Made a soup today. From a recipe. From scratch.
AND THUS SPOKE GLORIA GAYNOR
Monday, November 29, 2010
Sunday, November 21, 2010
We were not asleep before we woke up
Copping Jay McInerney. Making myself universal, out here in what seems to be less than two-dimensional space:
NAUSEA, BY JEAN PAUL SARTRE:
Last week you fucked up a hard-boiled egg, and even at the time this seemed catastrophic in ways beyond the culinary. You failed at an empirically simple task, and that makes the egg itself a symptom of what you may now call a disease: the things happening in your mind suddenly have real life, tangible repercussions and they are serious, involving life and death matters, sustenance. You're not just "possibly emotionally starving," you're dying, physically, literally, mentally -- you no longer have the faculty to provide for yourself in any meaningful way. Proof.
In a small, irrational gesture of protest, you make several plans to go out to brunch this week, where you'll expect to spend money you don't have. In the strain of domino theory most recognizable in those 'Give a Mouse a Cookie,' books, it soon becomes clear that the lifestyle of a person who makes plans to go to brunch simply won't accommodate a tedious desk job, or homework or rehearsals. You prune events from your planner with the same discrimination as your average born-again ascetic might rid themselves of earthly possessions: all you want is time. Time at home. Time to kill. Time to simmer in your poverty, your divine decadence. Time to become this alternative -- a fabulous care-free brunch cadet, unfettered by the possibility of cooking solo, subsequently happy, subsequently not sick. You giggle a little at this terrific loophole, the active imagination. But when you run out of money two meals later and find yourself surrounded only by the loose promises you broke already and the smuggled hours you fought so hard for, it's pretty clear you don't HAVE anything to do.
This draws attention to the fact that you don't WANT to do anything.
Luckily, the Internet has various portals for watching movies not-yet-released on DVD, and you and your roommates have thrown so many parties this month that the house can always be scoured and the repetition of this task won't seem insane. Luckily, sleep is always a good option -- It's like a friendly shadow, a suggestion, a wink. Luckily, most other people around you, aside from those few who know you very well, are happy to talk in a Cockney that makes your sick pedestrian: "Yeah, this semester has been rough. I've been feeling blue, too. What's up this weekend for you?" Luckily, Sushi delivery comes straight to the door. Luckily, no place in the neighborhood seems interested in upholding America's liquor laws. Most luckily, the real embracing of cynicism -- and I mean snuggling up to the concept, becoming BOSOM BUDDIES -- enables a candor you've been wary of before; a self-referential, 'dangerous', chiefly obnoxious, self-pitying kind of gobbledegook that creeps into your writing like a thief, your voice like a bandit, your art in general like inkblots on a page. You're only a little surprised that the glibness slips into you so easy now, when previously you've always felt yourself modest and comparatively well-adjusted, at times hypersensitive to rudeness and hesitant-to-offend to the point of fault. Whatever, is what you say now, Luckily there is some instant macaroni and cheese in the cabinet. You make this, following all the instructions a to a tee, and it doesn't taste right. It just doesn't taste right.
The night stretches out like a yawn still, full moon tongue. It asks nothing of you. You have no response. Is this funny? you wonder. Perhaps this is the Infinite Jest. You can't ever muse this with any credibility though, because you haven't finished the book.
NAUSEA, BY JEAN PAUL SARTRE:
Last week you fucked up a hard-boiled egg, and even at the time this seemed catastrophic in ways beyond the culinary. You failed at an empirically simple task, and that makes the egg itself a symptom of what you may now call a disease: the things happening in your mind suddenly have real life, tangible repercussions and they are serious, involving life and death matters, sustenance. You're not just "possibly emotionally starving," you're dying, physically, literally, mentally -- you no longer have the faculty to provide for yourself in any meaningful way. Proof.
In a small, irrational gesture of protest, you make several plans to go out to brunch this week, where you'll expect to spend money you don't have. In the strain of domino theory most recognizable in those 'Give a Mouse a Cookie,' books, it soon becomes clear that the lifestyle of a person who makes plans to go to brunch simply won't accommodate a tedious desk job, or homework or rehearsals. You prune events from your planner with the same discrimination as your average born-again ascetic might rid themselves of earthly possessions: all you want is time. Time at home. Time to kill. Time to simmer in your poverty, your divine decadence. Time to become this alternative -- a fabulous care-free brunch cadet, unfettered by the possibility of cooking solo, subsequently happy, subsequently not sick. You giggle a little at this terrific loophole, the active imagination. But when you run out of money two meals later and find yourself surrounded only by the loose promises you broke already and the smuggled hours you fought so hard for, it's pretty clear you don't HAVE anything to do.
This draws attention to the fact that you don't WANT to do anything.
Luckily, the Internet has various portals for watching movies not-yet-released on DVD, and you and your roommates have thrown so many parties this month that the house can always be scoured and the repetition of this task won't seem insane. Luckily, sleep is always a good option -- It's like a friendly shadow, a suggestion, a wink. Luckily, most other people around you, aside from those few who know you very well, are happy to talk in a Cockney that makes your sick pedestrian: "Yeah, this semester has been rough. I've been feeling blue, too. What's up this weekend for you?" Luckily, Sushi delivery comes straight to the door. Luckily, no place in the neighborhood seems interested in upholding America's liquor laws. Most luckily, the real embracing of cynicism -- and I mean snuggling up to the concept, becoming BOSOM BUDDIES -- enables a candor you've been wary of before; a self-referential, 'dangerous', chiefly obnoxious, self-pitying kind of gobbledegook that creeps into your writing like a thief, your voice like a bandit, your art in general like inkblots on a page. You're only a little surprised that the glibness slips into you so easy now, when previously you've always felt yourself modest and comparatively well-adjusted, at times hypersensitive to rudeness and hesitant-to-offend to the point of fault. Whatever, is what you say now, Luckily there is some instant macaroni and cheese in the cabinet. You make this, following all the instructions a to a tee, and it doesn't taste right. It just doesn't taste right.
