"There's this tea place in Hillcrest. It would be a great place for you to bring one of your many books."
I had told my new friend about my spontaneous collection of 200-odd literary classics. I had told him about my favorite book, The Magic Mountain, that it was set in a sanatorium in Switzerland before the outbreak of World War I, that it was an allegory for the intellectual milieu of prewar Europe, that it was seven or eight hundred pages long, that well it sounded pretty dull but it was, uh, great. I had offered a self-conscious little silence.
I had told him about something very important, this bookshelf, that fills me with many shades of trembling.
The blonde, a month before - she seemed too pretty for Thomas Mann. She said vague things about him over the music of the bar. Then she pummeled a guy in a wifebeater with her ass.
What to do with this strange impulse, to hear voices removed by centuries and oceans, to make sure others do as well.
Sunday, November 08, 2009
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
Apocrypha
In 2005, I started writing posts that I never published. Some were too specific and remain so. Others were abandoned because for a now unknown reason I was embarrassed to admit that I was in love on the occasions when I was, or because I did not want to betray my own unhappiness, or because I did not want to appear judgmental. In retrospect, these things do not seem so important to me. Here are a few favorites, in chronological order.
~~~
It often takes an hour of wallowing in the dry heat of Kaloustian's class to motivate myself to make a blog entry.
"Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot!" proclaims Massoud from the back of the class. Substitute does nothing.
School is ugly. It's like your underwear after a hot day at school. GOD, it's hot and gross and my head hurts and "Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot!" Soulless myrmidons patrolling the campus looking for children to bully, grades, grades, grades, the dumb nauseating pulse of the top forty at lunch, the smell of cheese everywhere, hot sun, I VOMIT YOU OUT, I EXPEL YOU FROM MY BODY LIKE A SICKNESS. I reclaim dominion over my life, they get no more anger, no more floorspace in my head.
"Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot!"
~~~
Late-night drunken thoughts of far-away places:
• Stepping in front of the car, brushing off sixty years or more like so many irritating flies, breaking down in the sunshine walk home listening to Eminem, of all things, fucking Eminem, Mockingbird, and I have to stop and just wait and cry because this man cares about his daughter and I care about my friend and it's as simple as that, because there's something worth caring about. You fill my heart even though you filled my life with pain.
• Confessionals. I miss you miss you miss you miss you and am not afraid to telegraph it secretly over underground internet wires.
• Hallelujah! Hallelujah anyway. There is something to miss and something to fill.
~~~
Crumble, beast. Disappear into the aether and take my hunching with you. Take the peering, the late-night safaris through wanting, illusion, the vertebrae falling one-two-three to your hypnosis. Gather up your hallucinations, your beekeeper's implements, your commerce of make-believe attitudes. Collect them back into yourself and go away forever.
When I first heard the rumor that Facebook was engaged in a lawsuit that might result in its dissolution, I was anxious - I don't like having my social crutch threatened. Then I started thinking about what would happen if it did implode. Not pandemonium, not any kind of lasting malaise, just a few flashes of anger and panic and then resignation; an exodus back into the world of living mouths, or a collective relapse into MySpace.
I liked the idea. I wanted the spell broken for me. When I realized that Facebook is a millions-dollar enterprise that will probably never be unseated from its privileged position in our lives as young Americans, that nobody was going to come and pluck me up out of my glazy-eyed stupor for me, I considered deleting my account. But then I didn't. Because it's hard to turn away from the promise.
Which is communion. Which is stray comments on pictures from girls of varying degrees of familiarity. One provocation, two provocation, three provocation, then the strike, the set, the reeling-in of new mates and allies. But it doesn't work that way. What happens is the thousand-yard stare, across a virtual horizon where forms move lethargically in silhouette, at the exact geometries of your virility.
So I'm done. I have just deactivated. I'm tired of feeling like a fly drawn to seductive death-glow.
This is not to scold anyone for continuing to use it, though I think on some fundamental level we recognize that it's all bad for us in some way (this coming from the guy who has wasted more than a few hundred breaths defending the whole thing to the 40+ crowd as a breakthrough in communication). It is not enough to touch only the most controllable parts of our lives together. It is not adequate to rifle through the digital laundries of others, hoping for accidental deposits of sincerity. It is not acceptable to me anymore to dwell in cardboard galleries and call it friendship.
This has been a fantasy, a mutually condoned imagining.
So crumble, dreamspace. Crumble away.
~~~
There is lead in between their hands, all over their faces, dormant in the crevices. There is lead in the pavement on which they sit outside the house with the party inside. There is lead all over everybody's hearts, it seeps. See it seep.
~~~
Sometimes you must confront the question: do I love you? Or do I look at you to keep myself feeling broken?
Do I love you? Or do I pound on the seat in front of me as we drive past you sitting on the curb speaking with another guy because I don't know how not to want to pound on seats?
~~~
When they put me under to have my wisdom teeth removed, it went blank. It did not go black, there was no color involved. No anything. Just sudden nothing. A cookie cut out of time's dough. Then I was awake, groggy, adrift in the stimulus-response neverland you reach after enough alcohol. I was laying on a table, my mom was sitting next to me. When my head began to stir, pivoting around to orient itself, she leaned forward. I couldn't speak because my mouth was full of gauze, so she handed me a piece of paper and a pen. Suddenly, I needed very badly to communicate to her just how in love with ______ I was, above and beyond anything else. My hand moved to write, "I am in love with ______," and then my self-censoring reason came back online.
~~~
Olympia, you make me feel like a paper cup caught in a dead bush on the side of the freeway.
Your hush is keeping me awake.
~~~
It often takes an hour of wallowing in the dry heat of Kaloustian's class to motivate myself to make a blog entry.
"Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot!" proclaims Massoud from the back of the class. Substitute does nothing.
School is ugly. It's like your underwear after a hot day at school. GOD, it's hot and gross and my head hurts and "Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot!" Soulless myrmidons patrolling the campus looking for children to bully, grades, grades, grades, the dumb nauseating pulse of the top forty at lunch, the smell of cheese everywhere, hot sun, I VOMIT YOU OUT, I EXPEL YOU FROM MY BODY LIKE A SICKNESS. I reclaim dominion over my life, they get no more anger, no more floorspace in my head.
"Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot!"
~~~
Late-night drunken thoughts of far-away places:
• Stepping in front of the car, brushing off sixty years or more like so many irritating flies, breaking down in the sunshine walk home listening to Eminem, of all things, fucking Eminem, Mockingbird, and I have to stop and just wait and cry because this man cares about his daughter and I care about my friend and it's as simple as that, because there's something worth caring about. You fill my heart even though you filled my life with pain.
• Confessionals. I miss you miss you miss you miss you and am not afraid to telegraph it secretly over underground internet wires.
• Hallelujah! Hallelujah anyway. There is something to miss and something to fill.
~~~
Crumble, beast. Disappear into the aether and take my hunching with you. Take the peering, the late-night safaris through wanting, illusion, the vertebrae falling one-two-three to your hypnosis. Gather up your hallucinations, your beekeeper's implements, your commerce of make-believe attitudes. Collect them back into yourself and go away forever.
