Archives for posts with tag: angst

keeping my nose clean

November 22, 08 //

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!

comments

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.

comments

the idiots

July 14, 08 //

Narratives, Photography

angst, books, holledays, libraries, now + zen, politics, victoria, writing

Victoria finally got the guts, the ambition, the fire in its belly eating up the oxygen from the wind in its sails to scorch its fair citizens with 84 degrees, no breeze, brazen. It didn’t last long, but I did. A few days then gone, I lived, sunblocked sheen, muscling the city your secrets! your energy! slipping in and out of my skin.

First stop is the beach. I don’t visit often ’cause it’s so damn far, and it’s less beach than rocky rim. You wouldn’t want to swim or even wear bare feet. But it still has its allure, mystique, crashing waves at me. Riptide rippling. Ceaseless like the change of seasons, sea sons and daughters spleen deep in the freezing. Ripe for profit, too—you can burn the water to CD and sell it to neurotics, landlocked nostalgics, hippies and yogis in all manners of human mandalas, overlaid with tablas and tabula rasas.

I’m a prairie girl grown tuned. I hear the rush and know what to do. Just shut up, that’s what. Listen and forget I’m listening, recall I am the wave in the making, then forget that too. Forget all this time how forgetful I’ve been—willfully, forcefully. Demanding my own reckoning then running away from it.

Doesn’t seem right. But it is just.

I buy Dostoevsky’s The Idiot for a quarter from the Spiritualist Open Door Sanctuary’s sidewalk book and plant sale. I’d taken this sect for nondenominational new age Christian goulash; turns out they’re honest to Gaia spiritual mediums, healers and clairvoyants and dead-talkers, oh my. My patronage shall help fund refreshments at their philosophical coffee klatch, or some other such heretical nation-destroying deviltry.

Oh wait, I’m in Oh Canada—BC, no less—where tolerance is actual acceptance or honest minding one’s own business, live and let live smile-and-nod politeness. I forget for dramatic effect, but I don’t really forget at all. It’s probably not the same everywhere, though. Canada’s a big country, identifying chiefly with its identity crisis, centuries long and cheerfully irresolvable.

My desire to read The Idiot is a nod to both my teenage self stumbling through various Russian tomes and to my once failure to track down a mother-language version of the novel for a library patron. Since the latter disgrace, The Idiot has been my pet-test title when exploring new OPACs. What does this mean? Upon entering a strange city or university campus, I will go to its library, secretly praise or abuse its floor plan and website usability, look up The Idiot in the online catalogue then see how long it takes to find it on the shelf. Should you ever see me, wild-eyed weaving through the stacks muttering, “Where is The Idiot?” know I’m not seeking a dull, stray companion, but less madness in navigation and a personal grail.

How marvelous it’d be to see all The Idiots in the world. Though the novel suits me fine, I’m not especially fond—it’s far from a favorite—but this no longer matters. I’ve made it my own. When I burn my stomach making supper (don’t ask how), the angry purple beads of little belly blisters spell Idiot in Braille.

The to the nth owned, hand-me-down copy is replete with handwritten notes, propping up Dostoevsky’s fun but rambling tale, prepping me for readymade conclusions and filling me in on the Russian milieu. I cannot read the novel—this particular copy of the book—without reading into what others have read into it, the literary, historical analysis written in the margins. I even read into the writing itself: the miniscule print font of our eighth grade education grandpas and the denser, foreboding script of a dilettante scholar. Mostly, “D.’s epilepsy.” Mostly, “Results of Russian society.” Mostly N.B.’s and look-at-me’s, predicting foreshadowing and calling out emotions. “Foreshadowing.” “Frustration.” “Foreshadowing frustration.” Classic, dry, uncreative author-centered interpretation.

It’s annoying but intensely intriguing, too. Who are these people? When did they read this? The edition was printed in 1965. Over forty years later, we got ratings, favorites, diggs and pingbacks, comments in cute word bubbles and detailed responses banged out in the feedbacks and sprawling in new posts entirely, everything packaged tidily all together or otherwise utterly traceable.