The night stretches out like a yawn still, full moon tongue. It asks nothing of you. You have no response. Is this funny? you wonder. Perhaps this is the Infinite Jest. You can't ever muse this with any credibility though, because you haven't finished the book.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
The Only Living Boy in New York
Here is what happened today. That’s the best way, so the only way, to begin:
I woke up at a friend’s house, early, with morning mouth and no toothbrush. The sun was rising with me when I tiptoed out the front door and down the block, eclipsed then underground while I waited for the first of two trains to take me home. I was sleepy. A little blind. Wearing the clothes from the night before, which is, as always, ‘another story’. The quotations there are glib and a little stupidly ironic. Don’t think too hard about them or the two sentences following.
I walked into my empty, chilly apartment and had some trouble breathing. Then I went to sleep. When it was time to wake up in an hour and a half, I was almost able to pretend that I’d been in my bed all night long and unusual things had happened during the previous night and day, unpredictable and unprecedented things. I set the water as hot as it could go in the shower and then, like most days, I jumped in the tub quickly and jumped right back out again because I’d burned my skin. By now the sun was high in the sky, hanging over Manhattan, but it still felt a bit like sunrise because the light was so cold and so colorful streaming down between the patches of autumn leaves in tall trees. I made breakfast, I put on some clothes, I put a few things in a bag and then made a big production of yelling ‘Shit-Shit-Shit I’m so laaaaate!’ to no one.
I wish now, already, that I’d thought to write down what I was thinking when I was thinking it during the day -- I see now, already, how even old minutes are robbed of their sincerity viewed backwards from a present mood. Right now, I listen to bluegrass and yawn and think about ways I could make this all very profound very quickly. I think about eccentric, half-baked metaphors that might service. I think about itemized lists of objects and encounters and artwork, lists that might do the work for me of shedding light on the elusive subject (bewildered fragments?) crux of this…piece. At some point today I finished Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go,’ because I have been assigned to read it for a class. I decided that if the book is as profound as it could be I like it and if it is not, I don’t. It registers that this is a stupid kind of opinion, one lacking panache and real drive, but I hold on to it anyways. I write it down now with an intention not so divorced from the ‘Shit-Shit-Shit I’m so laaaaate!’ ploy this morning -- asserting my personality in case anyone’s watching who would really enjoy It and care to say something agreeable or laugh or wave frantically at me across a train platform in concurrent response.
Here I go. I’m psyching up for the word itself. You are possibly very confused, untrusting, wary that what comes next will be presumptuous, predictable, pseudo-intellectual bullshit at best, many bad things. It is an honest thing, at least. The word is lonely. I’m exploring it in my mouth. Have you ever noticed that ‘lonely’ sounds like a swallow? Not the bird, but the gesture. It also sounds like a single fork clinking against a porcelain dish, or a solo saxophone far away, or eavesdropping on two old friends talking about something easy and great. There are a lot of things it isn’t, too, just so we’re clear -- it isn’t explicitly the two trains to get home in the morning. It isn’t directly to do with the other story, the one about the party last night. I’ll shake my head and correct you if you try to bring in the bluegrass or the sunrise or the trouble breathing. Lonely doesn’t walk around and behave logically, it doesn’t flatten or crush or do anything active, which is something I realized today, perhaps. It doesn’t make sense. It seems like it should be much older and wiser than twenty and a little girl. Mostly, lonely sags and underperforms, lonely’s impotent. It wants nothing and it’s uses are few.
I know a lot of people who claim they are lonely -- and I respect them because it isn’t an easy or socially acceptable thing to admit. In my experience, that act of admitting loneliness falls into one of two camps: 1) jolly self-deprecation/defense mechanism for single people surrounded by couples OR 2) Very Serious, Melancholic, Emo, See A Therapist. In a way, these social constructions makes perfect sense. Who wants to talk about being lonely at the dinner table? Who wants to really allow that kind of vulnerability, especially when the merit of doing so is virtually impossible to see? I could tell you I’m lonely, inactively and lamely, and there is not even the allowed hope that anything will come of it. You will know a pathetic part of my soul you perhaps already knew or didn’t want to know, necessarily, suddenly. I will have said it aloud and it will be real. But loneliness is not patently ‘curable’ or even ‘pitiable’ like another kind of problem, though I guess the former could often engender or imply the latter. In and of itself, loneliness is not an illness. It’s a religion: “I guess we’re all of us, more or less lonely and there’s no help for it” (A Cited Source).
Yet it doesn’t seem that everybody could be, especially since that vague holy grail for the lonely (okay, me) is being loved and in love and some people are those things. It’s supposedly possible to be lonely and loved and in love all at once, but this is a completely unsympathetic perspective to someone who is lonely alone, so I will speak for those I consider my people and not address these others, who we‘ll henceforth call ‘Greedy Bastards‘. If so many of Us, the Lonely Alone, shouting to empty apartments and telling no one useless stories of failed evenings, do feel folded folded folded folded up inside ourselves (this is what I feel), I guess I’m now tasked to ask, in a rallying cry, why no one’s mailing their orgy invitations or striking up heart-to-hearts with passersby. They tell me this life is an active exercise, it’s wanting, it’s having soul enough to show terror to someone else. You, if you’re like me, are so convinced you have a soul. It’s burying you, in fact. Is looking-for-love a scapegoat? A social pressure? What’s that honest hunt for a witness about, as ever, and why? So? Serious.
