dolce vita

"All those gentleman and ladies and boys and girls sitting at tables in that cafe- they were right, unquestionably right. As they talked, they become more and more certain of how right they were. And their certainty about being right was built on ridicule, devastation, and scorn for other people. they more they talked, the more they were right, the more their rightness demanded its tribute of words, threats, and gestures. As that tribute piled up, all the others,those who were in the wrong, became increasingly alone and unhappy. I looked out the window, across the street, and I saw other people sitting in other cafes: they were right too. This immense, single-minded rightness had split the world into two camps: those who has right on their sides (which is to say, everyone), and the others (which is to say, again, everyone)."*

I got into an argument with Daniel about literature, or rather an argument about Truth, since he reads mostly nonfiction, and mostly philosophy, which he thinks is a part of the Quest, and I think literature, specifically fiction and also poetry, makes for the surer road. He threw a biblical reference to me, about Babylon, and all the poor fuckers scratching in the dark, and I got wildly upset at the idea of all of this being some sort of misadventure, even though most of the time I'm convinced it is. Most books make our problems greater, but there has to be some truth in that. He meant, I think, that most people who write just don't have their hearts in the right place, which maybe makes "accredited theories" a better shot at figuring out the ways of the world and ourselves, but I think the same can be said for everyone. A lot of people don't have their hearts in the right place, they're on some other road entirely.

I think some reading ends up being in the "entertainment" category for me. A lot of the comics I read aren't going to teach me anything new about the world, but then again, X Men has a very special place in my socio-political arguments. Bolano is good, Marquez is also good (even though I know he would had to think so, Bolano had a hefty distaste for Marquez but as I explained to a friend the other day, it's like listening to both Morrissey AND Discharge), Mark Twain and Melville are good, Borges is good, and we all know there's mountains and mountains of trash in the literary world. Doesn't mean I'm going to give up reading. Anyway it seems like that's what most writers spend time thinking about anyway, in any interview you've got at least a few pages of the author talking about which writers he or she admires, and which books still matter, and that's all critics are trying to figure out anyway besides. I don't want to take sides in the fiction vs. nonfiction debate, despite the fact that I've been quietly thinking about it ever since the other morning over breakfast, which I was drinking my coffee reading a fantasy novel and Daniel was reading Gurdjieff.

*Stefano Benni, Margherita Dolce Vita

the siren call of the question mark

"Just as the shape of natural objects like rainbows, snowflakes, crystals and blossoming flowers derives from the symmetrical way that quarks arrange themselves in the atom- a remnant of the universe's lost state of perfect symmetry- so he is convinced that the unhappy state of affairs regarding love can be traces right back to the subatomic. If you read up on strings, you will learn that there are two different types, closed and open-ended. The closed strings are O-shaped loops that float about like angels, insouciant of spacetime's demands and playing no part in our reality. It is the open-ended strings, the forlorn, incomplete U-shaped strings, whose desperate ends cling to the sticky stuff of the universe; it is they that become reality's building blocks, its particles, its exchanges of energy, the teeming producers of all that complication. Our universe, one could almost say, is actually built out of loneliness; and that foundational loneliness persists upwards to haunt every one of its residents."*

I think I owe the Internet an explanation about my absence, but it would be so trite I don't think I could actually bring myself to write it out. I did go to Texas, I am in Europe now, and I guess I could talk about the late nights at work couldn't I? What's the point. Spring stretched out for me like a neglected lawn, punctuated only by reading some fantasy books, which I won't get into here but I think it had the effect of a big pile of sand for my head (i.e. I'm the proverbial ostrich). I think I had sort of given up, accepted the loneliness but also the fact that I couldn't be of any use helping anyone else with their hurts and wants. Although, on a night recently I helped Adrien clean the blood off his hands and face, sat him down with a fizzy water and told him to tell me all about it. So cuts and scraps I can handle, but the big existential problems I'd put on the back burner, at least until after my Great Rambling Adventure in Europe.

