Tapping the empty well

So I've been trying to figure out, for myself and for my therapist, why I haven't been writing more.

I haven't written in this thing in ... close to a year. I complained about my lack of a story arc. I think on some level an incomplete narrative, or a poorly written narrative is kind of ok with me now. I've made decisions, or hesitantly figured I might do... this or that. But I must do this or that first, like... to prepare. So I'm getting those out of the way. Not that any of that makes any sense, but I'm trying to build a syllabus for my development and maturation.  I've pretty much lived the last several years as a twenty-three year old in denial.

So in the last year, I've been trying to make decisions that would ... perhaps not ultimately lead to any lasting change, which used to bother me, but would ideally lead to some sort of greater knowledge or understanding in some way. Trying to take better care of myself, health-wise. Trying to open up to new experiences and options. Trying to accept that change comes in small steps taken in succession, and to be able to not beat myself up about how long it's taking. As it turns out, Prozac helps with that. Lots.

This has been a very internal process. I don't know why, but somehow in choosing this slow, brick by brick process, I've shut off my ability to externalize. I haven't been writing, except to my friends, who I can assure you, are sick and tired of me.

Possible reasons why I've internalized the process and refused to write about it:

It sounds like justifications for procrastination. All of my "sure, I'll apply to an MBA program once I get my shit together" sounds like a "I'll never get around to that because I don't have faith in myself". Not that it's not accurate, but I just don't want to have to be figuring out how to eat healthily and get enough exercise and take care of my emotional well-being while I'm working a full time job and a really demanding school schedule. Whenever I say it aloud, in writing or in words, what I hear isn't "I want to learn to take care of myself like an adult before I go about trying to take the next adult step" (which is how I feel about it), what I hear IS "I'm putzing about, just like I've been doing since I graduated."

I can't help feeling like specifically my weight loss plight, however successful, is boring. Nobody wants to hear me sound like a fucking infomercial. People ask, and that's nice and polite, but however proud I am of my achievement so far, I know it could be gone soon and I know other people are having a worse time of it. I don't even like to listen to myself talk about it. I feel... somehow... mass-produced, like I've subscribed to some sort of ... sickening pop culture standards of beauty. I feel like a hypocrite saying "Look at me, I lost thirty pounds, aren't I pretty now"? God, Blanche, shut the fuck up, please?

For a lot of this year, I was involved with someone I really enjoyed. I know that no one wants to hear about a good relationship. Bit me in the ass when it ended, but what can you do? That's how it goes. Honestly, the details are prosaic, and since I've nothing bad to say about him, the ending's boring too. Hearts break. As Placebo says in "Bright Lights" "A heart that hurts is a heart that works". Everyone's heard this story. People get together, they have fun. They try to make it work and it doesn't, but only one person knows. It ends, and the other cries. For the first time in my life my broken heart didn't make me want to write. I found the words I had for it were already written. By other people. Lots of Tool and Placebo. Didn't help that I tried as hard as I could to NOT think about it.

I guess another reason why I've been ... somehow absent... is that I've been avoiding it. Avoiding... release. I don't know. I'm afraid of... something. Some ghost that comes out of the page to tear my throat out and I bleed on the page. "Page" as imagined in the magical computer screen where life is written these days. I guess I'm not entirely clear what is so terrible about the ghost-me that lives in the whitespace but she's ... impractical. Unrealistic and intangible. I guess I've been trying for more tangible goals?

No, I've probably just been avoiding her because I don't like her. Or I don't like the me that she reminds me I am. You know, perhaps "Burger Queen" isn't the right song for this post... just a sec. Ahh, Puscifer. Mmm."Conditions of My Parole". Much better.

Seriously, I think I've just been avoiding admitting to myself that I don't find most of what I have to say worth saying. I'm focusing on these minor events and fixating on them to the point that I can't understand why my friends are still speaking to me, but everything else in my life seems... cliched. Self-improvement? I sound like a goddamn Chicken Soup book that pretty much makes me want to puke. A lot. Everywhere.

