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

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)

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

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