0209112012

Terrified of pollution-related birth defects, an eccentric locks his pregnant wife away in a sterile, toxin-free environment. The obstetrician delivers the baby on-sight. The baby comes out autistic, with webbed feet. The man shoots his wife, then the doctor, then himself. The child remains on stage, in a bassinet, gurgling and helpless.

0210110154

I guess this is the time of life where people really start to question their own motives, what they really want, because they're beginning to realize they're going to die someday, and they don't want to die miserable and alone

“it's so hard to find yourself when you've got someone else's shoes at the foot of your bed” –KC

0211111630

A carapace of ice constricts the earth.

0214112128

I want to sit down and write something about contextual geography and memory in the context of relationships.

0215111741 Generic Pub.

(Alright, son, have at it.)

The fact of the matter is that I realize I don’t miss her nearly as much as I miss what we had, certain things that endeared her to me. It’s pathetic; I see C.P. (of all people) holding his arms a certain way and I’m reminded of the way she used to prop her smoking arm up with her non-dominant hand, cradling her elbow. It looked elegant and unpremeditated, like everything else about her.

I’m trying to think of the last time I had this almost unutterable sense of existential despair. It’s easier when it’s acute, the pain. It’s easier to blow off steam when it’s acute, because acute emotional pain is much more closely related to anger than this. This dull, throbbing ache of purposelessness and discontent beyond discontent. Depression is rage turned inward, we’re told. I don’t really know if I’ve given myself enough (any?) time to be angry. I guess I don’t see the point of being angry; it doesn’t alter any outcome. I feel like my very being is imploding, like there’s some kind of strain that I’m not coping with adequately. But there’s no strain; graduate school is simple. I have good friends, it’s not like there’s no support structure.

I got to thinking…That Otis Redding song, “I’ve got dreams to remember” is so goddamned sad. The speaker has been robbed of his goals and desires. His very identity is dissolving alongside his relationship. Otis Redding was only two years older than me when he died.

Re and I talked once about this. Her schmuck boyfriend (Steve, I think) left her and she spent the better part of two years trying to figure out where he ended and she began, trying to disentangle her “herness” from everything she had been in the relationship.

Boy, that was a squandered opportunity. A beautiful woman drives from VIRGINIA to see me my sophomore year and it doesn’t compute for me that she wants to date me? I don’t really make any apologies; I was young, and it wouldn’t’ve worked anyway. Her car was named Electra. We burned the parking ticket she got in front of *generic dormitory*, the penultimate thing before her departure. A hug, a smile, a kind word, and the chance had passed.

I wanted to write more than anything, but nothing that’s coming out is any good.

I imagine myself driving south and trying to depersonalize, to disidentify things as innocuous as interstate exit numbers. Everything you’ve ever done contextualizes everything you ever do. There’s a sick part of me that wants to do some “disaster tourism” on spring break and drive by *******’s parents’ house, walk that walk from my old dorm room to hers, go smoke a bowl at the brush dump and remember and hurt. It’s hard to keep self-indulgence from leaking into the recuperation process; I want to aggrandize my pain, make it literary and exalted somehow, when my rational mind understands that such an attempt is, precisely, self-indulgent. People are starving. People are getting put through the machine and summarily executed. Thousands of lives come to uncinematic, violent ends every day (hour?), and I’m complaining because I live in a corrupt, declining society and I don’t have a girlfriend anymore? First world problems are the inanest problems. On an unrelated note, I’m SHOCKED that Word recognizes “inanest” as a word. I meant it to be a humorous neologism.

I never go to the same mountain twice. The things that happen to and around me there compound, and every revisitation is bittersweet in a different way. College is my spirit mother. I have dead relatives there. I fell in love there three and a half times. I worked several jobs, suffered the indignity of quasi- poverty there. I found solace and new family. The mountain serves as a perpetual reminder of what I could have been and am not yet.

I feel ostracized, which is stupid.

The mountain is an immense and textured canvas in my mind; every return there adds another layer of paint. Some things bleed through the new layers more than others, and the weaker details sift through oblivion into obscurity, but it’s a composite experience. The mountain is memory, and memory is funereal. (emphasis on the “real”).

