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[06 Nov 2008|10:07pm] |
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My girlfriend jokes that I'm addicted to energy drinks. At least, I think she's joking. She says it every day, usually after I've referenced a beverage that I've just consumed or mentioned that the reason I'm tired/unfocused/can't feel an ordinary range of emotion is because I haven't had any caffeine yet today. I often say this on weekends after we've spent the night together and she's seen me sleep until the early afternoon. She knows I've been awake for five hours and slept for thirteen hours before that, so I guess I have no excuse.
I attribute my constant state of lethargy to a solid rainbow Gcal, an inexplicable and unwise urge this semester to complete all my reading, and, if really pressed, maybe to the Game Boy and Pokemon Ruby game I bought on Ebay earlier this fall. Simple enough, right?
But Sussan tells me I have a dependency. Maybe she has a point. It's addiction, I learned in school, when you stop doing it for fun and start doing it because you can't stop, when you need to get fucked up on whatever just so you can feel okay. I don't get any particular rush from chugging down a Rockstar LoCarb or a Monster MiXXXd, but I do get the assurance that, for a couple hours at least, I can trust myself not to fall asleep in public.
But here's the thing: their magical restorative properties aside, there's something about the tall, brightly colored cans with the imaginative, utterly undescriptive names that just makes me so fucking happy. Invalid syllogism for you: energy drinks are awesome. Energy drinks are sold in America. Therefore, America is absolutely incredible. Proved it.
Why are energy drinks one of the greatest products in the world? I think it has mostly to do with the variety. It's absurd, if you think about it, that anything more than Red Bull exists. The drink entered the market as a coffee alternative, an extra-strength, chilled, carbonated beverage that tasted like joe's polar opposite: sickening, pixie stick, glow-in-the-dark, chemical warfare sweetness to coffee's earthy bitterness. America supports Starbucks' entire just-as-special-as-you are menu, I suppose, with all of its variations on cream and seasonal syrups, but for the most part, when you head to a restaurant or to a friend's house, coffee is still coffee. And it's popular, too. There are more Starbucks brances in the world than people in my hometown. It's amazing to think that a drink aimed at one segment of the population - tired people who don't like coffee - should spawn so many different varieties.
But new shit is cool, and as a high school freshman I bought a Red Bull from a Santa Clarita Exxon. Feeling like I was getting away with something seriously badass, I took my first sip of carbonated piss and forced myself to finish the can as quickly as possible - about a minute later. I was obnoxious beyond belief for the entire ride back to Northern California. The thing is, I wasn't the only one to find rumors of bull urine and heart attacks irresistable, and people of all the most marketable types - musicians, skateboarders, television personalities, and, um, online gaming enthusiasts - were drawn to the blue and silver cans.
With endorsements from all sorts of loud individuals, the energy drink soon transitioned from a workplace pick-me-up and became something for people who YELL ALL THE TIME and ride around on motocross bikes, spraypainting skulls and crossbones on shit and moshing to dudes with goatees and taking off their shirts and playing World of Warcraft nonstop like a fucking maniac and listening to their iPods at Cape Canaveral levels and get tattoos of flames and go Full Throttle when they're onstage - I mean they're real Monsters, Rock Stars who are totally Amped up and have absolutely No Fear and their music is a fucking Adrenaline Rush, a shot of NOS to the audience, who's all getting totally Crunk!!!
Yeah, those people are all individuals, really unique dudes and dudettes, so everyone needs their own particular brew of energy drink, the favorite can that represents which kind of RIP SHIT UP!!!! person they are. Some people are more intense than others - hence we have the Monster with the camoflauge can (and absolutely no description of what separates the beverage from regular monster, though there is a manifesto about sticking it to the Man) or those gigantic Rockstars with the caps that screw back on - and some are less intense - hence all of the juice mixes and the Vitamin Energy drinks, which are for tired, non-coffee-loving individuals who are too scared to put uranium in their bodies. Some are shitty beverages for shitty people, like all of the varieties of Amp, which run the gamut from repackaged Mountain Dew to repackaged Orange Fanta to repackaged Grape Fanta, and some are even coffee-flavored beverages for folks who don't actually need a new product but have run over to see what all the fuss is about. Monster, who has truly grown into the monster of the energy drink business in terms of an out-of-control product line, has eight varieties of "Monster Java." Two of these, Originale and Mean Bean, contain the exact same product description on the can and on their website. First: what the fuck does "Originale" mean? And second: how is a Mean Bean coffee beverage supposed to taste any different than a regular cofee beverage?
Monster is also on the forefront of normal-beverage-replacement in another unlikely category: alcohol. For several years, Red Bull-vodkas and the like have been a national treasure and public health risk, and some energy drinks - the surpsisingly excellent pomegranete Crunk!!!, for example - are marketed primarily as mixers. There are even a few energy drink/alcoholic beverage hybrids, such as Sparks. But Monster is the first company I know of to introduce nonalcoholic energy drinks that are supposed to emulate the taste of alcoholic beverages. The company produces two drinks meant to taste like Irish Coffee and White Russians, as well as one fruit juice blend (MIXXD) meant to remind drinkers of "jungle juice." I don't know who Monster is marketing these to: recovering alcoholics who aren't shaking enough already, or perhaps twelve year-olds looking to prepare themselves for a high school of binge drinking.
I don't mean to come down harshly on Monster, though, because I think they're on to something: the eventual replacement of every "normal" beverage with a more successful energy equivalent. I can already get my juice, my coffee, my shitty soda (thanks, Amp!), and even my alcohol flavor satisfied with an extra dose of taurine. Next I want milk-flavored energy drink for my cereal, energy drink chai tea (oh wait, Monster has that covered as well), and energy drink water to cook all the rest of my food in. Caffeinated soup to go along with my caffeinated soap (need. to. buy.), super energy-burning caffeinated celery, caffeinated shower with caffeinated towel and caffeine air. Fucking shower in that shit.
Perhaps I seem critical. Maybe that's because I made myself sit down and think about this. But I love things irrationally, and I love energy drinks. Oh God yes.
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| Stuff Grant People Like |
[06 Nov 2008|09:48pm] |
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music |
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The Gaslight Anthem |
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Having accidentally rediscovered my enjoyment for this writing stuff during a frantic moment of metaphorical claustrophobia earlier this week, I think I'll continue for a bit, see what happens if I do this somewhat regularly. It would be much more hip, much more user-friendly, and much less adolescent in name to start a new blog on a blogger-approved blogging website, but if the whole point of bloggery is to use blogging as a means of innovation, I think I'll blog on my own terms. And that means livejournal. Seventytimes78. Rock 'n Roll High School Beach Party USA.
Since the primary value of this blog, for me, is as a representation of the publicly private Grant Damon at various stages of his life, I'm going to continue writing to that purpose. But because I have neither the time nor the desire (nor, let's face it, the large, rewarding, and exceedingly sympathetic reader base) I once had, a series of confessionals seems both unrealistic and like a bad idea. No, I'm going to try for something different this time around:
Starting today, as a way of preserving who I am - and hopefully as a way of writing something entertaining as well - I'm going to refocus this as a positive series of entries on things that make my life good. If I enjoy something, hopefully it'll make its way here.
Are you ready, Steve? Andy? Mick? All right, fellas. Let's go!
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[04 Nov 2008|01:43am] |
My room has taken over. My stuff has taken over. My life has taken over my life. I live in a wild thing cave with one sunrise window behind a spider lattice and it smells like barbecue sauce because of the plate next to my computer. It is on a laptop case that is on a pile of sheets of paper and at least one bound thing. I don't know what it is. My baseball glove is second-to-top on another pile of things that I don't want. I don't want a hundred dollar book about public speaking. I want some space. I don't want English Through Pictures Book 2 and Cardinology and an empty pack of Orbit when the ceiling is sloped and too low and this corner of the room is too dark anyway. Angel's things were heavy to move up to the fifth floor and now they are in the middle of my floor and I can't tell which clothes are mine and which clothes he should have taken to Brighton two months ago. I stole a pair of his pants but plan on bringing the rest to him at work. Ginger Ale in a plastic bag with an unopened can of diced pineapples. Empty Bud Light on my bookshelf, which is stacked too high and too unevenly. My Cornell Law bookmark holds a place between graded essays and mark pages in my books with used Post-Its from a girl I met in lecture. She saw me taking notes in front of a mahogany slab on a MacBook. Like everyone else. So naturally she wanted me to email her my lecture notes from before she arrived late to class. I forgot but John Rawls is now split up by her address@fas. Acitomenophen and BCG metal cancer-free water bottle and a metal thing I can't identify on my dresser. Too many other things too: spicy deoderant, cheap picture frame on its side, Build-a-Bear miraculously in one piece, fan. Inside me: three cups of mongrel coffee. The brown church social container has cobwebs near the spout. Something wrong if it's used everyday but still has cobwebs near the spout. I drank water too from my Lil Wayne beer glass because I left my half-gallon in a PBHA van laziness incarnate and plus it feels wrong to have that thing when Sara's here again now. Also the BCG water bottle hurts and tastes like metal and plus it feels wrong to use that thing when they rejected all my friends and I decided not to apply. Myself. I need a job because I'm living like Catholic and Jewish guilt. I spend money and think about how I don't have a job and haven't applied, and I save money and think about how I haven't applied and don't have a job. I don't want those offers to go out. I don't want the signing bonuses to begin or even the flights to young people places around the country because I know I decided a long time ago I didn't want to go.
But if I'm the only one who hasn't taken Creative Writing and my voice is shit and my thoughts are shallow and I can no longer understand the artist because the artist is everyone else, and if I wear button-ups and plain-speak and have nothing to show for myself when it comes to immortality and suddenly my tastes don't run counter or hint at a deeper understanding. But. If then, shouldn't I have decided I'd go if they'd take me? Case in point. I've told people I'm a coward and I've just been scared by the process even though everyone grows up sometime and the time is now for everyone. I've held back, citing differences in ideology or personal ambition or dreams. And we all know because of this failure right here on the screen that that's bullshit. I know I'm doing well. I'm just doing well in one place.
God I'm fucking tired. For the past thirty hours or so I've been exhausted and probably only about half-awake. I don't know why. Caffeine addict addicted to the bright colors and hipness of energy drinks and to the simple bitter trial of cofee and I can't get sleep because the internet and because revisiting childhood nonmemories in videogames and because I need too much time to myself to not think like I used to. I'm holding it together for Sussan. She's really having a hard time I'm just trying to keep my ego intact with the least work possible. I look stable except I'm starting to not look stable and she knows I'm tired all the time. I don't like feeling tired all the time and I really don't like looking tired all the time because I need to be dynamic. Have you ever been so tired you want to cry? This room is out of control and I feel like I can't get out of my chair because the path to my bed is blocked and will take too much to clear. Space.