"Becoming someone new, I could correct the errors of my past. At first I was optimistic: I could pull it off. But in the end, no matter where I went, I could never change. Over and over again I made the same mistake, hurt other people and hurt myself into the bargain. Just after I turned twenty, this thought hit me: Maybe I've lost the chance to ever be a decent human being. The mistakes I'd committed- maybe they were part of my very make-up, an inescapable part of my being."**

I read that on the train from Berlin to Prague and it articulated exactly how I felt around the end of May. I felt happy to see my friends, happy to jump into the springs, even happy to wake up with a hangover. Yet I felt like I'd given up on trying to actually be happy. I thought if I just kept my head up, tried not to get involved with anyone, and worked hard, that I'd end up on the other side of my self-loathing.

Of course, thankfully, the world isn't that simple. I ended up kissing someone I've wanted to kiss for a long time, and the rug not only got pulled out from under my feet but suddenly pop songs on the radio started making sense too. I've never felt so utterly insane for someone. But, this isn't a blog about happiness, or musings on romance, so suffice to say that while something rather fundamental in my life up to this point has changed, the big questions remain.

I've spent my time here walking around, endlessly, climbing everything I see, and drinking an incredible amount of coffee. People keep asking me what I'm up to, why I'm here, alone, etc. I feel somewhat sheepish answering, "oh you know, just looking around." I did read One Hundred Years of Solitude again, which still makes me cry, and am rounding book 5 now that I've reached Budapest (I've picked up whatever I could get my hands on at used book stores, which has been surprisingly fruitful). In Vitezslav Nezval's book Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, which I read in Prague, he dedicated the book to, "those who, like myself, gladly pause at times over the secrets of certain old courtyards, vaults, summer houses and those mental loops which gyrate around the mysterious." So I walk a few kilometers (cultural note!) and then stop to stare at the view or a statue or just to smoke a cigarette in silence. I wrote Ryan and told him how I felt like a big key was in my head winding everything up the right way, like all the little gears are tuned correctly now, and when I come home I'll be lighter, clearer, dare I say it, happier. Maybe it's enough just to have my eyes open, and to have some time to think.

There's a true feedback story about exactly everything I've just written called don't give up on nihilism, and goddamn, I can't wait to get home to Gainesville to listen to it.

*Paul Murray, Skippy Dies, pg. 300
**Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun, pg. 42

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

Secret Story

"So now you're wondering what I mean by the secret story? asked my friend. Well the secret story is the one we'll never know, although we're living it from day to day, thinking we're alive, thinking we've got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn't matter. But every single damn thing matters! Only we don't realize. We just tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, and we don't realize that's a lie."*

I. Your hands shake when you hold the microphone. You don't trust your voice. You know all your friends are watching, but you can't help the shaky attempt at harmony that follows. Karaoke terrifies you. The words go across the screen, but they're hard to read, uncertain like everything else. You've been told you can do this. You try one more time. You don't recognize your voice when it comes out of the speakers, singing a song you didn't write.

II. I work for ten hours and cut a few corners to get out early. I have to get to the show before the second bands starts. I show up and nothing's started. No one's even talking. I go across the street and have a few beers with the people I rushed over with. One does karaoke and the other buys beers. I wish I had the nerve to sing a song but I can't stand the anticipation of waiting to hear my name called. The song ends. We finish the beers. Across the street the show starts without anyone noticing, but we're there just in time to stand around.

III. You figure out how to play guitar, you think, this is easier than singing. There is a comfort in the rhythm, not like the awkward cadence and meter of your voice. You practice to Ramone's songs in your room. There will be late nights, but there will be some progress. You "figure it out." There will be pedals, cords, and equipment. Your friends like it.

