Iconoclasts in the Mist: Show and Tell Part 2

It had all started to feel normal, shuffling past a man wearing a sequin dress and a wig and an overweight and heavily tattooed woman in a Vegas-style cabaret bikini to find a seat. I recognized almost everyone. There was Jordan Carlos, friendly TV comic who was surprised when I could quote his jokes back to him from his Comedy Central appearances; there was John, willowy Lower East Side veteran with the grating voice; there was Angry Bob, obese, hateful Angry Bob; and there was I, the quiet kid with the Moleskine, sad to be amongst the peanut gallery for the last time. Of all the performances I had seen during my time in the city, Show and Tell still remained the most entertaining, the most challenging, the most genuine.

A new face sits down across from me and asks me if I'm performing. I tell her no, find out she is planning on doing a comedy routine and ask her if she's been here before. She has, only a couple times. "A naked guy" is the best she can offer in response to my question regarding the strangest act she's seen. Child's play. I tell her about the bladder guy and, five minutes later, he sits down next to me.

"Hey man, how'd the oil thing turn out?"

"It went well."

"Are you going to do it again tonight?"

"No, I'm going to do an entire standup routine with thirty-two stitches in my head."

As jaded as I had become over the previous six weeks, this crowd still found ways to render me speechless.

He removes a bandana to reveal a gnarled bird's nest of flesh and suture thread.

"What the hell happened?"

"Fell off my bike. Broke my collarbone, too. And got a concussion." He pulls his shirt to the side to reveal a massive bruise on his chest.

"But it's alright, I've got a pocket full of Vicodin."

He pulls out a prescription bottle and giggles.

The reading of the names begins. Jeff Dickerson is called; Diane O'Debra chastises him for the second time for his fart-based rendition of the national anthem. "Do you know how long it took to get the smell offstage? Weeks."

But it's not all scatology in this twilight zone -- Show and Tell, perhaps because of its character or its reputation, attracts fairly big names. Seth Herzog, a well-known comic, opened the night with stories about accidentally signing up to entertain troops in Kuwait.

The real comedy arises about halfway through the show, when Abbie, a middle-aged woman doing a routine about her failed relationships, makes a confession.

"Cocaine is the drug to give me if you want a running commentary with your blowjob."

There are a few moments of silence, and then the audience gradually erupts into cheers, groans and hysterical laughter of recognition. It is a revealing moment.

Most of the content is light fare -- mediocre to good standup with a couple of decent music sets interspersed -- which is both a disappointment and a relief. My mind was saturated and my astonishment muscles were sore from flexing. All but one of my friends had, at this point, stopped coming with me, whether from lack of interest or low weirdness thresholds.

Despite all appearances, the grotesque spectacle is not really the show's greatest virtue. What sticks out most are the moments of lucidity, when a performer reveals something genuinely artful, often more by accident than anything else. I saw film-score-worthy music, HBO-worthy comedy and countless snapshots in time that were just too perfectly strange to adequately summarize.

Show and Tell is a crucible and a Rorschach test, from which molten talent can be easily retrieved, forged, and upon which swims a blotchy and chaotic pastiche of human potentials. There are many things the show is not. It is not necessarily good, as it is an extremely inconsistently bejeweled treasure chest. Nor is it always enjoyable -- some of the rough bits are agonizing. But it is, above all, authentic.

After the last act, I gathered my things, wished Mr. Stitches good luck with his set, and wound my way through the seats to the exit. Of all the spaces I had occupied in New York, in mind and body, I would miss this one the most. The smell will linger for months.

Gathering

What we have in common, I think, is the same unspoken dialogue: overwhelmed by cackling strangers, overwhelming crowd, music, social constellations of the grinning and nodding, backs turned in a circle, ebbing and morphing, the overwhelming crowd a many-headed hydra, some meat beast or other, you wanting only to make the phone call, to that person who is so very far away and say "I had a dream about you last night. I hesitated when you said goodbye and I ran through every single car of the subway train, trying to find you so I could kiss you but you were gone, and you're gone now, and I want to run all night to find you and kiss you, because I love you, I love you so much" but they're very far away, and it's late, and it would somehow ruin everything to call things by their real names.

You wanting only to sit down on the curb outside the party, holding them, not needing to speak much, understanding, warm. You ending up with armfuls of nothing, wondering if everyone is quite so lonely as you are just then, even those piled one on another, at the sides of parked cars, that copulatory lean, hands on hips, are you lonely? Do you possess one another? Show me your receipt of understanding. Show me proof of quietness, wordlessness, hands passing over hands.

You wanting only something to be gentle to.

You running down the aisles, one after another, hour upon hour

upon hour.

