Saturday, November 15, 2008

last night

it's like this: i'm sitting around in pajamas, eating breakfast cereal and idly chatting with friends and strangers via the internet. i read the news and update my facebook, i laugh when chau farts in his sleep. a message appears in my inbox from jake's dad. a question is asked and answered.

and then it's like this: i am shivery, weak, and ill. he has been dead for two weeks and here he has died all over again. a moment later i am composed, because i have to be, and i get on with the business of a normal day. i bake a cake. i shower. i accompany my sister to the library, and then to the tattoo parlor.

the scene is this: we are in the car, she is driving. we're just done laughing about something or another, we're eating ice cream. a moment's silence passes, and then i tell her what i've learned. i'm crying all of a sudden, shocked at how wet my tears are, at how little comfort i've gleaned from two weeks distance, from ice cream and everything. a void opens up and threatens to swallow me, just out of my line of sight, threatens to turn me permanently into one of those thousand-mile-stares weirdos. i sit in the car, too miserable-looking to go in with her. on the way home, we talk about it for a minute more, until something else comes up- and something else always comes up- and we're laughing again.

fast forward: it is three days later and i can't sleep for the need to hear his voice, so i call his voicemail over and over and commit to memory every rasp and inflection of his voice. i watch and rewind and rewatch in my mind: our first meeting, our first fight, our first kiss, our first i-love-you. i sublimate thoughts of him with tedious book reviews and essays on existentialism, both of which lead somehow back to him. i layer three comforters on myself and pretend to be warm and asleep until i am.

the next day: the morning is a blur of coffee and make-up and clothes, and i make it to my meeting on time, early even. i sit in the lobby and read bierce's witty letters, and mid-chuckle i get a flash of memory. i remember the blonde hair on his arms, and running my fingers over it eversolightly and i think- sifting through his ashes won't be the same. his arms and his arm hair don't exist anymore. i sit there with my breath caught in my throat, trying to conceive of the inconceivable until nancy calls me in and i'm all smiles for my picture.

later: i roll up my jeans and walk towards the water's edge. the sky is flawless, the beach is empty, i am peaceful and smiling. and then i step into the water and watch the fine brown sand slide and shift as the water recedes and i think, this sand could be you, will be you, eventually, someday, sooner than it will be me. and then a pelican dives for a fish, and raquel is laughing and telling for the thousandth time the story of my pelican guardian. i'm walking along the shore looking for seashells, i'm laughing when someone falls fully clothed in to the water, i'm face-up on the sand contemplating the vast blueness of the sky. walking along, i notice the heart & arrows & initials someone traced into the damp sand, and i trace yours and i realize they look like the symbol for pi, and i wonder if everyone knows i'm off by myself because i'm thinking of you?

now i wonder, is this how it's always going to be? i'm alive in this moment as you are not, but i'm alive in the past with you as well, and i'm alive in a future without you but always missing you, simultaneously. i look in the mirror and i wonder: is this me, all there is to me, these irises, this skin, this hair? because your arm hair is gone and that means you are gone. your mole i named jose is gone, and that means that you are gone. but my fingers that love(d) your arm-hair are still here, and my lips that kissed your mole are too, but how can they really be if you're gone?

everyone misses the ideals you represented, and i do too, but i also just miss the visible, touchable, actual fact of you, of your existence and your presence. two weeks ago, i had LA because this is where i live, and i had- was acutely aware of, plotted on my internal map- SD because that's where you were. now, i know you're everywhere, but that just means you're nowhere.

i write this down because i can't talk about it, because good, loving, supportive people just don't know what to say, and who am i to inflict such awkwardness and helplessness? they are trying to live their lives, as i am mine. what's weird is that despite myself, i am succeeding.