Springsteen: Everybody wants a place to rest. Everybody wants to have a home. Don’t make no difference what nobody says. Ain’t nobody want to be alone.

It’s a generally horrible feeling, knowing that your mother would probably be ashamed of you if she were still alive. There’s multiplicitous misery built into that sentence.

Writing is thinking out quiet.

If I’m going to be a writer ever, I need to start taking the “craft” seriously. The problem is this: I don’t approach writing as a craft. I approach writing as a necessity, something that comes out of me when I’m deeply sad, hurt or angry. It’s almost a coping/defense mechanism—someone wounds me or I’m unhappy, and I choose to find unusual ways of expressing my feelings through the written word, instead of voicing my emotions through more normal channels, like committing acts that end in “cide.”

God, no one reading over my shoulder would EVER date me.

What do these people think about? How do they spend their days? Beyond материальная блага, what are their priorities? They’re all reasonably-to-very good-looking, they all do a much better job of pretending to know where they’re going than I do. Moreover (and less important), what do they think about ME, the asshole who’s drinking alone and tapping tapping tapping into empty space?

I increasingly feel there’s no place for me in this world. I’m a liminal figure with a vagrant soul. I’m happy everywhere, but I’m rarely happy these days. It doesn’t add up, but do the math anyway; it’ll give you an interesting logic puzzle and a pretty good idea of how I woke up feeling this morning.

“You’re in your early twenties. Who said you have a right to be happy?”

Thanks, RM. I should play a game with myself. For a week I should pretend I have some kind of inoperable cancer, minus the symptoms. I should give myself a week to make things right with everyone. I should call TLD, bug SMG until we fix our friendship, write RM. I’m glad that’s really all I have on my plate…that I can think of. Those are the big hangups and disjunctions in my life, the things that nag me daily and remind me that I’m nowhere near as good of a person as I could be.

A good friend just called me. I’ve never seen him like this, but it makes sense. I was a pretty unfortunate wreck a few months before she left me, musing over the “could have beens,” and more unfortunately, the “isn’ts” and “aren’ts.” He’s employed in a detestable backwater. What the fuck is he supposed to do now? I’m at least surrounded with smart, attractive people. I imagine the plight of a career teacher in L*******, Georgia. It must be a sad affair, being a member of the educated minority. …hell, what am I saying? It is a sad affair.

0301111851 Generic Pub (again)

I was almost afraid to set foot in this fucking place, well-dressed on a Tuesday. That said, history may repeat itself, you just have to buffer yourself with differing circumstances.

I just had a twisted, despicable thought that I should message and tell her that ******* regretted telling her she could/would be involved in our wedding. Assuming ******* didn’t lie (which she would), it would destroy their friendship. I’m glad I’m not a terrible person—every good person has lots of terrible thoughts, but the difference between good people and their counterparts is the ability to see beyond the self, to filter when it’s wise so to do. I can already tell I’m up to no good this evening, if these are the first words I commit to paper.

It seems like it must be a recurring theme in adulthood—learning your lesson, but not completely. Every time I put myself in a similar situation, I manipulate circumstances and see what I can do about provoking a different outcome.

Communism: the only system in which an “ordinary” man could be canonized. I look at the statue of Lenin atop the never-built Palace of the Soviets and I marvel that such works of art have only been devoted to the divine.

Frat boys are endlessly gracious, if you know how to talk to them and you catch them before they’ve outdrunk themselves. Talk about women, frat stuff and money. If the conversation gets too involved, talk about guns. If they don’t like guns (rare), talk about cars. If they don’t like cars, they’ll like women. That’s why it’s first on the list, see?

I wish I could invent people…or at least characterize people without insulting or exalting them on some level. I want to treat my life not with Truth, because that’s impossible, but with the specific truth that resides within my consciousness, the truth that perpetuates itself as a function of all the stimuli I’ve encountered since that strange day some quarter century ago, that day I was born.

No one has the same home movies.