Pre-digerati, on the other hand… how to free the ephemeral in the margins of print? The talkbacks, the astonishments, even the remarks on obviousness and underscores nonsensical? obscure and obscured in libraries by the millions, university, public and private. Or is this a silly question. What would be the point, and what, the danger. Can value be assigned to “Shows the author’s interest in crime”? Would someone find a way to aggregate anonymity, target market advertise across space and time?

I walk in the sun three hours one day, a couple more on another day, and other short jogs jaunts circuitous routes get the gears grinding, cells synthesizing in my broken down vitamin D factory I’ve decided centralizes in the region of my third I.

Lemme be honest, I’ve been writing this entry for a couple of weeks and words keep getting away from me, keep getting in my way. How can I know what I’m saying? becomes the prime question. It doesn’t try to police me, pen me up (ha!) in the free-speech zone, but it’s there. Wontletmealone. The imperative and responsibility to not waste your time or kill my own and keep in check the lies I tell, not to amend them, just know when they’re happening. Time shifting for induced awareness. Speculative imagining, selective juxtapositioning. Incomplete confessions that time will change, with better truths to balance the debt. Deceit offset. Better Living through Heresy. Building Better Psalms.

I move across town, a new municipality, actually, on July 1, Canada Day, not meaning much to me, bussing midmorning to pick up a pickup to haul my things and stuff. I’m already seeing scads of red and white attire like a Target commercial set the size of a city. Country. Face paint and feather boas, whole families in funny hats, temporary tattoos in awkward places and clumsy, sad attempts to make the Maple Leaf sexy.

In downtown a woman boards the bus and remarks to the driver, “Bet yer glad you got this shift,” and he accedes noncommittally. The bus is near empty. I’d seen the warning but don’t know the history. I turn off my clix to get the dirt. “Gets pretty crazy at night, huh?” I say, and she looks at me, unimpressed by my ignorance but pleased to know things, and tell me, stuff.

Public drunkenness is the rule against the rules on Canada Day; last year in Victoria, revelers puked buckets on city busses, assaulted drivers and terrorized other passengers. “One-hundred-fifty police,” she tells me. “This year they got 150 police at the harbor for the fireworks.” Another woman joins the conversation, eye-witness accounting the wrecks it for everybody. Vandalism. Hooliganism. Family-fun ruination. Piss and barf everywhere, the idiots. All for the love of alcohol and postmodern patriotism if they can blow up the sky, why can’t we tear up the street? meet ourselves where we are. What we’re really like, or could be like, a possibility in all possible identities.

The recounting of scandal eventually withers away. I turn to look out the window, press play, and first to come shuffling is A Silver Mt. Zion’s “Teddy Roosevelt’s Guns.” The chances? One in 634 that I Am One with randomized self-selected personal meaning. But no, really, strange, fitting: almost enough to make me make believe the universe surveils 150 police strapping on stiff lips and sends me synchronicity god is watching over my mp3s.

What do I want from me. The question-answer to the prime questioning. I string up a bare bulb in my new bedroom, for light? sure, and to remind me the best ideas are naked and shades are for settling. This is just another space to spread myself thin. Just another room to take off my clothes in.

Belly burned and body tanned, I got a mountain to sit on the side of, now, see the whole city, see surrounding islands, even see the mountain peaks of Washington State in the broadest strokes but without mistake that’s home or some sense of it, my legs overhanging, dangling toward the abyss while fast-asleep feet still stand in line, white-knuckles still in a fist. Weak after week after week.

I feel closest to this country when I see the seams rip. No glory in contradictions, no, no pleasure in the feast of worms at the soft underbelly of this beast, just the mirror I can look past my shoulder with. Recognize my roots, the United States of Arrogance, recognize my duty to uprooting disbelief. I saw the blood on the sidewalk. I saw the cavalry taser the lifelost. The foots washed up on our shores are mine own.