Thursday, November 6, 2008

at any given moment the floor may open up

happily, the doctors are through reviewing my chest x-rays and are satisfied that i will not perish of tuberculosis anytime soon. on the other hand, that the skin test was positive is testament to the fact that my immune system is extremely sensitive to stress; if, let's say, the love of my life dies, it's not just my mind that falls apart, but my body also. fun stuff. the ultimate upshot is that i meet my assigned child next week, as well as with the principal, who will help develop my lesson plans. excitement amidst tragedy! for the past few months, there are three things jake and i talked about: his sickness, my job search, and how much we missed each other/what we were going to do once he was better. he would have been more excited than anyone to hear that i'm finally going to have my own personal pupil to corrupt and enrapt. i hope to do him proud.

i'd really like to get ahold of his mom and offer my condolences (whatever the hell that may mean), but my attempts to find a way to reach her have been stymied. on the one hand, she is living in a nightmare world where her oldest son died after courageously fighting- and defeating- cancer for months, and what could i possibly have to say that wouldn't fall on pain-deaf-and-numb ears? but on the other hand, if she loves him more than anyone else on earth, then i am at least a close second for the title, and i wish her to know that i understand and am there if she needs anything at all in the world, because let's face it, she made him and i love him, and one of the bigger regrets among the untold thousands that i will harbor from now until eternity is that i didn't meet her while he was alive, in his presence. he was so certain that she would love me, and he loved and admired her so much that i was sure i would love her as well, and yet we never met, thanks to the unhappy confluence of geography, insecurity, coincidence, and sillyness that were our lives for the past few years.

and it feels like a betrayal to even think of this, but what about the funeral? if i have thought about him and the fact of his death every day since the day it happened, and i have, and if i have mourned it, constantly and quietly, every other minute of every day since i got the news- via text message, let it be noted, because really, how absurd can you possibly get?- and i have-- if these things are so (they are), then i wish someone would tell me why and how it doesn't feel quite real yet? i read the comments everyone is posting "to" him and about him, i look through pages and pages of pictures, i relive snatches of our times together, i call his phone just to hear his voicemail recording, and i know that he's dead. and still i think, maybe? maybe i'm dreaming a really vivid dream where all the pot i've smoked is catching up with me, maybe it's all a terrible misunderstanding, maybe i can find a wormhole and go back in time and save him, maybe the ground at my feet will open up and i'll fall through to some hideous inferno where he's being held hostage until i can with my wit and cunning and vast stores of alternately love and rage win him back to the world of the living. maybe i can push through the screen of reality and touch all the other realities that might have been, and find the one where he got better and stayed better, where i can call his phone and he'll answer, where he grows up to be a famous writer, a husband, a father, a world-reknowned activist-singer, the so-cal master of barbecue, a grouchy old man on a porch somewhere- i'll find that happy land and stay there, if i can't bring him back to this one, to undo the things that need to be undone for him to be here right now.

my favorite, the one to which i always return, is the one where i attend his funeral and walk up to the front of the room to see him pale and somber on the wooden dais, whereupon the tears start up, and i lean in to kiss him one last time, and voila! like a post-feminist snow white fairytale dream, my kiss and the love in my heart and the tears in my eyes bring him back, and everyone oohs and ahhhs and we live happily ever after, content with the destruction of death and modern science that we have wrought.

if i see it, if i see him and see that he's not himself anymore, i think i stand a better chance of believing it. at which point i will attempt suttee, or cry mutely in his mother's arms. unless she hates me. ah life.

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

what i talk about when i talk about love

it's strange how he died five days ago, and already i'm expected to be done talking about him, thinking about him, crying about him. it would be easier to keep it to myself if everything in the world didn't remind me of him, everything, everything, every ridiculous little thing.

who is going to finish my ice cream cones now? who is going to try every ridiculous recipe that pops into my head without complaining, with lots of teasing? who is going to shake me when i'm on the verge of tears, who is going to invent mixes for me, who is going to leer at me from behind a door or a gravestone in the middle of the night? who is gonna yell at me to shower, knowing perfectly well that i only went six days without a shower once and for very good reasons? who is gonna watch the latest animated feature with me against his will, and then deny that he enjoyed it when he totally did? who is going to gag whenever shakespeare comes up in conversation, who is going to let me win at thumb war, who is going to muss my hair whenever it gets too neat? who is going to go to the pier with me on a windy day to watch the birds fly backwards?

it's strange to think that i knew a jake that no one else knows, and that by extension, i am the only one who can miss that jake, as well as every other jake besides.

