WHAT New Year’s resolutions? It has worked!
I have become the person I always wanted to be. Days when my self-esteem feels critically low, I can tear through the virtual catalogue of activities, ideas, experiences, idiosyncrasies and interests that I’ve deemed the collective elements of My Life and smile a little because they look exactly how I’d like them to. I’m blowing up singular inside of a cliché: a fabulous single city girl, Brooklyn hipster on tiptoe, intellectually engaged inside a generation that is most devastating where it is least interested. I tell people I am an actor and a writer. I tell people I like Paul Thomas Anderson movies. I sometimes wear crazy clothes into the world and bask in the myriad reactions. I like recreational drugs. I like all the quotes I remembered intentionally for the purpose of putting them in my Facebook profile. Even having a therapist falls neatly and sweetly into the great tome of Who I want to be SLASH (by default) Who I want you to think I am. I am a synthesis of contradictions. I have done the synthesizing work. I own a synthesizer.
For reasons (I’m not sure exactly what they are, only that they exist), having a self that is basically PRODUCT is where the Western World begins. Other people must want you for things in order for you to succeed. Thus, having a self that seems unique in a constellation of billions is critical, especially for artists and thinkers and people who aspire to have their faces rendered in marble somewhere. That’s Darwinian. And having a self that’s constantly engaged with seeking out and reassuring other idiosyncratic, yet somewhat like-minded selves is how we communicate and how we find love, which is also pretty Darwinian, which is to say a habit and to do with Mark Zuckerberg. The idea that preoccupies this Thursday – while I try to avoid serial commas and listen to must-be Neil Young -- is the contradiction that is my synthesizing work, my neat catalogue: I have always thought I was such a loophole, such a success at being a freakish individual even in worlds and fields devised of other freakish individuals. I’ve always believed I was at least special, even when sixteen taught me about boys etc and twenty taught me to feel abundantly horrible on solo Friday nights. But to formula, succeeding at being unique in this world means only that I’ve made myself marketable (or more troublingly, I labor under the delusion that I’ve made myself marketable), and that must be a hollow thing, and limited. How can I really be this fabulous entity of sensible contradictions, this living thing inside a cliché, if I am 1) Made. Working at it, at least by even thinking these thoughts at all 2) clearly kowtowing, even if unconsciously, to some higher social order? Maybe that doesn’t make sense. I’m driving at the hollowness, stay with me on the hollowness. As of this Thursday, I no longer believe I am “successfully unique”, which is to say, a success. The idea of being “unique” is corrupted by the fact that the world I live in asks everyone to rise to oddity like excellence. The idea that I meditate on my own uniqueness and consciously praise myself for becoming an idea of uniqueness that I (or, someone like Rupert Murdoch) has engineered is also zany, and has very little to do with my real life. So. This leaves me with thesis questions: Why does my society (which I question only as an extension of myself) ask me to synthesize my contradictions? Why am I packaged? Who wants that? What is it to be unique, or special, without agenda – impossible? And, like, you know, what does it all MEAN?
BITE SIZING:
I’m spending New Year’s with my mom this year, for reasons. This will be the first year in at least seven when I will not spend the hours preceding January 1st drinking someone else’s alcohol and being cheerfully loud about things that are forty percent sad. Two New Years’ have passed, in When Harry Met Sally fashion, where I kissed a boy on or around that vital minute.
ASIDE: Now I don’t remember magnifying those midnight kisses to oracle, then predicting signs for how the year to follow might unfold. I sort of wish I had. I could at least chart my progress to present, sitting pretty with some distant age, and decide if the 525,600 minutes times nine (or whatever) indicated a God anywhere. Coulda, woulda, shoulda. But to reiterate, do you see how I catalogued just there? I’m imagining that these disparate events make a whole somehow, and that the whole has analyze-able meaning and the work of analyzing means something and says something and makes me. But why should it? This is why New Year’s is important to the self. New Year’s is random, just like the universe. ASIDE OVER.
I have just told my friends I won’t be attending the New Year’s party at my own apartment in New York that has been “in plans” for three weeks. I need to spend the time with my mama. I don’t need to spend the time with my mama, and the real reasons (alluded to earlier) are these: 1) I don’t want to drive to New York and back 2) I know exactly how this party will go. It will be awesome, and not anything else. These are my best friends in all their hoarde glory, and I know them and they’re safe and there is nothing unpredictable about them moving around in a big group, just like there is nothing unpredictable about your friends or Barack Obama's or Tim Gunn's friends moving around in a big group, and this is neither good nor bad.
And I will be upset to have missed this party. I am an asshole for how I handled backing out. I will be hanging out with my mama, and she will fall asleep at 11:13 and I will drink a bottle of wine alone. And what did I feel then…Ta-da!
If you were interested, I could accurately predict most other things. Such as the future.