When I first heard the rumor that Facebook was engaged in a lawsuit that might result in its dissolution, I was anxious - I don't like having my social crutch threatened. Then I started thinking about what would happen if it did implode. Not pandemonium, not any kind of lasting malaise, just a few flashes of anger and panic and then resignation; an exodus back into the world of living mouths, or a collective relapse into MySpace.
I liked the idea. I wanted the spell broken for me. When I realized that Facebook is a millions-dollar enterprise that will probably never be unseated from its privileged position in our lives as young Americans, that nobody was going to come and pluck me up out of my glazy-eyed stupor for me, I considered deleting my account. But then I didn't. Because it's hard to turn away from the promise.
Which is communion. Which is stray comments on pictures from girls of varying degrees of familiarity. One provocation, two provocation, three provocation, then the strike, the set, the reeling-in of new mates and allies. But it doesn't work that way. What happens is the thousand-yard stare, across a virtual horizon where forms move lethargically in silhouette, at the exact geometries of your virility.
So I'm done. I have just deactivated. I'm tired of feeling like a fly drawn to seductive death-glow.
This is not to scold anyone for continuing to use it, though I think on some fundamental level we recognize that it's all bad for us in some way (this coming from the guy who has wasted more than a few hundred breaths defending the whole thing to the 40+ crowd as a breakthrough in communication). It is not enough to touch only the most controllable parts of our lives together. It is not adequate to rifle through the digital laundries of others, hoping for accidental deposits of sincerity. It is not acceptable to me anymore to dwell in cardboard galleries and call it friendship.
This has been a fantasy, a mutually condoned imagining.
So crumble, dreamspace. Crumble away.
~~~
There is lead in between their hands, all over their faces, dormant in the crevices. There is lead in the pavement on which they sit outside the house with the party inside. There is lead all over everybody's hearts, it seeps. See it seep.
~~~
Sometimes you must confront the question: do I love you? Or do I look at you to keep myself feeling broken?
Do I love you? Or do I pound on the seat in front of me as we drive past you sitting on the curb speaking with another guy because I don't know how not to want to pound on seats?
~~~
When they put me under to have my wisdom teeth removed, it went blank. It did not go black, there was no color involved. No anything. Just sudden nothing. A cookie cut out of time's dough. Then I was awake, groggy, adrift in the stimulus-response neverland you reach after enough alcohol. I was laying on a table, my mom was sitting next to me. When my head began to stir, pivoting around to orient itself, she leaned forward. I couldn't speak because my mouth was full of gauze, so she handed me a piece of paper and a pen. Suddenly, I needed very badly to communicate to her just how in love with ______ I was, above and beyond anything else. My hand moved to write, "I am in love with ______," and then my self-censoring reason came back online.
~~~
Olympia, you make me feel like a paper cup caught in a dead bush on the side of the freeway.
Your hush is keeping me awake.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Menagerie
The old language of mystery and mystification is slipping. I came here in narrow hours to try to find it. There is only a lack of light and a lack of sleep.
Remains: jumble of inadequate metaphors straining to describe the harrowing moment of lucidity when there is no longer an institution dangling vulgar carrots in front of your face. Bubbles, rumbling, volcanic tectonic rage: sitting at desks. Waiting. Everything ordained, everything comfortable, everything wrong. Can I go to the bathroom please? (I don't know, CAN you?) No adults left in the world. Nobody to break the bells in half, to draw the curtain just inches aside. Students, wards, anonymous phalanxes, all we have for you to imbibe are shards of fragments of incomplete ideologies. May you lack the faculties to arrange them into any kind of legitimate mosaic-language and may you never escape the maze of equivocation that renders you intellectual adolescents and our culture a true obscenity and disappointment. May you be forever content with the trinkets you have inherited in place of masterpieces. Before all else, may you keep our jobs easy - may you uphold unwavering deference to the power of scheduling and standard-fulfillment. And thank us for the kidnapping. Say thank you. You will be called an ingrate if you don't.
I have graduated and I possess: dreams, jumbled, too much for patchwork? A head full of conflicting, mutually-contradictory, socially reinforced and unshakable truisms, maxims, clichés, parables, proverbs, analogies, metaphors, plots, tropes, slogans, catchphrases that guide to nowhere but exasperation. Deep sickness at the realization that our world is driven by just such idiot semantics. I possess: one very large glass house. But my heart knows what my heart knows. I possess: enough desperation to consider dreams real things and to cradle their fragility in soft and careful fingers.
Remains: jumble of inadequate metaphors straining to describe the harrowing moment of lucidity when there is no longer an institution dangling vulgar carrots in front of your face. Bubbles, rumbling, volcanic tectonic rage: sitting at desks. Waiting. Everything ordained, everything comfortable, everything wrong. Can I go to the bathroom please? (I don't know, CAN you?) No adults left in the world. Nobody to break the bells in half, to draw the curtain just inches aside. Students, wards, anonymous phalanxes, all we have for you to imbibe are shards of fragments of incomplete ideologies. May you lack the faculties to arrange them into any kind of legitimate mosaic-language and may you never escape the maze of equivocation that renders you intellectual adolescents and our culture a true obscenity and disappointment. May you be forever content with the trinkets you have inherited in place of masterpieces. Before all else, may you keep our jobs easy - may you uphold unwavering deference to the power of scheduling and standard-fulfillment. And thank us for the kidnapping. Say thank you. You will be called an ingrate if you don't.
I have graduated and I possess: dreams, jumbled, too much for patchwork? A head full of conflicting, mutually-contradictory, socially reinforced and unshakable truisms, maxims, clichés, parables, proverbs, analogies, metaphors, plots, tropes, slogans, catchphrases that guide to nowhere but exasperation. Deep sickness at the realization that our world is driven by just such idiot semantics. I possess: one very large glass house. But my heart knows what my heart knows. I possess: enough desperation to consider dreams real things and to cradle their fragility in soft and careful fingers.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Vernacular
I have not written much of any importance in the past few months. My energies have been devoted to a subtle metamorphosis into Pretentious Upperclassman Seminar Blowhard Asshole, an event that would have chilled a younger me. A couple weeks ago I found myself expounding upon the "absence of moral substance in wildlife documentaries," interrupted by the snickering of a classmate who had lowered and begun shaking his head in exasperation. Shit. Oh well. I guess it was inevitable that I would become the thing I hated. Being pedantic is better than leaving every class with a stress headache.
I am not yet prepared to write a summary of my time here, nor to attempt to comment upon what I have really learned, but I can say with very little ambivalence that I regard it as three years of harried disequilibrium, conviction assailed on all sides by various fictions - cultural, social, institutional - that have evidenced worthlessness in their effect upon my intelligence and my happiness. The myth of the manufactured World Citizen, prepared for life's trials by exposure to rarified knowledge: this is a fiction. The myth that success in our society is expedited by intimacy with the classical canon: complete lie. The myth of the pleasure child undaunted in the pursuit of bacchanalia: this is also a fiction. The myth of provincial specialness, of "alternativeness" generalized and self-consciously broadcasted as a means of providing ballast to an unbalanced political reality: the most fatuous story of them all. The bars are filled with emptiness. The campus, lurching creature, wobbles on legs of half-imagined narratives, fragments of sentences, ideas about ideas about itself. It lunges blindly at its adversaries, often unable or unwilling to tell the dragons from the windmills.
