dance / run / fight

2009-10-13T15:46:00.000-07:00

Oh, by the way.

2009-03-29T14:18:00.000-07:00

oh hey there

don't have a computer so no new posts until... date tbd.

apologies

without it... life is not worth living.

2009-02-26T12:04:00.000-08:00

From CauseCast.com.

This made me cry the first time I watched it.

and every time after.

.

It's not gonna come out like I wanna say it cause I know you'll only change it. (Say it.)

2009-02-15T06:30:00.000-08:00

"Happy Valentine’s Day to you. May your face appear in every parted locket and every disowned scallop shell. May the color blue behold your body while sun washes your shoulders near the window. May gorgeous creatures invest their lives to understand the borders you mark between your flesh and your mind.

Happy Valentine’s while we still have a chance. Happy Valentine’s while breath still moves her broom across the floorboards of belief. You belong to love as birds belong to trees, as snails belong to swirls, as musk belongs to the hunt, as phlebotomy belongs to vampires, as rings belong to phalanges and promises, as corn belongs to crows, as trophies belong to illusions, as grapes belong to the blossoming of taste, as ponds belong to the thirst of ponies, as wheels belong to roads, as shadows belong to the ache of heat, as oars belong to wake, and as happiness belongs to the capricious pangs of the soul.

Bliss to your Valentine’s. Roam wide on Thor’s day until it becomes Friday, then sleep deeply into the day of Saturn. Fasten your cape to the sorrow of a mule. Give birth to your bawling intellect and become light as a child again. Write in apocryphal veracity. Roll your eyes at the stars. Shave your head until it pulses as smoothly as a human heart. Punch your fears in the face and run laughing into the arbors. Throw your body of pine needles into the fires of fate. Because we have today and only today. Because we have Valentine’s and only Valentine’s. Because we are. Awake and come forward alone to the place where you will meet a lover with mistletoe eyelashes, a lust as muscular as the demon who shovels coal in Hell, and eyes for only you; a lover who refuses to relent or acknowledge the despair of the world; a lover who is as much at ease with actions as with words; a lover who laces fingers with you more tightly than frozen shoe-laces and walks until you both are suffused with constellations of branches, asphalt orphanages of paper and mud, the sound of one river boring into the black. Suffused with red light in lonely windows, the ghosts of brevity and butterflies, listless mandolins, cartographer’s plunging dreams, the exhausted oxen of discipline, and the scent of a thousand seasons surrendering to each other beneath the circus tent of time.

Valentine’s of Happiness: May your visions conquer without combat; may your apples swell and spin upon their stems like dizzy globes; may your love come to you soon and never leave; may your crayons last forever and your glue seal every wound; may your slaughtered spoon-billed platypuses rise from their watery graves; may your clovers make love to luck in bittersweet fields; may your lunar and your solar meet against a sea of sand; may your lips refuse the kiss unless your heart is home; may euphoria find you in the place where you are lonely; may penguins sew all oceans into faith; may you light a billion candles with your mind; may your peaches fall like heroes and legends in your mouth.

Happy Valentine’s. Go outside. Stay in Love. Oil your heart more thoroughly than a gun or a Tinman; oil it with the milk of jasmine and the sweat of poppies. Use poems for rags because the heart is no machine and the grease is pure and plentiful.

When you talk in your sleep, tell your hopes that you are on the way. Warm them with sound instead of light. They listen to you. Reassure them. They know why you cry sometimes and cannot sleep. They loiter like homeless kings outside these walls and wait for bravery to manifest."

-- Into The Day of Saturn, Wolff Bowden

I thought about just posting a part, because its so long. But then I couldn't bring myself to do that... and after all, some things take patience but are worth it.

i don't want you hanging out with me, but i want you when i call.

2009-02-11T20:34:00.001-08:00

-- Isn't That Pretty?, Raphael Lacoste.

I love you more than.

heres a thought. its all that we've got in the world.

2009-01-31T18:09:00.000-08:00

This is all.

But also this.

and i sink so deep in you. ... you gonna save me or not?

2009-01-25T11:43:00.000-08:00

.

The AWESOME vs. NOT-AWESOME Newsreel/Media List for the month of January.

i'm in the market for a more succinct title, but w/e.

AWESOME:

1.

Kyle Andrews:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Kyle-Andrews/8045210158/

To be descriptive, all I can say is that he is the Postal Service for Optimistic-er adults. Meets Margot and the Nuclear So-and-Sos. Meets... meets me, bouncing around in my car screaming at the top of my lungs with the windows down, even though its snowing.
And, no, you shouldn't close your eyes while driving, even if its to yell "Whoooo!!!" in a shrill, high-pitchedrobot voice.

2.

Melissa Joy Manning:

http://www.melissajoymanning.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=SFNT

Fair-wages, ethical business practices, green resources, conflict-free stones... what more could anyone ask for in wearable art (read: blinnngggg). Oh yeah, she makes one-of-a-kind rings that are simple, classic and drool worthy.

3.

Eco Font. Pray-tell, wtf is eco-font?

ECO FONT.

Yeah. I willa dmit, at first i was all: "Give. Me. A. Break." Because how the hell do you make a FONT eco? Well, schooled me, cause actually the concept is fairly brilliant. And hey, any step in the direction of green is a step in the right direction. Plusssss I'll save some cash on ink. Soooo.... win-win.

In-between awesome and not-awesome:

1.

a.little.disturbing.

I'm always kind of torn when folks use scare-tactics to educate, especially when it comes to sex-education. We're already raised with enough guilt/shame/fear associated with sex, nobody needs more. However, we *should* be scared. Maybe a little more scared to throw our bodies around like they're indestructible. And maybe, sometimes, a little more fear makes us a little more cautious.

Like when you get pulled over. And then you drive 30mph for two weeks straight.

That brings me to #2:

2. Its allll over the news: Abstinence pledges are pretty ineffectual.

The not-so-awesome is that this is not-such-a-bigger deal. The awesome part is that, yeah, no shit abstinence pledges don't work very well. Thanks for the telegram from the future, Smarter-Version-of-Us.

(my fave news headline for this article was actually from the Atlanta Journal Constitution: "'Abstinence-Only' is a Total Crock."

NOT AWESOME:

1. Rick Warren. Why did you have to be such a blight on such a glorious day.

When he started speaking about kindness towards all, I wanted to hurl. But here's a more serious explanation of why we shouldn't kid around when it comes to who we keep company with.

Mikko Alanne's When Diagreement Becomes Murder.

Although, Obama is doing pretty well in his first week in term of "queer" (aka CIVIL) rights:

BACK-TO-AWESOME:

5.

The Agenda

New and improved, I say. Esp. the repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", and:

"The President will support common sense approaches including age-appropriate sex education that includes information about contraception, combating infection within our prison population through education and contraception, and distributing contraceptives through our public health system. The President also supports lifting the federal ban on needle exchange, which could dramatically reduce rates of infection among drug users. President Obama has also been willing to confront the stigma -- too often tied to homophobia -- that continues to surround HIV/AIDS."

as well as:

"President Obama supports the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and believes that our anti-discrimination employment laws should be expanded to include sexual orientation and gender identity."

Wooooo trans-rights! woooo. wooooo.

Eh, I'm sure I have more things on my brain that are on the NOT AWESOME list, but I'm sure they're a) mostly conceptual and b) will come back to me sooner or later. Soooooo...

To finish this out, I will say that if I ever start a band (anyone who knows me and has actually heard me sing have no illusions that unless I wake up tomorrow as the Bobby Fisher of guitar, there is no chance of this ever actually occurring), the band I start will have an album called:

4 Ways to Chop Onions Without Tears.

(thank you Google How-To of the Day. informative and enlightening, as always.)

you don't know me, i am an introvert, an excavator. i'm duckin' out for now, a face in dodgy elevators.

