Archives for posts with tag: angst

three inches

June 4, 11 //

Not hard to keep my chin up, just hard to keep from laughing, I know better than to take anything too seriously. Other than myself, but that’s a quiet matter not for polite company, you were raised better than that. Even wolves respect.

I am not about to deny it. We work hard to get where we get, never mind the sliding scale of damage and difficulty. Expectations warped, the web makes us believe we’re already famous, already what we’re supposed to be. Act natural. Be and believe in your someone else self, the trope you couldn’t imagine your way out of, as imaginative it may be. “Find what others want, and give it to them,” What Works, pads the penury.

Or hold your tongue in grit teeth and call it integrity. Ingenuity. Possession by a vision you’re not sure you want to see, much less attempt to explain and share. Then get rich in all sorts of things slowly. Life is not driven by plot.

I don’t want to be in a call center all my life. PhD candidates who can’t open PDFs, all some see, that raise in salary, more pennies for the debt how am I going to do this, ram a theory in a gap? shit, you tell me.

What am I supposed to do.

When I was a teen, there was no such thing as YA. You were a child, or you were an adult. Deal with it. I would go to Barnes & Noble, find the space in fiction where my name would fit and clear the shelves a foot, fuck it, two! three! four! for all my addictions, dissonance and grit, all the books I’d write and put on it. Someday. When the world goes away. When I sit my ass down and kill all the sleep in me. Trust myself to fail and succeed. When Bree wins the lottery. When all I really need is an inch, maybe three. Four, five. A half-foot of spines all lined up, caging nerve and fire.

Even three inches will take a lifetime, take and give my life away. But really, what’s the hurry? Slow plot or not, these characters got me got, all howl and growl, tenacity and wit.

I’ll never put me down.

I will never quit.

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werk point oh

March 18, 11 //

Shouts

angst

Someday my knowledge will be old
Someday I will be bought and sold
I beg you while the tide is low
Tell me something I don’t know

There you are, your own number on your very own door.
And behind that door, your very own office! Welcome to the team, DZ-015!

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century of the self

September 5, 10 //

Narratives

america, angst, art, deepsicks

I’ve been watching the BBC’s 2002 documentary, The Century of the Self. It’s the sort of artifact attack critique you want to show every man, woman and child, this is what it’s all about war terror talking heads, new + improved though I wouldn’t know what to expect or hope to follow. Y’all cogs are fools, capitalistic tools, me too tis of thee, all sorts of angst I thought I’s over, sidling up to thirty.

Paranoia. Social control. Virulent peace-time propaganda and the inextricable yet artificial linking of capitalism with democracy such that “good” business (effective, dominant, roughshod, bonanza enterprises operating regardless of ethics) means “good” government, with the best government existing only to indulge and legitimize business.

Meanwhile, psychology is imagined, not always without cause, but applied en masse with the intent of manipulation. Save our sick minds from national socialism, communism, perversion and too much isolation. Alone time, reflection, introspection is for weirdos — self examination better left to the professionals. Unconscious urges, the Freudian slippery slope, those sex bits were just the surface and in truth a diversion. Bait to freak out the proper folk dismissing it, while behind the scenes, the curtain, the machine is in motion, engineering consent, manufacturing desire.

I want some brownies. I’d settle for cake. But all the prepackaged quick-n-easy mixes require that I add an egg. Haven’t they figured this out yet? how to pulverize and include the egg I mean really. In my version of vegetarianism, I eat eggs when they’re “in things” but never buy them outright, the little pods of fetal chick goo gross that would rot in my fridge before I used them.

Later that day hello synchronicity in the next episode I watch of The Century of the Self, I learn that in the ‘50s one of the first product focus groups, i.e., a group psychoanalysis session, uncovered that women felt guilty about using readymade cake mixes, which originally included all ingredients. While the purpose was convenience, readymade cakes were thought too easy. Housewives were cheating their families of their labor and their love. Betty Crocker changed the recipe to exclude the egg, which the woman had to add on her own.

Her own egg. A symbolic contribution. For her husband, her children. Sales soared.

Sixty years later, I’m too neurotic for a family. I have a problem with factory farming. But I still consume the products, eat the cruelty, yield the profit, with indirect complicity. I just need the right conditions — the right conditioning.

Help me out, psychology. Fix me.

>> Watch all four episodes of The Century of the Self.

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recapped

February 10, 09 //

Narratives, Photography

america, angst, dancing, journeys, minneapolis, vancouver

It was safest to walk down the center of the street, Minneapolis iced up mulling deep the responsi-liabilities, post-Christmas economy crash cow it’s on us, you know. For worshiping idle, being economical, our faults, for knitting our own scarves to keep warm and our pennies, kill ourselves for loonies (MAD MEN!) how we’ll hang from this yarn. Hang onto this thread. Looking forward to our New Year’s hangovers.

American stores have the best merchandising, the most ironic irony. Vancouver has its moments, too.

I had fun in Fargo. I had fun in the Cities, snow to my waist and tearloose riding busses listening to Doomtree, feeling torn and interesting. Here’s the school I would have voted at last November. Here’s a little house unaware of its grace. Recall my swoon over Youth Moan? Its remains remain for those who remember. Bree made bacon cookies wtf, and Nic, Anna and I danced to industrial music at a gay bar like-old-times. In keeping with anachronicity, I showed ‘em good with an inspiring fusion of floorpunching, darksider stomp, tektonic, krump and jazz hands.

I might be really good at something. The best. I don’t know what it is yet. It doesn’t involve acceptance of uncertainty, I know that, I tried. I breathed real deep and sat real still and felt real fake and smoked and drank and stayed up late and made hot tea alone in quiet kitchens. Drowned myself in seven different bathtubs. Not long ago I had my last first day of school. Yesterday I raced off the 99 at Sasamat, rammed a book in the VPL dropslot, and got back on *the same 99* despite minimal new boarders to stall it for me, continuing my commute home straightaway saving myself anywhere from four to six and a half minutes waiting for the next shuttle.