But I do believe that to live in America (and I use this proper noun only for sake of experience) is to participate in this commerce of the soul's poor grammar. It is different elsewhere, but not much. Maybe it is the trying, the sometimes optimistic but usually smug assurance with which people here settle for these myths, these incompletenesses, that unnerves me.
I anticipate my Summer in the wilderness with great thrill and equal trepidation. It will be a big, immovable mass in my life's progression. I cherish its circumference, imagined.
I am not yet prepared to write a summary of my time here, nor to attempt to comment upon what I have really learned, but I can say with very little ambivalence that I regard it as three years of harried disequilibrium, conviction assailed on all sides by various fictions - cultural, social, institutional - that have evidenced worthlessness in their effect upon my intelligence and my happiness. The myth of the manufactured World Citizen, prepared for life's trials by exposure to rarified knowledge: this is a fiction. The myth that success in our society is expedited by intimacy with the classical canon: complete lie. The myth of the pleasure child undaunted in the pursuit of bacchanalia: this is also a fiction. The myth of provincial specialness, of "alternativeness" generalized and self-consciously broadcasted as a means of providing ballast to an unbalanced political reality: the most fatuous story of them all. The bars are filled with emptiness. The campus, lurching creature, wobbles on legs of half-imagined narratives, fragments of sentences, ideas about ideas about itself. It lunges blindly at its adversaries, often unable or unwilling to tell the dragons from the windmills.
But I do believe that to live in America (and I use this proper noun only for sake of experience) is to participate in this commerce of the soul's poor grammar. It is different elsewhere, but not much. Maybe it is the trying, the sometimes optimistic but usually smug assurance with which people here settle for these myths, these incompletenesses, that unnerves me.
I anticipate my Summer in the wilderness with great thrill and equal trepidation. It will be a big, immovable mass in my life's progression. I cherish its circumference, imagined.
Friday, March 13, 2009
Wings
I woke up today at four in the morning instead of going to sleep at four in the morning, a small triumph after weeks of insomnia. I enjoyed the early morning light instead of staring at it with bleary, defeated eyes through my blinds. I am home and I feel wonderful.
The sun is out. I am looking out at my back yard full of singing birds and I just remembered that I can open the window to feel the breeze.
Earlier, I walked to the pond where I spent most of my childhood fishing. There was a die-off last year, and it is still recovering. The water seemed barren of significant fish; I managed three small bluegill on a fly. Part of me feels very sad that the ecosystem I knew so intimately is probably altered permanently (many clues suggest the crayfish have grown to lobster proportions in the absence of predators). Most of me knows that, at least for a while, there will always be fish to catch everywhere in the world, and that, in the words of science penis Ian Malcolm, "life finds a way."
One annoying convention of nature writing is authors trying to saturate their experience of wilderness with narrative significance. Our experiences of nature, and the way we think about them, should not be subject to the conventions of plot development, symbolism, or anything else that "teaches" in a linear way. The moment that really moves me is what occurs when I become fascinated by something, and it is purely visceral.
The comic Billy Connolly, who is also a fly fisherman, offered the best description of this phenomenon I've ever heard. "When a fish strikes, it's like making contact, just for a moment, with an alien. I guarantee that the first person to encounter a space alien will have the exact same reaction."
Today I communed with the aliens. I was startled by two birds I now know to be green herons, and a third giant deep-voiced brown thing I still haven't identified. I've been bird watching for almost three years in this neighborhood, and I can identify almost anything I see within seconds. But nature's reserve of surprises is inexhaustible, and so is that perfect moment of humility that overtakes you when you witness something for the first time.
For all the myriad ways to be disillusioned by the world, to be ground down and joyless and suffering, I am filled with such gratitude that that one edge will never dull. I cannot imagine a more effective means of suspending self-awareness than watching a hawk snatch a finch from the air, or hunching in anticipation as a bass scrutinizes a lure with its snout.
Every time I go outside with the intention of observing, something special happens. Specialness is tonic; it transmutes indifference into joy.
I don't know what else to say about it. I'm happy. No plot. Just happy.
The sun is out. I am looking out at my back yard full of singing birds and I just remembered that I can open the window to feel the breeze.
Earlier, I walked to the pond where I spent most of my childhood fishing. There was a die-off last year, and it is still recovering. The water seemed barren of significant fish; I managed three small bluegill on a fly. Part of me feels very sad that the ecosystem I knew so intimately is probably altered permanently (many clues suggest the crayfish have grown to lobster proportions in the absence of predators). Most of me knows that, at least for a while, there will always be fish to catch everywhere in the world, and that, in the words of science penis Ian Malcolm, "life finds a way."
One annoying convention of nature writing is authors trying to saturate their experience of wilderness with narrative significance. Our experiences of nature, and the way we think about them, should not be subject to the conventions of plot development, symbolism, or anything else that "teaches" in a linear way. The moment that really moves me is what occurs when I become fascinated by something, and it is purely visceral.
The comic Billy Connolly, who is also a fly fisherman, offered the best description of this phenomenon I've ever heard. "When a fish strikes, it's like making contact, just for a moment, with an alien. I guarantee that the first person to encounter a space alien will have the exact same reaction."
Today I communed with the aliens. I was startled by two birds I now know to be green herons, and a third giant deep-voiced brown thing I still haven't identified. I've been bird watching for almost three years in this neighborhood, and I can identify almost anything I see within seconds. But nature's reserve of surprises is inexhaustible, and so is that perfect moment of humility that overtakes you when you witness something for the first time.
For all the myriad ways to be disillusioned by the world, to be ground down and joyless and suffering, I am filled with such gratitude that that one edge will never dull. I cannot imagine a more effective means of suspending self-awareness than watching a hawk snatch a finch from the air, or hunching in anticipation as a bass scrutinizes a lure with its snout.
Every time I go outside with the intention of observing, something special happens. Specialness is tonic; it transmutes indifference into joy.
I don't know what else to say about it. I'm happy. No plot. Just happy.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Lungs
Some fish walk on land. Like the catfish. One time, we kept one in a cooler for four hours before getting home and finding out it was still breathing. I don't remember how we executed it.
Sometimes living things just suffer without dying.
When I was two I fished a tadpole out of its tank and brought it over to the couch to watch TV with me. I set it on a cushion and forgot about it. When I realized it was dead, I cried. It's probably the most perfectly sad thing that's ever happened to me.
Usually I don't hear the persistent low whine of pain until I am particularly alone and it's very late at night. Lack of air does not come from a place. If you wanted to put your finger in a hole to stop vacuum from leaking into your room, you couldn't do it.
That tadpole would have had a pretty hard time telling me that it wanted me to carry it in my palm back to its little bowl. Maybe it tried.
I have a hard time falling asleep because my bed feels uncomfortable. I guess because I know where it is, and where it isn't. As well as who's in it, and who isn't.
One time a professor who is also a psychologist told me that I "have depression." Can you really possess the absence of a thing? Maybe that catfish "had thirst."
When I find spiders or silverfish in my bathtub, I nudge them so they run onto my hand, and then I put them safely on the bathroom floor.
Sometimes I have trouble sleeping because I am remembering what it feels like to swim.
Sometimes living things just suffer without dying.
When I was two I fished a tadpole out of its tank and brought it over to the couch to watch TV with me. I set it on a cushion and forgot about it. When I realized it was dead, I cried. It's probably the most perfectly sad thing that's ever happened to me.