2009-01-12T21:00:00.000-08:00

.

bitch post.

.

What a joke Manhattan real estate is.

what a joke

what a joke

what a joke.

i'd like to point out, that in the first link there, you are paying 2,700 a month for FOUR HUNDRED SQUARE FEET. That's

32 400

a year.

...

for 400 sq. feet.

...

i mean... they're not even full bedrooms. YOU DON'T EVEN GET WALLS. all that money, and ya gonna have to spend like another 300 bucks, cause you're gonna have to get two of these just so you're not eye to eye with your stove every night. that, or so you can sleep separately from your three roomates, whom you will need if you'd like to ever eat again, because you will have no money for your groceries. and you're gonna need to eat, because you can't afford to pay for heating so FATTEN up or you won't be able to keep warm in winter. not too fat though, or gawker will find you and kick you out of new york.

i just honestly can't imagine when i would ever have enough money that i would be willing to piss it away living like a gerbil just to be "in the heart of it all". i say this with loving affection, because truly new york is amazing. just... not with all the people in it. maybe a little more "I Am Legend", and a little less i-hope-you-didn't-really-need-that-kidney-because-the-black-market-pays-better-than-retail. good-luck-with-the-meatpacking-district. do you like furniture? too bad.

maybe i'm mad because i'm jealous. maybe its a bitter dosage of reality. a reality of my little kid fantasy coming craaaashing down like a ton of bricks on my lower spine.
when i was little, my dad would drop us off for thanksgiving dinner literally ON my aunt claudia's front step, literally pull up ONTO the curb to drop us off, because down in soho back then there were still strippers with day jobs as muggers, and they were probably hiding around every corner to kill us dead and steal our clothes and jewelry as we bled out on the sidewalk.

i mean maybe not that bad, but it was still plenty seedy. and that was only 15, 20ish years ago, and *still* with my father erecting a fence around us just to bring us inside my aunt's apartment, i had this vague feeling that ny city was where it was AT. women with fur stoles and very long legs were smoking ciggarettes and talking about dylan and drank espresso for every meal, and they lived in new york and didn't wash off their eyeliner at night but still woke up looking french. at six, i didn't neccesarily want to *be* them, per se, but i knew that the seemingly effortless bohemian thing had some sort of culture around it that appealed to me. my mom took me to the Met and i used to look up at these gigantic towering white brick buildings that had the balconies on top, and all around the baconies, up in the sky, you could see the tops of the trees growing on the terraces. i knew i wanted to have a life where i could wake up, lean over the railing on my terrace, and look down at a city coming alive; wake up and look down and know it was all HERE. all a finger's width away from me. new york was loud and argumentative and edgy and exciting.

and now... its not.

or maybe it was something different then. lots of buildings look tall when you're only three feet tall. and fur is gross and in reality, smoking is too, and i'm way too control-freak-type-A to ever sleep with eyeliner on. most of the time, girls like that annoy me -- and who knows whats going on underneath.

i'll never really have enough money to have a lifestyle where i'm not worried about spending. so blowing 32 grand a year to live like a pauper... well if i ever have 32,000 dollars, i'm certainly not going to spend it living in one room. i guess at some point, you have to acknowledge the cards you were handed, in life, and also acknowledge who you really are.

they say you can have whatever you want in life, if you want it bad enough. what they don't say is that wanting it bad enough usually means giving up a whole lot of something else: money, space, time, friends, dignity...
when you finally get older and understand the reality of what you want entails, sometimes you realize that the weight of what you would give up means you don't really want that thing at all, anymore. sometimes you still do. and sometimes its a little sad, to finally acknowledge that reality -- to realize that even though you still will want it, will always want it... you don't want it bad enough to give everything else up.

like walls. and groceries. and not living like a gerbil in a wheel.

but ya know, whatever.

i've been callin for years and years... & you never left me no messages. never sent me no letters. you got some kind of nerve taking all of our world.

2008-12-31T06:00:00.000-08:00

.

Its New Year's Eve's Day, which obviously makes me feel as though i should be writing something profound and epic. Something universally understood, which would resonate with everyone and make each person sit back and revel at it's candid acuity.

But I really... I just don't know. I have no idea. I've got nothing, except hopes and wishes.

Although hopes and wishes are two very different things ... hopes are what you have when faith abides in your deepest soul. I wrote this earlier in the week:

"Faith vs. No Faith.

if i see no evidence of God, then i don't believe? i doubt, i am doubting, and w/ that comes fear that everything won't be alright.
There is a comfort in religion and God, a comfort which whispers to us that everything is taken care of

[everything is happening, you are where you're supposed to be]

that comfort tells us: we are cared for by something greater, there is some great hand resting on the small of our backs and pushing us onward.

without faith in that, we are so little, so lost.

standing alone is so impossible, such a struggle...

deep down, human beings are not independent creatures [truly, i believe this.]
we form communities, towns, families... we couple off, even our lives revolves around the search for the understanding and acknowledgment of others, the validation of our existence through someone else's existence.

when we say no man is an island, what we mean is that you cannot possibly survive on your own. [this is true even in the purest sense of survival].

in my mind, monogamy as the default is up for debate... if we are meant for just one other, i don't know. is that 'natural', maybe, but being alone certainly isn't. humans are dependent on each other.

and so, when we are alone on earth, our last vestige of hope is that even alone, down here, we aren't really alone...
and with that, comes the hope that God is looking out for us, and will look after us until someone(s) tangible is sent our way... "

that's hope.

wishes... wishes are what i think you are left with when you aren't sure. when you are not-so-confident that it's all coming in...

so i have hopes and wishes, warbling like a tightrope walker in a very thin thread.

so i just really don't know. this year is different from last year. next year will be even more so. but in terms of understanding, i'm a boat without a rudder, i'm a tightrope walker, i'm a wish-er and a partial hope-er, and all i have to give is what speaks to me, what hits me hard. so here is that.

"Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living."

-- Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer

happy 2009.

The chromosome divides. Multiply and thrive. And the strong survive. And the strong survive.