Sunday, November 2, 2008

how seamless seemed love and then came trouble

it's just like him, i realize. i shouldn't have expected anything more. off he's gone to be one with all things, to push up flowers and see the really big picture from afar, and here i am, thinking about him, like i've always done, like i'll do for the rest of my life.

there's nothing stranger than the fact that life goes on, that you can't cry forever, that eventually the memories don't hurt as much, that maybe someday they'll make me smile. you spend five years getting close to someone, learning them and loving them and arguing with them, you spend five years planning the next year and the next and the next twenty years, albeit loosely, like the kids that you are, and then you wake up one morning to find that he's gone, and your plans are for naught, and that when you think about him one thousand times a day, you're thinking about someone who does not exist outside of those thoughts.

you meet someone as a child, and you doom yourself to loving that person forever by virtue of the fact that you're growing up together, and when you do that, he becomes a part of you, and aspects of your person will always be indebted to him, just as aspects of his person were due, for better or worse, to your presence in his life. and then you wake up one morning, and realize that those hard-earned pieces of your personality, those painful lessons and those glorious awakenings, are all you have left of him.

you meet someone when you're vulnerable, and your wrap him up in the gossamer threads of your emotions from the first, and eventually, he gets vulnerable with you, and the threads pull tighter, until you are one hundred miles away from him and he is still more present to you than the person standing beside you, at all times.

you love someone for so long, and so hard, that it's a given like your next breath, like the sun rising, like the world spinning around. you love him even when you hate him, when you wish you'd never met him, when you spend your days thinking about not thinking about him anymore. you love him when you shouldn't, you love him when you don't love anyone else, you love him with every surge of blood your poor ragged heart pumps through your body. and then you wake up one morning to having to wonder what exactly you're supposed to do with that love, the same love that never arose for anyone else, the love that reason forgot.

so where does it go when it's gone? if you were here, you could tell me, matter-of-factly, the way you said everything, especially when i was being fantastical and ridiculous and emotional. alas.

“I seem to spend my life missing you!”

Thursday, October 30, 2008

noon, midnight, talk, song

i fully retract the 'bastard' from that last post. and every other less than kind thing i've ever said or thought about you. i love you and i can't imagine the world's continued existence without your presence in it somewhere.

the worst was supposed to be over. i remember the day you were diagnosed. i remember the cold shock of those words as if it were yesterday, the feeling that i couldn't breathe, that i'd forgotten how to speak. you did all the talking and you asked me to be strong for you. what kind of a role reversal is that? and when we hung up, and i started to cry, and when i threw up, when i broke out in hives, when i almost crashed my car... i was convinced that it couldn't be real, that there'd been a mistake and we would be laughing in relief the next day. i mean, you'd turned 23 three days earlier. the universe can't really be that unkind.

but it wasn't a mistake, and the universe really is just that cruelly indifferent. so you were sick. but the understanding was, and is, and should be, that you were going to get better. that you'd convalesce, and you'd beat it, and all the plans we were making would be carried out beginning next summer. we're gonna go on a road trip to louisiana, and you're going to take me camping for the first time. we're gonna drive up the west coast and look for the aurora borealis. we're gonna go back to isla vista and commandeer a random couch, and we're gonna sit in the dark and talk the way we used to do in college, when we were drunk and together and happy more often than not. we'd known each other for three weeks before we decided that we're going to get married when we're old, remember? we're gonna get married and be grouchy old curmudgeons together, and sit on our porch and grouse and reminisce.

and then you got better, and the cruelly indifferent universe was full of light again, and the only thing between us and our reunion was my cold, because after all, you'd just beat cancer, you're understandably delicate. and once my cold was done, i would be down at your hospital or at your house once a week, and i'd read to you, and we'd watch movies, and talk all the time and count the minutes until we could be back in the world having adventures.