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[19 May 2008|02:37am] |
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I guess everyone can see farther than me Further I can’t see into my own vernacular Language Fuck. And without a journey inward how can I be Magically transported from the soul to the Soul And get whatever magic goggles the Poet gets when the Spirit hands him some magic tablets down from heaven where he keeps them stocked for anyone who’s willing to spend their time chopping up sentences and calling themselves Joseph and convincing themselves that they know something that we don’t. We being the laypeople. The ones who aren’t supposed to know that they’re missing out, that their compact, sealed-off, specified lives are part of some larger system or Spirit or Order or God, while the poets write poems and tell the sad little grillmasters and wage-earners that they’re doing the best they can to let them in on the secret too, but if they can’t get it it’s their own fault, or not really their fault, I guess, but their lot. They could understand it all if they just opened themselves up a little more. But they can’t because they’re not Poets, and that’s why the poets are special. But the poets aren’t really trying, and maybe the other laypeople and their bosses and their employees don’t care. But I do. I don’t like where my horizon sits. I don’t like Art. I don’t like the word “metaphysics” or rhyme and meter or Nature. I know a lot of really stupid people, and I think that stupid people exist, surround me, make up most of the Order of things. But I don’t think that anyone knows less or sees less than the Poets. Do you want to hear my secret. It’s not a secret, and it’s not very surprising. We keep our mouths shut. The concept of Poetry is Unfair. It is just not fair, and I will insist on Justice and Equality because this is America and not a windswept moor or a castle with a history of illogic and oppression and the creation of systems of thought by the ruling classes to control the minds of the plebeians. Yes, this is not Poetry. To craft another set of definitions – not to discover, but to craft – specifically to make Poets untouchable and impossible to argue with, to take a language and remake it so that it protects the people who flout its conventions – I’ll admit that it’s a brilliant move. There is no counterattack. The only option left is to quit, to create – or maybe discover – another language, another way of thinking, to claim complete originality, and then maybe, in your new existence, you can disagree with the Poets. But I like this language. I like my capitals at the beginning and periods at the end and subject-verb and tense agreement and clauses with all their parts in place. So, naturally, I’m a utilitarian. I’m killing the language. I’m killing thought. I’m killing existence. Or rather, I just can’t help it, and I’m not actually hurting all that much. The poets will save everything. Forgive him, he knows not what he does. The poets love all the conventions too. That’s what allows them to transcend. You can transcend anything you know and love. But you can think you know something and not transcend it. Or you can think you know something and a Poet will tell you you don’t because he already transcended it and your horizon is kind of low. But that’s okay because his is higher and he’s already claimed all of your property as his. And you can understand all this. But you can’t write a poem or a story, and you don’t have “voice,” which obviously means that you don’t have ears. Or sight. Or anything else because your horizon is too low and you’re killing the language. But the Poets will save you. You can watch them swoop in and you can wave your arms and yell, “I don’t need to be saved! I’m okay” and you can struggle in their grasp but when they lift you off the ground you can’t do anything, and when they put you down in a nice safe area with the other non-Poets so that your horizon doesn’t sit in front of theirs anymore, you can’t really complain. After all, and they’re never going to tell you, maybe you were in danger.
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| Failed |
[07 Jan 2008|02:48am] |
Simple New Year's Resolution: write something everyday. Not even "write a good piece of fiction everyday, since I decided during the Quiet Crisis of December, 2007, that I for some reason will not be happy as an adult unless I move (at least temporarily) to England, study literature, and attempt to write novels." Not even "write fiction everyday" or "write something decent everyday." No, all I aimed for was something, anything, that could be described as a string of letters arranged by me, being put down on a page or computer screen each day.
Already, I've broken the resolution. Yesterday, reading Shakespeare, watching "The Goonies," and attending Monticello's going-to-Paris party took precedence over literary production. Today, it's only my semi-retarded sleep schedule that's brought me to the keyboard.
I've been procrastinating all week, trying to avoid starting a History of Psychiatry paper that's due this Thursday. As the robotic, practically minded person I've become at school, I've tried to be productive, and so far, the procrastination has taken the form of emails, a completed grant for Chinatown Adventure, a paper for my nanotechnology class, two Shakespeare plays, a lot of really bad guitar playing, and three workouts in the gym. Tonight I officially ran out of other things I could do and began reading the books I'd picked up earlier.
My topic is terrible and will probably be different tomorrow, so it's irrelevant. What matters is that I've been reading a neo-Freudian's views on the psychoanalytic and non-psychoanalytic causes of learning disabilities. Even when studying something I don't believe in, I've gotten med student syndrome. Like a studious, socially inept surgeon hopefully reading a book of rare physical disorders and beginning to feel pains in his sides and points of swelling around his brain, I've found that I can't help but imagine myself with all of these problems.
I suppose that's the allure of psychoanalysis to begin with: it's a theory and practice that have been developed together so that one is the perfect cure for the other, and both are based not on responsible scientific investigation, but on (somewhat) common sense. With psychoanalysis, there's an explanation for every behavior, every stage of life, every worry or difficulty. My sage, knowledgeable source, who had been sitting on a shelf in the Graduate School of Education library since 1979 until I checked him out two days ago, just told me about a boy who was afraid to do math problems containing the numbers 2, 14, and 21. It makes perfect sense, really - "2" represents the couple, a sexual idea the boy was uncomfortable with because of his own repressed feelings for mother and hatred for his father, and "14" is even worse: the 1 is his father, standing next to two couples that make the 4. "21" represents the couple, followed by the father, or the inescapable fact that the boy's father, not the boy, made up the couple with the mother. Duh, right?
It's hard, though, not to see the appeal of certain aspects of the philosophy, especially when used in conjunction with other ideas about development and the human mind. Some children don't like to learn because, through conditioning, they've come to associate certain aspects of the learning process with negative memories? To repress these memories, they must avoid the actions that bring them to consciousness? Again, it makes perfect sense.
Let's take that outside of the classroom for a second. We'll take me, who, about two months ago, started to develop a slight case of Med Student Syndrome when, in the same class I'm writing the paper for, we began learning about manic-depressive, or bipolar, disorder. Stages of elation and unchecked creativity and productivity, followed by periods of crushing depression? At the time, I was alternating between days when I loved everything about my life and days when I couldn't find anything but empty meaning in everything I did. The catch was that bipolar stages tend to last weeks or months; my outlook on life would change halfway through the afternoon.
What was it, then? The admission came partway through our study of antidepressants, when we discussed how depression, as a serious medical term, is not external cause-related. That is, one could fall into a long, deep, suicidal period of unhappiness following the death of a loved one, but this would not technically be depression as it ought to be treated with drugs. If the chemical imbalances that Zoloft advertises are the true cause of depression, that is, this person would not have them and would therefore not benefit from the drugs (or would benefit, but would be receiving the cure for the wrong source of the problem).
So what then? I couldn't help but feel somewhat offended in the classroom. It had been a bad day, a bad week, a bad semester in general, and nobody enjoys hearing that their own problems pale in comparison with those of others. We resent the old Protestant code of self-reliance, but it won't go away. "Other people have real brain disorders that make them unhappy; your problem is externally-caused, which means your brain is perfectly wired to just suck it up and deal like the rest of us."
Perhaps, and I have to admit this to myself after looking back on my miserably emo teenage years, when, according to this very journal, I was unhappy nearly every day for the same small reasons over and over again, I simply don't know what real suffering is. Otherwise, I'd be able to push aside the external causes that have kept me unhappy for months at a time and save my energy for the important stuff. But maybe the problem is deeper than that. Psychoanalysis being a crock of shit or not, there is something to be said for the concept of hiding things from the conscious self. I end up feeling paralyzingly lonely and unhappy for the exact same reasons I was in high school. But when I look back at my high school self and see a miserable, pathetic person with none of that great Protestant self-reliance, how can I admit I haven't really changed?
Fuck it. It's been high school music and nostalgia for a time when I hated my life this week. I need some forced socialization and the chance to patch up a relationship. I don't even care which one. Maybe I just need to move out of the single. Jesus Christ, this exile needs to be over soon. And I really don't want to write this fucking paper.
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| Creativity-Free Fiction. Terrible Ending. Long Plane Ride. Lots of Alcohol. |
[02 Jan 2008|01:33am] |
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It was probably the alcohol. One of the great injustices of life, I think, is that the very enabler of so many of our social experiences is the same one that smashes them down to delusions and leaves us with our foreheads ringing from the violence the next morning. I like to think of Bacchus as a particularly malevolent Judeo-Christian god; he giveth and he taketh away at his unchecked discretion, testing our faith in ourselves and each other until we either “get off the sauce” or die alcoholics. St. Peter, standing at the gates of heaven, checks us for real friends or a coin in our pockets. Arrive with neither, and you get a straight shot of whiskey and a boot in the pants off of his cloud; the fire in your belly never goes out and you’re left with an eternity to wonder why the heart-to-hearts, tuneless sing-a-longs, hilariously destroyed kitchens, and, above all, those feelings of beautifully predestined, inseparable camaraderie with your fellow human beings – one of the most perfect and vital experiences we can possibly have – never feel so meaningful the next day. The alcoholic world is a dream world or a Las Vegas – we go together, dropping our baggage piece by piece as we walk through the terminal until everyone is essentially the same, ambling ecstatically under the bright lights and loud noises, pretty sure that more of everything is always better as long as we get to be with each other for the time being – the only span of time we can conceive of – but when we have to leave, we’re not allowed to take anything with us, save the reason we pick back up off the rotating carousel and a vague, shameful, smoky feeling that sticks to our clothes. Not every drunken experience is an illusion, of course – the pregnancy scare sophomore year made that pretty clear – but even the concrete disasters – or challenges, as you call them when you love someone and feel terrified and guilty for allowing passion to come before birth control – feel a bit like damages done to an empty house when the owner is on vacation. When I was sixteen, I left a kitchen door open at the Franklins’ house when I was babysitting their cat over Christmas break. I thought he had escaped, and I wanted to make sure he was able to get back into the house to eat, but there was a terrible storm, and my charge ended up sitting on the living room couch, watching me desperately try to mop up the water that had flooded the kitchen floor on Christmas Eve. Sophomore year, two months after Tina and I took an amazing break from responsibility on a Thursday night, Tina thought she was pregnant. Our actions, perhaps, but it felt a lot more like karma. Of course, there are good things that come out of our drunken vacations from real life too, the kinds of friendships that last when dry but thrive when under the influence, flowers that blossom most vividly when watered. The rare occasions when we can wake up from our respective points of lost consciousness, reconvene, and immortalize the night before in godly, serious bronze as a paragon of human associations – those occasions are worth being celebrated indeed. It takes a rare person to develop these kinds of relationships, but they achieve for us what I, at least, want most in life: not merely to be loved at my worst, but to be found more endearing when I’m in those states, so that when I arrive in heaven I’ll know I can find my friends waiting at the bar, and we’ll toast “l’chaim” on the longest and greatest Saturday night in eternity. I wasn’t with these friends on New Year’s Eve. I was with others, middle school buddies. Our blood runs thick with the fascinating, extended sobriety of childhood and the shared pangs of terrified adolescence. Adulthood, a venture we’re only still beginning to get used to on our own, is an even stranger adaptation to undertake together, so last night, I can’t help but imagine, it was probably the alcohol. Jonah’s house was the same as I’d last seen it, him turning eighteen and the rest of us a year or two behind, all of us obstinately holding on to the right to express ourselves as only teenagers are allowed to. A mess of dyed hair and facial piercings and quarter-inch pins on everything and The Matches leading a who’s-who of the local all-ages scene on the stereo, we stood in his father’s living room and helped Davy set up his drum kit for our third show ever. We made Bagel Bites in the eight thousand dollar oven and talked about rec center shows and band practices. We had more smokers than drinkers – youth in revolt! – but a few of us sank a bottle of Jim Beam, half-covertly, in the corner by the stereo system and the DVD collection. I preferred to hop around, hollering about terrorism, after I let Julie Salinger tie my shoes together. I was sixteen and had reason to celebrate. My understocked carabiner sang along each time Chuck Taylors hit the pavement, and I nearly missed curfew coming home. Not possible anymore, that kind of conscious carelessness, except with alcohol. So Seth’s house was exactly the same even without Animal Park – we broke up only a week after the eighteenth party – and with the dining room and kitchen tables covered in empty orange