2008-12-11T07:41:00.000-08:00

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"Jesus reinvents Judaism. Duffy reinvents catchy naivete. ~~ Injections of Juvaderm reinvent the aging face. Thom Browne reinvents the male suit, and therby, male calves. The beverage industry reinvents the movie theatre as a high-fructose-corn-syrup dump site. Deaf, Beethoven reinvents the sonata. ~~ Carmel Snow reinvents Harper's Bazaar. The roulette wheel spins. John Cage reinvents silence. Talkative Isaac Mizrahi reinvents Target, and Target returns the favor. Biogenetics reinvents chicken. Mark Spitz reinvents the bathing suit. Brooke Sheilds reinvents eyebrows; Richard Prine reinvents sleaze by appropriating a photo of 10-year-old Brooke, nude. The StairMaster reinvents the schlep. ~~ England reinvents tea. Tit for tat; Bollywood reinvents Hollywood. ~~ The word processor reinvents the typewriter. We're supposed to be thrilled. D.H. Lawrence reinvents the sexiness of soot. American Apparel reinvents men's briefs as penny candy. China reinvents capitalism. Alec baldwin, leaving a message for his daughter, reinvents the rant. Calm and collected, Marcel Duchamp's urinal reinvents the museum. ~~ George Duboeuf reinvents Beaujolais. Like a ripe grape on joy's tounge, James Dean reinvents sensitivity, anticipating Heath Ledger, who reinvents James Dean. Alice Waters reinvents nearby vegetables. Thomas Alva Edison reinvents kissing. ~~ Judy Garland reinvents herself by spawning Liza, and then Liza rejuvenates Judy: chain reaction. Jung fails to reinvent Freud; psychotropics reinvent melancholy. The Buddha reinvents sitting and breathing. ~~ Colette -- the fashion boutique, not the writer -- reinvents replenishment by serving 80 different waters at Le Water Bar. Jose Saramago, writing the novel "Blindness," reinvents apocalypse; on YouTube, which reinvents TV, he appears, watching the movie "Blindness," starring Julianne Moore, who reinvents Revlon. ~~ Nietzsche harped on Eternal Recurrance: dreck keeps happening. Freud understood the fine line between reiteration and transformation. Suffering a repetitive compulsion, we aspire to reinvent trauma by replaying it. We destroy the planet, we keep on destroying it. ~~ Michael Jackson reinvents childhood; scandal reciprocates, reinventing Michael. Eugene Atget reinvents fin de siecle Paris by photographing it before it dies. James Joyce does the same, in words, for Dublin. Much later, Zaha Hadid sees the possibility of squiggles, and turns them into buildings. ~~ Money-fueled, Dubai reinvents Vegas. The Supreme Court reinvents the Constitution. Antifacist, Pablo Casals reinvents the cello. ~~ The iPod reinvents the ear's interior. The cellphone reinvents rudeness and renames it "communication." Martin Luther King Jr. reinvents civil disobedience. Madonna names her 2004 world tour Re-Invention. Berlin reinvents itself after 1945. Rituals of expiation -- Yom Kippur, the confessional -- reinvent culpability. ~~ Why ruminate on "reinvention" now? Like Mia Farrow or Angelina Jolie, we want to do good. We want to remedy crimes against humanity, to put a hex on torturers and environment wreckers. We want to stave off avian flu. DDT reinvents spring, said Rachel Carson, who evangelism deserves repeating. ~~ Western Europe reinvents socialism. The W.P.A. reinvents labor. Legal abortion reinvents liberty. Didn't J.F.K. once mention a torch? Let's get back to work."

-- Wayne Koestenbaum, NYT Magazine.

Reinvention. Reinvention is the sonic boom of change, the brother of growth. There is a time when the catalyst hits, and suddenly what was becomes what needs to change, and then existence stops, or reinvention happens.

In the past year, America began to reinvent politics and leadership -- in doing so we reinvented hope within ourselves. We went from being jaded -- from brushing the dust of repeated failure off our hands and walking away -- to genuinely believing in the worth of this country and the possibility of salvation. We let ourselves hope, a vulnerability that we had previously closed off. So by bestowing the responsbility we bestowed on one man, we also reinvented ourselves. Now the doors are opena and the gloves are off. The world is different.

That's not to say all reinvention is a success. Sometimes the reinvention is a step backward. Sometimes it fails. Sometimes we return to the way things were. It might happen. We began to push, to push and fight, to reinvent government and system and America itself (some people had been pushing and fighting for a while, already).

But a truly great fighter doesn't win one round and return to their corner. They win a round knowing its just the first push. A fighter who really wins... they don't win and then relax. They win and then they push and fight harder the second round. And then the third. And then the fourth...

Don't sit back. We just got started.

Reinvention.

I've been reinventing, too, in the past few months. What does home mean? What does happiness mean? What does this all mean? I defined. I redefined. I redefined again. And to redefine means to reinvent.

Where does joy lie? How do you tread the thin line between endless possibilites, and the great vacuum that is endless, undefined possibility? Thrilling and terrifying.

We define ourselves by our goals, by what we want and how we define the journey of our life -- when we achieve a goal, we must reinvent ourselves -- we have to reorient towards a new goal. But first we need to redefine what we want. It reminds me of Princess Bride, when Inigo Montoya finally kills the Prince. He says something like: "My whole life, I have dedicated to revenge. Now that the revenge part is over, what do I do?"

I've always been a reinventor. Constantly changing, constantly redefining, changing goals, changing what I wanted, changing myself in reaction to things that happened. Yet... I feel for the most part, those changes were surface, or just beneathe it. You can't really reinvent something still so undefined. Its the difference between erasing pencil lines, and erasing oil paint. Once there's really pigment, shadow, delineation really laid down, it gets messy to change the picture.
Now -- well, now the picture is really taking shape. There's a lot on there, solidly on there. And so to reinvent, to redefine... its much harder, and it goes much, much deeper. So much has been laid out on the past 6 months... don't worry, I'm not going to keep going with the painting metaphor.

Its surprising, the things that have changed. No, not surprising. Shocking. Things have happened that even though hoped for or against it, I really didn't believe it could really ever change. I doubted. And then it did. I didn't really believe Obama would win, I'll admit that. I hoped -- REALLY hoped -- but I didn't have faith.
Its hard to have faith when precedence has demonstrated continually disappointing results. One might call that "blind faith", in a way: to continue to hope, simply based on true belief, when everything has proved otherwise. Science would call you foolhardy. Medicine would call you a masochist.

I had really lost that ability, the ability to simply hope based on blind faith. To have faith based on blind hope.

In every facet of my life, and in every aspect, I didn't have it. I didn't believe Obama could win, I didn't believe this country could be saved (maybe it can't), I didn't believe that I could achieve certain things, get certain things, live a certain way...
Who can I blame? Really, only myself. I can attribute it to things or incidents... but the only person who can allow the loss of faith is yourself.

And so: I am trying to reinvent faith. To allow myself to believe. I find that place again, childishly optomistic or hopeful or sure... (a space inside yourself that holidays are supposed to revive, I've heard.) Its against my nature, which is often logical and scientific to a fault, to put all money down on a bet that I don't know the odds of. And to admit that maybe, there are factors in the equation I don't know about. This great big terrifying universe of possibility and reinvention. To throw it all in there. To reach down and reinvent from a deep, deep place. To change the actual structure of who I have become --to allow faith to be reinvented.

2008-11-12T05:35:00.000-08:00

To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

-- In Blackwater Woods, Mary Oliver

-----------------------------------------------

The dieseled fields. The lava hardened into unlovable
craters. The buds on my raspberries covered in frost.
Idaho. Idaho. Look at yourself. Dotted with zealots.
Spotted with cows. Imagine what you look like
from outer space. Luckily this won’t be like leaving
a man. No scene. Nobody will be calling
anybody a whore. Not now. After harvests so
bountiful they saved entire dispirited towns.
How else to say it? It’s time. Maybe it’s related to
the ants I saw laboring away atop a puff
of marshmallow. Their determination quickly giving way
to sorrow. Their small lives, one by one, crying out
to be crushed. When I stomped on them, I thought:
I am doing my job. I’m doing it well. Then I asked:
Is this who you want to be? No. I wanted out
of the equation. I wanted away from those ants
and my own murderous foot. Okay. That wasn’t
the truth. I was traveling through Mexico
when I saw those ants. And they triggered in me
contemplations of poverty and sadness and all the
short-lived sweetnesses I have known. Everything I do
isn’t about me. It’s as if you can’t see that. It’s as if
you can’t see a lot of things. Maybe this will be
like leaving a man. Plopped down like a couch. And I’ve
had to live on you. Covered in crumbs. Look at
yourself. Plaid-covered and mustard stained. How could
anyone take more? Do not say that I’ve failed.
There is a polished gun in every room. I dream
of metal. I dream of the arrow piercing
the songbird’s heart. No. I’m not saying
that I’m the songbird. I’m saying that I can’t sleep.
Not on top of you. I didn’t want this to be
funny. I’m tired of making everyone laugh.
Idaho, look at me. I’m being serious. Your trick roads,
I’m done with them. The face they gave me.
What they’ve claimed as theirs. It’s no longer
beautiful, the sharp ways they fall. I am wood.
When I see them, nothing inside me curls. You think
you can haunt me? You think I feel the same
way about you? No. Everything has changed.
It had to. So, deer, shed your fur. Mate
recklessly behind the snapping trees. Throw
your brown bodies onto the road. I said I
was leaving. I said goodbye. I’m almost gone.
Watch me. Can’t you see what you’ve done
to me? Now. My hand is on the door.