The commemorated events are, of course, similar, but the ways in which they’re experienced are as variegated as identity itself. Sure, Czeslaw Milosz looks like Unknown Hinson, but they’re not comparable on any kind of rational level. My computer’s going to die soon. There is a very loud amusement park in front of my house…I should waste my last few minutes of free self-expression on the internet, shouldn’t I? I remember Word used to insist that I capitalize the word “internet.” Nouns lost capitalization when things started to blend into each other…you know, Baudrillard, all that. Internet is not a proper noun. It’s a fact of life. It’s not like Paris, which you can only experience by venturing there. It’s omnipresent. I reckon I have about five minutes. At most. What does it mean to die? What does it mean to realize that everything’s over, and short of spiritual verification (faith), you have no reason to believe that existence is anything but a one-time deal? I have no idea. My computer probably does. It’s flashing and making aggressive gestures at me. That’s not what dying people do. They fade away, b e

03020021 That’s the last thing the computer could understand, the last piece of data it processed. The computer’s last memory. Sad, isn’t it?

03060047

I’m reminded presently of Derrida’s pharmakon…the poison/medicine. I want and do not want to cut something out of myself. I want to feel whole again, but feeling whole again involves removing something critical but decayed so something new and self-sustaining can grow in its place…eventually. I’m going to compile every memory ******* and I ever made together and put it in a sarcophagus like so much radioactive waste. I’m going to put it somewhere far from me, where it can’t hurt my health any more than it already has. The things around my house are the easy part. I’ll assemble, contain and remove them for (possibly) temporary burial and safekeeping. The rest is essentially amateur brain surgery. I suppose alcohol is its own haphazard form of brain surgery, but its imprecision began to annoy me and cause me problems about a month ago.

I’ve had two disastrous dates that have only served to remind me how vulnerable I am, how unready I am to be attractive to another person. In both cases my interlocutors were much more interested (seemingly) in where I’m from and what I’ve done than in who I am. I felt felt sorry for. But I don’t need (or want) pity, I need patience. Someone who actually has the compassion and emotional breadth to understand that where I am…is temporary. Who I am now is not who I am or want to be. Who I am now is a function of all my scars and the things that have been forcibly ripped from me and allowed to abscess in recent years. My entire body feels covered in buboes and pockets of emotional venom.

I looked at an innocuous Guinness promotional sign that provided a “Countdown to St. Patty’s Day” in the bar tonight. I watched the seconds dwindle and recondense, eating into the minutes, and it occurred to me that these are the only minutes of my life. It’s not a countdown to Saint Patrick’s Day, it’s a countdown to the end of existence—not just for me, but for all of us.

I’ve been on the verge of tears for days, occasionally crossing the verge and crying, in moments public and private. I’m stuck in customs on the border between Malaise and Self-disgust. My life is disintegrating, but I suppose life is itself a process of perpetual disintegration. The things I built in childhood fell apart or ceased to be relevant. By the same token, then, the rest of my life is a perpetual process of me falling apart and ceasing to be relevant. Most people just call it “getting old,” but “old,” too, implies decay and obsolescence. I’m too young to disintegrate, though; the things I do to my flesh on a daily basis prove that my body is still strong enough to withstand my habits. But it won’t be forever, and I have a feeling that the wisdom that accompanies experience will soften me somehow, make me regret my decadences. I don’t have regrets yet. I don’t have enough of the perspective that accompanies age to know what to regret.

Disorganized. Dark. Partly fictional.

Names have been changed, details altered to protect innocent and guilty alike.

-It’s a funny idea, marriage. It’s all based on this idea that god loves us unconditionally. Marriage is based on the purity of god’s love. It seems to me that the disappointment that accompanies being in a relationship is loosely godlike as well. How must God have felt when the things he spent so much time creating and nurturing decided they wanted something different? That’s not to say I feel godlike, (though I guess through antithesis I’m creating a subtextual thesis), but really…what makes us as a species feel like we can stay together through anything, even when every external circumstance screams at us that we can’t and shouldn’t? Why don’t we just stay around until one or both of us are bored, then move on to other people? In principle, spending your entire life with someone you regarded as a close friend when you were young sounds like a great idea.