juice cartons, pumpkin Schnapps, and bottles of Pyramid Golden Lager. It was all this – it had to be – that brought everything back into balance so completely. Sebastian Jones is in a suit and tie by the screen door. I’d seen him a year ago in line at In-N-Out Burger – the same awkwardness of any unexpected reunion with a not-very-close friend. We gave the embarrassed, unenthusiastic How’ve You Beens and after that pretended not to see each other. Now, so many things to talk about. He’d joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints – transferring to BYU – dunno, at his first service he just realized everything they were saying was stuff he already believed – one of the few groups he’d ever seen that genuinely wants to do good – they can make fun of themselves, too. And Colby, my brilliant, tortured guitarist, vanished into junior college and prescription psychiatric meds, here in glasses and impossibly tight jeans – bought them in the city earlier today with Dan – where’s he? The Volta show – and here’s the tattoo on his foot that I’d heard about, “Annika” in thick, black cursive! It’s the name of a sister he’d found out he’d had, but he tells people it’s his girlfriend. I’d been told it was his girlfriend. Did I have the Brand New album demos? Of course. Seriously, they’re amazing – it’s Jonah himself, still with the hair and the sideburns curling out of control. It’s so good to see you, man. I know, it’s been forever. Thanks so much for having us! This is amazing – it’s me, and I mean it. The Pyramids – I’m on my fourth – are Steve Jordan’s. What’s up dude, amazing to see you! He’s as tall as before. Kate Kelly – marvelous to see you! What to drink? What not to drink! You, your mom, Central Center yesterday? Yeah – me – you and your mom too? Yeah. Thought so. My mother – Kate – asked if you were with your girlfriend. Seriously? Jesus. Colby – Hey guess what I’m getting in the mail!? Imagine the best Christmas gift ever. Marshall half-stack. White Fender Telecaster. Moving to Santa Cruz on Tuesday. Cabrillo. Me – Jamie!? Jesus, how have you been? Arnold George – drink this. Amazing. Photographs. Smile. Again. Now us three. Good. Awesome. We speak loudly without shouting over Rilo Kiley. Indie pop is our generation’s yacht rock, the safe choice for any group of decently intelligent, mostly white twenty-somethings. Jonah – have another. Davis? Great. Art School? L.A.? That’s right. Nice. You? Awesome. Love it. Holy Shit – is that Julie Salinger? It is. I realize that it’s been two and a half years since I’ve seen about ninety percent of this party. The reunion shame – is it because I’ve been a terrible friend, not keeping up relations across the country, or do I feel less successful, that troubling, arbitrary term I’ll talk to Sebastian about later, than my friends and their expectations of me? – rises up unpleasantly for a second but subsides the next instant. I’ve drunk enough to feel at ease, and not enough to feel sick. The satisfied realization prompts a single additional flutter in my stomach, but I drown it with more Pyramid and step into the kitchen. Someone has made Bagel Bites in the eight thousand dollar oven, and I choose one off the tray cooling on the counter. The taste, unlike the alcohol, isn’t merely an unexpected replacement for the party four years ago, it is the party four years ago: after our set, in my sweat-soaked home-made Green Day shirt and checkered wristbands, drinking Red Bull and eating Bagel Bites in the kitchen. My voice was almost gone, I remember, and I’d gone outside afterward because my ex had showed up halfway through the show with a guy from another school. Most of our songs were about her. In the driveway, Julie had tied my shoes together and left me there. It was fun, but then two seniors came out to smoke, and I, unable to stand the smell, suddenly cold in my damp t-shirt, and forced to realize that even our music hadn’t made me impervious to the sunken-hearted jealous feeling I now felt creeping in to dominate my entire emotional spectrum, had gone back inside to have the first, and so far only, minor emotional breakdown of my life. The next weekend, Colby quit the band, the Matches signed with Epitaph, and I got my first haircut in over a year. I’m in the same kitchen, at the same table, with the same Bagel Bites. I’ve just finished talking to Kate about my nonprofit work. Didn’t I want to write, though? But I seem happy. That’s what’s important. Sebastian agrees – that sense of purpose, of a real moral direction and a feeling of efficacy, is what’s taking him to Utah, after all. We’re all doing well, and it’s so amazing to see everyone again. I pick up a second piece of pepperoni, and a very drunk Julie Salinger runs – runs – up, a shot glass on a string of Mardi Gras beads bouncing around her neck. “Oh my God! How are you? Do you like the Bagel Bites? I just made them. How’s school? Good, right? Of course it is. You know, you’re a good person. I know that about you.” I have yet to respond to anything she’s said, but I’ve already been surveyed up and down, hugged sloppily, and now her hands are on my shoulders. She’s looking at me with eyes I recognize by now – intoxicated and physically unfocused, but with a fine, intense enthusiasm, the drunken clarity of forceful, unadulterated joy. She slows down and gives me time to respond as I skim over two and a half years of my life, punctuating the end of each of my sentences with a “That’s great! I knew it!” or an “Of course. You know, you have a kind heart.” She leans forward quickly with each interjection, the shot glass bouncing back and forth, and soon I attempt to turn the conversation back to her. I’m honestly very curious – what has the girl who tied my shoes together and laughingly left me in Jonah’s driveway been up to since graduation? “I’m at SF State, economics, basically no hope for a job. You know.” She sounds thrilled at the prospect. “Me too,” I add, perhaps more enthusiastically than I mean. I get further from it like each day.” The statement is true. I wonder how many of us, Mormon Sebastian included, feel further from a sense of direction than we did on Jonah’s eighteenth. We’ve already changed so much that it wouldn’t be surprising if all of this – the alcohol, the catch-ups, the job speculation, and all these realizations – are just another stage.I don’t wander long. Julie already has it all figured out. “You have such a kind heart,” she repeats. “You’ll be okay. My mother says it’s not about knowing yourself, but learning yourself.” She looks absolutely beatific. “There’s a difference, you know? Learning yourself, not knowing yourself.” I know. She hugs me and then has to go. Her boyfriend gets shy at parties, she says, and she has to go kiss him to cheer him up. She goes, and I leave the Bagel Bites for the dining room drink table. There were more reintroductions, more pictures, some Ipod wrangling – Colby and I wanted The Matches – and a few more drinks. Sebastian told Mormon jokes, Jonah gave us the basic outline of a screenplay he’d just finished – five dudes in their early twenties try to sort their lives out – and we gave Kate’s art school roommate a call so Colby could mock-propose. At 1:30, after hugs and replaced phone numbers, Arnold drove me home so I could pack and go to bead. January 1st, United flight 176 to Boston. A new year, another year of short hair and practiced adulthood and alcohol. That’s probably what it was last night, what made everyone seem to be doing so well, what made every corner of Jonah’s house so charged with memories that translated seamlessly to New Year’s Eve 2007, what made Sebastian’s conversion and Colby’s tattoo and new amp and Kate’s and my mothers at Central Center all seem to fit us like the past four years had been planned all along, and especially what made Julie Salinger kiss her boyfriend and then tell everyone else at the party, her shot glass swinging with the goodwill of angels, that they had a good heart. It was probably the alcohol that made me take her seriously and made me realize she was right. With every drink, with every conversation, and with every year, we’re learning ourselves. We learn with our cheap bass guitars and heartbroken emo songs, through the thin soles of our Chuck Taylors. We learn in our polo shirts and half-zip sweaters, over bottled beers on break during our second-to-last year of college. We learn in Ford Explorers on the way to Santa Cruz, our dreamed-of, untested Marshall half-stacks in the trunk, and in seat 24-A at 30,000 feet over western Pennsylvania. For now, it’s probably just the alcohol, but if this is learning ourselves, I’m ready to take up the shot glass necklace and wake up still drunk every morning for the rest of my life. - Near the East Coast, Jan 1, 2007
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| New Year's Resolution: Write Something, Somewhere, Everyday |
[31 Dec 2007|03:54am] |
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Ha. We'll see how long that lasts. Today's writing: fiction, with no attempt at plot or development, going on and off until i got bored
Allen shuts the receiver of his cell phone, no doubt nearly waterlogged by now, and returns it to his coat pocket. He keeps his hand there for a few paces, bringing his other up to join it on the opposite side. The pockets are too high for comfort, and he knows if he keeps walking much longer he’ll have to return them to his sides, or stuff them into the tops of his jean pockets and adjust his stride to accommodate the restricted denim. It’s cold, and he’s never figured out how to let his arms swing naturally – walking with his hands hanging down always makes him feel like the singer in one of those godawful music videos where the vocalist travels down a New York City sidewalk, dodging other pedestrians and singing into the camera as interesting things happen around him – so he chooses the jean pockets. The tightening of the fabric around his upper thighs and his shortened steps force him to look down slightly, drawing him inward. It is, Allen realized, precisely what he’d wanted. He passes the post office, with its ill-fitting beige stucco walls and Mission tiled roof, the front steps leading up to a double door and windows that are too high for him to fully see through. The building is open but, for all he can tell, entirely empty. Above Allen and the post office, oak trees – and other ones too, that he doesn’t know the names of – hover like austere members of a royal court, their disapproving glances blocking out pockets of the already-gray sky and throwing Allen and the misplaced building into the kind of semi-darkness he’s always considered timeless without really knowing why. Dusk, or anything like it, brings him back to evening at his grandparents’ in Ukiah, to identical suburban roads watched over on the perimeters by black shadows of trees, to front yards of lava rocks and the smell of smoke coming either from a chimney or barbeque – the time of year in the memory is lost – and the vague sense, aided by later books of photographs and outdated school documentaries with large-spectacled, large-haired, middle-aged women – that this is 1980s, Christian, middle-class America, and that any changes to his surroundings, friends, or values over the rest of his life are somehow a betrayal of how he was supposed to live. Seventeen years ago, he’d be sitting down in a brown and white room with lace on the tablecloth to say grace and eat pot roast and Jell-O salad. Instead, he directs his short strides past the post office and deeper into the manor of the oak trees, crossing the street and taking a left, then a right, onto one of the darkest and wealthiest roads in the county. Allen steps onto a dirt path, slightly sunken from the street, and looks at the Victorians that sit, old and straight-shouldered, like rich great-aunts behind shrubs and private noise-gates and personal forests. In sixth grade, he knew a girl who might have lived here. They had dated, whatever that meant in sixth grade, and he’d been heartbroken for the first time – and somewhat exhilarated by his participation at what seemed to him to be very serious adult drama – when she went to their first middle school dance with Conrad Ginsberg instead of him. Amanda. Her name was Amanda. She grew into a classic beauty and dated a succession of guys Allen could find no problem with until, at some point in high school, he completely forgot they’d even known each other and her memory became a piece of clapboard or an awning on one of these Victorians, something stately and lasting and far removed from the road. Now that he thought about it, and it had been some time since he’d thought about Amanda Whiteman, she hadn’t lived here at all, but on a far more modest street he’d elected not to walk along earlier. She belonged on this street, though, far more than the bottle-blonde wives in their velour tracksuits and their stress ball-squeezing power husbands who could afford to. They remind Allen of squatters or, worse, of Egyptian grave-robbers. At least, he realizes, they’ll be gone at some point, moved out to make way for a new wave of wealthy inhabitants who hopefully know how to wear their houses more appropriately. And, regardless, the severe trees will still hang over everything. He’s looking up at the sky again – maybe forty-five minutes until true dusk, though he’s embarrassed to admit to himself that after twenty years of suburban living, this is a completely uninformed estimate – but with his hands in his pockets, his body feels stretched. He looks down toward the path in front of him. Here, between the ground and the wall-shrubs on the side of the path, is what brought him outside anyway. The fog rolled in heavily this morning and sank further than usual, slicking the pavement and turning the path he’s walking on into mud that – Allen realizes this for the first time as his face falls downward – has kind of ruined his shoes. They were dirty to begin with, of course, and it’s been about two months since he gave up keeping them in good condition. Sneakers were a stupid hobby, not like him at all. It occurs to him that the creases around the toes and the spots of mud – impossible to get off the woven topsoles – are just part of the ordinary life of a shoe. A fanciful thought, but it has logic to it, and money not spent on Nikes is money… saved. The mud might make his shoes look slightly more fitting as adult clothing, a better match with his sweater and his black wool coat, which is starting to smell like wet sheep in the fog. He checks himself – alone on a silent residential road, cloaked by trees and weather, and he’s wondering what he looks like? Far better to concentrate on the path and the fog. Suspended as low as it is, the mist turns everything in front of him into a wet, dim, color-sapped blur. With a few more manholes and a few more trees, the scene could look like something out of a Batman movie, and Allen realizes that in his black coat, he’d be the villain. He crosses a stone bridge. The guardrails on each side are spoked, dramatic semicircles, put there perhaps to suggest to residents that the overgrown creek bed beneath them, only marginally damper at this point than the bridge itself, could someday grow into something wide, perilous, and rushing, a river to match the Victorians in respect. For now, the semicircles have accepted splashes of moss, and they seem resigned to merely dreaming of importance. Allen, the villain, feels dangerous. For the ten seconds he walks over the creek bed, he realizes that a malicious or negligent driver – maybe one of the designer-clothed squatters in their luxury monster vehicles – would send him perilously close to the edge of the bridge. The mossy guardrails protect him from what’s below, and he leans closer to the wet stone for safety’s sake. Soon, it’s over, he’s crossed, and the entire bridge looks comical again.