Not surprisingly, likewise in keeping, I feel my most American when I want more—both for my country of residence and my nation of nationality. Less consumption, more ideals in action, clashing if they have to but with full transparency, agendas in the open for exposure and dissecting. Fewer opinion polls telling us what we think, more discussion amongst ourselves about what we see and want to change, what we’d choose if we could and dared believe in something, and forget faith-based initiatives. We need human-powered heroism, unshackled ingenuity, integrity without caveats, humility without airs.

Yes, We Can! do better.
Than move to the middle.

Following the back-breaking, arm-straining sweaty move, I didn’t watch the fireworking its way into the sky, into the Canadian imagination of nationhood and pride, I was too tired. And the Fourth of July, naturally, means nothing here. Dreaming of the scent of spent flash powder glory. Econo ketchup and cheap beer. Layer stripped, enjoying the weather. My family off being a family together.

At some point in The Idiot, the print font drops off. I don’t notice it till the scrawly script ceases, as well, at a telltale dog-ear decades old. My fellow gentle readers never finished. Bored, I guess. Distracted, or dead. What could have foreshadowed that. What’s this a metaphor for. Facing the inevitable? face meets the floor, my useless limbs failing me. I continue reading, but it’s not the same. I continue writing knowing it will change, your whispers in my margins will blow me away. Or shame me. Like I oughta be. I can’t control meaning, can’t control anything.

How can I know what I’m trying to say? forget that, too. Who needs the weight.

comments

passing the timing

June 27, 07 //

Narratives, Photography

angst, dancing, deepsicks, internets, now + zen, vancouver, writing

Mid-May my laptop’s A/C adapter expires and I can’t seem to replace it locally for under $150 say what? yeah, and I get sick of looking—the Mom and Pop shrugging and the superslick Big Box Boys shoving into my hands product I can’t afford then blocking the rack so I can’t put it back while threatening the death of my laptop if I get a replacement off the internet. Hong Kong vows to send me one in 5-14 business days. It takes three and a half weeks. What does this mean? It means I can’t adapt. I can’t turn one energy into another kind of energy to spark force ease give birth to creativity, to convenience, to wholesale distractioneering. Oh dear. Oh my.

I camp out on campus to do my schoolwork and social digital upkeep, damning and disturbed by my dependency not only on the ether, but the ability to process words with a computer. Where’s my cut paste backspace built-in thesaurus with a blank sheet of paper and pen? …In my head, where they’ve always been, but I find it hard to think—to compose, to emote—without hypertextuality. I barely remember how it used to be, and I like how it is, writing with technology, “word processing,” one of those loverlies, the more I think about it, the more my smile hurts.

It’s unnerving. I’m an editor when I’m writing when I should be just writing, for personal works and academia alike. But the thoughts explode with the ra-tat-tat-tat-typing, and it’s not that pens are too slow—they’re too stupid to imagine what could possibly happen 10,000 words from now. They’re too archaic to remember, to find replace erase, what happened 10,000 words before. Here I sit with tatters and a splitting-open head—culled letters and paragraphs I’ve emailed to myself, scratches on scratch and bound-book journaling. I struggle to reconcile thoughts that are mostly the same thoughts, mostly redundancy. I figure out and forget the same things over and over and over under the cover of perpetual wonder, surprise surprise and joy, isn’t life mysterious and magical? when often it just makes me tired. Not life. Reliving it.

I’ve drunk this up already, I have told you this before.