Clues

1. Starting to put change in the cups again

2. Cleaning up the first cat's vomit in the middle of the night so my landlady doesn't have to

3. Rushing out of the room, pillow in hand, to try to comfort the second cat in its epileptic spasms

4. Faltering, severely

5. Determination anyway

6. Funny things

7. Perspective from benevolent strangers

8. Having reason to feel terrible about forgetting to call my mom on her birthday

9. Hope

10. Hope

First Aid

I once happened upon a word in the dictionary that was the proper term for the period of exhaustion you experience after crying. That was some amount of years ago and I've never been able to find the word since. It has since became one of my favorites.

Making that post was therapeutic. Writing it reduced me to an absolute mess but what followed was a weird kind of serenity that has lasted since. I make myself miserable with overthinking, with overpoeticizing, with distraction. Ultimately, there's not a whole lot more to analyze than "I'm overwhelmed." If I knew that word, it would be the title of this post, because I feel calm.

The past couple of years have been my two worst. Vicious insecurity has coalesced with a number of unresolved, undiagnosed physical pains and discomforts, a series of minor and major emotional traumas (crushingly bleak night followed by vitriolic confrontation with neighbors, dry ice bombs, moving to college, death of cat, Bryan's suicide) and a variety of domestic/academic frustrations to pound me into the most compromised state of my life. But it's OK, because I'm putting everything above board now.

If I was writing in the same cycle that I've used forever, what would now follow would be some kind of fabricated sense of grand perspective, a makeshift resolve to change. But I don't know what's going to happen, how I'm going to make it better or how long it's going to take. What I do know is that writing about this makes me feel like I'm unwrapping rotten bandages, cleaning the wound, drying it, exposing it to light and air.

I'm not going to say "this is the true nadir, the low point at which I begin to climb my way back up the ladder," because I don't know if it is. I hope so. I hope that I am ready to get better. I'm optimistic, though. This feels right.

Tomorrow morning I'm getting on a train to visit my Civil War re-enactor aunt and uncle in Vermont. They have a beautiful house on a beautiful lake and a beautiful garage full of canons. They're planning on taking me to shoot their MR-15, which is some kind of gnarly-ass assault rifle used for exploding Kuwaitis. Should also be therapeutic.

I will say that I am guilty of being too consumed by my own worries about myself to pay attention to the things that are happening around me. I've been cycling through old photos, which is a habit of mine, and almost every series makes me smile or laugh out loud, because my life is full of wonderful, hilarious people. Sorry if I haven't done my part to return the joy you all seem so ready to share with me.

I think things are going to change. Here's a wish in the well.

The Truth

I have a confession to make, and I don't want to. Definitely not. It's awkward for everyone - sorry to dump an icky thing in your lap. But right now it's something I have to do.

Everything I have written is one thing. Everything I have felt is one thing. Six years of blog is preface to one thing.

PAIN.

I have so much pain.

Here arises the gatekeeper to assurance, sneering, mocking,

"What do you know about pain? You with your middle-class everything, moaning about trifles, you whiny shit, you whiny whiny whiny whiny shit. Waaaaaaaaaah. Waaaaaaaaah waaaaaaaaaaaaah waaaaaaaaaaaaaaah."

I have so much pain.

I have so much pain in my body and I don't know why. I have seen so many doctors and none of them seem to be able to heal me.

I have so much pain in my heart and I don't know why. There is no poetry here. There is no esotericism, which is anaesthetic. There is so much pain. There just is.

These are the same pains. It's one thing and it rules me.

Everyone has pain in their heart. Everyone has rejection, insecurity. Everyone has a friend who killed himself, or worse. Everyone has a childhood with darkness in it, is saddled with doubt, loneliness, longing for transformation. But some people have a valve. Some people are very strong and I am not. It does not evacuate. I don't know why. Maybe because I don't evacuate it. I don't know why.

I am not content trying to pass the wound off as some kind of intellectual leverage anymore. That's a lie. I am exhausted from trying to hide it with flippancy, gestures of superiority, with pretend nihilism. I am exhausted by running from, obscuring the pain out of a sense of social obligation. I am so very, very tired of channeling it into judgmentalism, vindictiveness.

I know that this is not everything. I have been filled with beauty and love, but not for a long time. Not for a long, long time. Right now, every day is such a challenge. I don't know what I'm doing, what I believe, why I am filled with so much sorrow, how to change, how to heal. I have simply run out.

No, I am not suicidal, am not even Depressed really, just so god damned lost. So god damned lost and bewildered.

Sometimes I feel like there's an overpowering force at work in the world that seeks to destroy that within us that allows for happiness. And right now I feel overpowered.

So to know it, I am naming it.

I am naming it Enemy.

Phantasmagoria

I should not be allowed to listen to Vangelis late at night. I am given to mental cinematics. Memory, viscous, drools through every crack.

I am feeling a recurring moment. Lying on someone's floor, at the beginning of a new period. Coming back to college. Coming to New York. Feeling the vastness of potential, like some passenger in a caravan across a desert, awake all night, listening to the silence. Falling asleep swaddled in promises, of new beginnings. Waking smothered in familiarity. But it's still there, twinkling obscurely.