So I have to apologize here to my nearest and dearest to whom I've been speaking so much this year about the minor bullshit things that have been on my mind, the blah blah blah this minor detail of that thing that happened this week of whatever. What was that about? No idea, and no one cares. I'm bringing back fake names a la Livejournal here, so I am sorry to have bored you Beautiful Lover of D, Roxanne, Trillian, Luke, For Your Information, DragonFan, Peach Smints. Love you all and thanks for your help. I'm trying.

The title of this post "Tapping the Empty Well" comes from a poem I wrote several years ago that I feel pretty ambivalent about, but it's central metaphor and message proved applicable. Maybe sometime I'll share it.

Even Dante Hicks gets a proper story arch

Even though ten minutes ago I was bopping around to “What a wookie”, I have only just realized that I haven't any plot to speak of whatsoever.
I consume the plots of others. Of fictional characters, of friends, of family. I even try to influence the plots to see them all turn out right. This is all to mask the fact that my plot has simply stopped. Ended. With no true ending either, the author kinda sucks.
And “What a wookie” represents the intersection of two separate fictional plots, which only intersect at various places along my intellectual timeline. My intellectual timeline, however, doesn't actually influence the plot at all. It merely influences the themes, mood, motifs, and messages of the overarching plot. But there IS NO plot to create theme with, so there's … just... nothing.
Like that pure moods cd, where there's no mood to speak of whatsoever. It's just... washed out. Like an eight year old with watercolors. The blues the purples the yellows all look great, until you dip your brush again and they all get washed out.
My plotline is like that. Like someone dipped the brush into the water again and brought it back to the page suddenly erasing all pigment and purpose. Everything that makes a person a person and not a hard shell of overly intellectual escapism surrounding a vast void. God, does this remind anyone else of the Neverending Story 2? It's just me? Oh well. Kinda proves my point, doesn't it?
I do my best writing in the shower.

Reverberation.

I have always found that music that gets me in some way, will get me in a  certain place in my body.

Tool often gets me right in the gut, like someone's punched me really hard right where everything twists and writhes and churns. Makes me want to punch back, to destroy with the beautiful simplicity of the hydrochloric acid that fills us. A letting go, the urge like Fight Club, that is released when i hear "aenima", "H", or even "46and2". There is joy in that clenching pain. In that knock-the-air-out-of-you punch of the rhythm.

A Perfect Circle will get me in the heart. Where things bleed and mourn and die. Makes me cry for the love and hate and beauty and all the admittedly cerebral concepts that reverberate in the central muscle. Empathy overflows and the warring concept of man's inhumanity to man and "what a piece of work is man" bleeds out leaving a mono no aware shell. "3 Libras", "the Hollow" and even "Blue"

Some bands, however, depending on the song or the mood or whatever whim strikes them, (Admittedly often one such band is Puscifer...) , will go straight to the groin. The groin that fucks, that desires, that destroys. Makes me want to go mad in some ecstatic bacchanal. Like those ridiculous dionysian ideals i clung to in the ninth grade - well before i ever tried to understand any of it (not that anyone fully could). "Rev. 22:20" by Puscifer, also "God is in the Radio" by Queens of the Stone Age, and "Stinkfist" by Tool. Mmm.

Few bands that i love are a cerebral joy. Perhaps because there are no nerve endings in my brain. Mostly they include those whose lyrics are particularly witty and since we all know Lester Bangs' quote about rock'n'roll lyrics, i can't say that i find that very often.

Some bands will get me in my feet, too. "Pass that Dutch" by Missy Elliot, i can't help dancing.

I don't know if anyone else experiences this or if I'm over-dramatizing, but that's why i love this stuff. Likes waves in a pond expanding out to hit distant rocks or reeds and then bounce off, the notes reverberate inside me and out again filtered through my anatomy, changed and yet the same.

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like a tame cat trying so hard to be as wild as her tiger friends

Some undergrad inexplicably made me think of Ian H in high school. The kid probably walked a certain way or maybe it was a white tshirt and black floppy bookbag, but clear as day i was back in the CAHS cafeteria with him eating some disgustingly greasy substance and questioning whether it was truly dead. I remembered what he meant to me then. A walking symbol of where I'd come from and the utopia I'd arrived in.