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[13 Dec 2007|11:58pm] |
The self-diagnosis part is no problem. I told myself that if I sat down and wrote what I think the deal is, the outlet would prove at least partially satisfactory. Partly, because... well, that's partly the problem. Here goes:
1. I am a workaholic. I understand the term now as it used in serious contexts, not in the joking, somewhat offensive manner in which people make fun of addictions when they refer to chocolate. As far as I can tell (OED verification forthcoming), the terms "workaholic" and "chocoholic" derive from the serious, respectable word "alcoholic" (according to the OED, the "term" alcoholic as it applies to a dependent person originated from the common meaning, "of alcohol," and a 19th description describing a "chronic alcoholic," or one whose blood is constantly "of alcohol"). One who is addicted to work is not a "chronic work-ic," someone who is chronically "of work," but is a work-aholic, both the suffix and part of the root word being taken from the alcohol-related word. Disrespectful, somewhat incorrect, and used far too lightly most of the time.
Being a workaholic, like being an alcoholic, does not mean that one enjoys the substance (or activity) being abused a great deal. Rather, it refers to a dependency that causes a person difficulties or strong urges when the person is not engaging with said substance or activity. One doesn't need to "love" the taste of alcohol or the feeling of being drunk to be an alcoholic (though so many non-alcoholics and alcoholics alike enjoy both that it's difficult to imagine an addiction whose power rests not on joy, but on relief).
I had this problem until recently with the concept of workaholism. I was highly dubious, given my lifelong preference of play over work, the one could actually be a workaholic. Sure, fathers in Disney Channel movies consistently disappointed their children by placing work over school functions and soccer games, but these fathers never seemed to enjoy the work they were doing; there was always a reason, usually financial need or an inability to stand up to a domineering boss, that necessitated the long hours, and the fathers usually seemed to experience considerable anxiety.
I realize now that, as with alcoholism, enjoyment of the work is not a necessary - nor even an important - component of addiction. Rather, the workaholic simply feels unhappy when not working. In my case, I don't always necessarily enjoy my work at all. I'm often very unhappy while accomplishing time-sensitive, skills-intensive, quality-reviewed tasks, but I'm more unhappy when not doing so. It's difficult to explain. I feel anxious, restless, and purposeless when not doing work. My self-esteem suffers considerably, and as a result I find it difficult to interact with others. This, in turn, leads to a feeling of isolation and loneliness that becomes unbearable unless I find something else productive to occupy my time and attention.
2. I make things worse for myself. Workaholism is a vicious cycle. The more time I spend accomplishing my tasks - this November, I was elected Vice President of a student-led nonprofit organization at Harvard that runs 73 independent programs throughout the greater Boston area, and there is always more work to be done - the less time I spend with the friends I was once close with. They were, to reduce them to a function, my base, my emotional grounding, both company to spend time enjoying myself with and sources of support so that I didn't have to face difficulties alone and keep thoughts to myself. Now, we have less to talk about. Their lives have continued - with each other - and mine is barely connected. At times I feel uncomfortable talking to them, particularly about sensitive topics such as the one covered in this writing, but when I do, I often sense a hesitance on the listeners' end; I don't reciprocate, so they don't want to be there for me anymore (or at least find it difficult to do so).
The sense of isolation grows. My thoughts, kept to myself, grow louder and more frantic until I must force them out of my head or explode. I've gotten paranoid recently, convinced when I hear whispers from people I know that they are talking about my drifting away behind my back. Who can I share this concern with? Not friends. So, I find more tasks. If my mind is engaged, it is held captive.
3. I am jealous. Most of these feelings - loneliness, paranoia, anxiety - are feelings I would have felt more comfortable experiencing four or five years ago. I can't help but consider them somewhat adolescent, the product of a confused, developing, and very immature mind and psyche. It is not me against the world, youth against parents, life as a black hole, and I consider myself a much happier person than I once was, but the feelings exist stronger than they did during my high school years. Add sexual jealousy to the list.
I don't know why I've had such a difficult time getting over my last ex-girlfriend (I am hesitant to use specific names, though my existence of my readership is under question, yet I hate beginning anonymous descriptions, particularly of lovers and crushes, with gender specific pronouns, i.e. "i can't stop thinking about her"). We only dated for nine-ish months (a respectable amount of time, but by no means the near-marriage, long-term committed relationships that so many of my peers seem to be involved in), and the last one or two months were tumultuous at that. We never achieved levels of life-unity (to use a self-coined, way to new agey for my taste term) that she wanted or that also seem to be characteristic of the relationships of my peers. This is, of course, a combination of the fact that we simply weren't "right" for each other and my own needs for personal mental space. I cannot exist without privacy and time to myself, and I cannot commit all my time to a single person, no matter how much I care for her. Besides, it's nice to have multiple interpersonal (work, acquaintance, friend) relationships in additional to one's romantic one.
Obviously, some readers might say, I've just proven myself too immature at this point in my life to be in a relationship. This may be true. Perhaps I'm simply developmentally lagging. I'll accept that explanation, as it promises (or at least offers) improvement in the future. For my diagnosis, though, this is irrelevant. I am jealous. After breaking up, I attempted to move on with my love life. I found myself - very quickly, and very unexpectedly - falling for a coworker, and due partially to my own confusion regarding to the speed of it all and partially to workplace conventions, our relationship remained merely flirtatious until the second-to-last day of our program. But what was to be done? She went to school in another state, I was traveling to the West Coast for several weeks, and we would both be very busy in the fall. Now that the thing that had kept us together was ending, we would be moved far apart. Through it all was the very self-conscious feeling that, regardless of my attraction to her and our compatible personalities, the entire thing was most likely a subconscious coping mechanism. We attempted to make things work, and I even visited her in Maine that September, but eventually we both gave up.
The apathy on my side was fueled by a reunion with the ex. For several weeks in the early fall, we lived separate lives during the week and hooked up on weekends. Then, one night, at a party, the Jealousy inexplicably arrived. I was crippled - couldn't talk to anyone, couldn't think about anything else. I was wrong, of course; my particular suspicion that night was entirely unwarranted and false, and we ended up hooking up later that evening. But still, I had realized something. The next morning, during our customary "what now" conversation, I reminded her of the inevitable truth that, at some point, one of us would call the other, and the other wouldn't answer. One of us would move on. Looking back on it, this must have sounded like I was the one whose attraction was becoming outweighed by reason. I wasn't, but within three weeks, rumors began circulating that she was "dating" someone new.
It's been a while. She is. The new guy is tall, unattractive, and boring. They both live in my house. They're together most of the times I see them. I see them when I do laundry, eat meals, use the gym, walk to the drinking fountain, check my mail, work in the kirkland grille. I want to move on with my life, as the ex has obviously done, but it's difficult when the two of them are my life.
So I am jealous. The jealousy is irrational but uncontrollable and intensely gripping. The best comparison I can give is (unfortunately) to experiencing the presence of Dementors in Harry Potter. I turn a corner and see them together, and whatever emotion I was feeling, even a strong, work-motivated sense of personal accomplishment and vitality, is immediately striken from my body. All I can feel is envy - of him, because he has her, and of her, because she has someone to connect with - and shame that I feel envious. Jealousy is terrible. It's an ugly, utterly repulsive trait when manifested in another, so its existence in myself, despite my best efforts, is inexcusable. Is it personal weakness? I can't stand it, and I can't stand for it. This, of course, only makes me less happy.
The solution ought to be clear by now: more work. If I'm thinking about work, I'm not feeling. I'm not being jealous. I can't think about the ex-girlfriend and her new current boyfriend who makes me feel so abandoned and cast-aside. Have I sunk in value as a human being? I haven't, of course, and I know this, yet I can't help but feel broken, like the ex in films who lets go of himself and destroys his life, every time I see them.
More shame. The process repeats itself. I retreat.
4. I have made myself functional. I serve a purpose, like a robot, but a sentient one, one that questions (as evidenced above) both his actions and his experiences constantly. Also, a more attractive one. I enjoy serving purposes. I don't think I enjoy feeling like a robot, but part of the adjustment will be accepting myself according to new definitions of myself as a human being. I need to grow into my life. For now, I'm occupying it temporarily, and I feel like a tool created for a function (haha, "i feel like a tool"). I will soon feel like a human being who occupies a permanent place.
It will happen. For now, I'm okay. The understanding that I'm in a process of growth, a journey of sorts, is grounding. I have new supports, and I'm growing stronger and stronger, closer and closer to being able to stand nearly on my own. I'm a sexy dude. Haha. I'm a baller. I can psych myself up when I need to. I'm looking forward to break, not because of the break but because of California and the people there. I'm looking forward to coming back here because of Massachusetts and the people here. I'm okay.
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| chicka chicka yeah |
[07 Nov 2007|10:23pm] |
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Ultra Fuck Life: a respectably labeled, fine piece of poesy Grant Damon This is a pastoral because
Humble poets and beginner poets write pastorals
And then move to the cities and on to bigger and better things
Do all poets feel a pressure to shorten their thoughts so that they fit conveniently onto
one line with aesthetically pleasing space to spare, regardless of which font the
(intellectually suspect) typesetter uses?
I really would like to know,
Because I do. A gentle shepherde got moved to the city and on to
Bigger and better things before he ever wrote
The humble song that would typically serve as the customary antecedent to his more
ambitious, technically difficult, and grandiose-in-scale master work of societal
commentary and informed, respectful homage to his customary personal
antecedents.
It was epic.
Tonight is an irresponsible drinking night, and I am well prepared.
The purpose of poesy is debatable, Philip Sidney. The purpose of the poet
Is to get his shit together and hot-press bullets for the debate.
My shit is bananas, and I’m drinking stolen whisky,
Plagued by a sense of purposelessness and
Cowardice at not picking a purpose when it’s really easy and
Anger that I can’t express myself to anyone and
Anger that when I try to express myself to no one I realize that I don’t actually have
anything to say. This is not a pastoral. This is not a post-modern cityscape.
This is not craft, or natural art, or an extension of myself, or a paean to immortality,
Or a poem.