Not as far away, a nighttime S train rumbles up or down Franklin Avenue carrying people a short distance, some of them to a train I know for a fact isn‘t running right now. What will the poor believers in the C do when they realize they‘ve been adandoned? My roommates, returned from a weekend away, flutter papers or cough to prove they’re existing (just like me) in this big, drafty space. We must hear one another, surely. I’m listening for them, anyways.
I woke up at a friend’s house, early, with morning mouth and no toothbrush. The sun was rising with me when I tiptoed out the front door and down the block, eclipsed then underground while I waited for the first of two trains to take me home. I was sleepy. A little blind. Wearing the clothes from the night before, which is, as always, ‘another story’. The quotations there are glib and a little stupidly ironic. Don’t think too hard about them or the two sentences following.
I walked into my empty, chilly apartment and had some trouble breathing. Then I went to sleep. When it was time to wake up in an hour and a half, I was almost able to pretend that I’d been in my bed all night long and unusual things had happened during the previous night and day, unpredictable and unprecedented things. I set the water as hot as it could go in the shower and then, like most days, I jumped in the tub quickly and jumped right back out again because I’d burned my skin. By now the sun was high in the sky, hanging over Manhattan, but it still felt a bit like sunrise because the light was so cold and so colorful streaming down between the patches of autumn leaves in tall trees. I made breakfast, I put on some clothes, I put a few things in a bag and then made a big production of yelling ‘Shit-Shit-Shit I’m so laaaaate!’ to no one.
I wish now, already, that I’d thought to write down what I was thinking when I was thinking it during the day -- I see now, already, how even old minutes are robbed of their sincerity viewed backwards from a present mood. Right now, I listen to bluegrass and yawn and think about ways I could make this all very profound very quickly. I think about eccentric, half-baked metaphors that might service. I think about itemized lists of objects and encounters and artwork, lists that might do the work for me of shedding light on the elusive subject (bewildered fragments?) crux of this…piece. At some point today I finished Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go,’ because I have been assigned to read it for a class. I decided that if the book is as profound as it could be I like it and if it is not, I don’t. It registers that this is a stupid kind of opinion, one lacking panache and real drive, but I hold on to it anyways. I write it down now with an intention not so divorced from the ‘Shit-Shit-Shit I’m so laaaaate!’ ploy this morning -- asserting my personality in case anyone’s watching who would really enjoy It and care to say something agreeable or laugh or wave frantically at me across a train platform in concurrent response.
Here I go. I’m psyching up for the word itself. You are possibly very confused, untrusting, wary that what comes next will be presumptuous, predictable, pseudo-intellectual bullshit at best, many bad things. It is an honest thing, at least. The word is lonely. I’m exploring it in my mouth. Have you ever noticed that ‘lonely’ sounds like a swallow? Not the bird, but the gesture. It also sounds like a single fork clinking against a porcelain dish, or a solo saxophone far away, or eavesdropping on two old friends talking about something easy and great. There are a lot of things it isn’t, too, just so we’re clear -- it isn’t explicitly the two trains to get home in the morning. It isn’t directly to do with the other story, the one about the party last night. I’ll shake my head and correct you if you try to bring in the bluegrass or the sunrise or the trouble breathing. Lonely doesn’t walk around and behave logically, it doesn’t flatten or crush or do anything active, which is something I realized today, perhaps. It doesn’t make sense. It seems like it should be much older and wiser than twenty and a little girl. Mostly, lonely sags and underperforms, lonely’s impotent. It wants nothing and it’s uses are few.
I know a lot of people who claim they are lonely -- and I respect them because it isn’t an easy or socially acceptable thing to admit. In my experience, that act of admitting loneliness falls into one of two camps: 1) jolly self-deprecation/defense mechanism for single people surrounded by couples OR 2) Very Serious, Melancholic, Emo, See A Therapist. In a way, these social constructions makes perfect sense. Who wants to talk about being lonely at the dinner table? Who wants to really allow that kind of vulnerability, especially when the merit of doing so is virtually impossible to see? I could tell you I’m lonely, inactively and lamely, and there is not even the allowed hope that anything will come of it. You will know a pathetic part of my soul you perhaps already knew or didn’t want to know, necessarily, suddenly. I will have said it aloud and it will be real. But loneliness is not patently ‘curable’ or even ‘pitiable’ like another kind of problem, though I guess the former could often engender or imply the latter. In and of itself, loneliness is not an illness. It’s a religion: “I guess we’re all of us, more or less lonely and there’s no help for it” (A Cited Source).
Yet it doesn’t seem that everybody could be, especially since that vague holy grail for the lonely (okay, me) is being loved and in love and some people are those things. It’s supposedly possible to be lonely and loved and in love all at once, but this is a completely unsympathetic perspective to someone who is lonely alone, so I will speak for those I consider my people and not address these others, who we‘ll henceforth call ‘Greedy Bastards‘. If so many of Us, the Lonely Alone, shouting to empty apartments and telling no one useless stories of failed evenings, do feel folded folded folded folded up inside ourselves (this is what I feel), I guess I’m now tasked to ask, in a rallying cry, why no one’s mailing their orgy invitations or striking up heart-to-hearts with passersby. They tell me this life is an active exercise, it’s wanting, it’s having soul enough to show terror to someone else. You, if you’re like me, are so convinced you have a soul. It’s burying you, in fact. Is looking-for-love a scapegoat? A social pressure? What’s that honest hunt for a witness about, as ever, and why? So? Serious.
Not as far away, a nighttime S train rumbles up or down Franklin Avenue carrying people a short distance, some of them to a train I know for a fact isn‘t running right now. What will the poor believers in the C do when they realize they‘ve been adandoned? My roommates, returned from a weekend away, flutter papers or cough to prove they’re existing (just like me) in this big, drafty space. We must hear one another, surely. I’m listening for them, anyways.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Interview with a Celebrity
Prologue:
Why now? Why here? Why THE INTERNET? Why is your room a mess? Why Modest Mouse? Why Joan Didion? Why toothpaste, why cigarettes, scissors, the words 'yes' and 'no', why frayed ragamuffin 'chic', why snacks -- so many snacks, specifically -- why make-up? Round your lips and try to taste the flatness in the universe's most useless word: wuh-huh-ayyyyyy. Why don't you look up how to say 'why' in other languages, buddy? That might be more inclusive. Undoubtedly more poignant, somehow.
