GET ANGRY

Buff: Yo man, you're getting me all upset here.
Jeff: You should get upset! Everyone should get upset... It's my duty as a human being to get pissed off. Not that it makes any difference in the first place. Nothing ever fucking changes... It's all so fucking futile!
Tim: If it's all so fucking futile what the fuck are you so fucking upset about, fuckhead?
Jeff: I'm fucking alienated.
Buff: Me, too! I'm alienated, too. But at least there's Oreos.


...I don't even really like Oreos.

New Poem.

Formatting's messed up as usual. Whatever.


my words
they're falling in pieces
meandering
trudging through mind muck
breaking up
smaller every second
syllables separate
disintegrate
dissolve
spinning
they revolve
tumbling
down
brain to blood
blood to lips
lips to air to ears
HEAR:
what’s in my brain
doesn’t make it to your ears
fear and nerves rattle my words
they race around mental curves
vibrating herds of garbled noise
jumbled
they are mine no more
the moment the sound slipped from my lips
I knew:
the words were from another
from a foreign tongue
or a clumsy puppeteer
borrowing my lungs
to fuel her mixed up message
to mess with my sentiment
scramble my meaning
my feeling
perhaps it will translate
untangle
unravel
between your ears and brain
aim for restoration
reassemble my narration
patience cooperation
come to understand:
my words,
they have a mind of their own.

This is precisely how I feel today.

It had been years since Dick had bottled up malice against a creature—since freshman year at New Haven when he had come upon a popular essay about "mental hygiene." Now he lost his temper at Baby and simultaneously tried to coop it up within him, resenting her cold rich insolence. It would be hundreds of years before any emergent Amazons would ever grasp the fact that a man is vulnerable only in his pride, but delicate as Humpty-Dumpty once that is meddled with—though some of them paid the fact a cautious lip-service. Doctor Diver's profession of sorting the broken shells of another sort of egg had given him a dread of breakage. But:

"There's too much good manners," he said on the way back to Gstaad in the smooth sleigh.

"Well, I think that's nice," said Baby.

"No, it isn't," he insisted to the anonymous bundle of fur. "Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect—you don't call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you spend your life sparing people's feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can't distinguish what should be respected in them."

"I think Americans take their manner rather seriously," said the elder Englishman.

"I guess so," said Dick. "My father had the kind of manners he inherited from the days when you shot first and apologized afterward. Men armed—why you Europeans haven't carried arms in civil life since the beginning of the eighteenth century——"

"Not actually, perhaps——"

"Not actually. Not really."

"Dick, you've always had such beautiful manners," said Baby conciliatingly.

The women were regarding him across the zoo of robes with some alarm. The younger Englishman did not understand—he was one of the kind who were always jumping around cornices and balconies, as if they thought they were in the rigging of a ship—and filled the ride to the hotel with a preposterous story about a boxing match with his best friend in which they loved and bruised each other for an hour, always with great reserve. Dick became facetious.

"So every time he hit you you considered him an even better friend?"

"I respected him more."

"It's the premise I don't understand. You and your best friend scrap about a trivial matter——"

"If you don't understand, I can't explain it to you," said the young Englishman coldly.

—This is what I'll get if I begin saying what I think, Dick said to himself.

He was ashamed at baiting the man, realizing that the absurdity of the story rested in the immaturity of the attitude combined with the sophisticated method of its narration.


Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Pet peeve.

I hate it when people think I'm indifferent and indecisive about everything just because I don't care about stupid shit.

I'm pretty easygoing about a lot of things. Most of the time, I'd rather that someone else pick what tv show we watch, what music we listen to in the car, who drives, where we go for dinner, what time we go to the movies. If it doesn't matter to me, and it matters to you, why should I decide? I don't want to hear you bitch if I decide and you don't agree, when it doesn't perturb me either way. It makes other people happy, and it's so easy, so why pretend to care about shit I don't care about?

But just because I can go with the flow about little things, doesn't mean I don't care about anything.

Art and "Why?"

I suppose no one ever stops thinking about the "Meaning of Life" or whatever you want to call it, even if they feel like they should stop thinking about it and just live. There are a few things I've concluded in the past few years, though, without really meaning to do so, and I'd just like to jot them down before I forget.

Art is life.

My favorite quote from Dead Poet's Society is this:

"We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for."

We live for art. That's basically what he's saying. And this is what that means to me:

As humans, we each lead singular lives. We are all individuals with our own individual perspectives, views, feelings, thoughts, and these defining elements will never be reproduced in someone else in exactly the same way. At the same time, while we experience separately, much of what we experience is the same, and while we embrace our uniqueness and celebrate originality and independent thought, we embody a strange yet innate contradiction by constantly seeking companionship--by looking for ways to assure ourselves that in fact, we are not alone.

No one wants to be alone. Even if a person takes cold comfort in desiring solitude, it's not truth. No one wants to feel like he is the only person on earth in history to ever experience what he is experiencing. Everyone wants to be unique, and everyone is--but everyone also wants to be understood and heard.

To me, this is the cause of all art.