Usually I don't hear the persistent low whine of pain until I am particularly alone and it's very late at night. Lack of air does not come from a place. If you wanted to put your finger in a hole to stop vacuum from leaking into your room, you couldn't do it.
That tadpole would have had a pretty hard time telling me that it wanted me to carry it in my palm back to its little bowl. Maybe it tried.
I have a hard time falling asleep because my bed feels uncomfortable. I guess because I know where it is, and where it isn't. As well as who's in it, and who isn't.
One time a professor who is also a psychologist told me that I "have depression." Can you really possess the absence of a thing? Maybe that catfish "had thirst."
When I find spiders or silverfish in my bathtub, I nudge them so they run onto my hand, and then I put them safely on the bathroom floor.
Sometimes I have trouble sleeping because I am remembering what it feels like to swim.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
A Lovely Hallmark Greeting
The Vault has closed its doors. They are out there, lunging at imagined adversaries, bellowing and revving the engines of their giant retarded cars with T.I. cranked to full. And they are winning. They will breed with each other, will satisfy the needs of hearts unmuddled by the trappings of self-consciousness.
Weird, weird weird weird that I miss my dating blog all of a sudden, on the eve of the most colossally platonic and lonely day of the year.
Sick of it. Just sick of it, like my marrow is tying itself in knots. Elaborate hopes crushed in special ways. Her never finding out about my fucking charming idea to spend a night cooking something called "Karen A's Chocolate Dump Cake" together because she pretends she never invited the call she ignored. The deliberately unmet glances, the impregnable efface of anonymity segregating everyone from any kind of easy fun. Being ambiently hurt when a doorman asks for my ID after I stepped out only ten seconds before, and responds to my comments about same with an indignant, "I don't know you, man!" Sick of it. Sick of the weekend's insurmountable requirements here in this town, cardboard city full of half-recognized strangers. Like trying to build a happy life with a tub of incompatible legos and an instruction booklet filled with photos of dogs' assholes. And it's not much better anywhere else.
I don't know how not to be disappointed by this all the time. I have a hard time accepting that anyone does.
Weird, weird weird weird that I miss my dating blog all of a sudden, on the eve of the most colossally platonic and lonely day of the year.
Sick of it. Just sick of it, like my marrow is tying itself in knots. Elaborate hopes crushed in special ways. Her never finding out about my fucking charming idea to spend a night cooking something called "Karen A's Chocolate Dump Cake" together because she pretends she never invited the call she ignored. The deliberately unmet glances, the impregnable efface of anonymity segregating everyone from any kind of easy fun. Being ambiently hurt when a doorman asks for my ID after I stepped out only ten seconds before, and responds to my comments about same with an indignant, "I don't know you, man!" Sick of it. Sick of the weekend's insurmountable requirements here in this town, cardboard city full of half-recognized strangers. Like trying to build a happy life with a tub of incompatible legos and an instruction booklet filled with photos of dogs' assholes. And it's not much better anywhere else.
I don't know how not to be disappointed by this all the time. I have a hard time accepting that anyone does.
Monday, February 09, 2009
Counting Back from Twenty-One
Then again, anger doesn't really do much of anything but beget more anger. Another lesson I have been learning over and over again but have always somehow failed to cleave to my inner parts.
I think all I really want to do when I graduate is run around in the woods and teach kids how to catch fish and maybe fill a couple of sketch books. Just do something that doesn't make me feel like a fifth wheel every day of my life.
I can't deal with the demands of being an urban twentysomething. I don't want to get used to seeing destitute people dancing for change outside of bars, or to stumbling home weekend nights to an empty apartment, yelling at people I've never met. The party is fueled by loneliness, and the certainty with which everyone knows this but still indulge in its untruths makes it even more harrowing.
I require the same thing every person does but may not realize: a real community, contact with quiet goodness, functional relationships, family, trees, water, occasional mischief, mirth, things to learn and people to help.
I guess that chasing a career instead of learning how to nurture happiness without expensive implements is doubly foolish in the face of mounting economic catastrophe of unknown totality. I guess it was never that good of an idea.
What a staggering conceit, Supertramp. But I own it now, and it fits me well.
I think all I really want to do when I graduate is run around in the woods and teach kids how to catch fish and maybe fill a couple of sketch books. Just do something that doesn't make me feel like a fifth wheel every day of my life.
I can't deal with the demands of being an urban twentysomething. I don't want to get used to seeing destitute people dancing for change outside of bars, or to stumbling home weekend nights to an empty apartment, yelling at people I've never met. The party is fueled by loneliness, and the certainty with which everyone knows this but still indulge in its untruths makes it even more harrowing.
I require the same thing every person does but may not realize: a real community, contact with quiet goodness, functional relationships, family, trees, water, occasional mischief, mirth, things to learn and people to help.
I guess that chasing a career instead of learning how to nurture happiness without expensive implements is doubly foolish in the face of mounting economic catastrophe of unknown totality. I guess it was never that good of an idea.
What a staggering conceit, Supertramp. But I own it now, and it fits me well.
Saturday, February 07, 2009
Fountain Stopping
Right now I am upstairs and eight years old reading Expedition by Wayne Barlowe in my bunk bed that is now dismantled in the garage. I am home sick from school. Right now I am home sick from school becoming in love with elaborate fantasies involving imagined worlds. Right now I am home sick, from school.
I am reading the thing from cover to cover wrapped up in a feeling of warm security that only comes when you have no responsibilities aside from healing in your bed in your house while your mother cooks you meals and your suspicious father furls his eyebrows over concern for your homework. It is full of mystery. My favorite is the painting of the two-legged alien sauntering along the edge of a forest lit up like a hundred bioluminescent Christmases at dusk. I am warm and making these things real in my heart.
And now I am downstairs alone in my underwear with cold legs at five in the morning and there is nobody in the house. His second and third books contained paintings of Hell so vivid that they kept me awake until past sunrise because I could not stop feeling them in my heart, because parts of them were not so unfamiliar. I am home, sick, from school.
Nothing is different here. It is the same moment. Only I have been gone, lost in extended fantasy. Do not tell me to ignore my thousand overscratched itches that tell me that the whole thing has stood like some kind of offending monument before the judgment of reason. I feel every unmeasurable weight of emptiness that fills the promises of this institution, and part of me disagrees but the wick at the center of the waxy myths smolders. This imagining should not be made real. This piece of paper, this fuck fuck fucking badge of universally licensed trudgery and economic segregation. Something is festering and you can't convince me I don't feel real real ill approaching the last rings of the circus. Like it's all making the world so much a better place, devoting years, years, years upon years to begrudging participation in exercises that mean nothing to anyone. And human beauty still finds a way to poke its blossoms out from between the cracks in the lifeless concrete, but that's what human beauty does forever and ever, and FUCK the concrete, here to eternity, because it covers miles of blooming soil. I knew this from the beginning, pacing at the front of my fourth grade classroom during recess, arguing with my teacher about the fallacies of her curricular agenda instead of doing my tardy homework, the whole thing still like some kind of funny joke I could dispel with rhetoric, before it spoiled to fresh anger, disappointment, loneliness. Before I carried unshakable rage through middle school, until I learned how to quiet it and play the game. And now I'm on the other side looking in, and fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck school. Talk about privilege until your lungs collapse. I don't care. This has been very crippling to some unnamable thing that is precious to me. I am a middle-class white male with a competent mind. I am standing at the top of the mountain. And I am surrounded by broken things, boredom, listlessness, addiction, limitless potential defaulted upon in every crucial way.