This is a bitter refusal to admit that I know better, a spiteful, hateful attack on anything
that ever made sense because “made” is past tense and I am not. I am better
Than anything I ever knew before this moment,
and I don’t know anything new. We don’t use symbols here
Or words.
We use 1s and 0s and we spit them. Fuck you imagery, you can’t handle the truth.
Am I better than anything I ever was, or am I Better than anything that ever was?
Yes.
Seriously fucked.
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| Private Virtues |
[06 Nov 2007|02:17am] |
1. I am unified again, a unilateral, unyielding, and undivided thought process upon the plaine, pushing my own desires through the old nets of convention and compromise.
2. I have been usurped, subjugated to lust, ruled by urges that direct my eyes toward figures I aim to use.
3. I am universally envious.
4. Wait a minute. A spenserian sank the U-boats, torpedoing mathematics and chastity into the mustachioed face of cruelty and unchecked genocide. It makes sense, maybe: Spenser up in arms for his Gloriana, London in a down fog, and the US on some island fighting for Lady Liberty. Eddie would go for the honour. Would you?
5. Still, the man freed a thousand pages of poetry and called it "The Faerie Queene," an act that would now be read as an unasked tell and would stand him in front of the firing squad, an apple on his head, facing down lowered expectations for his honourable discharge. To this gentle knight we owe the pricking of the Zeppelin that propelled us here, car-bombing poets into immortal clouds.
6. My focus is dulled, or perhaps shuttered, and I can't seem to resolve whether the stealth photographs, half-glances, and shadowy pass-bys are merely aberrations in my view of reality or if -- well, at the very least, mine are my contribution to her own perception.
7. I'm at a loss for words, my vowels deserting me, and maybe I live too much to do much else. This raging in the night has made me an unproductive unity, hanging over a spectre of usefulness, connected in vice to my fellow undateables. We are 21st century men, Libertarians in a society that has lost faith in hedonism. We have no Gloriana, no code of honor, allegiance only to the Senate and to the House of Pride. Please process.
8. My chaste body despoils my mind, which seduces my body, which aspires to drag the female form down from heaven but is weighed down by my untouched mind. I feel shame for wanting to live, not for wanting to die on top of them. I feel shame for wanting to make it out to be so - Elizabeth, virgin or no, has been left behind.
9. Fie, fie, Edmund Spenser.
10. Float out to space, William Butler Yeats.
11. Float me to the U-boats, lust, to the center of the ocean until I can't breathe in the beauty anymore. The planet earth is blue, and there's nothing I can do.
12. Let me cause false coincidence and feign false confidence for long enough to feel, for once, for a little, as this island, as one gentle knight, true land.
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| Has not been edited or checked for coherency of thought. Midterms tomorrow. |
[10 Oct 2007|12:57am] |
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Truth What a bloated, silly, pompous tyrant of a word. Truth is an idea, an ideal perched (or a word far less bird-like), half-reclined on a Roman column, being fed grapes by a long succession of hemlock-chugging philosophers. They wait their turn, eyes cast towards heaven, declaiming in their mightiest basso profundo their mightiest thoughts as slaves disrobe them of their scholarly over-togas and use them to stock the palace’s many fires. Truth lounges fearsomely, a sweating pig overstuffed with ego and mightily invested power, an obese cross between Nero and the logo from Little Caesar’s Pizza. One by one, the great thinkers pause their exploratory proselytizing and gaze at the figure who rules them. They stare at the red, self-important face, the comical laurels protruding like a childish game of dress-up from over each ear, and the finely-woven cloths draped sloppily over the heaving belly, and they catch themselves beginning to wonder, “Is this really it?” They move to the next station in their pilgrimage, a short flight of stairs to a small stage to the right, where a goblet and a podium await them. They step to the spot, cup held high in the air, and proclaim, in mightiest voice yet, meant to carry past the columns and through the ages, “I have searched for Truth, and he will not be seen.” It is, of course, the truest statement they have ever made, or at least so is meant to be. The majority of the hall is shouting to the ceiling about existence and feeling and hears nothing, but this matters not to the terminally empowered philosopher, who is entirely convinced of the brilliance of his observation. He is also absolutely confident in the necessity of his next major decision; rather than take the steps quietly down the back of the stage and out into the salty, invigorating air of the Mediterranean day to sit at a café and eat a healthy, high-in-omega-oils Mediterranean diet while enjoying pleasant frescoes on the walls depicting popular events, he barbarically hoists his mug above his head one final time, sloshing poison onto the podium and down his under-robes, then triumphantly downs the thing in one. His body is carried off by the slaves, who use it also to stock the palace’s many fires. I have no problem admitting to the existence of truth as an understandable concept that plays a significant role in governing the lives and experiences of human beings. To reiterate far more efficiently: truth exists and matters. Even this statement contains two very questionable elements, though. First, that the existence of truth is itself a commonly debated subject and one that many would argue is the only real discussion one can have on the matter. After all, if the concept of proof and disproof is rooted in logical thought and rationalism, how does one empirically support (or not) a human-created abstract concept? Second, that “matters” is an entirely subjective (and fairly empty) word, which I will concede to immediately. It would appear, then, that I’ve written myself into the same hopeless labyrinth that has caused countless predecessors to ruin their lives and produce a lot of self-important, empty bullshit. We have a twofold trap, Futility the monster gaining on us from the southeast corner of the maze and Meaninglessness closing in from the northwest. The great minds, so publicly tragic, would have us choose a side and run towards our destruction in the loudest manner possible. I say we stand still in the center, maybe climb the maze walls. There are, after all, absolute truths we can use as footholds with which to boost ourselves to a better vantage point. These are not the truths issued by melodramatically suicidal thinkers about “the human experience” before their unnecessary deaths. These are not the sweeping statements or self-important insights meant to cause mini-revelations when readers decide their entire lives (along with those of everyone who has ever lived) have been condensed into a single sentence or paragraph and excitedly squeal, “Ohmygod that’s so true!” Who are we to decide what resonates with everyone who has lived? Who are we to assume that our understanding of ourselves (and, again unfairly, of others), limited before we read the So True insight, is now perfect, or even any closer to being so? Any truth that needs a qualifier is not a truth at all, for isn’t truth the one ideal that exists absolutely? It is, and it does. On a macroscopic level, two objects dropped in a zero-resistance environment, subject to the same gravitational pull, will fall at the same rate. Smoking cigarettes regularly will increase one’s chances of developing lung cancer, just as ingesting hemlock juice in substantial concentration will inevitably cause one to die of poisoning. Children with involved role models have a higher chance of going to college than children without. Children whose involved role models begin reading to them before the children enter grade school have a further increased chance. These are truths. They have been empirically tested with a minimum of human bias. They do not require shared values or the assumption that human beings experience the world in the same way. For that matter, if we still would like to understand the thought processes of others (as we ought to, for effectual active help is aided greatly by understanding), we have psychology. My faith in science has never been stronger, despite my continuing aversion to the study. I find it unappealing, tedious, and unglamorous. Many others have as well. The work of a great scientist, like the work of a great writer, can achieve immortality and retain relevance long after the genius responsible has passed away. The difference is that nobody surmises to understand the scientist through his work, much less understand the scientist better than the scientist could have understood himself. This entirely contradicts the argument I have given most recently in the defense of the study of literature, that the true value (and by value I mean usefulness to the rest of the world not studying literature) is not the wide-eyed thumbs-uping of evaluatory criticism, where great minds waste their intellect by sitting in rooms counting the ways in which other minds are greater than theirs, but in the search for the manifestation of recurring, historically observed social themes in literary works, intentionally placed or not. This argument contradicts the majority of this writing. Social themes? Aren’t human beings all different, their experiences irreconcilably separated by their individual consciousnesses? For that matter, doesn’t this leave the author out of our reach as well, especially the byproducts of their subconscious mind? It may well be true that I simply detest hero worship of any sort, particularly of melodramatic writers who overstep their bounds of understanding, and will find any excuse to avoid the unconstructive game of praise. It may well be true that I feel this way because I am jealous, desiring my own sentences to be compared to beautifully designed archways and pillars that house holy, wholly original (but universal) ideas. But perhaps there is a usefulness to be found yet, and one that can exist concurrently with the absolute truths that, due to their nature, are not going anywhere. We search for social themes because human behavior, unlike the human experience, is quantifiable and easily observed. I don’t understand why the child who is read to will attend college – his thoughts during the first page of his first book could fill twenty pages, while his thoughts as he drops his application envelope into the mailbox could fill another two hundred – but I can point to a thousand reasons that he may. When I find any of these reasons in a work of literature, it reinforces its existence and provides an alternate case study, a sort of computer model from the world’s most advanced computer – of how this factor effects a person and the people around them. From there, I have a responsibility to use my improved understanding – again, not of singular experience, but of trends in interaction – to further some sort of cause. These causes are non-truths – necessarily so, since human beings, with individual experiences, will naturally have varying values – but by now one has reached the end of logical reason and ought to be secure in one’s convictions. These non-truths, which, due to the limits of language, do tend to have very basic shared meanings that can change over time, include Justice, Understanding, Joy, Love, and the Preservation of Future. All fall under the very general, highly debatable banner of “Good,” and all humanity, despite the various understandings of the word that people have, can support it. It is, I would venture to say, an absolute truth. “Good,” of course, can be a tyrannical figure every bit as gross as Truth, her pilgrims showcasing the universality of their actions instead of their statements, aiming to be seen not as brilliant, loud, and insightful, but as selfless, meek, and open to understanding. They walk with their heads cast out towards their fellow man as they pass Good, the empress who offers them grapes, which they refuse for the sake of those who have yet to be offered, and with nearly the same pride found in Truth-seeking scholars, march directly into the fires, so as to best serve the palace.
But still, a safe amount of living can be done in the name of Good, and the study of literature can be a tool to help the process. I discover, in the pages of a work, an instance one of the factors that may send a child to college. My definition of Justice includes equal access to the empowerment afforded by education; I use my analysis of the instance and how it fits with the other themes of the work to better understand how to apply this factor in helping a child attend college. In a less field-unrelated example, I happen upon a “so true” in a work. Rather than marvel over the author’s uncanny insight and superhuman abilities of thought, I rejoice in a shared value or perspective, then use this single instance to better understand my own consciousness. Rather than applying the “so true” to the consciousnesses of others, I use my new sensitivity to my own to help them become more sensitive to theirs, to learn how to seek their own Undestanding. I begin to identify, after reading many works, elements that bring me pleasure. I write my own work in hopes that others will find pleasure from some of the same elements, thus creating new Joy. In turn, I hope that others do the same for me. We live in a world with other people, whether we enjoy this truth or not. To refuse participation in the world in favor of worshipping at the palace of tyrant Truth is to deny this, an action both contradictory and pathetically misguided. We have absolutes, reason, and faculty. We have differences that must be acknowledged. We have a responsibility to Good. We have to live, to participate, and to interact, because the only real alternative is self-delusion, the least glorious and worthwhile venture of them all. True that.
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| today I briefly thought seriously of names for my children. |
[03 Oct 2007|01:02am] |
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music |
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The Honorary Title |
] |
I’m surrounded by filth, suppressed by unpleasantries that threaten to contaminate and misshapen my thoughts. I am anxious, uncomfortable, and, incongruously, without direction or requirement. It is for this reason, the opportunity for and near-certainty of my failure, that I attempt to write.
My computer is falling apart. I won’t say “dying” because I hate it and would like to exercise my writer’s privilege to deny life to anything I bring to life. I’ll leave it inanimate and soulless, though the nano-scale components inside fire and react fire and react in patterns complex enough and speeds fast enough to create, if not a God-given spirit or a Cartesian consciousness, an intelligence and complexity of thought that far outpace, outcoast, and outdive mine. It’s not got soul, one could say, but it is a soldier.