I am making myself re-learn imagination, having consistently missed the point every day of the past years, years, years. I am making myself re-learn everything. I have not acquired the skill of living well, not being able to feed myself (today Fruit Loops, more Fruit Loops, a croissant, a vendor pretzel plus Gatorade, two slices of pizza, more Fruit Loops), not being able to do anything with my time but waste it (learning to turn off the computer, BREAK hypnosis cycle, the pornography of memory that is Facebook), finding nothing to put my eyes on but reminders of banality.

So I take my landlady's advice and start reading Interview With the Vampire, being swept away by the fiction, remembering what it's like to lose oneself in story.

I think about Endgame, our culture's obsession with its own death, memory ejaculated backwards, against the flow, rupturing the vessels, the ligaments stretched to snapping point from too much reaching behind us for answers, visions of huts, wooden boats, dances around fires by which to damn ourselves. Dreaming impossible now, like laying down track leading to a brick wall WE'RE ALL FUCKED NOW KID, and if you want to talk about hope the only option is the Great Big Handhold. We'll all sing We Are the World and buy spirally lightbulbs and after we've vindicated ourselves of any possible connection to anything bad or scary or uncomfortable then kid you go ahead and think your little thoughts about unicorns or whatever the fuck, but watch out for walls - be quiet in the presence of bricks, SHH...

Severed limbs are placed carefully around the sandbox so the children are sure to know their luck in being able to play. Let's all feel AS BAD AS POSSIBLE now, give ourselves guilt enemas, eradicate all signs of ease, and maybe then our insides will be clean for God.


Then I write something about getting stoned and going to see Harold and Kumar, then don't post it because it invites well-deserved mockery and I have said so many mean things about the hippies, but it involves the first bits of my new learner's permit of the soul. These are the guttural consonants that become words about nice things (just a piece, the whole thing is too stonery even for me):


I am beginning to understand why dogma unsettles me, even belief. Especially that of socialist tooth-grinding, globe-worry, the great, throbbing NPR headache. Because it does not allow for the hilarious beauty of encountering the divine on the way to see Harold and Kumar after getting stoned in your friend's dorm room.

That I could, in the bathroom at the theater, be caught breathless by a vision of my own mind, absolutely true: I am perched at the edge of a vast and dark wilderness, filled with illusion and undiscovered wonders, the trees and grass blowing in a slow wind, waiting in quiet expectation for the explorer to take his plunge. And I see the rewards. I see what I feel accomplished mystics must feel: the vibrancy, the urgent, indescribable worth of the experiences and the understandings to be culled; like unfolding toys made of holy jewels, the most splendid machines ever invented, more spectacularly important than anything material and mundane, though the wilderness spills out over waking life. I am filled with a sense of transcendent pleasure, privilege in having the opportunity to adventure into it.

Remembering that what is constructed of invisible fruit is real, because we are all at wander over those umbral fields and forests. That I realize this is all more important than notions of cheesiness, worries of smoke damage.


And oh God, what is more unpardonable to the grinders of axes than the rejection of axes? What is more unpardonable than the escaping trick, the Grand Neener, saying no? "You can come up with as many fantasies as you'd like to justify your passivity but ultimately you live in THIS world, Matt," seeing only reminders of banality, forgetting that SHIT IS NOT SO SIMPLE AS JUST LABELING THINGS 'OPPRESSION' AND 'RESISTANCE,' forgetting that cell phones would not be cell phones if it wasn't for the communicator on Star Trek, forgetting that we would have nothing if someone did not divorce themselves from the mundane.

So I am requesting you do not come near my playpen with your dripping meat things. Keep the hoses to yourselves and stop getting so mad when I don't feel like finding more space in my heart for sadness.

Right now, I have to re-learn. I have to take the food, heat it and put it on a plate in front of me.

I have to unfold the toys.

Beef

Maybe I shouldn't be so excited about having a nemesis. Perhaps I should take not so much delight in finally knowing someone I can despise without ambivalence.

Fool drafts an anti-Matt manifesto in response to the below piece, calls me a "closeted anti-intellectual bigot" and such things, posts it where everyone can see it. I try not to let it turn into a flame war. It turns into a flame war. I come to class with the intention of resolving things as peacefully as possible. I come to class willing to admit that I am perhaps too vocally contentious and invite confrontation. Professor obliquely raises topic of the flame war, which apparently everyone had been watching, before I have a chance to talk to Fool privately. I remain silent because I don't want to fight with people in class. Professor pushes issue, eventually declares in front of everybody that my piece offended him so profoundly that he only finished reading it out of professional obligation. Fool starts in with his infuriating, smug, fatuous drawl about how his screed was all a grand satire and really quite funny but he wouldn't expect me to understand. This is when I go off the deep end. What came out of my mouth was something between the frequencies of loud talking and unbridled, epileptic fury. I don't even remember what I said; basically that he was a bully and was incapable of being forthcoming/brave enough to just insult me without couching it in "this bullshit aesthetic, like you're providing a service by revealing my ignorance."