Art is the attempt to share your perspective, you own individual assessment of an experience, with someone else who can identify with your experience. It's letting others see an experience that they share, through your eyes. It's communicating your thoughts and emotions and ideas. It's introducing others to your way of seeing and feeling. It's inspiring them to reevaluate their own way of doing this.

Art brings people together. It gives them a shared human experience. It makes them feel like they are not alone. It lays the groundwork for connection on a deeper level. I don't think you can love art without loving people. Though sometimes art is making people feel uncomfortable, forcing them to confront something real they would rather avoid, it is still truth. Art is truth--personal truth in words, images, sounds, movement. To create real art, you must believe in what you're creating. You have to be passionate about it. If it doesn't mean anything to you, why should it mean anything to anyone else?

Art is courage. It's risky. It means finding your own personal truth, embracing every vulnerability, channeling it, and opening it to the world. And the world is frequently unkind. I think that stops people from trying to get people to listen and see them. It stops me. I have this habit I've developed of assuming that 1) no one cares about what I have to say, 2) I don't have anything to say worth listening to, and 3) I don't really want to lay myself out so vulnerably, anyway. It's terrible. They're awful excuses, and they shouldn't stop anyone from trying to make himself heard. We're constantly bombarded by images, sounds, words, all the time. There's a lot of garbage out there, and a lot of stuff that just doesn't mean anything to us--but it may mean something to someone. By not sharing, we're potentially depriving someone else of something meaningful. (I've gone off about this before.)

The Pop artist Ronnie Cutrone said that Andy Warhol taught him not to waste time trying to define art because you can't do it. I don't think that's true. I think you can define it--it's when you try saying what is "good" and what is "bad," that's when it gets tricky. I think that to me, "good" art is something that successfully communicates the artist's perspective, inspires interpretation, or both. There's plenty of entertainment that is not art, and I can appreciate it--but it doesn't mean anything to me. The only way I can criticize anyone's creation is look at it and ask myself, "What does this mean to me? What could this possibly mean to someone else?" If either answer is anything of significance, then I can't just dismiss it, can I?

But now I'm getting off on a tangent, and a really complicated one at that. I didn't mean to make this so long. These thoughts are full of contradictions. There's no logic to any of this. If you can find some, congratulations. If you can use logic or reasoning to destroy the validity of any of this, that's cool too. There's not really logic to anything I stick up here, 'cause that's not really my thing. This is all just what I know based on my own intuition, my own feeling and reaction to what's around me. It's just how I feel, in the most basic sense, about what I love and what I see.

I like day and night equally, for the same reason:

I like light.

Make sense of THAT one.

“Have you seen them? The words cut open . . . there’s something living in these lines.”

A steamy mug of dark coffee—or five—
nursed between soft palms as the night becomes
the morning. Lines begin to come alive.
They dance a reel or two and twiddle thumbs
for their audience is dull and drowsing.
Together in a mass of curves and limbs
thrusting out at all angles, harboring
resentment in the hours dark and dim,
they protest in anger: “We are not one,
but many—individuals!” they cry.
“Don’t let us blur, with your weary vision,
into a moody mess of black and white.”
Stare at the sheet in hand, eyes full of tears,
blink til it fades to black and disappears.


'Cause this is really what I need to be doing with my time.

The businessman at Sunday brunch.

I’ll have the eggs over easy, bacon
on the side. But I’d like sausage instead
if you could—Can’t you do that? Yes, you can?
Thanks. On what? Whole wheat or white or rye bread?
Whole wheat. Can I get that toasted? I said,
Can I get it toasted? And on the side,
not under the eggs? And jelly, not red
currant, but grape? And yes, the eggs are fried
but runny. I don’t want them if they’re dry.
To drink? A Bloody Mary, please. Give me
celery on the side. I can’t decide
if I want coffee also. Well, we’ll see.
Maybe later, when you bring me my drink.
No, now, please. That would be better, I think.

I feel exactly like me.

I like it.

It's completely perfect outside.

I hate wasting time sleeping.

I don't want to miss anything.

Another poem.

Awful, but I felt like writing and poetry + 6:55 a.m. don't always mix. It's on the lj too. Something different for me--trying to work with actual structure and form, whoa! I'm not happy with the last line in particular but it'll do for now.

Also, I never really noticed just how hard it is to figure out the syllable breakdown of some words. My meter is screwy and a lot of the rhymes are soft, but hey. You try writing a Spenserian sonnet at this hour. Iambic pentameter is not as easy as you might think.


Staring at the blinking neon numbers,
dim chartreuse entrances—wide eyed lying
flat on my back as guilt washes over
my body like the flow of sea crying,
creeping stealthily toward dunes, sighing.
You never mentioned her—that’s not my fault.
You smiled, shrugged. Thought you were teasing
until I felt your hand on my thigh, taut
fingers squeezing gently, then brushing soft,
tickling my ribs. I laughed helplessly.
Your arm came ‘round me, but I did not stop
your empty gestures. You grinned drunkenly
at my indulgent smile. I know next day,
you’ll forget. I won’t. I should not have stayed.