-- Goodbye Idaho, Kristen Tracy

-----------------------------------

Even after all this time
The sun never says to the earth,
“You owe Me.”

Look what happens with
A love like that,
It lights the Whole Sky.

- The Sun Never Says, Hafiz

.

2008-10-26T15:58:00.000-07:00

Never underestimate the world's ability to adapt. We react radically, but then, we change. Because in the end, its change, or die. We can't even imagine how far the depth of this ability goes... eventually, there is almost nothing that we can't accommodate in our lives. Eventually we consider it normal, part of the everyday routine, we accept it and incorporate it in. And then, we forget that it ever was unusual, or a change. Sometimes, I think we even convince ourselves that our adaptation is part of the way we *have* to be, the way we *have* to live. Or that it's part of us. And sometimes, we let it become a part of us.

But when presented with a stark contrast of how we could be or who we were, with who we have become, or what we have accepted ourselves becoming, we realize how we have adapted. Perhaps, what we have compromised, or what we have let go, or how we go about our lives, day to day.

And sometimes when things are presented to us in a different light or a different package, we realize how very strange it is, all these things we have forgotten, all these things that just blend in to the day to day... we realize how strange it is that we have forgotten how much we have changed.

A few links:

love this photo series...
The world of animals, evidence not only of how much life adapts, but how strange it is that we are so blind to how much things change. Us, animals... not so different.

except the norwhale (narwhale?). he's just weird.

-----------------------

I'm sitting down to consider
God doesn't exist.
He is my one and only

unanswered question, if you ignore
wars, death and UFOs. and girls.
Dear heavenly justice, did you

come in on the big bang bus;
are you leaving with it? or did you
really drive that double-decker

layered into above-firmament
and below-firmament?
Simic arrives dripping a trail of black

blasphemous ink. I close my eyes
my ears. he is a biased man.
I am not. Dear Charles,

your talent is proof
that the zookeeper exists.
and the angels

that your mind refuses to let
go of. and the love of the lovers
who crowd your poetry, and the sun

and birds and pigs, and the hell
where weddings sometimes take place.
that hell is the proof of heaven.

-- Tolu Ogunlesi, "On Reading 'A Wedding in Hell' by Charles Simic"

----------------------

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFl7QlHdjPU&eurl=http://mieka.com/

she is so... i don't know. just great, really.

god knows you put your life into its hands, and its both cradled you and crushed.

2008-10-19T05:21:00.000-07:00

.

The first time I ever saw Starry Night, I was on my first real date ... there's a whole background story to it. There's a reason why, even though its his best loved painting, his most well-known, and of course, such a cliche to admire it best, that I stood in front of Starry Night for 45 minutes. I hadn't ever been to the Museum of Modern Art without my family. I had rarely loved anything someone hadn't told me to love. I was stretching my wings, trying to find out what it was like to define myself internally by the external things that moved me.

We do this, as we get older -- we morph from a product of our parents, our nurturing, our past, to something new. Something we are constantly discovering, changing, trying to understand. We consider whether what we think we know about ourselves is due to what someone told us to know. We examine our own hands for signs of what truly lies in our hearts. We surprise ourselves, when we are really young, when we discover we are drawn to something which we have never been told to be drawn to. Sometimes we surprise ourselves, when we are older, by being drawn to something we didn't think we liked. Little things -- mushrooms, running, dissecting bugs, billy joel, whatever. Big things too, like what kind of a person we think we are, who we want to be, what we believe our personalities to be like... what we want to do with our lives... who we want to be with. Sometime what we stumble upon goes right up against the illusion we hold of what we solidly know. Our solid definition of ourselves we have decided upon -- sometimes we learn things which fall out of those boundaries; the type of person we think we are, what we think we should love, who we believe ourselves to be.

It's scary enough when its just a little thing... surprising and exciting too, of course. But it gets a little scarier when its a big thing. Something we never knew we never knew. Because then the whole planet we live on tips, and suddenly everything we thought we were sure of, may not be true. The story we've written for ourselves has a big chunk of the plot changed, and now the characters don't know if everything else is going to suddenly shift and fuck the whole story up. What if illusion of everything you think you know about yourself, and everyone, and everything -- those ideas and stories you hold to be solidly fact -- what if they were based on pillars of sand? What happens when one grain of sand shifts? Everything you know starts to slide.

And everything we know... everything has a story behind it.
Even things you think you already know, has a story behind it that you don't.

Maybe you think you know it. Maybe you don't. And maybe you've been living by the plot of one story for so long, that you can't see how everything has changed. You wear the story like a blindfold, while the world you think you still know slowly changes, has changed, has new stories written that you don't even know about.

Its a slippery slope. Letting those stories change how we see something. Maybe we see everything through them, like a fine mesh screen, altering everything. Maybe the stories are so opaque we see nothing at all.

Once we know the truth, the real stories behind all those things we think we know... they make the planet shift once we find them out. Once we know the real story, everything changes.

Starry Night and me. There's a whole relationship, there's a whole life of things that wrap around how I see that painting. But as long and as close as I've looked at it, for as much as I think I've known and seen, there's a whole story behind it that I don't know. I thought I knew, but I didn't.

Things we think are innocuous, or funny, or silly, have darker stories behind them too. Like corn, a product we all believe to be so wholesome and innocent, and commercials that the average person would have no background to judge objectively...

The story behind the new corn commercials.

Or the story behind politicians' claims. Via Mad Organica, a blogger who I read and have serious respect for -- a breakdown of what taxes you'd pay under Obama and McCain, via the Tax Policy Center.

How much do we actually know about what we say, about what we think we know? How many blindfolds are we wearing. How many stories have built themselves behind everything we think we already see.

The hope that starts, the broken hearts. You trust, you must confess; is someone getting the best, the best, the best, the best of you?

2008-09-17T17:46:00.000-07:00

Too many times
I've said I love you,

but really, I meant,

I want to pour honey all over you
and leave you in the woods
tied to a very sturdy tree.

--Too Many Times. April Dressel.

-------------------------------------

My god is a short god. My god wears jeans.
When he swims, he has a lazy breaststroke.
When he gardens, he uses his bare hands.
My god watches reruns of late night talk shows.
My god could levitate but prefers the stairs
and if available, the fireman’s pole. My god
loves bacon. My god’s afraid of sharks.
My god thinks the only way to define a country
is with water. My god thinks eventually,
we will come around on ear candling. My god
spits chaw. My god never flosses.
My god reads Proust. My god never
graduated. He smiles when astronauts reach
zero gravity and say My god, My god.
My god is knitting one very big sweater.
My god is teaching his terrier to beg.
My god didn’t mean for icebergs. My god
didn’t mean for machetes. Sometimes
a sparrow lands in the hands of my god
and he cups it, gently. It never wants to leave
and so, it never notices that even if it tried
my god has too good a grip, my god, my god.

-- My God. Sandra Beasley.