My basement suite sublet includes yard responsibilities, which I don’t mind—no, I do mind, I give it mind, I muddy my pants and let the earth chew up my fingernails, pulling weeds and trimming grass in the backyard and along the shed. I squeal every time I see the glittering black beetles, and the chlorophyll puts me in a coma. The woman in the unit above piles on praise, gold stars for the days the sun kisses the top of my head bent over the garden beds. She instructs me in the care of rhododendrons. After the blossoms bang, they wilt and rot. She shows me how to snap them off so the rest can thrive unhindered and how to prune the rickety branches without leaves. Crack strip snap. The whole wastes energy trying to revive, keep alive the dead parts never coming back. New flowers another year, sure, but these? Snap snap. Dead energy. Let those parts go. So the rest can grow.

For a moment she looks aware of her new age hippie dippery, and tries to mitigate with a leftfield line about bears and nature. In nature bears probably come along and knock them off, or something.

Yeah maybe sometimes, minorly, every millionth. Or dead parted life looks like what it is. Figures it out itself, or not. Drops the rotted to the earth and feeds off itself.

My walking slows down and I walk for hours to nowhere. Water’s rim adventuring, parks and alleys and steep grade stepping, and I can’t go back the way I came crashing, even as I cover and recover the same ground. In Jericho the crows surround. I’ve long felt an affinity; is this my chance, my proof? to talk up the caws and deliver awe to reason. I edge from tree to tree and they follow me in numbers growing, soon swooping at my head and screaming until I race a wide arc around and out the park, rushing free with all my skin and feeling extra marvelous. Running turns into dancing sometimes. It’s just you and the outside around you, crushing in hard.

Speaking of. I’ve managed to mangle myself on the dance floor several times the past few weeks, the neglected cast aside fast becoming imperative, play, the surest way to breathe properly, step steeping inside the grown old become wise, a slip-sly speaker caress into careening. I surrender to the trephining. The soul-strip-searching. Roiling the atmosphere, throwing off rays, I make music better. It reacts to me.

But back to my feet. As a kid I would pro/con me-powered transportation. My bike would get me far, fast, but not over that fence. With blades I could fly, run up and down steps, but I fell behind in the gravel pits of broken up lots. With the feet I was born on top of, yeah, it could be slow going. An hour, a day, to get to the plot. But I could zip across a train rail and jump over buildings, squeeze through a wormhole without a lock or lost time.

So I put on my feet and walk. I don’t discover anything not already existing but I do find the not always there —the low-tide Point Grey foreshore of English Bay, hardly a secret but still a sneak. Wet, vibrant slime climbs the cliffs to the condos overlooking but unable to impose, to know much of anything of what happens on the ridge of rocks below: The purple shards of mussels and the bulging weird rockweed, the doggies off their leashes pawing the evidence of campfire stay awhiles, lots to see here. Sailboats and kayaks in the bay. The skyline calling but I choose the sand. A great blue heron breaks the horizon, and a bald eagle hunches like a monster in its cottonwood castle, scattering lesser wings with a twist of its neck, the fierce dare in its eye.

I’m from the Midwest Coast with waves of grain; I understand tides but they’re not instilled, known in bones or at the front of my brain. If I’d come here when the moon was spewing, not sucking the water, burying the log perches and foot-purchase stepping stones, letting the barnacles breathe underwater, crash waves against retaining walls and eating up the seafare and wayfaring footprints weaving along the shore… I would never have returned. Just moved along. Nothing to see here.

And so. My lack of adaptation turns me into a mixed-blessing, lovehate machine, Canadian Lit fiend and follower of sunshot weather, seeker of water sounds, sandy-soled keen. Oh my god, who has emailed me since I last computer lab ratted out the shades of me enjoying no digerati arugh! the agony! LIES are the s’okays the internets are a waste! and I should happily instead through narrative seek the essence of the northern psyche. …And I have, I try. I read a book a day for a week: mostly tales of Chinatown and frontier BC, and Winnipeg I’ve grown a curious affinity for, though I’ve only visited once. The Red runs through us both. Messages unheard are Skyped into the sky, but I’ve been swept into the Interior Oh, Canada! oh my own inside soul. As opposed to the one on the outside? Oh ow ow, I suppose.