I, then, am an ungrateful and untrustworthy un-American, breaking unity of species (or, in this case, non) and withholding my support for our troops. This computer is American, everything about it, from the logo above the underachieving wireless indication light to the rough plastic casing, scratched, speckled, and smeared with food and drink, to the tendency to stop working after attaining job security.
And the “Widescreen” at the top of the lazy, filthy, black-as-a-slimming-color rectangle. Has there ever been a word more expressive of American identities and desires than “widescreen?”
Wide – we are, as a people, physically larger than we ought to be (fie, fie, filthy liberal, poking at soft targets. I move on). We push specializations on our children at early ages, limiting and unhelpfully directing their personal growth, but we ourselves seek to understand the big picture, the broad concepts that govern our daily lives, and the Trivial Pursuit answers and Jeopardy questions, without actually synthesizing and digesting the information to make real sense of it. We want width at the expense of depth, killer quips instead of…
(concentration broken. I am more like Proust than I want to be. My protean grace lofts – or vaunts, but not climbs, soars, or floats – skyward like the gentle bird it would be with but two letters change. I am my own scorn and disdain, and Percy Bysshe shakes his head. Still, I will soldier on. I’ve got soul)
…linguistical comprehension. We will all die of spinal injuries upon diving headfirst into our expansive wading pools.
Screen – yes, we love to watch. We have our televisions, slimming boxes with people inside whose lives are magically more interesting than ours, despite the fact that we have souls and that they are soldered. We have pocket-draining cinema, glorious bright and dark heavens inches in front of blank, solid concrete walls. But we still love to watch. We sit at the window and spy on the neighbors, lights off, eyes nearly level with the windowsill for fear of being caught. We watch the game through chainlink fence, hoping desperately not to get caught and called up to bat. Why bat, when a wide screen is all we really need to be alive? It keeps the mosquitoes out.
My words appear with slight delay on my own degenerate screen. When I decide to make a revision – that is, when I look upon a reflection of my internal, intellectualized self with abhorrence and seek to erase it from evidence and from occupation of my besieged brain, I reach with two fingers towards the screen to wipe the words away. I leave behind a faint and fading trail of grease – as with the dirty tissues, unwashed dishes, and bloody washcloth, my degenerate is the product of tainted blood and weak parentage – but the words remain. They, too, have their own screen. Or I have my own screen. Or we have it together, a crucial separation so that Adam does not walk with God in Eden and confuse the fuck out of God the next time he tries to collect and verbalize his thoughts.
I use my keyboard, an ingenious translator of human creation, to bridge the impassable divide of human creation and make my revisions. The keys squeak like antique farm equipment of the authentic, unappreciated variety. Rust and ropes at least allow for warm light to make palatable bales of hay, which at least once lived on their own to appreciate the sun. My tetanus square would overheat in the sun. If I am to ally myself with plasma and nano and plastic, rather than with dirt and mice and loft, I at least want personal aircraft docking at rounded skyscrapers in a hazy, perpetual dusk. Where is my city of the future?
It is not here, not in this machine. This machine does not develop. It does not even degenerate, for that matter. It merely breaks, ceases to work – no, doesn’t work. It exists in absolute states, I observe the changes. I have given it too much life already, or at least pretended to, and it’s nearly a relief (nearly, since I am sane) that it does not protest against the treasonous words that appear on its side of the screen. Much easier, this way, I alive and it not at all. Less messy, more clean. I’ve failed, of course, but I feel better already.
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| this is why I don't write anymore. |
[24 Sep 2007|02:10am] |
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Hackerson the Bear When they said they were going to tie me up and leave me to the wolves, I thought they were being metaphorical. Prosecutors, stacked jury, the long dick of the law ripping into my ass with vicious, animal thrusts of penal code and contempt of court. Doggystyle. How now, brown cow? They were serious, if ill-informed when it came to species identification, and they left me to dogs. Alaskan huskies, ten of them. The leaving was actually the most difficult part of the execution. When facing death, one becomes aware (acutely? Jesus Christ) of sensations of perception as one never was before. The body is a McRib sandwich, bursting with injected flavors as soon as one reads “limited time only” on the poster in the window. But a lot of sensations are seriously unpleasant. I was shackled to the ground, lying spread-eagled on my stomach in the middle of the stage. The cuffs were cold and had chafed sore spots into my wrists and ankles until I stopped struggling and instead focused on the splinters in my ass from the wooden floor. Plus, I was terrified. The dogs stood stage left and stage right, snuffing and shaking their heads and waiting for the cue. I waited, recited my lines: “Yes, I smoke now.”
“Yes, I understand that it’s going to kill me.”
“No, hearing that isn’t going to change anything.” Large Husky Number Five came in early. He lept from behind the curtains to center stage, turned briefly to face the audience, and then turned his canines and full attention to my left shin. The pain was excruciating, the relief immense. This was it, showtime, the real thing. I’d made it, had become the only one of my friends who could ever say he’d been set into by a pack of starved, bloodthirsty animals. But through the explosion of fire in my left leg and the audible tearing and the desperate fucking try to get my ragged, raggeder wrists to cleave or burn and melt their way through the tetanus wrist cuffs and then claw the air into the air for a defensive grip and the passionate, lightning crazed prayer to just have the left leg off and over by the front of the stage so I wouldn’t have to feel it anymore, I realized Large Husky Number Five and I had both forgotten an essential line. I stopped screaming and shot him an actorly glance. He whimpered and trotted sheepishly offstage. “Yeah, I totally know what you mean.” It was the concession to end all concessions, and the audience gasped in shock. Bingo. They hadn’t noticed Number Five’s miscue, apparently, and went crazy when the entire pack rushed at me from all sides. Having just surrendered my point of view and most deeply-held opinions, I was in no position to fight back, and so the scene went off perfectly. It was visceral, true, and profound, a ballet of silver, white, and red cyclones and my body as the chaos theory of dramatic theater. My left leg was off and over by the front of the stage, and my blood delighted the faces and shirts of the front row. The curtains went down, then up. I took my final bow and was showered with roses, a single thorn finding its way into one of my unprotected eyes. This would be more powerful as a one-off.
But it wasn’t time to leave, yet. I’d been standing for too long, dreaming bloody murder and sipping my Merlot.
“Yeah, I totally know what you mean.”
I had no idea what she meant. I didn’t know her name, but it was too late to ask at this point. I didn’t know what we had been talking about, or for how long, or how we had come to be here. In this room? There had been an invitation, a few mutual friends, and a want of opportunity to wear my new button-up. The heavy drinker in me had jumped at the chance to bring one bottle of wine and down several for free. Plus good food and intelligent conversation and, depending on how good I actually looked in the button up and how many other attendees overshot their drink contributions, maybe the opportunity to meet someone. I was still thinking about the dogs coming out for an encore when I finished my glass. Was she wearing anything underneath her dress? I agreed with something again. I had to stop doing that. Number Six snapped my femur between her teeth, and it felt like God had compressed the entire universe into my leg, then Big Banged-it out through my eyes. No more theater. She was talking about “The Office.” My agreements had been genuine, if accidental, after all. But seriously? A dinner party, and I had forfeited myself over a television show. I needed something revealing and clever to respond with. Quadruple Middle English Entendres or something connecting a failed Irish revolutionary leader with Martin Luther. Something European. Shit, think, shit, think, shit, think. Foucalt. A stand-by, a name at once dusty and pinched, edgy and everywhere. I only really know the author-function, and there was no place here. No meta. Mo’ meta, mo’ problems. Number Two brought his front paws down onto the back of my skull. My eyes bulged and memories turned into black holes. I could see them do it. Jesus Christ. I said this instead: Hey Paradise Crenshaw, you’re not so vibrant now, Hawk nose down to the sidewalk, silhouetted negative? Are you or are you not with warning Take a box-step and a loaf from the Penny-pinchers and stevedores Garble your messages, Handkerchief Jones. Sold out of a trunk so slyly The winter months numbed their fangs With your Jersey City Shudder. Stand With bare ankles, asset. Pace yourself for the Damagement or Give us many kissed some kisses Oh You’re not so tough tough tough anymore Cranberry Vodka, we got you beat.
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[09 Jun 2007|12:14pm] |
After nearly a week of botched attempts to find a supermarket other than my regular one which would sell me one-cup coffee filters, I finally gave in last night and walked to the Porter Square Shaw's. This, not my on-foot trip to the Cambridgeside Galleria and to Central Square, and certainly not my walking tour of the beautiful Mission Hill, Roxbury, and South Boston housing projects, is what has allowed me to sit this morning in my disaster of a temporary bedroom and sip coffee out of my own mug. To be honest, I feel quite pleased with myself right now. The coffee is Peet's Fair Trade Blend (so I support ethical practices), the mug is from Barnes & Noble Cafe, a gift from my mother, and features the likenesses of some 25 well-known authors (so I support intellectual thought), and the music - oh yes, of course a moment like this must have a soundtrack - is Miles Davis and his crack sax team of John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderly performing "Autumn Leaves" (so I support intellectual feeling).
My temporary bedroom is on the fourth floor of Eliot House and shares a fire door with Ground Zero, an infamous (by Harvard standards) party room. Yet when I close the door and open my two windows - one overlooking Memorial Drive, the other above JFK Street - I remove myself from proximity to any part of the university. My temporary roommate, Derek, left a fan in the windowsill next to my desk, a precaution, like the plastic bag ghost dripping from the fire alarm, against a forced evacuation when the smoke from his terribly rolled joints reached the ceiling. The fan, the bag, the socks on the floor, the Solo cups - stacked (!) by an awkward extended-network friend who sunk exactly one shot and promptly retreated to the sofa - the sofa itself, the crumpled blanket at the foot, left by yet another friend of Derek's who had passed out before I returned home last night and had left before I woke up this morning, the beer stains on my desk - these are the only reminders that this room is not entirely isolated from the rest of the world.
My coffee is black - yet another sign of my budding intellectualism (aww, young thought!) perhaps? - and good. Out the JFK window, I see that the sky is overcast. Sherri lost power last night while we were on the phone, and the experience was odd, hearing voices locate candles and flashlights while I walked along a well-lit stretch of Mass Ave. When I look through the lower section of the window, I can forget this. I see instead the dull silver workhorse of a radiator - think blue coveralls, a potbelly, and a wifebeater - and above it Derek's cannabis fan. With the jazz and the truck engines and sirens and bicycles outside - I sleep until nearly noon every day because I'm woken up at least five times a night by traffic on both streets - I can pretend this is a moist, heavy New York City summer and that I am the most writerly of writers, hacking away at a clattery typewriter and only taking breaks to guzzle my black coffee and take drags of the cigarette smoldering on the ash tray to my right. I am the voice of the city, of jazz, of people strange and lonely and ugly and pretty and entirely American. I am urban decay and urban revivalism and smooooth words when we need them on the boulevards at one in the morning inside of big cars and shrp! words when we need them on the sidestreets at one in the morning on the receiving end of baseball bats and switchblades. And I risk becoming too romantic. I am the slow, oppressive voice of rush hour and lunch hour and rush hour again on the crowded sidewalks underneath eighty stories of crushing obsidian heat. I am the heated, frenzied voice of the rush hour sidewalk rushers and the loud, self-important voice of the lunch hour sidewalk talkers and the muted, broiled voice of the rush hour walkers descending into subway stations and emerging into the smooooth hot cool jazz night. I keep this city alive.