and now, my cold is gone, and soon you might be as well. and i don't know if i can deal with that. it's one thing to come to terms with death in a personal sense. tell me that i'll die two days from now, and i could handle that, and i could die laughing the way i plan to. but i've never thought about others dying, i've never had to or wanted to think about someone i love dying. i can't wrap my mind around the fact that however much you want to live, however much i want you to live- and i want that with all my being, every cell in my body needs you to be alive in order to function and be happy- it might not matter and you'll die, and what does that mean? it means i'll never hold you again, never kiss you again, that i'll never hear your voice again or smell your smell again. it means the world will be missing one of its better assetts, one pillar of compassion and positivity. it means that our plans will never come to fruition, that all the things i never told you won't get said, all the things we could have been, you could have been, will never be, and what does that mean? what does it mean and what does it mean? it doesn't make sense, it can't be.

but dan says that it very well can be, and i'm not sure it's getting through to me. you can't die. i can't live if you die. i can't deal with "one or two weeks at most" and "i'll let you know if we get to visit one last time." one last time? what is that supposed to mean, because you can't go anywhere, not ANYWHERE. we have things to do, people to be. i love you. i've loved you probably since the day i met you. even when i hated you, i loved you. i can't imagine a future without you. i can't imagine putting you in the ground, leaving you alone. i can't do it. i won't do it. this is not how this story ends.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

the breathtaking dawn of a new era

Also known as "peace out, unemployment!" And how good am I, that I totally called it? I gave the same sincere answers to essentially the same questions for the same position, provided the same references, wore the same outfit- my Official Interview outfit, in which I am cute but professional and asexual- but this time, got the job. All because this time, my interviewer was male. What kinda bullshit is that, ladies? Let's quit holding each other down.

Well, crazy sexist self-hate aside, I am super excited about this new development. It will be good for a number of reasons:
  • It's a job! Four months of resume-spamming, vaseline-smiling interviews over and done with, about fucking time.
  • It's more than just some shitty job, it's a job I really wanted, which'll be excellent experience once I embark on my proper career path.
  • I've never done anything like it before, which means it's a challenge, which means it's exciting.
It goes without saying that equal to almost all of those things at this particular moment is the fact that I will have income, which means that reality-grounded dreaming and scheming (as well as the payment of student loans) can resume as if the past four months meant nada.

The one down note in all of this excitement, which resonated even through the past, unusually awesome weekend about which I'm sure to write later, is the conspicuous lack of communication from J. It should pretty much be illegal, when you are in the hospital recovering from cancer, to turn your cell phone off for an extended period of time, especially when you are fortunate to have a friend so understanding as I am/can be. Which is to say that not-calling someone for weeks/months at a time, when death is a looming possibility ( significantly moreso than is normal, anyway) for you, causes suffering and worrying the likes of which you will never know. To further break it down, I don't need a goddamned 40 minute dissertation twice a damn day, but it sure would be nice to know that you are actually alive, and that would only take about 2 minutes every couple of days, and I just don't think that that is asking a lot. Bastard.

Friday, October 24, 2008

we'll always have a.i.m.

In this sad age of convenience and mass-production, it's really refreshing to come across a real master craftsman. I tingle down to my bones when I stumble across one of these rare beasts, running a great cafe or bakery or restaurant. I once tingled in a bicycle repair shop, when the owner, who was grafting a new tire onto my bike, told me that he'd owned the shop and been in the same spot for 30 years. He was leathery of skin, and his hands were like six times the size of mine, rough, dirty under the fingernails, and I manfully resisted the urge to give him a teary-eyed hug before I left. I mean, you don't see stuff like that anymore, do you? People who love to do something, and work at it for decades, and are masters of that craft, and still keep doing it for the pleasure that is in it? I feel like a doddering old fool when I realize how sentimental these feelings are, but I am neither old nor doddering, though crazy might not be an imprecise adjective. It's not as though I can remember a golden age where mom and pop ran diners and drugstores and ye olde ice cream shoppes, being too young by about thirty years, but damned if I don't long for those days as if I did.