The technology, the very fun rap videos, the cars, the everything, I'd give it up in the blink of the eye just to be able to believe in my community and its founding myths for once in my life. This hunger has no bottom.
You tell me I am better, that I am educated because I have learned to sit in a chair for eight hours a day. I am sorry that I hate the things you have mandated me to endure. I am sorry that I have never been able to believe anything you say. You did not keep me warm when I was cold, and you did not keep me close when I was sick. Thank you for encouraging me to thwart my own youth every day of my life. I didn't need your help.
Now I'm going back upstairs to read about sightless aliens hunting with sonar across invented landscapes. And it will be made real. Because it fills my heart with wonder and I am home, sick, from school.
I am reading the thing from cover to cover wrapped up in a feeling of warm security that only comes when you have no responsibilities aside from healing in your bed in your house while your mother cooks you meals and your suspicious father furls his eyebrows over concern for your homework. It is full of mystery. My favorite is the painting of the two-legged alien sauntering along the edge of a forest lit up like a hundred bioluminescent Christmases at dusk. I am warm and making these things real in my heart.
And now I am downstairs alone in my underwear with cold legs at five in the morning and there is nobody in the house. His second and third books contained paintings of Hell so vivid that they kept me awake until past sunrise because I could not stop feeling them in my heart, because parts of them were not so unfamiliar. I am home, sick, from school.
Nothing is different here. It is the same moment. Only I have been gone, lost in extended fantasy. Do not tell me to ignore my thousand overscratched itches that tell me that the whole thing has stood like some kind of offending monument before the judgment of reason. I feel every unmeasurable weight of emptiness that fills the promises of this institution, and part of me disagrees but the wick at the center of the waxy myths smolders. This imagining should not be made real. This piece of paper, this fuck fuck fucking badge of universally licensed trudgery and economic segregation. Something is festering and you can't convince me I don't feel real real ill approaching the last rings of the circus. Like it's all making the world so much a better place, devoting years, years, years upon years to begrudging participation in exercises that mean nothing to anyone. And human beauty still finds a way to poke its blossoms out from between the cracks in the lifeless concrete, but that's what human beauty does forever and ever, and FUCK the concrete, here to eternity, because it covers miles of blooming soil. I knew this from the beginning, pacing at the front of my fourth grade classroom during recess, arguing with my teacher about the fallacies of her curricular agenda instead of doing my tardy homework, the whole thing still like some kind of funny joke I could dispel with rhetoric, before it spoiled to fresh anger, disappointment, loneliness. Before I carried unshakable rage through middle school, until I learned how to quiet it and play the game. And now I'm on the other side looking in, and fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck school. Talk about privilege until your lungs collapse. I don't care. This has been very crippling to some unnamable thing that is precious to me. I am a middle-class white male with a competent mind. I am standing at the top of the mountain. And I am surrounded by broken things, boredom, listlessness, addiction, limitless potential defaulted upon in every crucial way.
The technology, the very fun rap videos, the cars, the everything, I'd give it up in the blink of the eye just to be able to believe in my community and its founding myths for once in my life. This hunger has no bottom.
You tell me I am better, that I am educated because I have learned to sit in a chair for eight hours a day. I am sorry that I hate the things you have mandated me to endure. I am sorry that I have never been able to believe anything you say. You did not keep me warm when I was cold, and you did not keep me close when I was sick. Thank you for encouraging me to thwart my own youth every day of my life. I didn't need your help.
Now I'm going back upstairs to read about sightless aliens hunting with sonar across invented landscapes. And it will be made real. Because it fills my heart with wonder and I am home, sick, from school.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Elegy
Two days ago I wrote this as a final submission for my class:
Right now I'm staring at the spine of a book, The Devil's Teeth, that's sitting on a shelf at the foot of my bed. It's a narrative about great white shark researchers who live on the Farralon Islands in California. They spend every waking hour observing the sharks devour elephant seals. I told my dad I would read this book. I have not.
The things I have learned this quarter are things that have momentarily lifted me out of the dangerous waters, onto the privileged vantage of dry ground. I am sure that at some point in the book, the author draws a parallel between the jagged, volcanic geography of the islands and the serrated horror of a shark's jaws. But the mountains on my island are molar. Flat, reassuring. My footing there feels so sure. Then I'm slipping, have slipped, am once again shivering and terrified, surrounded by vague symmetries of monsters half-perceived in the murk.
I have learned that I have to start swimming, that rogue waves issued from the chance physics of the deep are not enough to keep me safe. I have learned that some people swim better than others. I have learned that my form is poor but that it improves with practice. I have also learned that treading water is easy. Easier than swimming.
It is a curiosity of humanness that the fear of challenge can overwhelm the fear of drowning, of great fish come to collect. Curious because it means that we are not indigenous residents in our own souls. The spirit is domitable. This is fact.
So what of the swimmers? What magic fuel combusts in their hearts to compel them forwards?
The answer is secret. It cannot be contained in self-help books, analogies, stories, therapies with names. The answer is unspeakable and holy and precious. But I have a feeling it has to do with selflessness. They must know that those of us content to bob listlessly in the tide are disturbed by their wakes. They must be more awake to the fear, because they remember more vividly the feeling of earth under the feet. They must be frenzied with self-preservation.
Some of them come back. Out they swim, to smack the blood into our faces, to coax our reluctant bodies into motion. And they do it again and again, for the rest of their lives. They become faster, more agile than the monsters. This is the definition of heroism.
In the past weeks, I have been touched by wakes. All I can do now is put one arm in front of the other, flutter the legs and start swallowing water until I'm strong enough to swim, dive, porpoise away from snapping maws. I hope I will make the return plunge if I am lucky enough to face it.
Here's a prayer, we floaters. Move.
This morning I found out that my friend Mathew has died. A fellow floater, lying on my floor at two in the morning, both of us drunk, both of us lost in morose reveries over girls not paying enough attention. I hope he felt something beautiful before he went. I hope that if he can still know, he knows that his rings will never really settle in my waters.
He seemed to know that he didn't belong. I can say of him what he maybe couldn't of himself: he was better. Smarter. Blessed and cursed with disappointment because his imagination was strong enough to make him know that there was more. Anger, America. He never got his chance. He felt the sting of your lifelessness deep in his heart. Anger for my dead friend with the big soul. He was better than you.
Right now I'm staring at the spine of a book, The Devil's Teeth, that's sitting on a shelf at the foot of my bed. It's a narrative about great white shark researchers who live on the Farralon Islands in California. They spend every waking hour observing the sharks devour elephant seals. I told my dad I would read this book. I have not.
The things I have learned this quarter are things that have momentarily lifted me out of the dangerous waters, onto the privileged vantage of dry ground. I am sure that at some point in the book, the author draws a parallel between the jagged, volcanic geography of the islands and the serrated horror of a shark's jaws. But the mountains on my island are molar. Flat, reassuring. My footing there feels so sure. Then I'm slipping, have slipped, am once again shivering and terrified, surrounded by vague symmetries of monsters half-perceived in the murk.