IV. The band at the show makes me want to go home and work on things I started months ago. I have to finish this or that project, I have to do something after watching them. The two people playing sounded great together. Proof that something can be done. I know I nodded my head, moved my feet around, but the whole time I was thinking "I have to get home, I can finish that sentence now." I get a record, I literally ask for the one "with the weird slow songs on it" and I balance it across my handle bars. I begin a story in my head while I bike home, "your hands shake when you hold the microphone..."

V. You make it to the show in a town you've only read about. Your friends aren't there. You are singing in a band for the first time and your hands still shake when you hold the microphone. You hold the guitar close like you could be dancing. Everyone stands in a weak half moon in front of you, but they tap their black shoes when your voice comes out awkward, then clear. You have no idea if anyone really liked it, but you get a few smiles, and someone buys a record. You see them biking off alone one by one and you go back to your van. You sit in the dark and tell yourself you're not alone.

*Roberto Bolaño, Dentist

Greener Pastures of Our Hearts

"Many, in fact, feign love of life to evade love itself. They try their skill at enjoyment and 'indulging in experiences.' But this is illusory. It requires a rare vocation to be a sensualist. The life of a man is fulfilled without the aid of his mind, with its backward and forward movements, at one and the same time its solitude and its presences. To see these men of Belcourt working, protecting their wives and children, and often without a reproach, I think one can feel a secret shame. To be sure, I have no illusions about it. There is not much love in the lives I am speaking of. I ought to say that not much remains. But at least they have evaded nothing. There are words I have never really understood, such as 'sin.' Yet I believe these men have never sinned against life. For if there is a sin against life, it consist perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life. These men have not cheated. Gods of summer they were at twenty by their enthusiasm for life and they still are, deprived of all hope. From Pandora's box, where all the ills of humanity swarmed, the Greeks drew out hope after all the others, as the most dreadful of all."*

Ah, spring time in Gainesville. Flowers are blooming on every corner, showing their faces like freed criminals and making my eyes water constantly despite all the Benadryl I've been eating. Through the haze of allergy medicine I stop to take note of the amazing greenness that's going on around town, everything all at once coming back to life with a sort of fascist vengeance. So too are the dormant pastures in our hearts turning green again, growing wild with the season.

I wake up every morning to a bracelet of hives (there is literally pollen covering every single fucking thing that I touch) and either an email, text message, or missed phone call from someone I haven't spoken to in enough time for it to seem disconcerting. My favorite this week was a message from an old friend that just said, "sorry for when we were young." I knew just what he meant, but I couldn't possibly explain it here, to the dark abyss of the internet. Suffice to say that there's something about the weather changing that makes people get teary eyed (for me it's half allergies and half nostalgia). We see the greener fields not just on the other side of the road (metaphorically and literally, work with me here) but also behind us. I want to wake up in the middle of the night and call Joe and talk to him about Mexico. Remember that time when...? Spring is the best time to send text messages that break the ice of winter or several years. There's something about the first warm days of shorts and afternoon bike rides that make everyone a little more prone to forgive and forget, or at least that's how it feels to me lately. I feel so high on all the drugs I'm eating and all the mended relationships that I find myself wanting more. This is good weather for "what might have been" and "what could be." I know for 24 hours this week if the right person would have asked I'd have moved out of Gainesville to live in their little room in a heartbeat (you know who you are, maybe). With the weather changing and after five months of being so completely alone next to my tiny little space heater the thought of going swimming with one person all summer and maybe even drinking frozen drinks with paper umbrellas in them sounds great, it sounds perfect, it sounds...possible?