Then,

"If you're going to look at me and say 'fuck you,' I want you to look at me and say 'fuck you!'"

"Drawldrawldrawl something something I enjoyed every moment of writing that review and I think I could do a lot better than 'fuck you.'"

I'm not communicating this well enough. Imagine you are hopelessly, transcendently in love with someone. You have spent months and months together. You have plans to marry and have devoted everything to each other.

Then, one day you come home to discover the love of your life splayed out, naked, in some unspeakably compromising position. Standing next to them, with a lit candle and a cat-o-nine-tails, is your worst nightmare of a snide, patronizing yuppie/carnie who is also your boss. He puts down his implements, calmly walks over to you and starts explaining that "s/he just wasn't satisfied, sexually, emotionally, spiritually. Maybe some day you'll be mature enough not to be so attached. Anyway, you're a grownup and I'm sure you can put this behind you. Someday we might even be friends."

That is roughly how I felt having to endure this goon's condescension in front of everybody. Luckily, a lot of people in the class went out of their way to defend me. One even called the guy a dick.

The conclusion was, basically, "OK, we hate each other."

As soon as the dust settled, I rushed over to the professor and made it very clear just how badly he had fucked up fomenting the fight, that I did not appreciate it, that he had forced me into an adversarial position that precluded the possibility of reconciliation, that the pieces could no longer be picked up, class-wide battle lines had been drawn and it was his fault. All in calm, lucid tones, because I am a fucking professional. We came to an understanding.

Now I've got distance from it and one thing sticks out. Usually, when people attack me, especially on the Blog-a-Log, it really affects me. Some big part of me is drawn to consider myself on their terms. This did not happen. Because I AM A FUCKING PROFESSIONAL and I feel more like an adult than I ever have.

The woman from whom I'm subletting my room in Brooklyn took me aside, detecting some crossroads in my life and prescribing about an hour of spit-and-nails New York wisdom as the remedy. After telling me to read Anne Rice novels about a hundred times and giving me a book about astrology, lecturing about the trials of parenthood, the travails of modern life, cigarette in hand, she told me, "Ya gotta figure out what it is you wanna do to make yerself happy. That's all life's about. Makin' yerself happy. You're how old, twenty? You don't know shit about how life works yet. Just be yerself. Ya gotta just be yerself and do what you do to make yerself happy."

I wish everyone had such a landlady in their lives.

I'm being myself. I am twenty feet tall.

Under Glass

Everyone in my class is supposed to publish two reviews a week on a forum the professor set up. We're supposed to review either poetry books or poetry readings, but the lines are blurry. This is my first contribution.


My Day in Art: Of Curators and Light Bulbs, Violins in the Subway


Where is Jasper Johns?

Not here, nor there. Not behind the samurai swords; not between the Gustave Courbet self-portraits, regarding each other with onanistic awe; nowhere near the Roman busts or New Guinean death masks. Somewhere on the floor above. Somewhere that takes twenty minutes to reach.

I am in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I am irritated, all elbows and glares. I have written two poems in my little diary so far: one about pants (Most of them just cover the meat / Some of them are glazed, pointing to this month’s shoes) and one about feeling overwhelmed by history, which I am finding a jolting reminder of transience and this museum something inappropriate in a way, unwilling to let the thing DIE. Scrawled: I am surrounded by dead people. / We have been over this. / These are my limbs, I use them to move. / This is my heart, I use it to fear death.

Which is easy to do, having the cumulative progress of the millennia laid out before you. Here we sprayed some berry juice on the backs of our hands. Here we drew a pretty picture of a horse. Here the horse stands forever in polished marble. And here Picasso examines a woman from twenty angles simultaneously. These are all gone moments, now, and suggested price for appreciation is twenty dollars ten with student ID.

So I commence the Goodwill litmus, favorite tool for dispelling snootery and illusions of immortality. It goes like this: the best way to gauge the merits of a particular piece of art is to imagine that you happened upon it in a thrift store and it is selling for five dollars. If you would buy it, it is worthy. If you would not, it is just a very expensive smear.

Monierre Dawson: Statement, Meditation
Drab messes of dark lines, pastels on small canvasses.

Helen Torr: Crimson and Green Leaves
Looks like Ikea overstock.

Fernand Léger: The Bargeman
Someone’s Montessori eighth-grader flipped through a book on Cubism and broke out their My First Paint Set.

Henry Matisse: The Young Sailor II
Looks like Walt Disney was painting a male nude by flashlight under the covers, his mom discovered him and made him superimpose baggy clothes as punishment.

But there is still something askew. A thought persists: We have been over this. Why are we dwelling? And then counter-memories, of the agony of all street theater, the inanity of Bansky and all others attempting to extend the museum beyond its walls. Still, I am mostly unmoved by visions of the past, somehow redundant; even the Pollock seems very still.