------------------------------------------

i like that last poem, objectively. but i found myself re-writing it in my head all night.:

my god invented corn dogs as a joke.
if god could be colorblind to words, god cannot see
accidents.
god thinks we are funniest
when we are in traffic, or having sex. or both
which god has seen.
god wants to gently remind you
you were never supposed to be friends.
god is not envious of our ignorance; god is waiting for us to step up.
god created you,
but no map for me to find you.
when it rains god gets uncomfortably humid.
when it snows god reminds godself
that god doesnt understand what it feels like to doubt.
god wore havianas before you, but would let you think you did first. god
eats dessert whenever.
god appreciates cupcakes and doesn't try to question logic. god
watched klimnt and davinci with amazement. god
is happiest when suprised. and also saddest. the windows
are always rolled down in god's 1960 firebird. god likes the socratic method,
pickling, and phosphorus. god
can't wait for us to discover that thing over there. god is anxious
for us to find our own way; god knows all the answers, and all the questions,
god prefers a bicycle, god hates AM radio too, god would
impishly bet you
that god has a far more impressive organic garden than you.
god only wears pants that can have hands wiped on them, god
is lonely sometimes, when we don't seem to get it. our prayers are
gods nightmares and lullabies, god takes credit for the dimmer switch,
god has never gotten lost, ever. god thought
the pinecone would be evidence of gods love and will wait for us
to get it.
god wrists are full of noisy bracelets,
god wants us to rise, but first, to look at our own devastation
and say "what have we wrought?" god calms down by
fingerpainting and
watching the amazon, and inventing ice cream flavors. god
didn't invent allergies, but is sorry for us anyhow. god prefers spicy
and salty, god is pointing to the waves, when there
are tornadoes, god has to look away
for a moment.
our lives are too short
to live without just apologizing;
sometimes god secretly wishes god could
place a hand on the back of your neck,
right where you still have that trail of hair, and whisper
all the answers in your ear.
if god could.

dark blue, dark blue, have you ever been alone in a crowded room? when i'm here with you?

2008-09-04T07:20:00.000-07:00

i don't know if i believe in past lives.
or any sort of weird veiled religious theories about souls, time and lives, for that matter. but i have to admit, my reaction to certain disconnected things always makes me think that maybe there is something in us that knows more than we consciously understand. certain preferences or fascinations... maybe it does all come down to neurons and science. or, maybe something else within us recognizes something from our past.

(wow, if you just survived that weird tangent, congrats.)

the reason i bring that up: when i saw this tiny article in the paper, i seriously freaked out.
(and SO tiny -- this seems like such a huge deal to me, and there it is, stuck in the back of the paper.)
i just started saying "Oh my god. Oh my god." and i wanted to run and tell someone about it. i wanted to show everyone that there was finally proof for everyone else of something that i had known was real, forever.

i mean, i guess it can't possibly be Colossus of Rhodes, which was made of iron and would have been much, much bigger. but thats what i wish it was proof of.

unlike jesus, or buddah, i have never questioned that Colossus of Rhodes existed. i remember when i learned in elementary school that it had been destroyed and never found, that maybe no evidence of it existed. i got ridiculously sad. more sad, i think, than if you told me my pet had died. really.
i know that sounds absurd.
i was shocked that it had been destroyed, i felt like it was some sort of personal offense committed against me. and then i remember the thought popped into my head: But that means... I'll never see it again. And then another voice said: Again?

maybe i'm just attached to human displays of genius and grandeur... i'm usually blown away by them, and intensely sad when i hear they've disappeared or have been destroyed. like when paintings are stolen, or when i read about ancient temples that were burned. i feel like i've lost something.

if i see the pyramids of giza, or the great wall of china, or the taj majal, nothing in the world willbe different for it. if i never saw a single one the world would still be no different for it. no record of my seeing them will really ever exist, or if one did, it could never outlast those things themselves. but still -- if i die without seeing those things... well, a little piece of me would die incomplete and disappointed.

i mean... can you imagine. FIFTEEN FEET TALL. this statue they discovered was solid marble. 15 feet tall. can you imagine what kind of city it was in? how long it stood for? how long it took to create?
the things that have existed on this earth, that might exist, the possibility.

<---- blah blah, yeah yeah, crazy crazy.

now here's an apple with a tougher skin.

2008-08-30T15:34:00.000-07:00

.

New York Times: Unity Deferred - Can you cross out 'Hillary' and write 'Sarah'?

Answer: No.

---------------

Ancient 'Urban' Villages discovered in the Amazon.

i wish that i was a treasure hunter/indiana jones, and had discovered this.

---------------

It's so dark walking East Hill Road
we no longer see each other,

what does it matter? outline
of trees crowding the sky, fog lowering,

our bodies urgent, fractious, reinvented.
Once, I would have married,

you say. Around us no light
enters. Surely the pinewood

has closed in on itself, a body
of water deepens. He was climbing

down from the roof
when he fell,

you say. Three stories.
Your hand makes a straight line

in the air, he just stopped feeling.
I remember the hidden meadow,

dense with fescue and steepleflower.
I wonder if he recognized you

after, if you stood there saying
who am I

to remind you? Feel something.
Where the road finishes, we turn

back, and for once I understand
the blind heart fumbling, the way

language uses us: elderberry, fox-
glove, the pink trumpets of morning

resounding in the airfield.
There's no hurt you can't unthink.

Around us a slow wind begins.
At least he won't ever feel sadness,

you say, and I think I see you,
your arms swinging

at your sides, unable to choose
what you can live without.

-- Half June, Stacie Cassarino.

you know that were doomed; slow dancing in a burning room..

2008-08-24T06:38:00.000-07:00

The theme of this post is patience, and waiting... Patience to wait, patience to find out, patience to work...

Hmm. Big shock, shockity shock shock shock.

Researchers question the wide use of the HPV vaccines.

-------------------------------------------------------------
From Grist:

"Twiggin' Out:

Scientists have proposed genetically engineering trees to self-ferment themselves into usable fuel. Hopefully, they'll soon turn their attention to sandwiches that self-assemble themselves into usable lunch."

Deep down in my gut, I have a really adverse reaction to that. Why? Because it reminds me of Orwellian don't-fuck-with-nature-or-nature-will-go-TheHappening-on-your-ass. Not that I think nature is sentient/aware/going to kill us all. But when you mess with the natural order of how the Earth works, without fully understanding the whole natural order system, then you are also changing things you are not aware of

I guess the caveat to my train of thinking, is that we have already so blindly and irreversibly fucked up the natural order of things, that maybe we do have to cross some lines to fix what we have done... I just see the fantastic error of an eye for an eye mentality when it comes to using technology. I'm not sure our massive mistakes warrant changing the way the earth works... Trees are not supposed to self-ferment themselves into fuel for a reason. Maybe I don't know what that reason is, but I sure as fuck think that if the Earth didn't do it that way, The Earth probably had a good reason.

Albeit, maybe this will become the savior of the world and I'll be totally off-base. Only time will tell. I'm just suuuuper anxious to find out whos right, here.

---------------------------------------------------------

will this video work? will i have wasted a disproportionate amount of time trying to do it? Yes is the answer to one of those.

34.25.36

2008-08-01T18:25:00.000-07:00

good video, totally fucked subject matter. its weird that this video popped up for me today; but no weirder than all the weird "coincidences" of the past few days. i wish i knew anything about math and could figure out the probabilities of events occurring in the past 7 days. the resulting equation would probably cause the world to implode.

34x25x36

2008-07-26T07:19:00.000-07:00

I really just don't know how to start this.

I guess, first off, I should acknowledge the fact that this blog has become completely personal. All of my excuses and rationalizations that it was otherwise; the one thing I was so set on was setting boundaries between my personal life, and this blog. I didn't want to end up where I started -- writing about who I am and what I'm doing and how I feel. Because, as lovely as that all is... I just didn't want to put myself out there anymore.