But when I look up, leaving the heater and the fan, I see that sky. It's almost a God-forgot gray, the kind of atmospheric nonentity that leaves us with one less complication for a day, but the shade is just too dark, just too heavy, and the trees outside of my room are just too sparse at the top, just too easily shaken, for this sky to be nothing. Still, this is not a lights-out sky. This is a San Francisco sky, the tree a San Francisco tree, west Golden Gate Park and the Sunset and the Richmond. The branches reach up and out but reach nothing, and as the gray slithers around them, they are twisted into a skeletal gesture of futility, dozens of bony last grasps for air and sunlight through the liquid fog. The leaves grow - these are skeleton warriors and will do anything to break free to the land of the living - and the lush green grays and darkens the phalanges and metacarpals it springs from. But to call the leaves "lush" is an overstatement. They are bright but far between, and they droop in defeat, barely starting to cover the brown maze underneath. This tree is not a skeleton, merely an emaciated, damaged person, the suggestion of a rainforest battered by wind and choked by fog and starved of sunlight. I get the feeling that I'm looking at a corpse, preserved in its death throes by the very elements that destroyed it in the first place.
Yet it's not dead, just... different. The life eked out by these trees is incomprehensible to a human being, but they somehow twistedly enmesh themselves in the pitch-black depths and heights of Golden Gate Park, themselves surrounding and choking the life out of old Mission-style buildings, attempts at California unwisely erected in this cold, unchanging netherworld where the sky has a limit and it comes rolling down the cliffs of the Headlands each afternoon at four. The buildings have doors stripped away, the plaster soaked inside and out by the living fog until lichen makes way for moss and moss makes way for the skeleton trees and suddenly bison slump in a ring of dirt, isolated from the rest of the world for years at a time until, by chance, a wrong turn takes visitors deep enough into the reclaimed park to find them. The aborted trees meet their likeness across the street from the park, where wrinkled Asian women, their bodies crevassed and compacted into dark gray jackets and navy blue linen pants, pull dollies stacked with plastic bags behind them. The sun doesn't come out here, and the women sink further and further into their jackets, their husbands growing thinner and donning tan baseball caps and thick glasses. They walk past row houses on the numbered streets, with their dirty white ancient ruin carvings of lions and winged jewels above the one-car garages. The front doors are all on the second floor, and with enough imagination, the transformation of these homes is easily visualized, the fade of the alternating pastel colors to a uniform, cold, sea-swept gray, the settling and stretching of each car parked in the driveway to a maroon Buick, the hardening of the front yards into stone gardens, dirty white, like the lions and the shops on the named streets. The bus stops are silent and still - to the outside observer, that is. The waiters have headphones on, all of them, hoods up or hats down or faces buried in self-help and medical school books - always self-help and medical school books, as if to get them anywhere but the damp bus stop. A group of teenage girls, all hoop earrings and hairspray and cigarettes, takes the pole by the corner, but they too observe the rules and stare at once disinterestedly and intently on their red fingernails and the smoke around their faces and anything but the world outside of them.
In my room, the coffee is not for guzzling, but for holding. I am jealous watching the steam rise into the air and want it for myself, so I drink the rest quickly.
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[18 Apr 2007|09:28am] |
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music |
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Thelonious Monk - Carolina Moon |
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I heard a very boring story two weeks ago (tomorrow) about a bonfire and one bickering couple and one very much in-love couple and a trip to Target, and because I thought it was boring, I didn't express nearly the amusement of my classmates or my professor. I don't like stories about mundane events that are supposed to carry weight because they are "real." If you think about it, a story with everything above and a robot and a three-year sentence for tax fraud would be just as real, seeing as how it's nothing but the product of one real person's mind, which is itself at least partially a product of real experiences. But I don't want to think that way, because people who think that way are invariably assholes.
And also, until the Realness of the story kicked in, I liked it. It reminded me of Corbett's Hardware at 5pm after a rain. Corbett's, in my mind, always exists under these exact conditions, as do video rental stores, people who look like Jeff Foxworthy, and anyone related to my father. This is my realness, I suppose.
You'll have to pardon the difficulty with which this is written. The sentences are laborious and groan either under the strain of my constructions or at the content of my observations. I'm a carpenter without a sense of humor, a Christ-like figure, if you will, returned from the dead. Jesus Christ, or just Tim Allen. I find myself compelled to be here, a clause at the bottom of my realness - this morning I gave myself a choice: take your book to the Kirkland House gym and read while on the exercise bicycle, or don't.
I chose the latter, of course, because I'm an American. I'm at the age where I no longer consider myself qualified to judge my country. We're too similar - underexercised, weak-willed, proud of being unsure of our futures, ashamed of being unsure of our futures. I don't know quite what to do myself, so I've committed this summer to educating and entertaining little kids with immigrant parents. America... I cut myself shaving this morning. America cut itself shaving this morning. America couldn't decide which jacket to wear outside, because it is raining so it would be stupid not to wear a jacket out, but the courdoroy one is overworn, the blue jean one is the same color as America's pants, and the black one will smell like sheep if it gets wet. I need to worry less about my appearances and buy a waterproof, fully-committed winter jacket. I am worrying less about my appearances but more about my bank account. America is worrying.
But I don't judge. I want to say clever - no, geniunely intelligent - things about America. In Real Amuhrica, I might say, the past two days were business as usual. New Americans came to work in Real Amuhrican jobs that many of the Real Amuhricans won't work in anymore, and many of the Real Amuhricans were out of work. Meanwhile, the New Americans held on to their jobs like... Americans, or Amuhricans, that real American caress that's openly passionate and secretly almost loving and sexually revolutionized so it's secretly mostly passionate and not really loving because, best case scenario, there's a fifty percent chance that the whole thing will end terribly. And it's always best not to get too attached.
But I'm still nineteen years old. God, it's been forever since my last birthday and God has let everyone around me have five while I wait. What is age, though, really? Besides a device that relates the life cycle of the human body to our not arbitrarily-assigned measurements of time, I cut myself shaving this morning.
And this is after I stayed up all night - gave a yank on the ol' all-nighter - simply because I could. Well, not simply. I read the first section of Caleb Williams, which is like every other 18th century British novel except for The Castle of Otranto (which is hardly a novel and is also shitty). I took a shower, which was like every other shower I've taken this year, mostly without exception. I watched Dazed and Confused, which was better than the first section of Caleb Williams, which I read as I watched. Earlier in the evening, I left her room, which has grown so difficult, due to the softness of my American existence, that I consider it a major accomplishment, and spent nearly two hours looking at photographs of the northern exterior wall of the Ara Pacis. It's the wall, you know, with the senators on it, the damaged and less important wall, of note largely because it depicts a child who may be Lucius Caesar and may be a captured Gaul.
Yesterday he asked us to please... whatever we do today... whether it be... going to class or... an extracurricular activity...to... do it to the fullest... so that at the end of the day... we will know that we have lived. The tears didn't leak from his white rabbit face (no, not if bespectacled and shaggy), but poured out afterward through his mouth in a torrent of Pompeii villas and Metamorphoses illustrations. The effect was devestating.
Is it perhaps that I'm not sure what to do to my fullest, how to live, that is the reason for my continuing consciousness? I learned many things today (yesterday). I learned how never to sleep again. I learned that potatoes originated in Peru, that the term "school shooting" can still be applied, with all its political implications, when the gunman is twenty-three years old, that Percy Bysshe Shelley, believe it or not, isn't gay. Tonight, when I get tired, I will unlearn the first lesson, but the other three will remain.
I had to stay up, see, because I've grown underexcercised and weak-willed and too in love with sleep and not terrified enough for the woman who was in the news studio when they told her that her son died. I wasn't terrified enough for the son, or for maybe-Lucius Caesar who will never be a sure thing, or for the people who don't look like Jeff Foxworthy and never really had a chance in my realness when it rained, because it rains all the time now. So I am awake, and because I'm remaining underexcercised I have to write. I'm terrified for Percy Bysshe Shelley and his new sexuality and for Professor Tarrant who cries for Rome, and for the fifty percent chance that this will all end terribly.
I have too much to be terrified for, really, and I'm so happy I can't even begin to describe it.
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[25 Aug 2006|04:04pm] |
Friends and acquaintances,
It is with heavy heart that I announce the near-total death of the livejournal known as Seventytimes78. It has served me well, but I feel that livejournal, besides being a website and service that is far from growing, carries with it a significant attitude and mood, one that is not particularly conducive to becoming a self-reliant, optimistic adult. Thus, despite the years of therapy and literary practice I have gotten from this thing, I have moved on to another blog. For reasons of privacy (I'd like this to be a clean break, without any of the hard feelings and months of awkward interactions that other break-ups cause), I can't tell you where I've taken my internet self, other that it involves "_____damon.blogspot.com."
If you care to look, i have it printed somewhere. If you care to read, happy searching. It's been nice.
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| I Could Totally Be In Fresno Right Now |
[20 Aug 2006|11:23am] |
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mood |
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 weird |
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music |
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The Format - Dog Problems |
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I always thought it was merely an easily accessible, socially acceptable cliche to say, after unfortunate events, that the unfortunate event felt like a dream. You know, like when, after tragedies of a global scale, people tell other people that it "puts things into perspective." Both statements, I figured, are simply easy, safe things to say in lieu of any sort of intelligent reflection on the happenings.
But last night, at about 9:03, as Dan and I sat in the cab of the truck that was towing my Honda Accord, I let my eyes relax for a second. "For Those About to Rock (We Salute You," by AC/DC was playing on the driver's Sirius transmitter, and as we passed over the hump of the Richmond Bridge, the blurry lights of San Quentin swam into view. I realized right then how ridiculous the situation was - did the driver really have to be a burly guy with a moustache who listened to classic rock and country but, for some reason, was amazingly tech savvy? Did my first ever traffic accident really have to occur on my first ever family-free road trip? Jesus Christ, did it really have to occur just a few miles from highway 5, the freeway I'd selected music to drive on to over two years ago? Did it really have to occur after, earlier in the day, Dan and I had selected my car to take instead of his, on grounds of "safety and reliability," something I'd made a conscious effort to point out to my parents no less than three times? Did it really have to happen when I was driving responsibly - sober and at the speed limit? Did the registration really have to blow away when we exchanged information with the driver of the other car? Seriously, that was too much. And here we were, in the cab of the tow truck, after Dan's AAA Plus card magically appeared, at the driver's encouragement, and bought us a free ride back to Marin, watching the lights of California's maximum-security prison welcome us back to a summer of financial obligations and transportation restrictions, when just two hours earlier we'd been closing in on a road that I, at least, had viewed as the ultimate symbol of freedom and adult responsibility since I was young enough to think about driving.
The metaphors were so obvious, the timing so perfect, and the characters so predictable, that this had to be a dream, right? I'd had a particularly vivid one a few weeks ago, where I was driving the Honda, Dan in the passenger seat, and taking turns around corners in a red brick city at speeds I knew to be dangerous until I skidded out of control and into a wall. As soon as my head had cleared from impact, in the dream, my first thoughts were something along the lines of "Jesus Fucking Christ, how the fuck did I let this happen? I'm fucking screwed." I woke up to the greatest sense of relief in recent memory. But just two hours earlier, approximately five seconds after traffic in front of us came to a sudden and unexpected total stop, four and a half seconds after Dan yelled, "Grant, slow down!" four seconds after I slammed on the brakes, and two seconds after plowing into the back of a red 2006 Honda Accord, crumpling the hood of my car, sending fragments of headlight across four lanes of highway, and causing a sizeable, yet merely cosmetic dent in the rear bumber of the red Honda, these exact thoughts repeated. When, approximately a minute and a half later, I got back in my car, having pulled it not quite all the way off the road, and attempted to correct this postion, only to find that the trusty silver vehicle would no longer start, owing, I later discovered, to some displaced boxes and wires underneath the hood, these thoughts intensified.