What the fuck am I saying? Does this sound like me? Read my last few posts and you'll be asking yourself, "who the fuck is this happy stranger? I mean I know she has a 'posi' tattoo but this is getting really pathetic!" I know. It's not me though, I swear, it's spring. Everyone has seen Bambi and if you say you haven't you're lying, but everyone might not remember the scene where the little rabbit (Thumper) explains to Bambi why all the animals are acting bonkers. It's because they're twitterpated. I'm guessing on the spelling of that, but it sounds right. I think it was the Disney way of saying "horny" but I think they touched on something else. There is a certain kind of spring horniess that makes everyone go crazy. Maybe it's the shedding of clothes after winter, maybe it's the animal instinct taking over after hibernation, but either way it makes me feel overwhelmed by all the possibilities. The possibilities of what? I don't know, happiness maybe? I talked late into the night with a trusted friend about relationships, and the conclusions were all doom and gloom. I think my brain is fucked up beyond repair, and not from things I've done to it lately. I don't know if a few weeks of good weather can fix it.

There's either a Cometbus zine (80% sure it was him) that talks about the weather being great all of a sudden and walking around kind of smug like knowing if you asked someone to marry you they'd say yes, and that's sort of what it seems like lately, not just because of the weather but because of this terrible, awful winter ending and it just seems right to start completely over. But, I think I ought to know better. These feelings won't last, and as soon as weekly trips to the springs start and it's warm enough to go swimming when I get off work, I won't be thinking of what's on the other side of the fence. We'll all be focused on what's right in front of our faces, which may not be pretty but at least it'll be honest. The phone will stop ringing. The messages will stop coming. I know enough to know we'll all still forget about each other again.

*Albert Camus, Summer in Algiers

Litany Against Fear

"Without change something inside us sleeps."*

He asks on the phone, "how are you doing?" which makes me pause, because unlike with my mom or most of my friends, I actually want to tell the truth. Sandy's more to me than an old boss, he's really the dad I always wanted. Am I ok? Are we ok? He understands the daily cups of coffee, the afternoons on the porch, the quiet unchanging moments of the day to day which make things seem alright. He also understands the restlessness, the need to be looking over the edge at something, the days spent traveling alone, waiting in train stations where we recognize none of the signs and none of the people. We both love books, but there aren't books for this sort of disconnect. Books that explain the highs and lows - the weekend punk rock shows and the tuesday morning trips to the post office, so that they become one narrative, one feeling? I tell him I'm enjoying myself, but am basically really, really lonely. He tells me the same thing. We talk about long distant romances and our fears of slowly becoming too solitary for redemption. It's as if we've backed ourselves into a corner, and it'd be nice of someone lured us out, but until then we're content to sit and face the wall.

Punks don't like change in general. All in all, an entirely reactionary group of people. How many of us are conservative in our routines and interests? I get cranky in the morning when there's a boy in my bed and I can't drink my iced coffee immediately, what would being in an actual relationship be like? I still wake up hungry for experiences though, and it's depressing to see the young adults who've apparently had their fill. New bands and people become threats if you let them. Sometimes the change gets too much, you turn your back on the world for a little bit but since it keeps going on without you, when you look again everything's different and you're even more alone and stubborn as before. There's opposite problems too, people so hungry for something new they aren't discerning and their tastes aren't their tastes at all, just another passing fad. The way you experience something ought to count for something too. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration, but what about stagnation?

I spent all day doing exactly what I wanted. Watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, reading comic books, drinking two iced coffees at the two coffee shops I go to, eating when I wanted and what I wanted (jackfruit sandwich, yucca fries, goat cheese) and then sitting on the sofa for two hours thinking about Dune, change, and routines. No one stopped me. No one challenged me. I didn't even have to share my personal space with anyone. This can't be healthy. There's nothing new coming in, just a steady consuming. That's when it's time to leave the house. Pick out a book from the different part of the library (mystery?). Meet someone somewhere new, or even try to meet someone new. I know I can't live in a little bubble that I control all the time, I have to let something in, even if it's just a little new idea, or a new band. If you wake up and everything goes your way and everything's the same you didn't wake up at all. I told Mike on the phone today that the weather was so perfect I thought maybe I was dead, and he said, "well maybe you're in purgatory," and it hit a little too close to home. The sleeper must awaken.

*Dune