The movie Notting Hill and a Joan Didion essay on Hollywood and people wearing shoes bound up in plastic bags on the subway have got me thinking about every single one of you, which is to say, myself. What's everyone doing when they're zoning out or into something, regarding objects passing? I have never run into anyone subconsciously. I also don't read UsWeekly, but that's probably because I'm too poor to buy magazines. How many therapists per capita? I know we can't see the same things. There's no way. But if I am all of this, what might you be?
Where else would I live but inside of my head?
Why now? Why here? Why THE INTERNET? Why is your room a mess? Why Modest Mouse? Why Joan Didion? Why toothpaste, why cigarettes, scissors, the words 'yes' and 'no', why frayed ragamuffin 'chic', why snacks -- so many snacks, specifically -- why make-up? Round your lips and try to taste the flatness in the universe's most useless word: wuh-huh-ayyyyyy. Why don't you look up how to say 'why' in other languages, buddy? That might be more inclusive. Undoubtedly more poignant, somehow.
The movie Notting Hill and a Joan Didion essay on Hollywood and people wearing shoes bound up in plastic bags on the subway have got me thinking about every single one of you, which is to say, myself. What's everyone doing when they're zoning out or into something, regarding objects passing? I have never run into anyone subconsciously. I also don't read UsWeekly, but that's probably because I'm too poor to buy magazines. How many therapists per capita? I know we can't see the same things. There's no way. But if I am all of this, what might you be?
Where else would I live but inside of my head?
Saturday, October 2, 2010
Say Hello to Steve Perry for me if you ever get to heaven!!!
Why You Might Miss High-School:
You might miss high-school because somebody was always coming to pick you up there. You might miss high school because expectations were so low on Friday nights. You might miss high school because even the looming threats and things to look forward to were still all at heart kitschy attempts, dry runs, glib rehearsals. You might miss high school because once upon a time you had a bed that knew you, I mean your body across planes of time, better than anyone else ever has or will know you.
I don’t miss high school. It ended three years ago, and it wasn’t better than the years since. I have already begun to remember it in wide, un-specific swathes. Long hallways are contracting -- soon Montgomery Blair High will all have taken place along one fuzzy aisle with three motivational posters repeated every few paces, like a cartoon backdrop.
You don’t miss high school because it is way, way too late. That is not even an acceptable thing to think aloud at this point in your life. You like finding your own way home in the dark, and fucking up with panache and gravity. You like your independence, you love your independence, the things around you are evidence of choices you have made. If you don’t like what you see in a grand sense years out of high-school, the ball’s in your court. And that is so fabulous, right.
Why You Won’t Sleep With That Guy:
Because these are the only possible outcomes you predict:
a) Lying there, you will be so not a mystery. Just a person, making a person’s sounds, in a person’s skin. He will see this and you will lose something important.
b) Lying there, you’ll trip green and go, go go. This will be humiliating for everyone. Your friends will make the worst faces and you will feel powerless and small.
c) Lying there, you’ll know this was never going to be the answer. You have Lied, Lying there.
d) Lying there, you’ll get your answer: no.
But Actually, Why:
Recently, I have kind of started believing that I’m smarter than everyone else I know. I am, after all, reading Infinite Jest. I read Infinite Jest on the subway. Other people around me read those Stiegg Larrson books that dominate airport bookstores.
I know this is a toxic (and more importantly, wrong) worldview. I know with all of some sleeping part of my intellect, really, that there are many people in the world who are more intelligent than I will ever be. I even know some of these people. I presume the others are scientists and philosophers and political analysts. But lately I’m preoccupied with this duality of rational mind and ego; the chasm-ic difference between what I find logical and what I, fully knowing ‘what is logical’, believe nonetheless, is unsettling in a lot of ways. I think the simplest way to put it is that there’s a war going on in my mind and It is the root of every problem I have ever had.
I am selfish, to actually go around judging people for what they read on the daily commute. I am selfish also to spend time trying to convince some imagined audience that I’m actually a good person, and I didn’t really just think that mean thing about the little old lady and her copy of Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Here is my selfish theory about the selfishness: people like Lady Gaga and Beyonce who (I assume) have the kind of jet-propelled egos which are consistently opportunistic and usually able to get them whatever they want are not like me; I am not like them. I don’t have the clout to back up my insane self-involvement with action -- instead, the part of my mind that would be spending energy on living up to incredible standards is too busy berating the other for dreaming big (and ugly) in the first place. I have a rotisserie inner monologue going at all times that volleys between the bi-polar and non-productive extremes: ‘I am great’ and ‘I shouldn’t say that.’ This does not make me a good person. I don’t really believe it makes me a bad person either, but at best and honest assessment it makes me lazy, and when traced backwards through everything I whine about it makes me insufferably unsympathetic. People can only whine, tolerably, if they’re doing things. I am patently useless. Stop reading my BLOG!. Stop all the clocks! What I want, actually, is help: how does one ‘get out of one’s head’? A man on the street in Bedford the other day told me that the mind and the emotions were good servants but terrible masters. He smiled at me and called me lovely before making a pitch for his yoga studio. Why didn’t I ask him, ‘what else do I serve?!’?