But where is Jasper Johns?

Whether from too much time on my feet or not enough street vendor pretzels, I am weak, headachy and nauseous. The feeling is one of entombment – trapped with the squinting, nodding, sweater-shouldered, bored-child-dragging effluvia of the Looking On world, forever treading in circuits through the relics. I want to leave but am going to find this exhibit, god damn it.

I ask five different security guards. Second floor, down the hall, turn right, all the way at the back.

When I find it, a sweat breaks and a new poem enters the diary in under a minute:

Saying No to Jasper Johns

I spent twenty minutes
walking through this
labyrinth of a museum
to find this?
Cool, texture.
Awesome, art devoid of color or life,
just sap the fucking life out of the clay.
This whole building is vulgar, somehow.
This building is a series of fine graves.
Gray.
Fucking gray.

The pieces are soupy with pretense. We are asked to examine the nature of art, or something. There is only the monochrome, meant to reveal the brush strokes, the creative structures underlying the spectacle of painting. But how joyless. Like eating a cake made of flint and cardboard. Somewhere, a superior baker is fattening a jubilant many. Somewhere, Those Who Do Not Squint are awash in sweets; somewhere that takes more than twenty minutes to find.

In the subway, a man is playing the violin for change. At first, it is only novel. The underground is usually the territory of bucket-drummers, gospel quartets bellowing golden oldies for tourists, homeless men wishing you a “PROSPEROUS DAY” at the top of their lungs. He plays two pleasant songs and I give him some quarters, not expecting to have my life changed.

After applause from the sizable crowd he has gathered on the platform, he plays the opening notes to a piece that is so profoundly remorseful and beautiful that I am frozen where I stand. Tears begin to well. I am having that experience. Oh Christ, it’s so trite. But the notes. They wrench.

I walk away in under thirty seconds, winding through a dozen people, so I don’t begin to openly weep.

This has never happened. I don’t even like classical music.

But something becomes so clear, riding jumpy-throated back to Brooklyn, held together through force of will alone. This is the only litmus necessary. This is the meaning of great art, the true immortality that has nothing to do with polished floors, expensive cafés that smell like your grandma, with gray or samurai swords, with the embalmment of academia, the obscenity of squinting. Simply,


Do you have to turn away?

Boy On the Block

I still don't have an apartment. I'm sleeping on my brother's floor and may be moving into a room in Harlem temporarily, starting tomorrow. I went to the neighborhood today. It's just grim enough to make me feel like I can be all like, "Yeah, I lived in Harlem. It was kinda sketch but whatever, y'know?" Without actually fearing for my life.

I can only stay there two weeks at the most, so I've been a slave to Craigslist. As in, I just sent out over thirty emails at one in the morning to various people across the city.

I went to look at a room today in Brooklyn. Being unfamiliar with the area except for the ultra-gentrified island of Park Slope, where I am staying, I believed the guy when he said that his area was "one of the safest in Brooklyn."

Wish I had a picture of my expression when I walked out of the subway tunnel. Imagine every Wu-Tang video ever made, then subtract the music so the setting is just muted, decrepit and ominous. I walked down the street. Oh, a playground. That's nice. Wait. Marcy Playground. That's a song or a band or something. And that's a project. Holy shit. Marcy Projects. Ashy Larry. Jay-Z. Holy shit holy shit holy shit.

My first impulse was to flee back to the subway without even calling the guy I was supposed to meet. Instead, I called my brother to make sure I wasn't just being all white-flighty.

"What streets are you by?"

"Uh, Marcy Ave."

"Aaaaaahahahaha."

I met with the guy. The apartment was nice. The view from the windows was literally the urban erosion of what looked like five decades. The buildings were literally melting or something. Piles of trash everywhere.

It's the only place I've been that rivals rural Hungary in terms of decrepitness. But Hungary was funny, because it was like being in a country full of shirtless Marios. Living in Grand Theft Auto is not acceptable, though; even if the rent is good.

Nevermind

New York is going to rule.

Redeye

Going to try to write away the nausea. My gut is churning from lack of sleep, a house full of someone else's party, sitting in a room containing furniture, an empty bookcase, this computer, full of uneasiness, one part dread, many parts uncomfortable reminiscence. I'm going to have to go to the airport tonight and sit in the terminal for many hours. Maybe I'll Spill it all onto a page to be unburdened for my six weeks (this is the advantage of writing). Maybe I'll just play Pokémon until the sun rises.

There are no such things as clean breaks. Change rolls in on cogs of rejection, fear. Huge departures have never made me excited in the way they should. Just removed, itchy, amoebic. Everything is pulled in every direction. I am a blob. I don't see the linear construction of life events; I see a ship listing in curly-cues. And as such, I'm fairly seasick.

