Notes

Just some brief notes:

I have a pretty packed day for the first part of tomorrow. I'm going to try to get up relatively early (I slept til like 1:30 today-- not even because I was tired), get a haircut, drive out to the Jackson Outlets and Six Flags to fill out some applications and figure out how to make some cream this summer, then head out to Liberty Oak to play some Ultimate-- something I haven't done in a long time and am excited to get back into.

I've started eating right again, and exercising a little bit also. It gives me something to work towards and some semblance of control over what's going on. Typically I couldn't really care less-- would rather just go with the flow-- but it's a time in which I need something like this.

I'm watching this show on Comedy Central and doing my laundry. The show is called Ugly American and it is stupid. The laundry is also stupid.

I'm finding it very difficult to keep myself occupied. Everything is foggy and without its usual brightness, brilliance. This is an essential challenge, however. It is a good thing I like playing Ultimate and getting haircuts I guess.

I started keeping a paper and ink journal while away (oh shit, I guess I should blog about that trip or something I dunno) and I really like it. Think I'll keep it up. It helps.

AAAAHHHHHHGHGHGHGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!

I want a Droid. And a sampler. And a job.

I have some bad habits to address and remedy. It isn't going to happen immediately, but I'll do what I can when I can.

I have really really unbelievably warm friends.

Well, off I trot to Washington for Sasquatch!

Mom and Dad think we're going to drive off of a canyon.

I sure hope we don't--

When I despair I micromanage but I'm running out of internet and out of tongues and out of lines and out of time and if I could be the one who didn't wear ice the same number of nights fur, I would be.

How do I even talk about these things that don't feel good?

Tunnelvision

Taking an undeserved break from researching for my postmodernism presentation (due tomorrow) and final paper (due I forget), that's what I'm doing yep yep. I'm finding myself short on everything these days, not least of all time. There's a hypocrisy about the length of my fuse that I'm considering with a sort of resolved sadness; I can't take what I give a good amount of the time. My self-awareness somehow falls short of understanding how I am at times a pretty fucked-up friend, and bad habits are hard to uproot when they wear flowers on their heads.

MAN am I ever (sometimes) supremely envious of nihilists!

I fear that I see things with terrible sort of paranoid distortion. It makes it super hard to tell when something is something I should worry about and when something is something I'm only worried about because I'm worried I am supposed to be worrying about it.

What's with this nagging fear of obsolescence I've picked up recently? I feel I've moved on from the stage of psychosocial development that I was hung up on for, LIKE, forever and now I've entered one a whole lot scarier and its lousy and blah blah blah I'm still the narcissistic whelp I've always been don't fret about that!

My problem isn't that I can't see straight but that I can only see straight, like I have this autistic inability to focus on stimuli, positive or negative, from more than a handful of things. So while I'm busy biting my nails over some shit only I'm worried about I'm losing contact with the orbiting periphery.

And I wonder if, in a grand stroke of irony, all of this would go away if I chilled the fuck out and got my shit together. I just want to feel less sometimes, or figure out how to stop burning my hand on cooking fires.

I don't post here much anymore for a variety of reasons. It feels both too public and permanent to be completely honest in-- and without honesty, the whole thing is bunk, isn't it? I wouldn't be surprised if this was the beginning of the end for blogger and me. Seems my personal thoughts, the ones I've enjoyed posting to see what people thought of them or what shape they took upon revisitation, are better suited for the margins of legal pads-- where they can remain in ink, spared the embarrassment of internet immortalization, and me their eventual betrayal.

I most often haven't words to excuse the fits of anxiety I'm sometimes prone to. They come in flash floods and dissipate with equal unpredictability. For any number of reasons, I seize up with terror, draw scenarios in the sand and cast the sample in concrete. Then I unhinge my jaws and swallow the whole thing in one, where it sits in my belly a stone-- its etchings enhanced by stomach acid.

Everything now feels like setup for the next season. What comes and goes when one ends?

But if I were to say anything here with clarity, it would be that I am desperately afraid.

Artax

It's 51 degrees out, cloudless and blue, a Sunday made for walks past cafes, through grassy city squares down to the water where great barges crawl like they're just left to float where they do. Reminds me of Savannah, so practiced at formality it manages prim in 90% humidity.