In David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech to Kenyon College, he talks at length about My Problem (and I see the irony, don’t worry). It stems (he says) from the admittedly unverifiable but totally rational perspective that one’s problems can only ever be one’s own because one has no context besides one. I think, therefore I am, and therefore whatever I think about you is true. But DFW argues that a liberal arts college education is principally for the derailment of this mentality; that education is all about broadening the mind which is itself, really all about empathy. Acting is also all about empathy. Falling in love is all about empathy. I have lived many years thinking I was empathetic but it’s come to strike me that there’s no way my definition of the word (which is more like concern) is in line with the stuff of true-blue, wanna-get-to-know-you, can-draw-from-many-contexts, well-rounded-human interest. We train ourselves to think this way, he says. And it’s difficult. It’s exhausting, I say, and I’ve tried/I think I’ve tried/No, I’ve really tried/Are you mocking me? And now I’m worried that the extension of my inability to change is actually suicide; that if my definition of the word trying (which is more like teething) won’t take me anywhere, I will simply coil in on myself many times over like Uroburos and rot.
Paraphrasing Tennessee Williams: we use each other, and that’s what we think of as love.
And I think, there must be a way, surely, to explode outward. Even though David Foster Wallace killed himself two years ago, I think.
New Years’ Resolutions:
I want to be a friend, and thus in the world, and thus in the moment, and thus not alone.
I don’t want to want to have Already Lied There Without Actually Lying There.
I want to watch strangers pass and think nothing.
Because it’s easy to bitch about not being in love, and feeling unwanted. It’s easy to feel thrilled and chilled by one’s own capacity for darkness. What’s terrifying (and, I suspect, ultimately an antidote to negative love vibes and general malaise) is forcing deadweight into productivity and forcing self-pity and congratulation into real, absolute care. That is art. That is also how to become great.
I.
Think.
And P.S (Because where would we be without a Peter Pan Complex?):
The Ultimate Guy from way-back-when, from whence sprang all drugs, most illicit nights in cars and aggravated hormones, political subversity, THAT GUY, was on the C train with me leaving the city just now. He was just out of appropriate yelling-range for a crowded car. The girl he was with saw me staring and I quietly begged her to nudge him so I could say something but she didn’t, he didn’t, they got off at Hoyt and I watched them go and I thought profound thoughts.
You might miss high-school because somebody was always coming to pick you up there. You might miss high school because expectations were so low on Friday nights. You might miss high school because even the looming threats and things to look forward to were still all at heart kitschy attempts, dry runs, glib rehearsals. You might miss high school because once upon a time you had a bed that knew you, I mean your body across planes of time, better than anyone else ever has or will know you.
I don’t miss high school. It ended three years ago, and it wasn’t better than the years since. I have already begun to remember it in wide, un-specific swathes. Long hallways are contracting -- soon Montgomery Blair High will all have taken place along one fuzzy aisle with three motivational posters repeated every few paces, like a cartoon backdrop.
You don’t miss high school because it is way, way too late. That is not even an acceptable thing to think aloud at this point in your life. You like finding your own way home in the dark, and fucking up with panache and gravity. You like your independence, you love your independence, the things around you are evidence of choices you have made. If you don’t like what you see in a grand sense years out of high-school, the ball’s in your court. And that is so fabulous, right.
Why You Won’t Sleep With That Guy:
Because these are the only possible outcomes you predict:
a) Lying there, you will be so not a mystery. Just a person, making a person’s sounds, in a person’s skin. He will see this and you will lose something important.
b) Lying there, you’ll trip green and go, go go. This will be humiliating for everyone. Your friends will make the worst faces and you will feel powerless and small.
c) Lying there, you’ll know this was never going to be the answer. You have Lied, Lying there.
d) Lying there, you’ll get your answer: no.
But Actually, Why:
Recently, I have kind of started believing that I’m smarter than everyone else I know. I am, after all, reading Infinite Jest. I read Infinite Jest on the subway. Other people around me read those Stiegg Larrson books that dominate airport bookstores.
I know this is a toxic (and more importantly, wrong) worldview. I know with all of some sleeping part of my intellect, really, that there are many people in the world who are more intelligent than I will ever be. I even know some of these people. I presume the others are scientists and philosophers and political analysts. But lately I’m preoccupied with this duality of rational mind and ego; the chasm-ic difference between what I find logical and what I, fully knowing ‘what is logical’, believe nonetheless, is unsettling in a lot of ways. I think the simplest way to put it is that there’s a war going on in my mind and It is the root of every problem I have ever had.
I am selfish, to actually go around judging people for what they read on the daily commute. I am selfish also to spend time trying to convince some imagined audience that I’m actually a good person, and I didn’t really just think that mean thing about the little old lady and her copy of Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Here is my selfish theory about the selfishness: people like Lady Gaga and Beyonce who (I assume) have the kind of jet-propelled egos which are consistently opportunistic and usually able to get them whatever they want are not like me; I am not like them. I don’t have the clout to back up my insane self-involvement with action -- instead, the part of my mind that would be spending energy on living up to incredible standards is too busy berating the other for dreaming big (and ugly) in the first place. I have a rotisserie inner monologue going at all times that volleys between the bi-polar and non-productive extremes: ‘I am great’ and ‘I shouldn’t say that.’ This does not make me a good person. I don’t really believe it makes me a bad person either, but at best and honest assessment it makes me lazy, and when traced backwards through everything I whine about it makes me insufferably unsympathetic. People can only whine, tolerably, if they’re doing things. I am patently useless. Stop reading my BLOG!. Stop all the clocks! What I want, actually, is help: how does one ‘get out of one’s head’? A man on the street in Bedford the other day told me that the mind and the emotions were good servants but terrible masters. He smiled at me and called me lovely before making a pitch for his yoga studio. Why didn’t I ask him, ‘what else do I serve?!’?