I’m not saying anything coherent. I’m just realizing through subtext that I’m not as “over” ******* as I thought or would like. That, in turn, is probably just excusing myself for being fucked up all the time and sleeping later than any self-respecting young (?) adult male should. The more I think about being single, the more I’m certain there’s nothing really special about me. I’ve got a receding hairline, I’m not in especially good shape. I have a few interesting ideas, but only a few people are drawn to interesting ideas—because either A) people or B) my ideas aren’t as interesting as I’d like, I suppose. I’m reasonably confident. I’m gracious and accommodating, if occasionally gullible/arrogant. When you perceive the world as a series of disembodied systems, it’s difficult not to (even subconsciously) repackage yourself into something palatable, something desirable. We might not all of us want to be palatable, per se, but we all want to be desired. I do. Shit, I just want to be with someone as badly as (she) wants to be with me. I was telling CB the other day that it’s very difficult to imagine circumstances under which I would attempt to keep another long-distance relationship alive. That could have been phrased much more tidily, I guess. Who cares.

` When I think of all the time and emotional energy I misspent on her…

For me, women are, most of them, some combination of A) gorgeous, B) intelligent, C) petty/neurotic, and D) interesting, which is usually some intangible confluence of A) B) and C). Can I get an ABD without the C, please? I wonder if the inverse is true? I’m sure it is. Men are, to some degree, A) handsome, B) intelligent (don’t really know how important this is to women), C) perfidious/self-absorbed/insensitive and D) manly, which is as context-sensitive and elusive as “interesting,” its female counterpart.

I guess I’m making this more difficult than it should be. I find myself staring at the ceiling in my bedroom at strange hours of the night/morning, discerning patterns in the shadows and wondering precisely why it is that I feel so alone in this world. I feel like everything would be magically ameliorated if I had something warmer and more animate than a down pillow to cleave to myself…but I think about that outcome, too, that happiest of ostensible outcomes. This person I’d hold close…well, we’d eventually end up sleeping in our own postures, on opposite “sides” of the bed, regardless of the bed’s size. I hope at the end of the “day” that it’s enough just to have someone comfortably sharing the bed with you.

Maybe I have high expectations of and strange ideas about marriage. So many people are so unhappy in their marriages. I’m watching some of my friends get married around me; even more of my acquaintances are doing so. One part of my mind that’s only about three months old wants to know “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU PEOPLE DOING?”…other parts just want to know what these people have in their relationships that I didn’t have in mine. I know it’s not that simple. It’s not like the breakup was my decision, much less my idea. It’s not like I’d been apprised of my inadequacies, although the “whatwentwrongohmygodImsosorry” part of my brain feels like there were a thousand unspoken warning signs, registered things I ignored, willfully or otherwise. In any case, it’s over…

To get academic on this sum’bitch…I’m just having trouble reinserting myself into the “discourse”…or the economy of bodies, if you want to be crude about it. I want companionship without cheapening human emotion, without marginalizing myself or someone else. I want to experience intimacy without tawdry side effects.

…also, I want a pony.

Basically, I’m a reasonably intelligent, not-bad-looking graduate student. Just like everyone else here. I and someone else of the opposite sex will probably, someday, decide mutually to lower our expectations, not just for each other, but for ourselves out of loneliness and an inexorable fear of dying alone. The transition to low expectations will probably be seamless, since chances are we both will have made some humiliating sacrifices/compromises by that point, and all subsequent sacrifices/compromises will seem petty by comparison.

Adulthood is institutionalized, perpetual forgetfulness intertwined with inaccurate, indelible memory. The way we all experience things has absolutely nothing to do with life-as-lived. Milosz said “the only memory is the memory of wounds,” and that’s neat. It’s not accurate, but it’s neat. The only memory that matters is the one you carry with you on a given day. Maybe even that one doesn’t matter. Like any sentient animal, negative stimuli condition humans more quickly and effectively than anything else.

I was going somewhere with the above. Maybe later.

We all of us live in natural systems. We don’t precisely know how we fit, but on an intuitive level, we understand that the greatest of human achievements are somehow just crude geometric approximations of natural structures. We and our geometric approximations of nature wage perpetual war against dissolution, chaos, entropy (as we understand it). But no matter how we strive to keep everything (EVERYTHING—structures, machines, flowerbeds, relationships) in order, our temporality, ephemerality, relationships to/with our surroundings all wear us down to nubs, as they must. Governing law of the universe: flesh yields to patience.