I could assert some navigatory conviction, falsify an inspiration to star plotting, release some rhetorical homing pigeon. But the truth is that I am not at all sure what is going to happen or how I'm going to react to it.

Swirly, swirly, swirly.

Kneel

At three in the afternoon I am in my bed, face-down, deciding just to fall asleep with the lights on, savoring the texture of Here. I can feel little hooks catching in the fabric, pulling it east. Everything will move - nothing comes with me but clothes and books containing poems. No bed. No posters.

This bed, at which I crouched and prayed, hands on head, on which I prayed again, unable to sleep, on my knees, arced into the mattress, prayed for stillness, retrieval. This bed, containing strangers. My bed, too small, possessor of one hundred, one hundred more waking hours, of more than two prayers.

I say "Excuse me God who is no bearded man with bearded sons who is formless and unknowable excuse me God that is the understander of narratives, who, what is greater than words good and evil who, what makes us hunger for something we've never possessed, grace, Grace, please help me with it, please God let me have Grace, let my body heal, excuse me please Open the Fucking Valve Please."

How small shall I make the instruments of my autopsy? She walks towards me down the hallway, pretending not to see, eyes a thousand miles away. Gleam. Sneaking into an abandoned house to see my first Playboy, age seven. Seven. SEVEN. Gleam. Watching my family drive away for the first time, finding myself alone, staying that way. Seeing the rain begin to fall, fall, fall. Gleam. The pain in the legs, absolutely relentless. Gleam. They gleam on the tray. They gleam tinily next to my bed.

But there is really only one tool. There is only How.

Waking, laying for half an hour, feeling How? How?

Why is too easy. Why has an appropriate answer, which is "nevermind." How has six and a half billion answers, none of them correct.

Walking to the bus, knees aching, How? Riding the bus, seeing the cragged, weathered faces, How? Seeing them walking by the lake, clutching each other, How? How?

This is everything, I am one word.

Knowing always the standard reply, which is to turn the ? into a . Albion Moonlight seeing his own face staring down at him from the house of the divine.

But the question stands:

How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How?

I pray for periods.

Sisters of Mercy

Come over, rub your toothy skin all over my sensitive life. Come over and help me wrap things in barbed wire.

Come over and drink, having never seen me before, rubbing my head, grabbing me, pinning me on walls. Give me enough rope for noose-making, asking for walks out to your cars and then just getting into the cars and driving away, hands under arms, me like a rock hurled at so many pigeons.

"Matt, girls don't like your posters. What the hell do you have on your walls? Commando? Funny pictures? The Kiss. That's alright. That shows you're sensitive. We want you to change your posters, please. Why didn't you make out with that girl? Give me your phone, I'm going to call her."

Then

"Matt, untuck your shirt. You look like a boyscout,"

swarming, untucking my shirt, goofy mannequin,

someone grabbing it, ripping all the buttons off in one movement, shrieking,

rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrupture, tipping, inhaling acrid bullshit in the garage,

stranger hugging me, all grabbing at each other's elbows,

saturated with the frustration of it, the obscenity of desiring,

waiting for the sharp grain to rub in the right direction,

watching her truck disappear down the street,

needing a thing,

needing a new shirt,

needing a new life,

waking with aching head, reading Bukowski in bed for an hour,

remembering tests,

"What's my name?"

"Uh, L?"

"No."

"Well, I don't even remember my own parents' birthdays. I don't even remember my own name. What's my name?"

"Matt."

"Oh, really? Ha ha."

never seeing them again,

having failed their test, having shown them my silly boy's wrong objects,

now summoning the truck back, reversed, the door opening, passing it, heat moving to wooden limbs,

sick,

of the crucible,

the variables,

finding nothing in my kitchen but buttons and empty bottles,

finding in my heart reasons for tears,

hoping that somewhere

she is filling my room with honey,

keeping my wings still,

wrapped in amber.

Gummo

Watched a movie that is one of those that I don't doubt has changed my life in some way. Usually hate these types, go out of my way to despise them. This one sticks to the ribs; I may lose sleep thinking about it.



Ive never seen a more honest piece of art.

Cue Ball

Shaved my head. The kind where every strand of hair is a centimeter-long cliché standing at attention. New Beginning whatever.

A nice little analogy pooped into my head while I was trying to take a nap at 8 p.m. My life is like a cruise ship. Plenty of opportunities for merrymaking, but completely intolerable if not moving forward.

Now my head sheds water. I'm feeling all hydrodynamic. I'm going to sleep at four in the morning not because I can't bring myself to close the book on a day in which nothing was discernibly accomplished but because my cerebral cortex is itchy with visions of the future.

I love and hate the night before travel. Ever feel like a pellet in a slingshot, stretched taut?

The Greatest Told

Pushing the exhaustion margin again, riding the crest into a weary tomorrow (today). Have lately been feeling like I need to write something but the waters are murky and I am having trouble connecting the dots. I'll just see how this goes.