Even on that ridiculous Food Network show, 'Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives', where Guy Fieri drives across the country and eats himself into an early massive coronary, he always stumbles across people from all walks of life who, finding themselves to be dissatisfied accountants, bankers, lawyers, Hell's Angels, etc., upped and decided to spend their days slaving behind a greasy counter, serving up dishes their mothers used to make- and find themselves satisfied and fulfilled, and bringing communities together by virtue of their passionately perfected green chile pork stew, or whatever. I think it's really great, really inspirational. When I was a kid, I always aspired to a grandiose future, to the kind of high-profile achievements that would really make an impact on the world and grant me some small measure of immortality (not that I was deluded, pretentious or Goth enough to think of it in those terms), and while I can't say that the dream is totally dead, I can just as well imagine myself opening a bakery somewhere down the line, and serving up delicious cupcakes and interacting cheerfully with a small community of regulars, and being totally fulfilled. Who's to say I couldn't be a baker/novelist/master gardener/whatever?

Another part of this longing for things that I've never known is this nagging urge to pull a Thoreau and seclude myself in a far-off forest somewhere, and live by myself, off the land, with the land. The sterility of city life rubs up against my brain like chicken wire- certainly not the cleanliness of it, not here in L.A., buddy, but the separation from nature. From nature like I've never really known, having grown up in L.A. My shangri-la is a small town full of poets and writers and painters and bakers and master chefs, secluded somewhere in a vast tract of wilderness, hidden by thousand year old trees, totally self-sufficient. Which is not to say that I'm some rugged, l.l. bean-wearing nature girl, because I can just about shatter glass when a spider finds its way into my bathroom, but being so far removed from spiders and dirt and rivers and stuff really does take a psychological toll on a person, be he aware of it or no.

I dislike technological isolation- haha, she writes in her blog, alone, at one in the morning- and I dislike the imposed sterility of relationships carried out over the internet, the phone, occasionally the postal service. I'll take the phone over instant messenger any time, but phone talk doesn't begin to compare to 2-in-the-morning-electric-blanket-on-the-couch-in-the-yard talk, not by half. I'm a little afraid of people who smell not at all like people but instead like perfume inserts in glossy magazines. On a semi-related note, I had short ribs for breakfast this morning, and it was glorious, and I felt down to my cell nuclei how closely related I, in my humanity, am to a tibetan rat terrier, which creature also loves to and cannot help but occasionally gnaw a juicy bone.

When I think of bones, I also think of dancing, and of fire, and of chocolate, which makes me think of blood, and black dirt, and sex, which makes me think of oranges, and frangipani, and salt-encrusted pebbles on a black shore. None of which makes less valuable the soapy smell of a freshly washed someone and the dingy warmth of an aparment kitchen on a cold night by a tame shoreline, or the sanctity of chaste kisses and old charlie brown holiday specials. All of which is to say what? That people should be able to spend time alone, and spend time together, and spend time in nature, and that everyone should find one thing to be devoted to, even if it's just cupcakes or bike tires or plain old nostalgic ramblings, and that these are traditions very much worth preserving. In my ever so humble opinion, that is.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

it ain't no sin to be glad you're alive...

hard as that may be sometimes. And now, a list:

Things That Cause My Reptile Mind To Take Over:
  • grown women who refer to themselves as 'girls'- and act the part as well. Worse, when this horrid backwards cutesiness is rewarded equally with success and condescension.
  • knowing that my interviewer tomorrow will be male, and that this fact makes it slightly more likely than otherwise that I will get this job. What's that about, anyway?
  • anti-intellectualism in people smart enough to know/do better.
  • the hideous complexity of romantic inter-personal relationships.
  • the focus on romantic inter-personal relationships within my age group.
Any and all of these topics is enough to fuel a good rant, but who has got the energy for that? When the flash of rage subsides, I'm mainly just bemused by it all. And anyway, I've just finished a Tom Robbins book, which means I am in a terrifically good mood and generally at peace with the universe. His books are classified as Humor, most often, which is another thing I find confusing, because while they are undeniably hilarious, in subtle and obvious ways, they are also so much more than just humor! They're philosophy and science fiction and total bunk and life-affirming manifestos of the hippie kind; they're hilarious in the all-encompassing way that life is hilarious, even when it's ugly or sad or strange, especially strange. I don't mean to be a fanatic in the ugly sense of the word, but I do so love TR. I wish I were a character in one of his novels. Though on second thought, if they have to be codified, boxed-in, and labeled in any way, they might as well go in Humor, since Robbins often asserts that having a sense of humor is the best way to deal with this odd world.