I remember him in middle school but always apart, only because of the way it was there. People were separate. The stifling pressure of conformity. He was older, but always nice. Never gave in to the conformity or the separation. I looked up to him even then. He damned the man, and never said sorry.

When he transferred with Moni and me, i had no idea that would solidify our friendship in the way it did. He reminded me of my cousin and all the girls thought he was the cutest, which got weird a couple times. But having him around always reminded me of how far i'd come in my journey. I'd come to a haven of creativity and support and considering the desolation i had come from, i couldnt help ride the wave of elation.

I had never truly let myself believe that it would end. The freedom, the confidence that came with that freedom. We were all big fish in small ponds there. And therein lies the beauty of that place. We had the headroom to soar above the mundane ;)

I guess in a way Ian always represented that to me. The example of what one could become when one is freed from social prison and asked to BE. Perhaps i put too much on an adolescent boy, but people never know the effect they have on others. Just by being himself he helped teach me not just to trust myself, but the CAHS world too. A sempai, a mentor, a zen master. Hope he's doing well. :)  

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Why are thoughts only worth two cents?

Here's my thing about Thanksgiving:

Yeah, it's built upon a complete and total lie. There was no happy harmony between new settlers and indigenous people. There was only slaughter and smallpox.
This is not something to forget. I am not trying to forget anything about that. I think it was nasty for historians to TRY to forget that. To gloss over all the death and teach children some fantastical lie about turkey and corn. While slaughter and smallpox is a little heavy for young minds, I think it's inappropriate to lie to children. Doesn't help anyone.

However, I do not think that celebrating Thanksgiving as it exists today has anything to do with those stories. None. There's no connection between modern Thanksgiving rituals and that lie you tell second graders to pretend our ancestors didn't slaughter whole societies of people.

Celebrating Thanksgiving, as it exists today, is not about some ancient fluffy lie. It's about family and friendship. It's about sitting down and enjoying some food and company and taking a minute to feel thankful for what you have. Even if you don't have much, it's worth taking a minute to be glad. It's about a feast before a long, hard winter. It's about the harvest. It's about enjoying what you have while you have it.

Thusly, I haven't any qualms about celebrating Thanksgiving despite the horrific atrocities my ancestors committed against a full country of people.
We cannot forget the past, but we also cannot forget that things change. In time, meanings change and societies change and a lot happens in two hundred years.

In conclusion, a quote from a Thanksgiving special.
"A bear! You made a bear!"
"I didn't mean to."
"Undo it! Undo it!"

hounddogs

Makes me want my duct tape covered notebook and some black coffee. And chocolate cake, on some summer afternoon after the 11th grade. I do so love it here sometimes.

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A Memo to Men

You know how people always look at you just a teensy bit nicer when you're dressed up? When you clean up nice and wear a button-down Oxford shirt and nice, well-tailored slacks? People may compliment you and point out, with a note of surprise, that you look good when you don't look like hell all the time?

Let me impart some wisdom:
All men look good in an Oxford shirt. All of them. At formal occasions, when fully buttoned with a tie, men will look good. In informal occasions, with sleeves rolled up and the collar unbuttoned, men will look good.

The Oxford shirt is specifically designed to flatter a man's distinct lack of curves. It shows off the angular shoulders and straight hips with ease and elegance. I am convinced that that shirt is one of the greatest product designs of all time. Whoever designed it is some sort of Grecian sculptor reborn, etching the post-war man from blocks of marble in a Platonic Ideal ecstasy.

This is not to say that it doesn't look excellent on women, too. The angular tailoring of the Oxford shirt emphasizes the places where a woman's curves distort the angles and all my CAHS education is screaming at me to giggle "curvilinear lines!!" Thanks, Mr. Feeser.

My point is simply to clarify what perhaps you were never told before:
Wearing an Oxford shirt makes you look your best. When you flatter your shapes with the eloquent confidence of the greatest innovation in men's fashion, those who are turned on by the shape of men will act like total and complete idiots in your wake. It can only improve your hopes of a best-case scenario on a Saturday night, whatever that outcome may be. Waffle house? Yes, please.