I might slur a little, but it would be a pleasure to hear your voice.

Consciousness/identity appears/resolves from a thousand thousand choices. As easy as it is to say “I am not the things I own,” it is easier to say “the things I own exist as a function of my identity.” I imagine my mortal remains scattered, buried, disidentified…but if you assembled my things, the things with which I had chosen to surround myself…you would have a puzzle. But you would have a puzzle with decisive clues. What an idea for a board/computer game. You’re given a shoebox. You have no way of knowing what will be in the shoebox. It could be a box of pictures without dates or notations. It could be five years of a family’s itemized bank statements. It could be correspondence. It could be a box of maps, maps of places you don’t immediately recognize, with a few documents written in a mysterious language, or better, in cipher.

There would be no guarantees.

But the game’s guarantee is this: each box contains at least one life, and the life(ves) open to you are yours to explore. This would be a very detailed game. You would even receive access to the shoebox-story-person’s medical records. You would have full access to libraries, the internet, and government documents pertaining to the shoebox…because all the data in any given shoebox would have to be “true,” right? Because otherwise, what would the point be? Why trace the life conduct, origins, habits, and foibles of a person who never existed? You want to learn something tangible, someone’s microhistory, right? What’s the point if there’s no authenticity? No history behind the gambit, the search? It would be archaeology for dummies, in reverse: We give you the artifacts, you supply the facts and deduce the history. Mad Libs with the lives of others.

Or worse: the shoebox contains a certain data set. The data set could belong to anyone. You could pay a premium to get a shoebox associated with someone alive. (Basically identity would become a commodity. Not only can it be stolen, it can be sold and adapted. You can be twelve different people at once, depending on what everyone else is doing with/to “you”. Truth becomes irrelevant, and you (victim) become subject to the New Criticism. The officers look so good in brown, their red armbands so gay in the spring sunlight!

All it takes to convince someone he/she is crazy is a widespread social conviction.

I think it’s to my great demerit, discredit and shame that I’ve never had any kind of spiritual experience worth half a shit when sober. Not since I was old enough to know better, anyway. I have a memory so mystical and sfumatoed it might as well be a dream by now. I just remember colors, and impersonal smells. Being in some kind of gallery in a dark church, seeing the plain ROYGBIV colors of the inarticulate vitrazh. Amazed at how different that space was from my own. Licking the screen doors, the taste of nicotine and aluminum. Walking in on my mother, vomiting. She pretended it was some kind of game. I might have been seven. Dad was at rehearsal. She explained that she was playing hide and seek.

Childhood is a strange thing—I’ve been musing on this a lot since I started reading Schulz…the disorientation that accompanies childhood is untempered by paranoia, clean of conscience and worry. Images, or at least the way you remember them, are so different. Things are bright and focused. Unnaturally so. The grisly JC-Penney peach ruffle curtains in my parents’ bedroom windows…the unchanging indian face. Years passed and mom dusted, but I always saw the outline of a suffering indian in the curtain’s lace outline, the way most children see animals in cumulus clouds on spring days.

When I was seven or eight, I decorated my first refrigerator box. I colored in different control panels that could propel us out of the garage and into the mysterious blue. I had no heroes to speak of. I changed my name to “Steva” because no one was named “Steva,” and I wanted to do something exciting, something original. I tried writing a play about the stock market when I was six. I gave up because it sucked. And now I’m twenty-five. In most developed countries, I’m a third of the way done. And where am I? God knows I’m not the first whiny twentysomething to kvetch about his lot, but I really still feel like I have promise. Like every time I stay up until 8 am writing about my problems isn’t an abject fucking waste of my precious time on earth. God knows I couldn’t’ve (the compound contraction should be totally legal. We’re in agreement here, right?) written

Through my lens right now, childhood seems garish, imprisoning. I miss Clarksville most of all.

The clubhouse. The sandbox beneath it, and the larvae I found there. They disgusted me, their overlapping carapaces, the moving lusty energy of the earth in my fingers…I usually threw them into the yard. The way it would rain for days, the drainage ditch in the back yard running fast, brown and deep…the only connection with the outside world: the bridge my father built. Beyond: who knew? I found a squirrel’s tail. I’m certain locust trees must be rare in the southeast united states, but I swear there was one on our little quarter-acre. I remember the tall grass field Caleb and I only dared to venture toward once or twice.