The reason this is – or seems to be – is that I feel sometimes like I know my world too thoroughly, which is a complicated disaster and I will explain why. I feel like I know every avenue readily available to me, and I can imagine its fall-out in the short term and the crazy long-term. I am probably not right about any of it but that doesn’t matter at all, because this is my mind, I am a know-it-all, and I think [therefore] I am. I’ve come to a point where I am backing away from good things, things that belong in a catalogue to make me, because they’re too familiar. This is like they’re alien. This makes me a stranger to myself. What do I want? Kicker.
Here comes the hollowness again, and I think it’s involved with the unnameable pressure and unnameable guilt stitched into the previous paragraph. I want to take responsibility for my actions and feelings, but let’s say the only thing to measure an authentic kind of self is Want. I collapse further into the ashes of my synthesis. I have no imaginary ideal, dramatic drop-kick New Years. I don’t want anything, because I have become the person I wanted to be. This person, then, is not a person. I am dead or a robot. It has not worked.
TRAPPED IN A BOX OF TREMENDOUS SIZE
Sometimes people tell me I have high expectations and I have trouble understanding what they mean; it strikes me that one can only either have expectations or not have expectations, and I don’t comprehend at all what it would be to live like the latter. Following the twisted logic that not wanting to do anything for New Year’s is the second reason why I am not a person, it stands to reason that maybe my Want is just dull and missable. I feel like I mostly expect everything to improve, eventually or all the time. I expect that everything about this life has potential to be better. I spend time thinking about vague ways in which my life could be better: feelings, ideas. And in a vague ‘everything’ there is a specific ‘nothing.’ Now I have become the limits of my catalogue and my imagination has apparently gone on sabbatical: I am the starving artist, Brooklyn hipster, I am her, I am Carrie Bradshaw close-enough, I am, on paper, the person I always wanted to be and there is no other criteria to inhabit and no sensible next move inside the catalogue nexus, no directions. I am where I want(ed?) to be, but it does not feel like enough, and so I have no idea where to go from here.
Lie. I do have another want. What I don’t have in my life is romantic love, or any sex to speak of. Because I don’t have this, I have assigned the lack paramount importance. I am lonely, that’s the problem. No one will pick up the phone to hear me whining in a parking lot. Honestly, I look up to the sky and find this fact sort of cosmically amusing, even though either my emotions or my intellect (best guess this time) is upset. My friends are mad at me, and I have done and can do very little to dispel this for at least the next few days. But am I lonely? Am I really lonely? Do I want to be with another person, with other people? A fraction of my catalogue has made a choice not to be, on a holiday. Part of me feels tepid at best about that. Another part is warm and sure. This is a paradox. An un-synthe-fucking-sizable party paradox.
Okay, so, would I go to this party if I knew something outrageous could happen there? And by outrageous I mean wildly unusual, I mean a validation, which is to say reassurance that I will not always be lost, which is to say a fulfillment of lack, which is to say… sex? Yes. But maybe we can draw thin lines along the page to make that both emotional and intellectual, and not just shallow. This leaves only the glaring elephant in the room: what do I actually want to do. If we go deep enough into the lack and the quiet belief that conditions will improve in time, perhaps that’s all only un-phased sky, too. And maybe that all means I have no feelings, heart or sex drive and am, as feared, a bona fide zombie. It could also mean I’m very bright, by my own standards.
It could mean there is work to do, synthesizing. But that seems like a lesson unlearned.
RECORD COMPANY PEOPLE ARE SHADY
This year I have learned a lot, and if I want to treat New Years like the grand marker of all things, now is the time to conclude neatly. Fuck the man (Rupert Murdoch, me, or whoever). The sheer amount of work required to keep making sense of all my contradictions (READ: THIS ESSAY) so they might become presentable and pleasant for all is stupid, and at last I can see, wasted energy, and what people are criticizing in me when they think I am quiet or spineless in a certain way. While the exercise has always felt smart and interesting, it’s time to cut losses and live in the space between choices that make no sense internally or externally when assembled together and compared. It’s time to get a little reptilian.
And speaking of work, I have lots. I’m driving out. This rambling missive is going out into space, where several people could ostensibly read it and get their feelings hurt. This is an attempt at fulfillment and honesty, and towards this end hopefully the last simmering, directly selfish act completed for a while. By driving out, I mean the internal idea-hopping-brilliance-energy will go towards writing and acting with competence and consideration. This should leave more room inside for caring about other people, which has been poor form for 2010. It will, in fact. I know this because I can predict the future and am learning to discern it from the past.
These are how New Years resolutions function: Tidy. Bright. Optimistic.
These are how great essays function: Idea, Mullage, Brilliant Bolt Conclusion, Shattering Last Line (note disparities above).
These are truths non-conforming to everything I’ve discussed here:
I will be better. I will be great. I will be loved. It will get better.
These are my fingers, typing: sdifufjenensmslfov
I am blind now, but here I am. Becoming something I can’t see and must stop looking for.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
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.
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