So when, then, would I wake up and feel the relief again? Would it be the night before the road trip, prompting me to call Dan and insist that we take his car? Would it be the Sunday night before? I'd gladly repeat my last week of work to do this over again without the accident. The beginning of summer? All of summer could be part of the dream - that would be fine - as long as I managed to relive it without fucking up this seriously.
But I focused my eyes again, and San Quentin and Marin grew sharp and unforgiving. I took a deep breath and set about giving the driver (I never learned his name) directions to my house. We arrived and unloaded the car, backwards, into my usual parking space underneath the basketball hoop. My parents came out and helped push while I steered. I went to bed early, after watching about half of "The Rock," and woke up this morning, as my mother had said I would, thinking of nothing but the accident.
I haven't gone out to check the car, but the Highway Patrol's collision report information card is on my desk, next to a scrap of paper with the other driver's information on it, and a bunch of other car and insurance-related documents. That means that it actually happened.
The fact that I can't recall nearly as much of the accident as Dan can leads me to believe that I probably wasn't paying enough attention to the road, was looking ahead but not really seeing what was there. Or, perhaps, I simply wasn't paying enough attention to anything. I need to become more observant again. I don't think about things nearly as much as I used to, preferring to just watch and exist. We shall work on that. Other than that issue, which I suppose plagues my entire consciousness, not merely my vehicle operating abilities, I was driving well. I'm a safe driver - no accidents or tickets up until yesterday - and my insurance rates, after three years of transgression and collision-free driving, were about to go down. But I suppose that my accident-avoiding skills, the ones that nobody wants to need to have, are less than stellar. I probably could have done better than to slam on the brakes - well, to push down rather hard, then, upon realizing that it wasn't going to be enough, to slam on them. I didn't even think to honk my horn, let alone to swerve onto the fast lane shoulder, near the divider. I am SO not an action hero.
But it could have been much worse. My ever-stormy relationship with God, like that of the constantly-bickering couple, except that in this case one isn't always positive that the other exists, recieved a nice little jolt of life when I delivered a silent lamentation heavenward, asking what this had happened for, especially after I had thanked Him for the life of the family friend whose memorial service I had attended earlier in the day, the kind of prayer someone as self-centered as myself almost never thinks of making. But I caught myself about a half an hour later, when I realized that at least nobody had died - or even been injured. Hell, the airbags didn't even deploy in either car. This meant that the impact speed was less than twenty miles an hour (and that the crash, i guess, almost didn't happen). So my car is nonoperational. Fine. Everyone is safe, barring any mysterious, secret injuries that I haven't heard about yet.
Seriously. This could have been terrible - loss of life on a stretch of freeway that, the tow truck driver said, sees at least one major accident a day, serious injury, the involvement of more than two cars - but instead it was merely bad. A car wrecked, a road trip thwarted, and a paycheck consumed. My father even said that I could use his bike to get around (my own having been destroyed during my absence at school when my brother, another safe Damon boy, rode in front of a car that was exiting the Albertson's parking lot). So I guess I'm grateful for the way it turned out. At the very least, I can stay home all day, now that work is over, and read books. That's what English concentrators are supposed to do anyway, right?
Fuck yes, school. DeWolfe will be incredible this year, owing largely to my own presence (but of course), as well as to the occupation of rooms by tons of other Kirkland sophomores, most of whom look down to transform the building into a den of, if not debauchery, at least pleasant times. Plus carpets (actually, these could be a negative, as I expect more than a couple drinks to be spilled over the course of the year), climate control, cable TV (because I didn't watch nearly enough last year, when I increased my television intake more than tenfold), and, last but certainly not least, a fully functional kitchen. Counters, a dishwasher, a stove, a full-size refrigerator and freezer to fill with delicious and/or controlled substances: yes.
Three weeks, though, until the liver punishing, Flat Patties eating, and, yes, knowledge devouring begin. Until then, I have some business with an insurance company to take care of, the concept of not having to sober up and drive home from parties (and of having to wait for rides home) to grapple with, and some quality back-to-school shopping to enjoy with my mother and her car. Life is looking up, or at least straight ahead with both eyes on the road and a foot hovering cautiously over the brake pedal.
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| The Resurrection and Ascension of the Bay Area |
[15 Aug 2006|05:03pm] |
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It was time, I suppose, for it to disappear. After all, it had already sensed that I needed a miracle to restore my faith in the area, to feel once again that I could claim this place as my hometown. And so, for a few glorious weeks this summer, owing perhaps to luck, perhaps to the hyphy movement, and perhaps to my own lowered standards of fun, the Bay Area made a comeback.
It must have started at the camp party several weeks ago, when, somewhat intoxicated in the passengers' seat of my car on the way over, I found myself inexplicably joyful - about everything. I was absolutely jubilant, enough to roll down windows, throw my ego and my self-control out them, and surrender my entire self to the desire to shout out to the dark highway.
I woke up the next morning able to recall little in the way of detail from the night before - sure, I had certain brief images kept quite sharply in my mind, but much of the night was little more than wandering around, enjoying the feeling of being intoxicated. However, the mood I woke up in was a perfect one, as I was absolutely certain that, no matter how little or much I did the night before, I had a good time. I also woke with a compulsion to download all of the music - mostly Bay Area rap - that I'd heard before, songs that, whether or not they were any good, would now be associated with the undefinable feeling of joy. The feeling carried into the following night, as the Bay rose even further from the discarded past memories pile that I'd all but relegated it to. I stayed sober for a night of party hopping, instead opting to quaff as many energy drinks as possible, the caffeine and residual good feeling making it possible for me to act at ease (and even obnoxious) around people I'd never met before.
And from there, this place was perfect for me. I felt (reasonably) comfortable at work, had a good time whenever I was out, and eagerly set at chronicling what I percieved as an awesome summer by creating a playlist of the most "important" songs of the past several months, quite a few of which I'd never heard until a few weeks ago. Suddenly I was serving campers "Faderade" in red Solo cups and watching them act drunk on camping trips while listening - with the utmost enjoyment - to KMEL and Wild 94.9, dreaming of designer New Era Giants caps, and wondering (if only briefly) where I could put an "SF" tattoo on my body. This past weekend, when I went to Washington to visit members of my dad's side of the family, I felt terribly ill at ease, as if the only environment in which I could reasonably live was two states south. I missed the Yay Area.
It's interesting to think that I could ever feel so connected with this place, seeing as how I'd felt little more than a spark in my first eighteen years here, but I was in the perfect situation - returning from a long spell away - and the perfect location - as Marin County is perhaps the part of the Bay Area with the least neighborhood cred, it becomes very easy for residents to identify with any and all other cities and movements instead.
Then, just when it had convinced me of its greatness, the Bay disappeared. I returned home from Washington - a beautiful place - to find the lights in my house dimmed, the result of a switch to energy-saving, fluorescent bulbs and the cause, I'm prediciting, of a number of waking nightmares. I came to work and discovered that my identification and association with all of my fellow counselors hadn't quite survived the weekend away. My other friends, meanwhile, had had their own life-altering experiences in my absence, and last night at Dan's party for Michael Keefe, I felt like an outsider among a crowd that I had been comfortable with, even in the days before I had faith in the Bay Area.
All of it is enough to make me stop and think. Am I now to take the few weeks of unadulturated, inexplicable happiness that I felt and use them to improve my social life and my appreciation for my hometown on my own? Am I to view these last few weeks as a miracle, a sudden turn of events that has showed me a path that, regardless of the lack of motion in any direction of growth, is the one that could lead me to the most happiness?
Or was I simply the drunk guy, not just at that camp party, but every day, thrilled that everyone loves him and that everything is going his way, when in fact all anyone wants is for him to pass out or leave? I very well may have been so blinded by my own sudden excitement at all aspects of life that I didn't notice that most of them weren't worth getting worked up over.
A family friend died today. He used to live across the street and was best friends with my brother the entire time I was in middle school. It was shocking when they discovered his brain tumor. His death, for some reason, was less shocking, just a little strange. I feel bad because I had very little reaction to the news. I tell people that nobody close to me has ever died, but I wonder how many people, were they to die, would be able to change that. I would cry at the funerals of my nuclear family. Who else?
I want the week to end. I want to go to Southern California. I want to go back to school. I've gotta make these last few weeks work for me.
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| Got some for me? |
[03 Aug 2006|11:51pm] |
My family just bonded... over Scarface.
The movie was entertaining, though thoroughly predictable and with one of the worst soundtracks in the history of film. Seriously - synthesizers were hot stuff back then, new, exciting technology, and I understand that, but there's no excuse for the "Push It To the Limit" montage.
We finished the film, and I said to my brothers, "Guys, that's why, if you decide to become coke dealers when you get older, you don't get high on your own supply. It'll make you paranoid, and you'll get shot by a man who wears sunglasses at night,"
to which my mother replied, "Or if you're gonna do coke, just don't sell it."
exploding high five.
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[01 Aug 2006|07:50pm] |
Let's make this quick. Like, really quick. After watching Sunday's episode of "Entourage" on OnDemand and eating a quick dinner of assorted, fish-scented Thai foods, I find myself with just over an hour until "Rescue Me" begins, and I, as a productive, motivated participant in the game of life, know exactly what that means: enough time to watch a movie! The movie, in this case, is Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, which I've never seen before, and the only thing standing in my way of a passively blissful evening is the promise I made, several days ago, to update my livejournal more often. Not that anyone responded to this promise, or to the brilliant reflection on life as an increasingly regular teenager in Marin County, with words of encouragement, condemnation, or even mild amusement, but I suppose I need to learn that there are other things in the world worth just as much as attention.
Like, say, life experiences of the cinematic variety. Let me expand: two days ago, my mother and I huddled around the downstairs computer (for warmth? shelter from the bombs dropping?) and booked my plane tickets for the coming school year. I now can travel from California to Massachusetts as I please, provided that I only please to travel on several pre-specified dates, and that I don't mind using United.
The interesting (to me, at least) bit is the Holiday Combo, also known as the flights to and from home for Winter Break. Flight A, from Logan International Airport to San Francisco International, was a difficult flight to book, as there were zero direct flights available within a several day span from the airports mentioned (on United Frequent Flyer SuperSaver Miles, that is, the only kind of flights that my father allows the family to buy). We found a flight on December 19 or 20, finally, but there was a catch: I have a two hour layover in Chicago O'Hare.
Yeah, that O'Hare, the one that has played a supporting role in countless holiday movies where the main character, hoping to get somewhere for Christmas, is delayed indefinitely in Chicago and either ends up on a flight elsewhere or else has to find an alternate mode of transportation. United, here in August, gives my flight a 40% chance of reaching San Francisco on time. During my two-day snowstorm delay, I'll entertain myself with the thought that somewhere up in a corner of the room I'm in, someone is filming me and will eventually edit the footage into a heartwarming holiday story.
Flight B, right after the crushing, yet highly exciting left hook, is a sucker punch to the balls. Seriously. Blame Harvard's "unusual" schedule, the poor language skills that require me to take Spanish this year, thus necessitating my attendance at reading period classes, or my own reluctance to sit down and book December flights before the end of July, but I shall open up 2007 by boarding a flight that departs at 6:30 AM, January 1.
FADE IN: 4:30 AM, January 1, interior: Damon household
(scrabbling at door audible)
CUT TO: Close up of door
Door explodes, revealing intoxicated and energy drinked Grant Damon
GRANT
MOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMM!!!!!!!! TAKE ME TO THE AIRPORT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
FADE OUT
I'm pumped.
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