I imagined a tall structure, made of cement gutterpipes and leading up to a clubhouse. In the clubhouse there were chairs, wood floors, a soft drink machine in excruciating detail, down to the C02 cylinders. I had different versions of this dream until I was about fifteen-sixteen. I remember on some stupid kids’ menu survey or activity book, an exercise posed the question “what is the ideal age to be?” it seemed stupid at the time, and it seems stupid now. At the time (I was 8), however, I answered “eleven”. I’m still convinced I was right. Eleven is the last year you’re really a kid. By eleven, you’re fucking GOOD at being a kid. At eleven, you know how to get along with your parents, there’s no peer pressure, and hormones haven’t kicked in. Puberty sucks. This is a universally acknowledged fact. You go to college. You meet people you think will remain important to you, close to you forever. Then you realize that there are too many people, and that forever, even in human terms, is a very, very long time.

But what happens after college? You’re thrust 2/3 against your will into unfamiliar social situations. Adapt or die. College is microsocial Darwinism. You meet more kinds of proto-people in one place than you ever could elsewhere. At a certain point in the cell division process, we (all entities) branch out. Life springs from the same source, we’re all just predisposed to have codes, things built into us that enable us to read, write, communicate…have skeletons, much less be bipedal. In college, you see things budding. Asexual organisms like wealth and nepotism perpetuate themselves, an evolutionarily conditioned coping mechanism. This coping mechanism helps families and fortunes survive despite being surrounded by more intelligent entities. In college, you learn to understand people within thirty, no, five, seconds of meeting them. The greek letters College gives you to pigeonhole people are more useful than you could ever imagine as a naïve 18-year-old. Long after you’ve been in college, you’ll sort people by letters. “Well, in College terms, he’s basically a Fiji.” “You know, she’s a KD type.” These are not just College greek types. These are KINDS OF PEOPLE YOU WILL ENCOUNTER FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. They exist at College in their most stereotypical, essentialized forms. Everything else is an allegory of the cave.

It’s as though life were a series of sieves. Something pure and thick, rich, vibrant and unified undulates from an amphora, and the stream’s vitality knows neither beginning nor end. It flows from mesh to mesh, losing bits of itself along the way, finally unburdened and without memory, worn down as though held beneath the river Lethe…into the hospital, oblivion, and death.

Conversation excerpt:

VT shit, I'll be closer to Australia/New Zealand than america by the time I'm 45, if I play my cards right

8:31am

MP what card game is that?

8:31am

VT the metaphorical "adulthood" card game

you win when you get to do everything you want to do, and life still has wonder and mystery.

8:32am

MP I hope to never play it

Lethe et cetera, above. The image is one of emerging from a life of boredom and forgetfulness only to realize it’s too late, that the opportunities are gone, it’s too late to enjoy your life; your health is limited and your days are numb(ered). You buy a nice car because you’re losing your hair and your children are ungrateful and your wife doesn’t love you anymore and what the fuck what the fuck else are you going to do? Your self-esteem is all vicarious and dependent upon your kids’ soccer teams and your W-2 every year. Six figures? Six figures. Because you deserve it. Because you deserve a vehicle that can take you quickly, wastefully away from the problems you’ve created for yourself. Yes, no, All of them…because that’s what freedom is about, isn’t it? Absolution? Absolution is all any of us want anymore. Absolution for ourselves, for our grandparents, for our parents, who knew not what they did, for our sinful selves and natures. All the accrued guilt of the Modern Experiment heaped in an apotheosis of cruelty, a mountain of mutilated flesh, man and animal. In the background, smokestacks belch acid into the atmosphere.

I’m calling it a morning. It’s ante meridian nine thirty-seven, Eastern Standard Time on the third of February, anno domini two-thousand and eleven. I wrote close to three-thousand words tonight. Some of it wasn’t terrible. I deem it a success. As for my upcoming test…god, I have half a mind to say “who cares”.