And for a wild departure from the established tone:

Things I Miss So Much It's Like Physical Pain Sometimes:
  • three a.m. deep down soul talk.
  • eduardo and the no-pants dance.
  • all-day breakfast and movies Sundays.
  • the zany, spontaneous, and frequent adventures that resulted from an extended group of friends all living with a three block radius of each other.
  • certain fleeting certainties.
Ok, so call me ridiculous, but despite the neverending stream of things to either be angry or sad about, I'm mainly, irrationally, cheerful, and yeah, glad to be alive. The holidays are coming! And I have an interview with a man tomorrow.

Friday, October 10, 2008

doomsday hysteria!

The main difference, as far as I can tell, between adulthood and adolescence is this: if you're 16 and having a bad day, it's 100% the worst day ever and if you're not contemplating suicide from moment to moment, it's only because, sob, you're so strong and misunderstood and if you kill yourself, you won't ever be able to revenge yourself upon the persons or things causing you to have such a terrible, terrible day. If you're say, 23 and having a bad day, the reaction is more like this: did I get enough sleep last night? oh my god, when was the last time i ate something?... when was the last time i had an orgasm? how much whiskey did i actually consume last night? Or along those lines anyway.

Which is not to say that it's impossible to be angsty at 23, or that the reasons for angst aren't weightier, if anything. Being twentysomething is like being a goddamned leper, minus the whole "my limbs are falling off! this is an actual medical condition!"-justification. It's just that, by now, most of us have achieved some distance from that self-centered, paranoid, apocalyptic tendency that most teenagers exhibit early on and right through the very end. Hopefully. I was a veritable Hamlet myself, though more outwardly cheerful and less crazy, and I'd accepted my self-diagnosed bipolar disorder until I was about 17 and realized that if I was bipolar, so was everyone I knew. Which didn't make it easier, the next time something totally fell apart, to step back and calm down and understand that the largest part of the problem was actually my own reaction, which in turn was due to hormones, chemicals, lack of sleep, and the general batshit insanity that is being a teenager in this crazy world. But now, aha, sweet sweet clarity is (mostly) mine.

A darker day than yesterday I've not had in many months. Which is in itself odd, since for most of those past months, I've been just as unemployed and annoyed as I was yesterday. I mean, unemployment aside, there are plenty of good reasons to wander around miserable and scowling. The general state of things, for one. This horrendous late summer we're having in L.A., the plight of the polar bears, the Ugandan children, and Iceland's banks- further: the fact of Palin's existence and ubiquity. The point being that there is no shortage of reasons to feel angsty and apocalyptic in this day and age. The other point being, so what the hell was particularly wrong with yesterday? If I were still a wee lass of seventeen or nineteen (nineteen being far worse by virtue of at that point being in college and all that that entails), the day's misery would have resulted in intense journal-writing, letter-writing, calling the bestie and crying for an hour or so, or else in a good three hour block of chain smoking after having downed half a bottle of whiskey. Which of course would have resulted in today being as atrocious a day as yesterday.

The point! What is the point? The ultimate point is this: when an offhand comment brought me to tears of rage, did I drink, did I brood, did I imagine the world ending in a fiery collision with a comet? Ok, so I did brood. For about ten minutes, before I realized I was being moronic, and how come? As far as I can tell, it was due to a combination of interview-exhaustion, lack of sleep, and low blood sugar due to a lack of appetite due to a cold (which in its first days was itself enough of a reason for some amateur-level brooding). And while I'll curse the heavens for as long as I live for the fact of my animal nature's chemical dependency, I'm also really really glad that I can step back from myself and realize that while, yes things are shitty and some degree of consternation is justified, the "end of the world" is just as easily the result of sleep deprivation as anything else.