The night before I flew to San Diego, I did not sleep. I was too excited by the discovery of Inferno, a book by my favorite sci-fi/fantasy artist. Not since early adolescence had I experienced as inflamed an imagination - fleeing into alien worlds. When I was tween, I would read Aliens vs. Predator novels and become viscerally involved. That place was real to me. I had the ability to transplant myself into it. Then, there I was, for hours, until my alarm woke up, the sun was on the floor and I was still treading in solemn caravans across the ashen expanses of Hell.

It makes me wonder about lots of things. Like why my mind can be wholly elsewhere, why I'm not involved with excitement, at what point between dropping to my knees, six years old, and tearfully praying that a vivid dream of love (I remember her name, for some reason I don't want to tell you what it is - she kissed me in absolute understanding; among the most beautiful moments of my life) be real to reading the Chronicles of Narnia a few months ago and being deeply moved I stopped believing in awesome powers. At what point I lost track of my holy narrative, which I maybe believe everyone has. At what point the fiery bazaars of Dis became so very interesting.

I try to retrieve things from myself and it results in confusion. I try to retrieve things from others and it results in rejection. I have not tried to retrieve things from God since I was a child, since retrieval started connecting dots with chemical vacations, dumbass haircuts, dumbass books with clouds on the covers, dumbass cults with their dumbass leaders, dumbass esotericism, symbols, heiroglyphs, ciphers, costumes, all the trappings of dumbass, tryhard, dimestore enlightenment. But this idea of God is bigger than the New Age section of Barnes and Noble, bigger than C. S. Lewis, bigger than churches, beyond good, beyond evil, part and parcel of both, stirring its fingers, shifting its weight massively between the atoms.

Trying to escape back into my own story, because I have definitely lost the page.

Exxon-Valdez

The lens is focusing in. We are passing the skin, the muscles and ligaments, the bones, the various squirting masses, down through the brain with its confusion of heat lightning, through the stomach, behind the heart, beyond the body whole, to the swamp, the icky bullshit, which is where music comes from but also poison. Little hippie kids on furry dragons fly around battling Nothingness. The view reveals a mess, That Which Spills.

I know you didn't ask for this uncomfortably intimate vacation. But this blog represents what is important to me, and I can't believe I am the only person reading this who has a hard time dealing with the invisible organ's painful emissions.

At another party, after another rejection (it was impossible, was completely expected, was still kind of heartbreaking), she insists everyone Spill, a gameshow for the intoxicated. She points at me.

"Spill!"

And I spill, about needing too much, projecting too much, various too muches (you don't get to hear if you don't Spill yourself). Everyone pours it out. I walk to the bathroom punching the walls so my Lil' Bow Wow picture falls to the ground.

But my gut still sloshes. The noise kept me awake all night.

I must now organize part of the mess, or I'll be staring at sunlight through my eyelids again.

Let's pull at the biggest thread, which is that I am not happy with my life and have no idea how to rearrange its elements to make it work. I don't care anymore, about sounding whiny, about seeming morose, about the impulse to self-censor in the presence of more painful lives. I grin ear-to-ear, sing to myself and clean my house. I watch caddisflies crawl along the silt at the bottom of the river, little gems of life, watch a pair of mergansers waddle awkwardly up a rapids. But sometimes a hand reaches up out of the swamp and grabs my head and pulls it down so I can do nothing but breathe foul water.

I am not depressed. I am not the Sad Kid. I knocked down a Lil' Bow Wow picture for God's sake. I'm also having a hard time finishing this post and not listening to R. Kelly and going to bed smiling. I am also not a victim. I'm just allergic to enzymes, overly sensitive to certain squirtings, like, "Why is it so hard to fall in love with someone at the same time?" and "Why is it so hard to dance with the hipster people?" and "Why is it such a challenge to be by myself in my room in the middle of the day?"

Next quarter I will probably be in New York for six weeks, writing and performing poetry in Manhattan. This is a thing I have to do and want to do, very much. It'll be nice to be doing something I know I can become very good at. The reason I write is to focus my own lens, past the clay and into the invisibleness, to retrieve some sort of order. To hell with esoteric ramblings in books; the mouths live.

I am going to sleep now.

Spill it out.

Us

I spent most my time in the backs of cars,
inhaling the dark behind the stars.

We wandered while our parents slept,
tallying slow the hours kept

charting maps before the dawn
of holy places between the lawns.

Was it only I who saw it there,
gleaming faintly everywhere,

one ragged strand of angel's hair
wound through the mornings that we shared?

A ghost of memory not yet whole,
perching briefly in my soul,

of a new day our hearts extolled,
for both to keep but which you stole.

Somewhere out there you lost your way,
burned the map and kept astray.

Now your mother is awake,
watching moonlight bend and break.

Factotum

Charles Bukowski used to talk about how most poets are incapable of writing "true things," that they are "fiddling assholes waiting for immortality that never comes because the poor fucker just can't write." They are incapable of producing simple lines like "the dog walked down the street."