I have learned that I have to start swimming, that rogue waves issued from the chance physics of the deep are not enough to keep me safe. I have learned that some people swim better than others. I have learned that my form is poor but that it improves with practice. I have also learned that treading water is easy. Easier than swimming.
It is a curiosity of humanness that the fear of challenge can overwhelm the fear of drowning, of great fish come to collect. Curious because it means that we are not indigenous residents in our own souls. The spirit is domitable. This is fact.
So what of the swimmers? What magic fuel combusts in their hearts to compel them forwards?
The answer is secret. It cannot be contained in self-help books, analogies, stories, therapies with names. The answer is unspeakable and holy and precious. But I have a feeling it has to do with selflessness. They must know that those of us content to bob listlessly in the tide are disturbed by their wakes. They must be more awake to the fear, because they remember more vividly the feeling of earth under the feet. They must be frenzied with self-preservation.
Some of them come back. Out they swim, to smack the blood into our faces, to coax our reluctant bodies into motion. And they do it again and again, for the rest of their lives. They become faster, more agile than the monsters. This is the definition of heroism.
In the past weeks, I have been touched by wakes. All I can do now is put one arm in front of the other, flutter the legs and start swallowing water until I'm strong enough to swim, dive, porpoise away from snapping maws. I hope I will make the return plunge if I am lucky enough to face it.
Here's a prayer, we floaters. Move.
This morning I found out that my friend Mathew has died. A fellow floater, lying on my floor at two in the morning, both of us drunk, both of us lost in morose reveries over girls not paying enough attention. I hope he felt something beautiful before he went. I hope that if he can still know, he knows that his rings will never really settle in my waters.
He seemed to know that he didn't belong. I can say of him what he maybe couldn't of himself: he was better. Smarter. Blessed and cursed with disappointment because his imagination was strong enough to make him know that there was more. Anger, America. He never got his chance. He felt the sting of your lifelessness deep in his heart. Anger for my dead friend with the big soul. He was better than you.
Monday, November 03, 2008
A Story by Corbin Smith
HOW I AM FEELING BY MATT LOUV
I am hungry and horny.
20 MINUTES LATERS
I ate and jerked off. Now I am bored.
I am hungry and horny.
20 MINUTES LATERS
I ate and jerked off. Now I am bored.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Poof
Last year, I turned twenty with a ritual. It was kind of weird so I'm not going to share the details. I turned twenty-one tonight with a much better one.
I spent my last half-hour as a minor collecting significant belongings and stacking them in a pile next to my computer chair. Lots of books. And Superbad. Kenneth Patchen, Kerouac, a book of career-oriented personality tests my mom had to coerce me into reading, the Chronicles of Narnia, even my copy of Diablo II. Then I composed a photo collage of friends and family, took it in to get a sense of story as the numbers rolled by. And roll they did.
Now I'm an adult. It feels weird that it feels good to write that. Not to sound over-sentimental (I, of course, never do), but it feels like a new kind of childhood. Square something-close-to-one.
I'm going to eat a bunch of my words and start practicing Chinese medicine and eating herbs and having fun with myself, because to me, being an adult mostly means having humility and a sense of humor. Why not? It's an adventure. Everything's an adventure.
I spent my last half-hour as a minor collecting significant belongings and stacking them in a pile next to my computer chair. Lots of books. And Superbad. Kenneth Patchen, Kerouac, a book of career-oriented personality tests my mom had to coerce me into reading, the Chronicles of Narnia, even my copy of Diablo II. Then I composed a photo collage of friends and family, took it in to get a sense of story as the numbers rolled by. And roll they did.
Now I'm an adult. It feels weird that it feels good to write that. Not to sound over-sentimental (I, of course, never do), but it feels like a new kind of childhood. Square something-close-to-one.
I'm going to eat a bunch of my words and start practicing Chinese medicine and eating herbs and having fun with myself, because to me, being an adult mostly means having humility and a sense of humor. Why not? It's an adventure. Everything's an adventure.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Exponents
The day after tomorrow, I will be 21. Childhood is over. It's tempting to sublimate my alarm to thoughts of "21 is merely a socially constructed abstraction with little relevance to benchmarks of growth and maturity in your own life; only you get to decide when your childhood is over." But eventually, you have to concede to the rules.
One of my most vivid memories from elementary school was turning eight. At some point right before my birthday, I was at school (I remember the exact spot) and I thought to myself, "I will be twice as old as I was when I was four." That seemed astounding to me.
Now I'm throttling towards adulthood. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
One of my most vivid memories from elementary school was turning eight. At some point right before my birthday, I was at school (I remember the exact spot) and I thought to myself, "I will be twice as old as I was when I was four." That seemed astounding to me.
Now I'm throttling towards adulthood. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Like Drops of Slow Molasses
Some moments are so utterly, transcendentally adult as to be inaccessible after their passing. Some moments allow you to feel your place in your own narrative, can reach back and tap your fingers along the heads of selves past, smell the ionized air of deep time around you.
Moments like watching pornography after a four-month moratorium and finally seeing how utterly stupid and lifeless it is.
Asking my mother to pay for a weeklong seminar in Stanford about my chronic condition, having the honesty to know that I need help, that I'm not ready to flush the monsters from under the bed by myself yet.
Realizing that the retards don't have a Monopoly on the politics of human empathy, that a happier world is probably just as simple as people taking care of each other. Feeling suddenly overwhelmed in class by a desire to help someone, then sad and dizzy at the realization that that notion has an exotic flavor.
Going to bed thinking about the things that I have, not what's missing.
Moments like watching pornography after a four-month moratorium and finally seeing how utterly stupid and lifeless it is.
Asking my mother to pay for a weeklong seminar in Stanford about my chronic condition, having the honesty to know that I need help, that I'm not ready to flush the monsters from under the bed by myself yet.
Realizing that the retards don't have a Monopoly on the politics of human empathy, that a happier world is probably just as simple as people taking care of each other. Feeling suddenly overwhelmed in class by a desire to help someone, then sad and dizzy at the realization that that notion has an exotic flavor.
Going to bed thinking about the things that I have, not what's missing.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Code Red
I've been having 28 Days Later-related nightmares a lot lately. Sometimes a franchise rotates into mental prominence and I don't really know why. Like when I'll be obsessed with Star Wars for a week, or when I'll chew through an entire TV series on DVD in a matter of days. It's mostly that I become enchanted with the idea of whatever it is that's caught my attention; my whiskers brush along their symbolic core.
I just finished watching the sequel. I had seen it before, but I'm still jittery. Not just from the tension, the violence, but for the sense of distilled hopelessness that pervades its scenes. As I get older and see things change, I come to recognize what I have, to value it more. Unlike when I was fifteen, unmoved by images of gore, seeing things taken away is now painful. And these movies take everything away, ruthlessly. Society, family, the future, our own humanity. I worry that they are so popular because they reflect our culture's self-image: a world of cannibals, grasping tenuously at a century whose momentum is overwhelming. They're not haunting because of the blood, the monsters creeping in the dark. They're haunting because it all seems so much closer than it should. And why is that? AIDS? A global economy poised on the edge of catastrophe? A spiritual ache for a mode of human artifice that does not presuppose environmental self-destruction? All of that, partially. But mostly, I think, because everything seems to be slipping, and losing things hurts. It is the fear of total social regress; of falling off the pedestal we built to keep us from the screaming wildness below.