And speaking of so-called markers of maturity, I recall reading somewhere once that the day you're officially an adult is the day you can't walk past a sink full of dirty dishes without either stopping to reverse this condition or walking on and feeling guilty all day long. Silly. Total bunk! I know plenty of lovely people who are functioning adults in every sense of the word, who love to live in pigsties. In my case? One hundred percent the truth. And though I think astrology is total bunk as well, I must admit that in the case of dishes, I wonder if it isn't the Virgo in me making its anal-retentive self known.

What else? I've gone from being the world's worst insomniac to having an intense and passionate love affair with my bed. In high school, I ran on about five or six hours of sleep a night, and managed even to function in society and all- well, as much as any teenager can. In college, god, you'd think someone had cursed me to die in my sleep at any given time. I was pro at being awake for three days in a row, and functional to boot, though of course by the third day I'd be seeing music and talking to the imaginary pet that lived in my poor addled head, or whatever. Right up until senior year, I was the inadvertant witness to more sunrises than most people will ever see in a lifetime. I've even narrowed down the precise sensation produced by watching your second sunrise in forty-eight hours: it's like someone's sifting sand down through the back of your head. Lots of sand. Heavy, heavy sand. Anyway, that explains most of the angst I felt back in those days, I expect.

Now, at the ripe old age of 23, if I sleep less than eight hours, I'm pretty much a monster. I feel ugly and slow, I'm quick to anger or sadness if I don't sleep enough. I function well enough, which is a good thing, considering that I love to be awake til late at night and most jobs begin in the early hours of the day. I just feel like shit, and whether I realize or not that it's due to lack of sleep, it mainly... is. What's this damned fascination with my own sleep habits, anyway? Not with sleep habits, really, but with the markers of my own aging. The markers along the line of my own mortality... blah blah. For the most part, I'm just glad that I'm far enough around the bend to debunk the occasional apocalypse, for my own peace and sanity. Knock on wood, in any case.

Sunday, October 5, 2008

it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought

For as long as I can remember, since I emerged from the coccoon of childhood and into the brave new world of being a real person and establishing myself with myself/with the world, I've had a pretty good sense for the absurd. Life is, in every way that matters, absurd. If you can't laugh at the ridiculous, it becomes insulting, it becomes painful and a chore, and you become one of those deeply unpleasant, uptight people for whom nothing is funny. The type of person that should be banned from society, basically.

Anyway, all of that is to say that I know that life is ridiculous, that things tend to work out in precisely the opposite fashion than what a reasonable person would expect, and that if I can't laugh at it it's because I'm a bore who takes shit far too personally for my own mental health. But goddamn if the world isn't testing my sense of the absurd to the very limits lately.

There's the matter of American politics, of course. Here we are, a month to the Most Important Election Ever!!!, and the vast majority of Americans are either a) indifferent/bored of the whole spectacle, or b) seriously contemplating, if not dead set on, voting Republican. And if you fit into neither of those camps, you're probably glued to a computer screen twenty-four hours a day, shitting your pants every other minute in, alternately, excitement/mortification. So where does that leave me? I freely admit- and think this is a sign of health- that I can't wait for the damned circus to roll out of town, but that's mostly because I've come to, despite my rather smug disdain for politics in general, be one of those sad bastards who sits around online all day, shitting my pants- 99% of the time in mortification, which is a small comfort. I just can't take anymore of this fucking stupidity. I mean, I attended college in Santa Barbara, and thought that the depths of human stupidity were exhausted in my mind, that they could no longer dizzy me, surprise me, stimulate my gag reflex. I was wrong. I remember reading, around the time of the last election, about a new syndrome going round. Something about "outrage exhaust," where one is so constantly bombarded by atrocities and stupidities that the reaction to these becomes dulled and your righteous anger can't be bothered to manifest itself anymore. That's a line that has been unequivically crossed.