In David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech to Kenyon College, he talks at length about My Problem (and I see the irony, don’t worry). It stems (he says) from the admittedly unverifiable but totally rational perspective that one’s problems can only ever be one’s own because one has no context besides one. I think, therefore I am, and therefore whatever I think about you is true. But DFW argues that a liberal arts college education is principally for the derailment of this mentality; that education is all about broadening the mind which is itself, really all about empathy. Acting is also all about empathy. Falling in love is all about empathy. I have lived many years thinking I was empathetic but it’s come to strike me that there’s no way my definition of the word (which is more like concern) is in line with the stuff of true-blue, wanna-get-to-know-you, can-draw-from-many-contexts, well-rounded-human interest. We train ourselves to think this way, he says. And it’s difficult. It’s exhausting, I say, and I’ve tried/I think I’ve tried/No, I’ve really tried/Are you mocking me? And now I’m worried that the extension of my inability to change is actually suicide; that if my definition of the word trying (which is more like teething) won’t take me anywhere, I will simply coil in on myself many times over like Uroburos and rot.
Paraphrasing Tennessee Williams: we use each other, and that’s what we think of as love.
And I think, there must be a way, surely, to explode outward. Even though David Foster Wallace killed himself two years ago, I think.
New Years’ Resolutions:
I want to be a friend, and thus in the world, and thus in the moment, and thus not alone.
I don’t want to want to have Already Lied There Without Actually Lying There.
I want to watch strangers pass and think nothing.
Because it’s easy to bitch about not being in love, and feeling unwanted. It’s easy to feel thrilled and chilled by one’s own capacity for darkness. What’s terrifying (and, I suspect, ultimately an antidote to negative love vibes and general malaise) is forcing deadweight into productivity and forcing self-pity and congratulation into real, absolute care. That is art. That is also how to become great.
I.
Think.
And P.S (Because where would we be without a Peter Pan Complex?):
The Ultimate Guy from way-back-when, from whence sprang all drugs, most illicit nights in cars and aggravated hormones, political subversity, THAT GUY, was on the C train with me leaving the city just now. He was just out of appropriate yelling-range for a crowded car. The girl he was with saw me staring and I quietly begged her to nudge him so I could say something but she didn’t, he didn’t, they got off at Hoyt and I watched them go and I thought profound thoughts.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Gu-logy
The heat today, behind my sunglasses, looks like how I imagine the 1970s. It’s sort of sepia and mean. I’ve been trying to feel (or explain what it is I feel) for a few days now. Insides like a low tumble dry.
Somebody who always looked like he was going to die young did. I think. It’s hard to tell. It’s a rumor. I no longer know him and my only real contact is Facebook, but a google search of his name doesn’t produce any useful results.
He is a person I can remember a lot about, in some ways:
-a very distinct leathery smell, mixed with some kind of soap or unassuming cologne.
-the sound of the same leather, rubbing the way leather does against angular bodies
-rogue-isms. This person was a bona fide rogue. Gentle swaying fingers that knew a lot of things and moved together, long hugs, sleepy eyes, winks.
I grew out of this person. He was one of very few people I think of this way. I watched him (as much as ‘watched’ is ‘knew for a while, left for a while, came back and knew for a while again‘) shrink into jackets that weren’t actually getting bigger. The second time I knew him he was honest, and older, and vulnerable. He told me a lot of secrets I didn’t really want to know but liked hearing anyways. He had a chip in his tooth from a drinking accident, and textbook addictions. He was taking classes at a community college and getting jazzed about philosophy. We talked about the meaning of life like only very naïve people can once, on the phone, for hours into the night. Now I’m going to make up something that happened between us. I say ‘make up’ because I want it to be understood that I’m already warping what was, and it’s important you know this because my friend is dead and so can’t defend himself:
“How long are you going to be away for?” (Him)
“Well, a semester, probably.”
“But New York’s not that far away.”
“Yeah.”
“I mean, it’s not that hard to visit.”
“Yup, that’s true.”
“Aww, you sound so cute.”
“Whaaaaaat?”
“Oh no.”
‘Whaaaaaat?”
“Well I’m a little worried now. I really like you, and the last time I really liked someone I got really hurt.”
“Well, we’re friends!”
“Yeah.”
Something something, something something. And maybe I should feel even worse about that call. Maybe once I figure out just how he went I’ll comb memory again to look for ‘signs’. Every mistake is fatal, eventually.
We went on a date, that second time around. Saw a movie. Had a meal. I was hyperconscious of how we looked together (of that, I am ashamed) and he could tell. Leaving the theatre I can’t recall if he said he wanted to see me again or drive me home or what, but I remember what I said:
“Look [it began….] -- I’m in a really weird place right now, so we’re going to have to take this really, really slow. You know?” When I said this, I did not know what I meant. He did. He smiled a very wise smile, and said:
“Okay. I just like you. That’s all.”
And we hugged. And I didn’t watch him walk away, because I was too relieved.
The first time around.
I had the biggest crush.
And I was jealous.
I was high on suddenly being pretty and talented and ogled in the drama department. He was one of those bizarre aberrations in high school theatre, the Dude technically too cool for these shenanigans with the face and Friday Night History of someone ten years graduated. He was a legend, and a presumed whore, and a flirt. He used to give joke ‘butt massages’ to another friend of mine (with whom he also flirted) and all the freshmen and sophomore girls hovered around him like gnats. He liked me, and I loved that he liked me. There were a few cast parties in memory when he’d be near by during all the PG fun, and I’d smell his leather, and we’d make eyes. I sat on his lap for the entire duration of the movie “This is Spinal Tap” once, reclined kind of awkwardly. He gave me a rose that night but I left it on the hostess’ piano. By accident.
He was still sleazing around a lot after his own graduation, and though there were two years between us he still seemed to show up at all the drama functions when I was gone, too. But for all the time he seemed to be around, there was a lot people seemed not to know about him. Once I overheard him mention that he and his Dad had lived in this other girls’ basement for a while. I asked why. He shrugged.