I could use a parachute.

As March begins, it burrows inside me spinier than I expected, and I expected it to hurt terribly. Ironic that with the sun and the warmer weather, so [nearly] ending my hibernationesque retreat from myself, comes this month of rejection, change, and difficult decisions.

In the hollow part inside me, left by the wilting of a child's garden: wonder, amusement, trust, belief, faith-- I feel this detachment and loneliness pressing out like gas expanding within me, or dark water pushing at the sides of a pipe-- finding imperfections to gnaw at until it bursts.

I wonder if there exists a spring to water myself from.

Sometimes I get shakes when I realize I see things too romantically or fantastically. I worry that if I'm not good enough even at what I'm good at, well, what use is there for me? And losing the good things. And being stuck somewhere/here.

Will I be like Artax, overcome and doomed?

Wax cast

2/12
I've got a wet rattlecough robbing me of sleep lately, as if I'm trying to get something out but can't. Sometimes words get stuck to my inner throatlining like the spikeball seeds we threw at each other as children did to sweaters. The cooperation of my stomach and lungs, tightening and, so, pushing up against disease is valiant, even heroic-- and in this grey time futile and impotent.

Winter is as it tends to be, lined with trees reaching feebly up like bronchi on burnt trachea fishing in lungfluid. I wonder about the relationship of snow and nicotine tar, about duality and sameness and irony and death. The panic of falling through a frozen laketop giving softly to the sad cold synapse failure of alcohol.

2/15
I have this recurring dream in which I'm in a play but don't know any of the lines I'm supposed to deliver. Last night I was watching the show and using the bathroom during intermission (after wandering accidentally into the ladies' room and running into a very unexpected Ramaperson). Then I was told to go onstage and was expected to take the role of a sort of scripted stage manager. There was a halfwall upstage that I could hide behind momentarily and glance at the script, but never for long enough to glean any lines. At some point a man rode by on a horse, said something, and delivered me a large fish. At another there was a giant green snake.

I wonder now, recollecting as I sit in a class that demands "what does it mean?" what business I had in this dreamspace. We take on different roles daily, momentarily, different masks for different performances. I'm painfully aware and, it seems, concerned less with how I am than how I appear to be. The great irony is the near universality and therefore nullification of any validity, any truth, to this obsession.

And then the words, how I can never seem to hook the right ones. The cottonmouth feeling of wordlessness and, so, silence. Improvisation as a method-- in dream a viable approach when in waking life I'm bound by this repeated cerebral assessment of possibilities and opposing vantages, forever in rehearsal.

It doesn't seem enough anymore to ask "who am I?" so much as "where am I under all this?"

The internet

it's blowing up!

Numerology

Something about winter makes me seize up with anxiety. I get worked up and then worked up about being worked up and then worked up worrying if my behavior is working someone else up. It's no way to be. Totally unnecessary but it feels inescapable.

The bullshit numerology books says I would do well to live near the ocean.

I want a sunny home that lets the light in, somewhere warm to build those four walls and adobe slabs.

WOO!

9, 10

What do I have to say about 2009? I don’t know, man, it’s hard to go back to this time a year ago and see things the way I saw them, trace the trajectories through space and draw, with some acumen, anything notable or profound from the differences. It’s ridiculous to try and recall all of the things that shaped the moment I’m suspended in right now, do them the justice they so richly deserve, identify and thank them for delivering me here.

I rang in 2009 black-out smashed in Studio B, my point of recollection ending just before a long-line return to coat check but I have flashes of trying to remove my contact lenses in an abandoned upstairs bedroom of Dan’s Grandmother’s abandoned Staten Island home, fishing until my eyes bled only to realize I had already removed them. The next morning I was awoken by friends bearing a gallon of water and offering me half of their egg sandwich, which I graciously, and likely wordlessly, accepted. Friendship like you can’t put into words. Downstairs a Polish stranger was eating breakfast and drinking vodka at the stripped living room’s only table. We don’t know where he came from but no one seemed to mind. I drove us home and we recounted the night— peeing on some wall outside, expensive drinks, confusing rooms, crazy party people— listening to Abbey Road at a level barely audible.