The list does not end there, naturally. There's still the perennial favorite, of course, that endless source of vexation that is so pervasive, so damned inescapable, that I wonder if it isn't a torment from hell itself. I'm talking about rap music, of course. Not the Platonic ideal of rap music, true, but exarcerbated by it's ubiquity: commercial rap music. "Music" featuring Akon, or Lil' John- "music" that is essentially NONSENSE WORDS REPEATED TO AN ANYEURISM-INDUCING SYNTHESIZED RHYTHM. My god people. I mean, I know that the vast majority of you are simpletons, well-meaning but essentially tapeworms, the complacent packaging for ambitious genetic material, but holy crap, do you realize what you're doing?! You are bopping along to or repeating (frequently, too loudly) NONSENSE on the order of fucking BABY TALK (if babies were mysogynistic, ignorant pigs) produced by liquor-addled morons with hard-ons who are becoming filthy stinking rich on the basis of your willfull ignorance and bad taste. You are handing them money- and respect, and power- without them having to earn it by hard work or manifesting appreciable talent, and what they're providing you with in return is, not to mince words, the DEATH of your goddamned SOUL.

Man it felt good to write that down. Is it ridiculous to flip out equally over politics and shitty rap music? Yes! Are politics and rap music two fundamentally absurd notions? YES. And if I have to hear, "lolly lolly lolly, let me see you pop that body (?)" all the way through one more time, someone is going to die the sort of gruesome death that will guarantee my name in lights for a long time to come.

Something else that has recently crawled under my skin and begun to feed, loudly, on the proteins that make up my muscles, etc., is the mind-boggling fact that not one, not two, but three people with whom I was/am friends with are now engaged to be married. One of them, one of the two was-friends, will be married next month. Not only is this girl completely insane and immature and homely, but she might well be the last person in the world whom I'd thought would get married- EVER. Oh, and, she's 23. And while I am aware of the fact that childhood does end at some point and people get on with adulthood in the more tangible sense of the word before anything else, I am also aware that we no longer live in the year 1953, and that women who are unmarried past 25 are no longer fed to the bears as a matter of social policy. I mean, wow. I'm worried that either it reflects poorly on me that I think marriage at 23 is- what's the word again?- ABSURD, or that the world is an even more hopelessly ridiculous place than previously assumed. The other couple consists of two 23 year olds, and the last couple jointly turned 25 this year. And none of the aforementioned reactions to all this absurdity begins to accurately depict the confusion surrounding this last engagement specifically, since the groom and I are sort of in love with each other, and the bride is this terribly pedestrian creature who enjoys the less-than pedestrian musical offerings of Jessica Simpson (and all the terrible things implied thereby).

A list of other (less offensive?) absurdities:
  • that not once, but twice, a bird has landed on my head as I walked down the street
  • the existence of fat-free ranch/cheese/butter, and other such FAT-BASED commestibles
  • that once you are educated to some extent, you see the society that educated you for the joke that it truly is?
  • that truly subversive things are co-opted into the mainstream, albeit unwittingly, alongside cosmic trash
  • that someday, politics and rap music will go into the void right next to shakespeare, miles davis, the haggia sophia, and the species homo sapiens

Say what?? Ah, life.

Sunday, September 28, 2008

i blog therefore i am (?)

I've never learned to talk about myself without resorting to listing my various likes/dislikes/etc., besides which I have long secretly harbored the questionable habit of making a list for every occasion, so I'll start with what I know best:

Likes: public libraries, small children, big tracts of wilderness, the bizarre, the hilarious, the melancholy, the smell of wet asphalt, honesty, trying new foods, baking, incorrigible old people.

Dislikes: two-faced rat-bastardry, creeps who haunt public libraries, spinach that is not baby, people who are mean to animals, dentists, los angeles summer days.

I am twenty three years old; I attract crazy people wherever I go, I spoil the shit out of my cats, I've held many an odd job, and I've been thinking about starting a blog practically forever. It's my dearly held belief that contradiction is the essence of existence, that my reality is probably not yours (it might not even deign to greet yours if they passed each other on the street), and that the only way to cure sadness is to listen to a sad song. Most likely something written by Sam Cooke or Otis Redding. Anyway, I guess this is growing up. Or my blog about it, in any case.