I feel like only recently have I had enough humility to write things that represent anything beyond my own self-involvement. True things, like pieces of the first poem I've written in months and months:


I sometimes think the popularity of coffee is a conspiracy
perpetrated by the same people who pretend that tea
tastes like something other than leaves in hot water
(and carry it around in glass jars like little backstage passes
to Zen heaven where Ginsberg eternally masturbates and
bald men pace flowingly on hemp sandals)


The test is something along the lines of the Goodwill Litmus, a device I came up with wandering through art museums in Europe for judging works I knew nothing about: if you encountered whatever painting is in question on sale for five dollars at a thrift store, would you buy it? The Poetry Litmus is thinking about whether or not you would be embarrassed to speak the lines out loud in front of people.

I saw Kimya Dawson perform at my college. She was all adorable and whatnot, sang songs about farts and butts and people drowning in floods. I love seeing people who have found their genuine thing and are not pretentious about it. I also love seeing them making livings off of it and being able to connect to hundreds of people at once, revealing something that is actually themselves. The best art is neutral, reflecting many places at once. The best art is also simple, contained, true.

I recently encountered a piece of art that has since become my favorite, maybe ever. It's a short book of comic strips about a cat doing adorable things, called Cat Getting Out of a Bag. The following is a MySpace correspondence between the author and I.


I see that you list The Blow under your favorite music. I saw her perform recently. She is, to trot out a tired platitude, a force. After the show, I wrote her a rather gushy MySpace message about how much I appreciate sincerity in art because it is so rare and valuable. Apparently, this is becoming a habit for me.

My gushing will benefit from context:

Tonight, I had dinner out with my parents, who are visiting me at college. I ordered a boca burger. I hate boca burgers, but I've been a vegetarian a number of years and after a while you learn to settle. Halfway through my meal, I realized that I was actually eating beef. It was the first time since Junior year of high school that any meat had made it far enough to be swallowed. I was stunned, and sunk into lasting malaise.

The issue was not just dismay over having compromised, even if by accident, my values. I was upset, deeply, because I didn't know if I really WAS all that troubled; whether the past however many months, even years, of adherence to my diet was just out of force of habit. Was I just too lazy to come up with a tenable enough justification to start eating meat again? Did I care at all?

We went to a bookstore because my parents thought it would cheer me up. I was going to buy the new Onion book, "Our Dumb World," but some guy swiped it while my back was turned in defiance of his ambiguously European wife, who was loudly denouncing it as trashy, distasteful, and gauchely American.

"Cat Getting Out of a Bag" was on display. I opened it and thumbed through half of it.

By the time I came to the sequence of Misty summoning you to turn the light on in the basement so she could use her litter box, I was on the verge of breaking into tears right in the middle of the shop.

I settle for boca burgers because sometimes animals look at you and there is a moment of recognition, maybe even understanding.

I bought the book. Your drawings helped me to renew my conviction when it was most threatened, so thank you.


Matt
Thanks very much for the message, it's truly appreciated, and it makes the art making all worthwhile.
I have yet to see The Blow live... I did mix some song titles and lyrics into a comic I did that comes out later this year, I'll be interested to see if anyone catches it
Best to you,
Jeff

~

I want to learn create things that are exactly what they are, that are of use to people, that are true.

Orientation

I have been in this library staring at words for over ten hours solid. Next to me sits a six-page outline scrawled painstakingly in green ink. It constitutes the rough sketch of what is to be the most fruitful implementation of my analytical energies of my entire college career, perhaps barring a 20-page biopic about metaphysics in The Journal of Albion Moonlight.

It took me over ten minutes to write that paragraph. I am trapped here for another half hour. Girl with the magic purse is asleep on a couch.

Sat down at this computer to start writing the introduction to the essay proper. What came out in giggly delirium is the following:


Dragons dragons dragons poopy poop dragons.


Right now, that's the funniest thing I've ever produced or seen written by anyone ever.

Girl with magic purse is giving me a scalp massage. This is the best thing ever. I am about to pass out. Not fall asleep. Pass out.

Girl with magic purse finds her nickname vaginal. I can't tell if I agree.

She wants to know if she farted in her sleep. I can't tell. She also says she is so sleep deprived that she's going to go home and "fuck a bunch."

Instead of writing this essay, I'm going to gluestick some cookie fortunes to an orange and throw it at my professor's head.

Now I'm filled with glee because GWMP just materialized next to me holding a slice of cold pizza and let me take a bite. I demanded she recognize my status as "the best girlfriend ever." This guy keeps walking past and I flash him the Wu-Tang sign and I can't tell if it's funny.

GWMP is making toy police officers have sex on my keyboard. She also put a felt mouse on my shoulder. I am living in a David Lynch movie.

I swear to god I'm not trying to sound dazed. This was supposed to be a narrative. Art transcends.

Wu Tang.