with writing. I can see the thousand peaceful cities where you will live from day to day, a thousand peaceful white cities of phlegmatic architecture and friendly climate. Torrid heat reigns from early morning. A streetcar, open on both sides, is making its way through green pastures. Oh, how sweet it will be, to live in the heart of that life that is slowly waking but always nodding off again before final awakening. Open windows, dark apartments, the somnolent dramas of the residents, an oval table covered with a cloth, the remains of banquets that never end, hammocks, easy chairs, old architecture, a thousand gentle rivers under a thousand old bridges, lazy girls going for walks along grassy shores...I'm afraid it's already too late. If you have the misfortune to chance upon a lazy body at the very beginning of your youth, you'll be lost for life. Your innate tendency toward laziness will be awakened and set for all time, and you'll spend your entire life searching for the promised land of laziness. You'll pass through a thousand peaceful cities. All your life you'll hunger for lazy arms. You won't live, you'll sleep instead."*

Be patient with me. Nothing I'd ever say out loud, in the real world. In the real world I'm always tapping my fingers, ready to move on, always rushing around. Inside though, alone in my room, I beg the world for patience. I have to have the exact right amount of time to write. The exact right amount of uneasiness and unhappiness, but not too much, because then I'll be busy taking care of it. There's always something to take care of, but it's hard taking care of ones own self.

I thought that lately I'd been happy. I was wrong. I'm not even sure I deserve to be happy, but really I think I was just being lazy. When it's easy to sleep past noon and stay up with someone, one on one, why wouldn't you? I realized that I need a break from being self-indulgent. This weekend I drank a lot, ran around with old friends and caused some trouble. It was fun, but I got sick and had to lay in bed for the past three days thinking. I mean really Thinking. Maybe that made me even more sick. I realized I still have a lot of work to do before I can be really happy, and that does seem like the point, to me anyway, just to be happy in the end. I saw my friend Charlie this weekend and he said he missed reading my blog, he asked why I'd been so busy, why I haven't been writing, and over beers I realized I didn't have a good excuse. So here you go Charlie, this ones for you.

Rose Cross has one song about partying. The gist is "turn off my brain" and I hop up and down and pogo and it sounds happy but it isn't. I spend a lot of time wondering why I have to be the one to think so goddamn hard. Everyone else seems ok most of the time, like nine out of ten people can walk into a messy room and feel fine and I'm the tenth person that walks in and completely looses it. Going into work and fixing other peoples mistakes, cleaning up after people, putting things back in their place...where does that bone in my body come from? Why can't I coast along, doing the bare minimum, smiling dumbly and dutifully? I get frustrated at everyone's lack of interest with the problems around them, and am worn out always trying to fix them. I often feel like I don't have much to show for it either. Sure, I work a lot, but I'd have rather been at that Halloween party than standing behind the bar for eight hours. I had a really amazing boyfriend for about five months but then I freaked out, thought I was doing everything wrong, felt depressed and ended it (that is the very, very short version of the story). If I could let things go...wouldn't I be happier?

Well fuck that. I'm not going to let New Years sneak up on me. I'm making my resolution now. No more sleeping in, no more comfort, no more easy living. I'm going to be writing more, updating this more, and trying to fix all the goddamn problems, and I don't care how unhappy it makes me. In the end it'll probably be worth it. Probably.

*Jerzy Pilch, A Thousand Peaceful Cities

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

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