I just finished watching the sequel. I had seen it before, but I'm still jittery. Not just from the tension, the violence, but for the sense of distilled hopelessness that pervades its scenes. As I get older and see things change, I come to recognize what I have, to value it more. Unlike when I was fifteen, unmoved by images of gore, seeing things taken away is now painful. And these movies take everything away, ruthlessly. Society, family, the future, our own humanity. I worry that they are so popular because they reflect our culture's self-image: a world of cannibals, grasping tenuously at a century whose momentum is overwhelming. They're not haunting because of the blood, the monsters creeping in the dark. They're haunting because it all seems so much closer than it should. And why is that? AIDS? A global economy poised on the edge of catastrophe? A spiritual ache for a mode of human artifice that does not presuppose environmental self-destruction? All of that, partially. But mostly, I think, because everything seems to be slipping, and losing things hurts. It is the fear of total social regress; of falling off the pedestal we built to keep us from the screaming wildness below.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Friday, August 08, 2008
They Run Away
The day, chopped into little pieces by all these sympathetic diversions, had in fact crumbled in his hands, and turned to dust - and he would notice it now, either in cheerful amazement or, at worst, with a little pensiveness, since to shudder at the thought would have been inappropriate to his young years. It seemed to him that he was simply gazing, 'on and on.'
- The Magic Mountain
Holiness is a sense. The same as taste and smell. Holiness is sense of plot - assembling mosaics from the disparate fragments of life events. The sense of joy is intimately correlated to the sense of tragedy; they are essentially the same feeling, which is acknowledgment of the world's potential for beauty, whether in regards to its fulfillment or its abandonment.
But it doesn't stick. The fragments are mutually, magnetically repellant. Dwelling in holiness requires all of our faculties - it is exhausting. When was the last time you cried for more than ten minutes?
So what is left when my grip loosens is static, a severe ringing in the ears. What is left is feeling like a droswy, beached whale. I look around and I see slow suffocation - the neighbor who constantly has some van in his driveway, some piece of wood or marble set atop wooden horses being ground down to its appropriate shape, to be wielded against the degeneration of his perfectly-fine house in whatever new fit of rennovative zeal he has caught himself up in; the eternal shortening of the lawns; the slow breeze of lives passed in tedious routine.
The part of me that travels into mosaic land complains, like an old man with cataracts bent over some small province of a puzzle with infinite pieces. He knows that these assessments are wrong, are in fact an offense, because there is holiness in absolutely everything.
And so I trudge around feeling like my head is filled with farts and ghosts, fists full of cardboard.
- The Magic Mountain
Holiness is a sense. The same as taste and smell. Holiness is sense of plot - assembling mosaics from the disparate fragments of life events. The sense of joy is intimately correlated to the sense of tragedy; they are essentially the same feeling, which is acknowledgment of the world's potential for beauty, whether in regards to its fulfillment or its abandonment.
But it doesn't stick. The fragments are mutually, magnetically repellant. Dwelling in holiness requires all of our faculties - it is exhausting. When was the last time you cried for more than ten minutes?
So what is left when my grip loosens is static, a severe ringing in the ears. What is left is feeling like a droswy, beached whale. I look around and I see slow suffocation - the neighbor who constantly has some van in his driveway, some piece of wood or marble set atop wooden horses being ground down to its appropriate shape, to be wielded against the degeneration of his perfectly-fine house in whatever new fit of rennovative zeal he has caught himself up in; the eternal shortening of the lawns; the slow breeze of lives passed in tedious routine.
The part of me that travels into mosaic land complains, like an old man with cataracts bent over some small province of a puzzle with infinite pieces. He knows that these assessments are wrong, are in fact an offense, because there is holiness in absolutely everything.
And so I trudge around feeling like my head is filled with farts and ghosts, fists full of cardboard.
Thursday, August 07, 2008
Never Write Fan Letters
Dear Patton Oswalt,
Last night I had a dream about recruiting William Shatner, my neighbor, to combat a murderous cult that lived on our street. We rained righteous fury on them for hours while Satan drove around in a semi. Then I was exploring catacombs beneath Reed College, where I saved this girl from a giant lizard that spit poison. She thought I was a werewolf and we were totally about to do it when my alarm went off.
That was a pretty good dream. One I thought you could appreciate. But I have another dream you might be interested in (awesome segue). Keep reading, even if your psycho-fan-spider-sense tingles.
I am about to be a senior at a college where people have spent whole quarters studying Buffy the Vampire Slayer and making elaborate installation art pieces that allow you to stare at your own asshole while sitting down. Not hyperbole. A professor last quarter was telling me about a study contract proposal that had come his way from a girl who wanted to obtain a baby rabbit, raise the rabbit, and write nice things about the rabbit. For credit.
This morning I woke up and lay in bed for half an hour, gripped in a panic over what to do after graduation. With the economy being what it is today, the anal periscope market will probably have a grim outlook for the next few decades. So what am I supposed to do? Write papers about German existentialist literature and neoliberal reform in China for the rest of my life? Listen to Wu-Tang and eat Taco Bell until Judd Apatow gives me a job?
I feel like the options are to start listening to Sting and find some job that barely dovetails with my interests, go hitch-hiking and get raped and killed, or pursue one-in-a-million chances that will make for warm hearts, broadened horizons and fat Disney film options. I'm going to try the last one before packing my bindle.
What would I do if I had total license over the events of my life and the wills of others? Living in a house made of Scarlet Johansson vaginas is kind of beyond the realm of feasibility, so the next best thing I could think of was apprenticing myself to Werner Herzog. But he might shoot me, or declare war on my decadent images, or eat my shoes.
The fantasy that immediately followed was interning for the Comedians of Comedy. Yes, that's how high of a regard I hold you in: scraping your drunken, vomit-and-semen-caked carcasses off hotel room floors, fetching Mountain Dew and dressing up as a Kobold for you and Posehn to beat senseless in your LARPing manias is at the top of my list of life goals right now.
I don't know if you're looking for help, now or ever. But imagine the things I can do for you:
• Filing
• Data entry
• Chakra cleansing
• Read the 4.0 rule books so you don't have to
• Mail Carlos Mencia cash-on-delivery bricks
• Fetch you Christmas turkeys
• Paperwork
• Enforcement
And what qualifies me to do it?
• I am an aspiring creative something-or-other and am too diminutive to prevent you from appropriating my ideas
• Anal periscope
• I have a car with leather interiors
• Beard
• I own Turkish Star Wars, Turkish Spider Man, Turkish Superman, Turkish The Wizard of Oz and Turkish Star Trek
• I know this guy who knows Patrick Stewart
This is a serious offer, because I admire your work above all other standup, it's made a positive impact on my life and I would love to contribute my energies in your benefit in whatever way I can. I'm responsible, professional-minded and I write good. I would even consider taking some time off of school if it interfered, because I can't think of many adventures I'd rather have.
Like I said, one in a million. But the risk of embarrassment and rejection is far, far less dire than the risk of coming to enjoy "Desert Rose."