I skip the sad songs on shuffle. I painted my fingernails blood red.

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keeping my nose clean

November 22, 08 //

Narratives

america, angst, journeys, joy, politics

Though several days have passed since the election of the Next President of the United States, I haven’t updated since, and so: My guy won! Woohoo!

While most of the sappy weepy yet elegant historically significant emotions have stabilized, the high and hopefulness continue—but.yet.and so does my hesitancy to throw myself into full-blown optimism. S’bleak out there, man. With the collapsing economy and our ill standing among other nations, an environment oozing wounds and wars still waging, I temper my expectations, and not only because of the rough and ragged state we’re in. I have forgotten what it’s like to have a leader I believe in.

I feel like I’m escaping an abusive relationship. I don’t know how to trust, how to listen without assuming I’m being lied to, forces dark and heavy tied to every move this cretin government makes. The Bush Administration has made me paranoid, cynical and inherently suspicious, always trying to suss the secret agenda, the manacles behind the curtain, whichever way the wind blows the windfalls today, smoke up our assets while other wallets get fat.

Now out with the old and in with the new, or so it goes, or does it. I am an Obama supporter 100 percent, but still cautious in my homage and growing concerned about the swelling cult of personality, the seas of people seizing this black-and-white notion of history (ha! I’m so on my game) as though politics, society and culture were ever that simple. Black president = all better. Democrat = all better. All bitter = all better. Next stop, bliss.

I don’t fear Obama will turn into a not-so-secret Muslim terrorist Antichrist socialist. I fear he will become just a man. Imperfect, yes, fine, welcome. But susceptible to greed and corruption. Powerless against inflation and inflated expectations. Susceptible to sniper scopes, dashing hopes and dreams of unity.

Sigh. Oh well. I can’t help but look forward, take a helping of belief: things will improve. Not all at once, and not everything. But things will get better.

As an aside, this entire election season and especially toward the end, the internet was double-fisting awesomeness. Despite living in Canada I was able to follow online with relative precision the issues that interested me, from national contests to local referendums. Naturally I was into the Minnesota competitions (with the senate race still going on, heh), but it was cool to see more obscure races brought to the fore as never before. From campaign commercials and news broadcasts I don’t get in BC to some of the most wicked hilarious and creative photochopped and captioned reimagining of events, I felt… there. Included. Cheering and groaning along with everyone else. Thanks, Al Gore!

On a related note, my video “An American Abroad” was favorited by PBS’s Video Your Vote project and made it to the front page of YouTube for a couple of days, garnering me some short-lived goofball fame. It went from 350 views to 4500 overnight and leapt by the thousands from there. I’m currently grasping near 100,000.

While certainly an ego-trip in a general sort of way, it also feels plain good—and profoundly. I created the video chiefly to be silly and to celebrate voting, but also to channel my election alienation. As connected the internet made me feel, I was simultaneously isolated from the election experience. Cheesy but true: I wanted to express myself, sharing both my moping and uncontrollable excitement with my family and friends. To have this pool explode into a worldwide audience of tens of thousands of viewers has been surreal and affirming—for me as a person, an American, a Minnesotan, an expatriate new patriot and an artist crazy dancer.

My vote counted 96,609 times. Right now in Minnesota, they’re counting it again, both sides making a ridiculous mess of it, yes, but nonetheless… I couldn’t be more pleased.

Hooray for me! Hooray for Obama! Yay, America! Yay!

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i went to the animal fair

September 16, 08 //

Narratives, Photography

america, angst, deepsicks, politics, victoria

The birds and the beasts were there. On the way in the winding car of colleagues, eager to see bunnies and farmkid arts and crafts (I’m a llama woman, myself), I was bitching out fantastic all my being an American. It was a few weeks ago, the Sunday before the RNC. The arrests riling, piling up. Palin just selected, starting to flail in our throw up. In bumper to bumper no-go traffic through residential Saanich, my fervor was other otherworldly, magnificent and deadly and I was aware of it. The hate and my outrage bordering on absurdity.

Anger is a prickly fiend. Hand on my shoulder I am with you, friend twisting me up, leaving, the tension behind tormenting, tight muscles seething in my back and neck. My shoulders ride high and my head strains forward, grotesque, I can’t relax. I am bent up, disfigured by current events and continuing to deform as I explain it to my friends: the status whoa, the reconstituted blog barf, hearsay hear, hear! and heresy otherwise known as the freedoom of speech, feeling ugly and sideways I’m being so negative but unable to keep it to myself when suddenly, the minivan ahead of us turning left slams into an oncoming scooter.

Slow speeds merge into further slow motion—the slowest fast thing I’ve seen in my life. The driver on the bike managed to stay on it, but the passenger behind him flew off, up, over the hood of the van, tumbling and sliding, limbs bowing weird, wrong ways and taking forever. A body become what it is—a squishy sack of bones, blood and fat, bendy and breakable.

At last she landed on the pavement, conscious, trying to sit up, shatter the spell of shock enough to start screaming. Strangers streamed from cars consoling, swearing, ambulance calling and chorusing oh my god.

It shut me up. Finally. I couldn’t speak for fifteen minutes, eyes huge and hand clamped to my mouth like a cartoon. This is where I am. Not in Minneapolis. Not on the internet. I am right here, shaken, and sick.

I went to the animal fair.
The birds and the beasts were there.

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three inches

werk point oh

century of the self

recapped

keeping my nose clean

i went to the animal fair

brave empire

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