The cold and white of winter saw me lower than I’d like to admit I go. I made a lot of mistakes and hurt a lot of feelings. I invented a lot of fictions and allowed myself a number of misunderstandings, spent a lot of time in paranoid semi-isolation. But it’s really not as dramatic as it sounds. I developed a bad jetskiing habit and wasn’t the most responsible with alcohol. But despite this, the friends that today I count among the finest anywhere (and I dare you to challenge me on it) provided a cushion of hands, pushing me back up, brushing me off, and shoving me back into the expanding chaos as if to whisper, “you are and will be better, friend.”

As the earth defrosted, I found my feet a cloud that would hold my weight. I did some of my best creative work and conducted some necessary distancing and re-proximation, an exercise, again, in realizing how wonderful the people around me are. It slowly became warm enough to uncocoon and, under a bed and in the morning springblue, tree bark or construction equipment underfoot, I met the most wonderful, beautiful girl by some inexact but, I’m convinced, divine circumstance. I spoke with less pretense and more humanity and began to understand some things.

Overseas, I moved in a surreal multiverse of literature and human interaction. I learned about philosophy and Mixed Martial Arts from intelligent, big-hearted artists and friends. I was cried on. I met a man who knows on Jesus Green and when he asked me who I am— I didn’t know. I had wine with distinguished scholars and waxed Ulysses with a Cambridge fellow whose favorite band is Talking Heads. James Joyce, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus manifested themselves a [new] Trinity within me and made me wonder, then, what constitutes soul. I watched sunrise from both the top of Arthur’s Seat, Edinburgh, and on an exhausted hike through a sleeping London. I very foolishly climbed on buildings.

Fall 2009 was, without question, the most difficult and magnificent semester I have had the privilege of enjoying. Academics were tough. But my delightful, wonderful, ever-understanding and hilarious group of friends expanded incredibly— like gravity did some weird vacuum thing and allowed all the awesome in the available universe to collect in late night, bathroom floor conversations, balcony sessions, and beer pong standoffs. Beautiful friends shared their beautiful friends and we all danced under a paper lantern moon with smiles wide enough to sail across, into the alabaster ghostmorning.

So now here we are, I guess. Another year older each but aged so much more, chipped at and built up by the people we’ve bounced off of and into. We’ve moved like tokens on a game board but the stakes feel unimportant. We’ve come to share squares with different pieces and I sure feel all the better for it. We see the game from a perspective we couldn’t have previously and, as we continue into 2010, that much more revealed will, I’m confident, be wonderous and new and exciting. This is a thrilling beginning and a chance to take inventory of that, of those, we’ve been blessed by, carried by, relied on, needed, trusted, been unjustly hurt (because we love them so) by, surprised by, reduced to tears (the laughing ones) by, felt more intimately.

Thank you all, Happy New Year, and all that. Cool, whatever.

Things that are scary

1. My penultimate semester of college ends tomorrow.
2. My ultimate, final semester as an undergraduate begins shortly thereafter.
3. My graduate school applications have to be done by, like, Wednesday or something.
4. Graduate school applications.
4.5. Inevitable rejection.
5. The very idea of student teaching.
6. The future.
7. What am I doing?
8. That everything lately has been so so good lovely on lovely like peanut butter and jelly in a ziploc made personally, especially-- and I don't know if that I deal pretty well with change carries over into this space I've occupied, nestled into, hibernating.
9. Personal statements-- Who am I and why can't I manage two double-spaced pages on it?
10. The simultaneous inescapability and impossibility of being.
11. Bad habits.
12. Spiders.
13.

You so right

It's hard lately to tell what I am and what I am not doing right. Even harder to tell or even begin to know what I am and what I am not. I want to be everything to everyone but I get all stretched over this impossible surface and start to rip. And I'm not even doing a very good job of it.

I have some bad habits and worse, there are probably some I'm unaware of.

But also, I wouldn't change a thing.

Such brief blogs

I've been writing some songs again. It seems like every year I begin this project right around this time and abandon it just when I shouldn't. Perhaps this time I'll have the constitution. I'd like very much to put some sound in your ears.