“They had a basement,” he said.
Gu Khalsa was a good guy. He had heart and soul and genuine-seeming interest in other people.
I worry about taking responsibility for commemorating someone I feel I was cruel to, someone I haven’t spoken to in a long while. This was the friend who de-friended me on Facebook at some point in the recent past, and from that small thing I have read in fifty larger images. They are all deeply narcissistic so I won’t write them down.
I think what your memory elects to preserve intact is important by default; I think what we remember makes us metaphorically enormous. And I’d like to think that by nature of being so far detached but still so concerned this “eulogy” is proof that people don’t die when they’ve had friends, at least not immediately. Now you know, is the idea. Tell sad stories of the deaths of kings. High-school greasers.
It’s not that I would change the past, necessarily, given the opportunity. I’m not sure we were meant to sail out beyond a mediocre date and an odd-shaped love or neurotic freak-isms in common, I’m not sure we were. Let me try a little harder to articulate what I feel about this thing that was put down and deserted, this thing to which I cannot return to. Every day I walk around thinking I haven’t made choices, thinking my real life will start any minute and It will be better than even the pale, interesting goodness of the times before because It will explode like a star with opportunities to be strong, and honest, and loved, most of all.
But on earth, you were right, Gu. New York isn’t that far away.
And I did choose.
Somebody who always looked like he was going to die young did. I think. It’s hard to tell. It’s a rumor. I no longer know him and my only real contact is Facebook, but a google search of his name doesn’t produce any useful results.
He is a person I can remember a lot about, in some ways:
-a very distinct leathery smell, mixed with some kind of soap or unassuming cologne.
-the sound of the same leather, rubbing the way leather does against angular bodies
-rogue-isms. This person was a bona fide rogue. Gentle swaying fingers that knew a lot of things and moved together, long hugs, sleepy eyes, winks.
I grew out of this person. He was one of very few people I think of this way. I watched him (as much as ‘watched’ is ‘knew for a while, left for a while, came back and knew for a while again‘) shrink into jackets that weren’t actually getting bigger. The second time I knew him he was honest, and older, and vulnerable. He told me a lot of secrets I didn’t really want to know but liked hearing anyways. He had a chip in his tooth from a drinking accident, and textbook addictions. He was taking classes at a community college and getting jazzed about philosophy. We talked about the meaning of life like only very naïve people can once, on the phone, for hours into the night. Now I’m going to make up something that happened between us. I say ‘make up’ because I want it to be understood that I’m already warping what was, and it’s important you know this because my friend is dead and so can’t defend himself:
“How long are you going to be away for?” (Him)
“Well, a semester, probably.”
“But New York’s not that far away.”
“Yeah.”
“I mean, it’s not that hard to visit.”
“Yup, that’s true.”
“Aww, you sound so cute.”
“Whaaaaaat?”
“Oh no.”
‘Whaaaaaat?”
“Well I’m a little worried now. I really like you, and the last time I really liked someone I got really hurt.”
“Well, we’re friends!”
“Yeah.”
Something something, something something. And maybe I should feel even worse about that call. Maybe once I figure out just how he went I’ll comb memory again to look for ‘signs’. Every mistake is fatal, eventually.
We went on a date, that second time around. Saw a movie. Had a meal. I was hyperconscious of how we looked together (of that, I am ashamed) and he could tell. Leaving the theatre I can’t recall if he said he wanted to see me again or drive me home or what, but I remember what I said:
“Look [it began….] -- I’m in a really weird place right now, so we’re going to have to take this really, really slow. You know?” When I said this, I did not know what I meant. He did. He smiled a very wise smile, and said:
“Okay. I just like you. That’s all.”
And we hugged. And I didn’t watch him walk away, because I was too relieved.
The first time around.
I had the biggest crush.
And I was jealous.
I was high on suddenly being pretty and talented and ogled in the drama department. He was one of those bizarre aberrations in high school theatre, the Dude technically too cool for these shenanigans with the face and Friday Night History of someone ten years graduated. He was a legend, and a presumed whore, and a flirt. He used to give joke ‘butt massages’ to another friend of mine (with whom he also flirted) and all the freshmen and sophomore girls hovered around him like gnats. He liked me, and I loved that he liked me. There were a few cast parties in memory when he’d be near by during all the PG fun, and I’d smell his leather, and we’d make eyes. I sat on his lap for the entire duration of the movie “This is Spinal Tap” once, reclined kind of awkwardly. He gave me a rose that night but I left it on the hostess’ piano. By accident.
He was still sleazing around a lot after his own graduation, and though there were two years between us he still seemed to show up at all the drama functions when I was gone, too. But for all the time he seemed to be around, there was a lot people seemed not to know about him. Once I overheard him mention that he and his Dad had lived in this other girls’ basement for a while. I asked why. He shrugged.
“They had a basement,” he said.
Gu Khalsa was a good guy. He had heart and soul and genuine-seeming interest in other people.
I worry about taking responsibility for commemorating someone I feel I was cruel to, someone I haven’t spoken to in a long while. This was the friend who de-friended me on Facebook at some point in the recent past, and from that small thing I have read in fifty larger images. They are all deeply narcissistic so I won’t write them down.
I think what your memory elects to preserve intact is important by default; I think what we remember makes us metaphorically enormous. And I’d like to think that by nature of being so far detached but still so concerned this “eulogy” is proof that people don’t die when they’ve had friends, at least not immediately. Now you know, is the idea. Tell sad stories of the deaths of kings. High-school greasers.
It’s not that I would change the past, necessarily, given the opportunity. I’m not sure we were meant to sail out beyond a mediocre date and an odd-shaped love or neurotic freak-isms in common, I’m not sure we were. Let me try a little harder to articulate what I feel about this thing that was put down and deserted, this thing to which I cannot return to. Every day I walk around thinking I haven’t made choices, thinking my real life will start any minute and It will be better than even the pale, interesting goodness of the times before because It will explode like a star with opportunities to be strong, and honest, and loved, most of all.