Ah ha, I said it.

But:

I couldn't do it.

Or it can't be done. Or, I couldn't do it. If this blog was an experiment, if it was a science lab testing things about my life and myself and my intellect and my heart, then what this experiment will be written up as a Failure.

I don't mean failure in a negative way. But the experiment itself (Can I write a blog about what I think, without including the rest of myself in it? Can I keep a public me and a private me, teased apart?) is an utter failure.

I'm not so opaque I guess: people who know me -- even people who *don't* know me -- can read this blog and read me just as well. This blog reads like its own story. I can look back on posts and know exactly where and when I was, what I was thinking, why I wrote that entry in that way. And it would seem that I'm not the only one who can look back and see a story too. I kind of feel like I'm in Earth Science, looking at a cross-section of soil...
"And this was a drought year. And that layer of sediment there? That year, that year it rained. And that layer there? That layer -- there was a flood."
Anyone who reads this may not know what happened exactly. But they can put a story to it. And to me... they can put a story to me.

For all the protests about how much I wanted this blog to be kept separate, the one side of me was not enough. The one face of Jekyll without Hyde. The light without the dark. The posts never felt complete, never really felt completely satisfying. There was always some deeper truth I was playing at, trying to imply, trying to say.
And it wasn't honest, in that regard. And they weren't honest for the fact that we all know Jekyll has another side. He isn't complete without Hyde, the story can't be told with his other half. The entirely good side is a facade, its overdone makeup, its a costume. The real story, the whole story, it may be dark, ugly, embarrassing... but whatever it's underbelly, it can't exist in full without both sides.

By trying to keep it all separate, it almost spoke more about what I was trying not to talk about -- the other side. The contrast; the full and honest story.

And so this blog was a failure. I always feel that some of my best education has come from my failures, and I feel no differently about this one. I learn from them, almost more so than from my successes sometimes. And what I have learned here, is that I just can't. I can't separate myself out. Maybe you can. Maybe other people can test this theory and find success. But I couldn't, and I can't.

I accept this.
I accept this about myself -- I can't be truly happy if I'm just being one side. If I'm separated. If I keep myself teased apart. It isn't me. To be honest, I do embarrassing, ugly, dark things. But if I'm not standing by both parts... then I'm not fully there. And acknowledging this? However embarrassing it is to un-seperate, to de-wall... to reveal that side, the Jekyll, the dark -- however scary it is, I'm happier now than I've been in a very long time. Sometimes being there, being 100% there, means there will be lower lows too -- but honestly, if you're going to get on the rollercoaster, you get on for the whole thing. The dips and the rises. I guess what I'm saying is, I have to acknowledge and accept the dips to ever feel the rises again. I have to live both sides, be both sides, acknowledge all of them.

I'm just trying to remember that there would be no value in the light, if there was no darkness to exist on the other side. The other side -- its holds weight too. Place value on its existence: what it means for a person's complexity and the contrast it gives to everything, or maybe everything loses its vibrancy.

So, I will probably come to feel awkward about this, maybe. I'm not even sure who all will ever see it, read it, understand it. But... its here. God, I already feel kind of fruity about this post. But I'll bite down and stand here through it.

2008-07-16T20:46:00.000-07:00

2 pairs desert camo boots
sleeping bag
assault pack: NODs, ammo, night-vision goggles
wind-stopper gloves

These don’t belong to me.

Camelbak backpack for water
Kevlar helmet
MICH helmet
grenade pouches
magazine pouches

I have no place here. This is not my life.

9-millimeter holster
equipment vest
same old ruck

He can’t bear my worry. Like the rucksack he carries
on his back, it seems
to suck the life out of him.

socks ... green/black
PTs — shorts, shirts for workout
SPEAR silk underwear for cold weather
SPEAR body armor ... ergonomically correct
barracks bag for laundry
rain poncho and linerblack wool cap

I was always asking if he was warm enough.
Put a sweater on, I’d say. Your jacket ...

duffel bag
entrenching tool
kneepads
elbow pads
uniforms
Nuclear, Biological, Chemical suit

I can’t protect him.

Vaccinations:
anthrax
hepatitis
flu shot
meningitis
tetanus
typhoid
smallpox
TD

No one could explain his nosebleeds. They always seemed to
come when I was packing
for business trips: Pittsburgh, Chicago, Detroit ...

CDs: Springsteen, Sarah McLachlan, U2 ...
DVDs: “In the Name of the Father,” “Boondock Saints,” “Elf” ...
Marlboros
chewing tobacco

Tissues fell from him like crumpled doves.

pin light
“Case for Christ”
“Onward Muslim Soldier”
“Salem’s Lot”
“Catcher in the Rye”
laminated four-leaf clover

He tilted his head back, pinched his nose
between thumb and index finger:
“Don’t worry, I know what to do.”

Officer Record Brief
Hazardous Duty Orders
Zero Your Weapon

He’s given me his dog-eared copy of Komunyakaa’s
“Neon Vernacular,” underlined:
“We can transplant broken hearts/
but can we put goodness back into them?”

Life Insurance: to be split between Mom and Dad
Emergency Records ... who gets called
battalion wants to know what to read
at your funeral, what songs to play

He looks up from the paperwork,
hard into my eyes:
“You said you wanted to know.”

-- Inventory.Frances Richey.

well nothing ever went quite exactly as we planned. our ideas held no water but we used them like a damn...

2008-07-06T07:04:00.000-07:00

.

Today, in Awe Inspiring StupidityPolitics:

Bush: Olympic Boycott Would Insult Chinese.

boy·cott (boikt)

tr.v. boy·cott·ed, boy·cott·ing, boy·cotts

To abstain from or act together in abstaining from using, buying, or dealing with as an expression of protest or disfavor or as a means of coercion. See Synonyms at blackball.

Verb

to refuse to deal with (an organization or country) as a protest against its actions or policy

... yeaaaaaah. ... that's... that's pretty much the whole idea. the insult thing. yeah. who is his press secretary again?

Press Secretary: "Ok, Mr. President. Let's go over this one more time. What do we do before we speak to the media?
President: "... We... wait, I know this one... we think about whether what we're gonna say is an Out Loud sentence or a Keep It To Myself sentence."
Press Secretary: "And what do we do if we're not sure?"
President: "I find you, and test it out."
Press Secretary: "That's right. And a good rule of thumb, especially when you can't find me, is: 'when it doubt, don't let it out."

McCain Battles a Nemesis, the Teleprompter.

Dear Mark Leibovich,

Please be my friend.

Love, Me.

I don't blame you and I know I'm not your friend. How we livin', young American?

2008-07-05T07:40:00.000-07:00

.

Should I write a post about "freedom" and American independence and July 4th? Surely I should. And I was gonna. BUT:

Honestly, I love July 4th. Its usually my favorite holiday. not because I'm so "rah rah rah" America, but because it combines my favorite three things: Summer, BBQing, and Things Exploding with Bright Colors. Believe me, if Labor Day had fireworks, it'd be golden.

This year was kind of rainy; between that, and the fact that I had work from 8am-4pm (plus not many folks were around for celebrations) I had fairly low expectations. Additionally, when I'm not eating char-grilled snacks, drunken flag-waving, bottle rocket launching patriots seem a lot less tolerable to me. This post was gearing up to be pessimistic and cranky.

Yesterday, however, turned out to be very cool, despite colluding factors which might have made it otherwise. This, to me, was the best part:

After leaving a fireworks display at Sea Cliff beach, this random guy shoves a paper in our hands. Later I'm gonna do my damnedest to scan it in; it's called "The Dispatch: 'This Time, Let Your Truth Prevail -- Rain on the Parade Edition".