Sincerely,
Horatio Alger
He read it and did not respond, which I expected but which has also been emotionally distressing enough to prevent me from viewing myself as anything but weird, gracelessly needy and over-sincere. This is the feeling that arises after writing in a congratulatory way to anyone I admire. I get the impression people look at me and think, "What the hell am I supposed to do with this guy with all the pathos? Go eat an ice cream sandwich and a Xanax."
I wrote earlier, "I feel foolish for searching for a way out. But is that what aspiration is? Looking for an exit until you finally escape?"
Just trying to find the right ladder to climb.
Last night I had a dream about recruiting William Shatner, my neighbor, to combat a murderous cult that lived on our street. We rained righteous fury on them for hours while Satan drove around in a semi. Then I was exploring catacombs beneath Reed College, where I saved this girl from a giant lizard that spit poison. She thought I was a werewolf and we were totally about to do it when my alarm went off.
That was a pretty good dream. One I thought you could appreciate. But I have another dream you might be interested in (awesome segue). Keep reading, even if your psycho-fan-spider-sense tingles.
I am about to be a senior at a college where people have spent whole quarters studying Buffy the Vampire Slayer and making elaborate installation art pieces that allow you to stare at your own asshole while sitting down. Not hyperbole. A professor last quarter was telling me about a study contract proposal that had come his way from a girl who wanted to obtain a baby rabbit, raise the rabbit, and write nice things about the rabbit. For credit.
This morning I woke up and lay in bed for half an hour, gripped in a panic over what to do after graduation. With the economy being what it is today, the anal periscope market will probably have a grim outlook for the next few decades. So what am I supposed to do? Write papers about German existentialist literature and neoliberal reform in China for the rest of my life? Listen to Wu-Tang and eat Taco Bell until Judd Apatow gives me a job?
I feel like the options are to start listening to Sting and find some job that barely dovetails with my interests, go hitch-hiking and get raped and killed, or pursue one-in-a-million chances that will make for warm hearts, broadened horizons and fat Disney film options. I'm going to try the last one before packing my bindle.
What would I do if I had total license over the events of my life and the wills of others? Living in a house made of Scarlet Johansson vaginas is kind of beyond the realm of feasibility, so the next best thing I could think of was apprenticing myself to Werner Herzog. But he might shoot me, or declare war on my decadent images, or eat my shoes.
The fantasy that immediately followed was interning for the Comedians of Comedy. Yes, that's how high of a regard I hold you in: scraping your drunken, vomit-and-semen-caked carcasses off hotel room floors, fetching Mountain Dew and dressing up as a Kobold for you and Posehn to beat senseless in your LARPing manias is at the top of my list of life goals right now.
I don't know if you're looking for help, now or ever. But imagine the things I can do for you:
• Filing
• Data entry
• Chakra cleansing
• Read the 4.0 rule books so you don't have to
• Mail Carlos Mencia cash-on-delivery bricks
• Fetch you Christmas turkeys
• Paperwork
• Enforcement
And what qualifies me to do it?
• I am an aspiring creative something-or-other and am too diminutive to prevent you from appropriating my ideas
• Anal periscope
• I have a car with leather interiors
• Beard
• I own Turkish Star Wars, Turkish Spider Man, Turkish Superman, Turkish The Wizard of Oz and Turkish Star Trek
• I know this guy who knows Patrick Stewart
This is a serious offer, because I admire your work above all other standup, it's made a positive impact on my life and I would love to contribute my energies in your benefit in whatever way I can. I'm responsible, professional-minded and I write good. I would even consider taking some time off of school if it interfered, because I can't think of many adventures I'd rather have.
Like I said, one in a million. But the risk of embarrassment and rejection is far, far less dire than the risk of coming to enjoy "Desert Rose."
Sincerely,
Horatio Alger
He read it and did not respond, which I expected but which has also been emotionally distressing enough to prevent me from viewing myself as anything but weird, gracelessly needy and over-sincere. This is the feeling that arises after writing in a congratulatory way to anyone I admire. I get the impression people look at me and think, "What the hell am I supposed to do with this guy with all the pathos? Go eat an ice cream sandwich and a Xanax."
I wrote earlier, "I feel foolish for searching for a way out. But is that what aspiration is? Looking for an exit until you finally escape?"
Just trying to find the right ladder to climb.
Monday, August 04, 2008
Exactly Why I Am So Viscerally Frustrated by College, the Dire Intellectual Presuppositions of the Liberal First-World in General
A human being lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or subconsciously, the lives of his epoch and contemporaries; and although he may regard the general and impersonal foundations of his existence as unequivocal givens and take them for granted, having as little intention of ever subjecting them to critique as our good Hans Castorp himself had, it is nevertheless quite possible that he senses his own moral well-being to be somehow impaired by the lack of critique. All sorts of personal goals, purposes, hopes, prospects may float before the eyes of a given individual, from which he may then glean the impulse for exerting himself for great deeds; if the impersonal world around him, however, if the times themselves, despite all their hustle and bustle, provide him with neither hopes nor prospects, if they secretly supply him with evidence that things are in fact hopeless, without prospect or remedy, if the times respond with hollow silence to every conscious or subconscious question, however it may be posed, about the ultimate, unequivocal meaning of all exertions and deeds that are more than exclusively personal - then it is almost inevitable, particularly if the personal involved is a more honest sort, that the situation will have a crippling effect, which, following moral and spiritual paths, may even spread to that individual's physical and organic life. For a person to be disposed to more significant deeds that go beyond what is simply required of him - even when his own times may provide no satisfactory answer to the question of why - he needs either a rare, heroic personality that exists in a kind of moral isolation and immediacy, or one characterized by exceptionally robust vitality.
- Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
- Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
Saturday, July 19, 2008
World Without a Facebook
My mom has a gun or something. We're in a compound, in a gray dusk. I am trying to collect as many rare comic books as I can before the shooting starts again. Then she's gone, and I'm charging through rebar and fences, hiding behind crates, rolling back and forth and such. Everything is confused. I find her, except she's not my mother anymore. I've been looking for a love interest the whole time. She has a gun or something.
Aaaah, then I'm back with K, just the same as she was when we parted ways somewhere around ninth grade. Everything settles comfortably.
I wake up un-despondent. I've somehow moved into a place where kissing girls in my sleep leaves me not-depressed. That's a good place to be.
I'd tell you about how it is I believe in God (or some divine holy thing that makes life important) but my words have hairy, fumbling knuckles and God is easily tangled in capital letters. Think about mushiness.
This blog has been kind of embarrassing the past few months. Let's move on and return to consciousness with a pleasant little smile and a stretch.
I have a giant foam stand-up poster with shirtless Mario Lopez on it. This is some kind of meaningful allegory.
Hi everyone.
Aaaah, then I'm back with K, just the same as she was when we parted ways somewhere around ninth grade. Everything settles comfortably.
I wake up un-despondent. I've somehow moved into a place where kissing girls in my sleep leaves me not-depressed. That's a good place to be.
I'd tell you about how it is I believe in God (or some divine holy thing that makes life important) but my words have hairy, fumbling knuckles and God is easily tangled in capital letters. Think about mushiness.
This blog has been kind of embarrassing the past few months. Let's move on and return to consciousness with a pleasant little smile and a stretch.
I have a giant foam stand-up poster with shirtless Mario Lopez on it. This is some kind of meaningful allegory.
Hi everyone.