But on earth, you were right, Gu. New York isn’t that far away.
And I did choose.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
MY WEEKEND:
I keep meeting strangers. It's very surreal. I think there might be something in the air these days that walks and talks like good karma. This revelation comes in tandem, of course, with a lot more time spent in transit between Brooklyn and Manhattan, and a lot more time spent at parties thrown by students of the New School, and a lot more time spent gunning down fading summer afternoons in Union Square Park alone. Still, I find myself in the unusual position of having to convince The Rational Brain (Martha) that it's all a coincidence and there is really nothing holy at all about the man yelling hooey from the Bible's back-pages up and down Fourteenth Street on a Saturday. Nor is there anything profound about the man beside him (they seem to be friends?!) who's trying to convince every single woman in the park to sit on his face for 'big laughs'.
I went to see a friend's show this weekend, and it made me sad. It was supposed to, on the one hand, and on the other I was in that weirdly vulnerable mood that sometimes steals in on Saturdays -- the sun was shining, and beautiful couples seemed to be congregating on every corner, and I was awkwardly hemming and hawing through an intermission where I realized I didn't have enough conversation to string between fifteen friends and ten minutes. After the play I went to the park where I watched a man I'd once given my phone number to seduce and destroy some other hot young thing, and then the sun was setting straight into my eyes like a fire, like a brilliant cracked egg. I went underground, feeling morose, and someone complimented me on my shoes, which is to say, Wagner filled the air and small cherubs danced from between cracks in the mosaic and filled the world with fairy dust. And no, no one was ever lonely again. At Franklin Avenue, an art collective was putting up murals all along Eastern Parkway when I got off the train.
That night, I went with some friends to a patently Weird Party, and met a personal trainer and a Pilates teacher and a bunch of other people crouched under the insulation of an attic. Someones and Strangers. I tried halfheartedly to make sleepy eyes at a loud person, but the evening wanted to end in an overpriced cab around 4am, sleepy roommates drunching on glorified Easy Mac and smiling at the wood paneled walls that weren't bouncing with stupid comments or spilled tequila, were silent, belonging to us. We watch Dazed and Confused, and a few episodes of Freaks and Geeks, and I weep with jealousy over the memoirs of Pamela des Barres as I fall asleep reading. Before I really enter Lala Land I register feeling nostalgic for high school, when days were long and pointless but discernibly and objectively hilarious. Not always, but most of the time.
And on Sunday, Someone I already Knew agrees with me about Annie Hall being a terrifically optimistic movie, actually, and she articulates it loads better than I ever have: because the beautiful part about life is actually transience and if there is any kind of proof for true love it must be in the fact that perfectly happy, complicated, wonderful relationships fail where others with the exact same ingredients can succeed. We sit and talk about love and existential crises while rolling around on a studio floor, leaving something due Monday abandoned.
At a dinner meeting, I am asked 'what I want to do with my art', and somehow manage to concoct something. I realize only once I've said it aloud that the mission is so so so right, even if it's a little pretentiously worded: "I want everyone to find the hilarity and lovability in their neuroses, flaws and weirdness."
And that's the end. This has all finished happening. It's Monday now. Writing it down it doesn't read like God. Maybe that's the bizarre thing, actually.
I went to see a friend's show this weekend, and it made me sad. It was supposed to, on the one hand, and on the other I was in that weirdly vulnerable mood that sometimes steals in on Saturdays -- the sun was shining, and beautiful couples seemed to be congregating on every corner, and I was awkwardly hemming and hawing through an intermission where I realized I didn't have enough conversation to string between fifteen friends and ten minutes. After the play I went to the park where I watched a man I'd once given my phone number to seduce and destroy some other hot young thing, and then the sun was setting straight into my eyes like a fire, like a brilliant cracked egg. I went underground, feeling morose, and someone complimented me on my shoes, which is to say, Wagner filled the air and small cherubs danced from between cracks in the mosaic and filled the world with fairy dust. And no, no one was ever lonely again. At Franklin Avenue, an art collective was putting up murals all along Eastern Parkway when I got off the train.
That night, I went with some friends to a patently Weird Party, and met a personal trainer and a Pilates teacher and a bunch of other people crouched under the insulation of an attic. Someones and Strangers. I tried halfheartedly to make sleepy eyes at a loud person, but the evening wanted to end in an overpriced cab around 4am, sleepy roommates drunching on glorified Easy Mac and smiling at the wood paneled walls that weren't bouncing with stupid comments or spilled tequila, were silent, belonging to us. We watch Dazed and Confused, and a few episodes of Freaks and Geeks, and I weep with jealousy over the memoirs of Pamela des Barres as I fall asleep reading. Before I really enter Lala Land I register feeling nostalgic for high school, when days were long and pointless but discernibly and objectively hilarious. Not always, but most of the time.
And on Sunday, Someone I already Knew agrees with me about Annie Hall being a terrifically optimistic movie, actually, and she articulates it loads better than I ever have: because the beautiful part about life is actually transience and if there is any kind of proof for true love it must be in the fact that perfectly happy, complicated, wonderful relationships fail where others with the exact same ingredients can succeed. We sit and talk about love and existential crises while rolling around on a studio floor, leaving something due Monday abandoned.
At a dinner meeting, I am asked 'what I want to do with my art', and somehow manage to concoct something. I realize only once I've said it aloud that the mission is so so so right, even if it's a little pretentiously worded: "I want everyone to find the hilarity and lovability in their neuroses, flaws and weirdness."
And that's the end. This has all finished happening. It's Monday now. Writing it down it doesn't read like God. Maybe that's the bizarre thing, actually.
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