[Let me preface the body of this work by saying two things: I have not looked into the veracity of any claims hereafter about deleted paragraphs and such. Also, we got into the car and I read this out loud, in my best Founding Fathers voice, while accompanied by the final three minutes of the 1812 overture.]

"'The Declaration of Independence, The Deleted Paragraph.'

'He, [King George] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted has negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the peopleon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of nor people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another.' - Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence (prior to delegate edits)

"While you celebrate our country's 232 year of independence from Great Britain, remember those who were not 'freed' from the so-called yolk of British tyranny in 1776. On July 4th, 1776 while the American aristocracy sat in Philadelphia, patting itself on the back, African slaves continued to toil under the wretched system of chattel slavery - a tyranny worse than those any of the 'founding fathers' ever suffered under.
As reprinted above, The Declaration's writer, Thomas Jefferson, attempted to included a paragraph blasting the King for sanctioning and facilitated [sic] slavery, an evil running in direct contradiction to '...life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...'
Jefferson, himself a slave owner, was shot down by delegates (primarily from the South) who refused to sign the document should the paragraph stay.
It is an undeniable fact that the omission of the anti-slavery paragraph from the Declarartion Of Independence was the most horrific failure in the founding of this country. It set a precedent which continued more than halfway through the 19th century in the form of chattel slavery, after which manifesting itself solely in the form of anti-black racism/violence which continues to the present.
So, as you celebrate today, take time to remember those who were not freed from tyranny 232 years ago as well as the disastrous injustices that our overwhelmingly racist 'founding fathers' brought unto African slaves and their descendants by not abolishing the practice of slavery on the first day of our independence from great Britain. Not to mention the complete negation of the 'inalienable rights' of those men women and children who inhabited this land prior to the European invasion.
In the end, maybe there is not so much to celebrate..." - Warner Bass

I'm going to let that speak for itself.

Although I will add that the 1812 overture ended on the exact moment I finished reading. If you've ever read any sort of document with a full orchestral accompaniment, you'll understand me when I say: I felt pretty damn majestic.

standing in the dark

2008-06-22T09:24:00.000-07:00

.
until later today:

Melting Words by Koutana Bouabane -- a dark/beautiful photo project. Check out the full series, which is progressively more cutting and cruel. although i know that on another day it might be very depressing, for some reason i keep looking at it and feeling inspirited.

usually they just bite our hands. cause normally we have clothes on without a fight -- but now fighting's a part of baby's romance.

2008-06-12T22:31:00.000-07:00

EDIT: yeah, i did fall asleep while posting this, sooooo... here i am at 9:00am posting it.

wish i had a better, closer, less-scratchy-audio version. but: so. tired. my coherent thought train = non-existent. may have already fallen asleep typing this once already.

from one of my favorite shows; cheesy or not.

why? because of choreographers like mia michaels, who create weird, achy, gorgeous, quirky dances like this. maybe its the combination of mia michaels and me'shell ndegeocello. me'shell ndegeocello will always remind me of a period of gutwrenching pain i endured, but also of the most cavernous depths of love. if sometimes you find that a sunset is almost too much beauty for you to bear, then you understand what i'm talking about. if a choreographer and a singer could diagram heartbreak, then these two would be able to.

daily dose of art concerning the human condition for you.

And if you don't like it, you can shove it. But you don't like it, you love it. ... I'm the greatest man that ever lived.

2008-06-06T05:57:00.000-07:00

.

A quick preface -- if you do nothing else i ever tell you to do, do this: Get. The. New. Weezer. Album.
"The Greatest Man That Ever Lived" is a track which is the kind of epic that you makes you wish that choirs of men singing falsetto followed you around talking smack about your enemies. You probably won't understand what I just said. But you will.

Onwards:

I was very nearly on the verge of posting, last week, but I hesitated. I hesitated because the subject matter was pretty touchy, pretty personal, kind of controversial? I hesitated.

Sometimes when you're really up close to something, its hard to see what everything really looks like without taking a step back. But sometimes even that doesn't really help, and you need someone else to sit next to you and narrate the scenery and tell you about what you're looking at. Writing is like that sometimes too -- I can't even tell sometimes, I guess because I'm so embroiled in it, if what I'm writing makes any sense at all. Or if it sucks. Or if its totally fucked up and problematic and I'm majorly putting my foot in my mouth. So... I palmed it off to someone else and asked them to read it first.

They did. But afterwards I felt just as... unsure... as I did before they read it. And even though it seemed to resonate, and even though we talked about the subject matter, I didn't feel any change in my position about whether to post it or not.
Although... I was also grocery shopping at the time, so in my head the memory that really sticks out is my desperate (and fruitless) search for tamari.
(Maybe I didn't give the conversation its due space. Now I'd like to sit back down and really talk about it, for an hour or two, but... too late.)

Recurring theme: revealing the big piece. I struggle with how personal the political becomes, I struggle with how much to give away for the sake of writing, for the sake of understanding. And sometimes I wonder what the fuck my motivations really are. The entry I was going to post was about really specific topics which I simply have no vocabulary to write about without speaking very candidly and personally about them.

But I mean, isn't that our entry into most things? And how divorced can the intellectual be from the personal, when these things HAPPEN. And they happen TO US. We don't exist in a bubble, protected from all significance and meaning. We exist in context, although for me, my context is usually very personal and very tied to a hundred other things. Maybe thats the sign of a good writer: someone who can write about one subject, isolated, and divorce it from all personal meaning.

But I know that's not true. So when I claim that this blog is about culture and society and politics and news and art, and not necessarily about ME, am I full of shit?

I'm pretty sure I am.

To compound my sneaking suspicion that I'm not only full of B.S., but also not fooling anyone about it, I read an article in NY Times Magazine about Emily Gould, a former blogger at Gawker, and why she decided to bow out of the blogging world.
For those not initiated into the micro-culture of NY social culture, Gawker is a catty, scathing gossip website, where bloggers essentially complain about NY and NY related shit that anyone outside of that micro-community doesn't give a damn about. Sorry if I sound biased; I am. I think Gawker really represents the lowest common denominator in terms of ruthless gossip and petty name-calling. To me, Gawker was that girl in high school who wasn't as popular as her friends, and developed some kind of deep psychological complex about it; she knew she'd never be as popular, never be as pretty or interesting as the first-in-commands, which caused her to try twice as hard to be twice as vicious.
Somehow that viciousness made her even uglier, and its wasn't like she had such a lovely character in the first place, although somehow her cruelty made you forget that she was just like you, except with biting commentary about people's most vulnerable flaws.
Maybe you didn't have that girl in your high school, but I'm sure you know the kind of person I'm talking about.
Gawker is like that -- no holds barred, no conscience, no borders. And no scruples either; Gawker is perfectly willing to forgo decency and all standards of privacy and respect in the name of reporting the "juiciest" gossip and the most scandalous pictures of those that have the unfortunate pleasure of landing in the crosshairs.

In an earlier NY Times article, Nick Denton, the owner of Gawker Media, wrote that: “THE ideal Gawker item is something triggered by a quote at a party, or an incident, or a story somewhere else and serves to expose hypocrisy, or turn conventional wisdom on its head."

Although ask the bloggers at Gawker who's a hypocrite, and the answer will be pretty much anyone who's breathing.

I try to stay away from Gawker, because reading it usually manages to both lower my I.Q. and make me seriously nauseated. Once you start reading it, its like a drug -- you feel this intense panic that if you don't keep reading, all the time, you're not going to be in the loop, you're going to miss out on something really important that everyone else will have in their frame of reference. (Before you started reading, of course, none of it meant anything to you, and you were completely fine without it. But once you're initiated? Its an obsession. Describing this weird panic is hard, and only a certain subset of people, a certain generation if you will, really get what I'm referring to when I say its like facebook. If that reference just rang a bell, you implicitly understand Gawker. If it didn't, then I'm afraid I don't really know how to explain the sick psyche of the internet to you. Sorry.)