Also, tumblr?

Blog more

Give me something interesting to read.

Just some goals

1. Make a concentrated effort not to blog while annoyed.
2. Forgive people for lying. They're probably just in the habit.
3. See more sunlight, do things in morning hours, be more productive, more awake.
4. Be a better friend and a better son.
5. Find a thing to fall in love with every day. Repeating things is okay.
6. Continue to work "I don't know" out of my life.
7. Be a student sometimes.
8. Don't worry so much about spreading myself too thin, I can be elastic if I allow it.
9. Read, write,
10. At the same time, appreciate everything around me that is so so good. I walk through blessed days lately. Maybe spend some time inventing words to share with the people I'm lucky to have arrived here, today, with.

Pisces

& so summer ends.

It's different herenow, but not unfamiliar. Not uncomfortable. Someone changed the water in my tank and meanwhile I particled around the spare, a season without ornamentation, tasting the other side and returning having seen the filter in pieces to be cleaned. We bought it and built it and let it bubble and bubble until it might as easily have been wind. First, see it. Second, the sea. Let's be true communicators this year. We are of the holy.

Tumbling

Some very brief highlights.

Grizzly Bear
Under the nearest lightning bug we pick at blades and speak like there isn't that human distance, like everything is simultaneous and close and these friends we've made are fingers. We fumble against each other as if by accident, but not.

Beastie Boys
I wonder if we're all thinking it when someone says, my god, this is so fucking awesome.

Phoenix
There's sugar in my shoes, or something. Rather than recall dances where my hands grappled themselves like comfortable strangers, I forget to be alone. I move because we all move and when I sing, we sing. The sound rolls and bounces us about, balloons bunched against a windy Sunday, and I consider between hey!s that this could be belonging.

Wilco
It's one of those guilts like, man I hope everyone is half as into this as I am, but when I can steal my face from the fury and chance it around I can't help but appreciate the reflected treetop pink in surrounding sunglasses, the blissful gathering calm and opening organ chords. And I wonder, if only for a moment, if this is back then. But as the clang and glide of guitars slip afternoon into evening our bodies are taken and those brown eyes dream and dream.

Band of Horses
All sun but a sliver cast by a lemonade umbrella, all sound and the dizzy of space, I am a lizard. There is a terrible local band playing a stage behind us, but if I turn my head this way and jab a cartilage earbud in I can just hear a shimmer through the trees. The seagreen is bed enough, the sky an expanse of time, music like its crackling over a homespun cassette and I am an X on a map, found.


Bonnaroo was an indescribable experience, among the greatest I've been blessed to share with beautiful friends ever. Returning is strangely like departing something more intimate than "real life," remembering like reflecting on a dream. I'll be back next year, come hell or adulthood.

My high streak continues into this, the latter weeks of June. Life has cradled me something tender and wonderful. The charge now is to just stay, just keep my head in this place-- this here now today you and me and us together, ethereal.

But I leave for Cambridge July 5. Mixed feelings. But those are for another post.

Anybody have anything they want me to write about? This felt good.

photos by Mike Locke

No, don't warn me

I'm finding it difficult to look back on a time when I was this happy. Perhaps in the wonder of childhood, when everything was new. There are things to be said about this happiness, the circumstance and perspective, but this is summer. Hardly a time for retrospect.

I'm here, now. And part of the pleasure is refusing the times I wasn't here, now, intrusion into my head. Certainly, I flit from memory to memory like a bird between branches just like you do. But these days I'm noticing the time I'm wasting somewhere, some astral plane if I may, other than the momentous and beautiful present. And I'm really trying to quit it, the bounding from guilt to worry and back, because it doesn't mean anything real to me anymore. We have, perhaps, learned to live in this impossible multi-temporal state of "where will I be next year?" when honestly-- we'll be right here, in the forever-present, as we were. And this journey our minds make is a distraction from everything that is lovely and going on currently. "Currently." Like the river we move with.

All this time talk, so to foil myself: Bonnaroo in less than a week and I am excited.

It's familiar, lying here while the morning blue peeks in, bird chirps between distant rolls of thunder-- and you, a fogless dream or a lucid memory, lovely as the sound that words make when we mean them.