Given eBay and PayPal home address snafu times ESL and potential inattention, I wouldn’t be surprised if my new adapter showed up in Minneapolis accidentally instead. The waiting part is fine, it’s the uncertainty that digs. I wouldn’t mind being patient if I knew for sure it’s coming.

Despite the antsy irritation that sets in me, I do remember other things, to hear and ways of hearing, to see and the visioning. My last year in Minneapolis I lived without a live wire, and I slowed down then, too. Walked and biked leisurely, nothing was anywhere waiting for me, it was always already happening, right here now there before. Time felt different—restructured without the structure of compulsion and the promise of instant gratification, which has nothing to do with satisfaction, only the bliss-demand of immediacy, the now, Now, when instantaneous anything is anything but an authentic appreciation of reality. It’s not even an acknowledgment, and my incessant browsing cannot approach a pastime, pleasure, a worthwhile endeavor, unless distraction is a hobby and mindlessness is key to reconstructing constructions of identity. It challenges it rethink your shit but that doesn’t mean I hear it, I heed. Yes, I need downtime diversion vegetation like any information-addled twenty-first century digital girl (studying information science, no less). But when I question “Distraction from what?” I shudder. I don’t want a distraction from my distraction, I want a mission. Voice for the vision. Cease the black sails from passing in the night.

Apropos Dan writes about wanting to change the wanting to pass time by. Seldom but insistent. So well, so strong, I feel it too, and strange without the internet to conceal that I’m doing it anyway. Lay your head there, still. Stay. It comes with a panic, the impulse toward and realization of time not passing but me passing it up, putting it off, pushing it away—naps when I’m mere-remotely tired and taking the long way home, not to see new things but to delay, do away with time. Plugged in the hours were passed just as cold: careless, unnoticed, unconscious, and I crack. What do I want from me. Really. I thought I had this figured out, the resentment run dry. Another epiphany I’ll forget, backtrack then retread and feel awesome then like hell again, and again, what do I want. To be done? Figured out fully and finally, me it everything nailed shut, locked down.

Neither true or the truth yet it creeps and overcomes, and like a lost cause I’m founding finality trying to separate intellect from emotion while injecting logic into everything—which, incidentally, my intuition tells me ain’t right. “I want only to exist”—and my wanting it precludes me from attaining it. The idea versus the ideal with the laugh-track of perception whose definition? and holy shit, I’m trying too hard. A concentrated effort is too much effort. The crows attacked me and I wanted to believe it was because I’m special. For a few brief moments I stopped wanting it and was it—not special, not magical, in-tune or out of time passing it by, or scientifically realistically too close to a nest or otherwise threatening. I became belief. Broke free of boundary, perception stripped, dancing with a mind full lost completely. My soul fell out of my body. And the crows were coming to take it away.

“It’s all about timing” said for a lot—people and places, things, fortune and mis-. A feel-good and forget about it, move on—justification and rationalization for the holdups and the left-the-blocks before the gun shot, hesitation and what the hell are you doing, honestly, my precious fool perfect idiot pretension. Passing the timing. Prefer to not mind anything. High tide, keep walking. Just wait just watch someday somehow, something someone some thought some song will come along and snap all your dead parts off. Leave you naked and new.

I wouldn’t mind being patient if I knew for sure it’s coming I would mindless being patient glowing in the surefire. Sending energy to blackholes when I should eat the dead alive.

Nothing is settled, and nothing settles you.

I was unfortunately unable to finish this post before I began my Midwest Crashing—unfortunate because while the above’s not overripe, I’ve been flooded anew with the emo-stim of travel and complications of homing in on “home.” I spent a week in Minneapolis and am currently in Fargo until well I don’t know, until I feel like leaving. Late July at the latest. Perhaps another day will see those words through (/see through those words, ho ho ho).

comments

keeping my nose clean

i went to the animal fair

the idiots

passing the timing

brave empire

buy product

browse tags