Emily Gould was a writer for Gawker a while back, kind of a blogger darling, but had a magnificent fall from grace that ended in a pretty long bout of obscurity. When I say a magnificent fall from grace, I'm talkin' about the kind of fall where you trip and fall flat on your face in front of the whole Varsity football team, and your new skirt flies right over your head, and you're wearing underwear with Muppets on the ass, and then your crush walks up and laughs.

Yeaaaaaah, a HARD fall.

I didn't really pay much attention to any of that while it was happening, I just was kind of vaguely aware that it did. Then, this past week an article in NY Times magazine chronicled Emily's rise to "fame" and subsequent horrific disposal. Written by Emily herself, confessional style, she talked about her reasons for getting into Gawker, why it happened and how she started. Before she joined the company, she had written another, more personal blog about her life. In one entry, she referenced her boyfriend, who was incensed at being mentioned on said blog:

"My blog post was ridiculous and petty and small — and, suddenly, incredibly important. At some point I’d grown accustomed to the idea that there was a public place where I would always be allowed to write, without supervision, about how I felt. Even having to take into account someone else’s feelings about being written about felt like being stifled in some essential way.

As Henry and I fought, I kept coming back to the idea that I had a right to say whatever I wanted. I don’t think I understood then that I could be right about being free to express myself but wrong about my right to make that self-expression public in a permanent way. I described my feelings in the language of empowerment: I was being creative, and Henry wanted to shut me up. His point of view was just as extreme: I wasn’t generously sharing my thoughts; I was compulsively seeking gratification from strangers at the expense of the feelings of someone I actually knew and loved. I told him that writing, especially writing about myself and my surroundings, was a fundamental part of my personality, and that if he wanted to remain in my life, he would need to reconcile himself to being part of the world I described.

After a standoff, he conceded that I should be allowed to put the post back up. As he sulked in the other room, I retyped what I’d written, feeling vindicated but slightly queasy for reasons I didn’t quite understand yet."

Of course, as I read on, I began to question my own motivations for blogging. Like Emily, I've always had some kind of online journal where I could write about my thoughts ... although sometimes I digressed into airing my grievances and vaguely bitching about something abstract that was obviously a very real reference to someone or something. And what had started as me wondering about what was appropriate to include on here, began to dissolve into a total paranoia about blogging in general:

"... But is that really what’s making people blog? After all, online, you’re not even competing for 10 grand and a Kia. I think most people who maintain blogs are doing it for some of the same reasons I do: they like the idea that there’s a place where a record of their existence is kept — a house with an always-open door where people who are looking for you can check on you, compare notes with you and tell you what they think of you. Sometimes that house is messy, sometimes horrifyingly so. In real life, we wouldn’t invite any passing stranger into these situations, but the remove of the Internet makes it seem O.K. Of course, some people have always been more naturally inclined toward oversharing than others. Technology just enables us to overshare on a different scale. Long before I had a blog, I found ways to broadcast my thoughts — to gossip about myself, tell my own secrets, tell myself and others the ongoing story of my life... "

The more I read about Emily, the more I started wondering if I, too, fell into that category of bloggers who chronicled their every minute movement for validation of their life and existence.

For Emily that validation wasn't only an obsession; at Gawker, it became her job. Writing about others, speculating on their lives and spying on their daily routines was what she got paid to do, and as she writes in the article, it pretty much consumed her. The more she wrote for Gawker, however, the more she started to mix up real-Emily with Gawker-Emily -- in fact, they became one and the same. Suddenly there was no line between personal and professional; Emily's profession was the personal, and not only was there no line, but she found herself infamous enough to actually begin to be posted ABOUT on Gawker. This weird new-found celebrity, where anonymous commenters/tormentors knew every private thought and all the sordid details of her life left her feeling kind of like she had eaten a pound of gummiworms: kind of ill, full of crap, and deprived of anything with real substance and nutrients...

"For a year, I had been getting up each morning at 7 a.m., my thoughts jostling in my head, eager to escape. I wrote constantly, responding to the events of the day in real time, under perpetual pressure to condense everything I thought and read into something readers could consume. But now I was burned out and directionless, and without an audience, I lost the narrative thread. ...
Soon after that, I lost the will to blog altogether.

The will to blog is a complicated thing, somewhere between inspiration and compulsion. It can feel almost like a biological impulse. You see something, or an idea occurs to you, and you have to share it with the Internet as soon as possible. What I didn’t realize was that those ideas and that urgency — and the sense of self-importance that made me think anyone would be interested in hearing what went on in my head — could just disappear."

I sympathized with her, honestly. Even though I wanted to feel superior, I understood the entire "will to blog" thing. I've lost mine too, several time, where I simply can't work up the energy to say anything, let alone anything of substance. Sometimes, writing something comprehensive is exhausting, and writing something where you have to finesse a feeling of expertise... well, that takes guts, guts which I sometimes wonder if I have enough of to claim knowledge about anything. Often, the will to blog means having the will to be part of the world, to be a functioning human being in the universe who exists via the internet. And honestly, there are some days where I seriously want to say a big "fuck you" to every online social-tool and wouldn't care if to others, I seemed like I just stopped existing. If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? If I don't exist on myspace, do I really exist in the world? And, to be serious -- what happens to the record of people who never make a mark of themselves in this world? Once we're not aware of them, do they simply stop existing too?

In the end, Emily removed herself from the world of blogging. She left Heartbreak Soup, her more personal online blog, unshuttered -- "Late one night, I unlocked Heartbreak Soup and wrote one last post there. In it, I talked about how a single blog post can capture a moment of extreme feeling, but that reading an accumulated series of posts will sometimes reveal another, more complete story. I talked about how taking the once-public blog and making it private, though tempting, felt like trying to revise history.

Knowing that the worst of my online oversharing is still publicly accessible doesn’t thrill me, but it doesn’t scare me anymore either. I might hate my former self, but I don’t want to destroy her, and in a way, I want to respect her decision to show the world her vulnerability. I’m willing to let that blog exist now as a sort of memorial to a time in my life when I thought my discoveries about myself and what I loved were special enough to merit sharing with the world immediately."

The article made me question myself, especially in light of the post I was *about* to post. It seemed like a cautionary tale, a "this could happen to you if you put too much of your personal life online!"

It gave me the impulse to wipe out any record of myself online, to shutter this blog, take back all the things I'd said for fear of the mistakes and flaws about myself i may have exposed in writing here. But then, the last thing that Emily said struck me; that she had left up the blog as record of her existence.

Maybe that motivation isn't so bad. I don't really think its so un-relateable to want a record of your own existence, to know you existed and to prove it to others. And in a technological age where no one seems to have time enough to sit down and have those deep conversation about life and God and politics, those thoughts go nowhere. Like little boats set adrift on a sea of human consciousness, they have to land somewhere. When no one is physically there for them to land on, they seek other harbors; like the internet. So although the internet becomes a substitution for human interaction, I wonder whether that substitution is part of complex chicken-or-the-egg debate.
Like in High Fidelity, when Nick Hornby wonders:

"What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?"

Did we start blogging because we had lessened human connections? Or have we lost human connection because we're so preoccupied with blogging?

For that matter, did I start this blog because I didn't have anyone to talk about these topics with? As a substitute for human connection? Or have I stopped trying to have these conversation with actual physical people because I blog about it instead?