last year at this time we were crushed by a snowstorm; the streets were swollen with snow for days, but it was ok, no one was really going anywhere anyway.
right now we're having a bit of a thaw, and this is the first not-completely-white christmas we've had in buffalo in a number of years.
funny what a difference a year makes. christmas, last year, was one of the first times in months i had spoken to or seen my family after they had kicked me out of the house. i was shocked to see how old they looked. people can age in four or five months. or maybe it was just that i hadn't realized that they were getting older until the lifelong images of them that i've been holding in my head really came smack up against reality for the first time. your eyes tend to gloss over ageing process when you look at someone everyday.
i never intended to spend christmas with my folks that year. i was still mad at them for showing me the door and giving me the boot. i don't know what it was that made me stick around; maybe it was the memory of bygone christmases, that, though they shrink back into the past, still dangle within sight, like a sprig of mistletoe above a doorway. i love the christmases of my childhood; i'd give anything to run into them again. going through the doorway of my parents house and hanging about seemed the only way to do it.
now, as i get older, the excitement of christmas morning fades: supposedly i am too old to play with toys now, but the real reason i don't ask for any is because there aren't any good ones in the toy aisle anymore. the prospect of presents thrills me less and less. to be honest, i could go without gifts altogether, as long as i had the people i love around me. (although, i have to stop myself here and say that the clothes i received this year came at the right time to the right fellow -- i haven't had any new clothes in years, or at least that's what the holes my jeans seem to say when anyone looks at them...) but really...i have no burning desires for "stuff" the way i once did as a kid. there's stuff i want; i might buy it for myself, or i may never get it, but i'm not breaking down over it.
the thing i'm loving more and more about christmas are these things: seeing people, friends, family members, anyone that i don't get to normally see and running into them at the holidays, and spending a little time with them, or a lot, depending on how busy they are, catching up and reminiscing. it helps to know that those people are never lost, though you might have no clue where they are or what they're doing throughout the rest of the year.
i also can't get enough of giving people exactly the gift they never knew they wanted but can't stop smiling over. it makes christmas shopping tough, laborious, torturous -- but it has never not been worth the effort. i love giving presents. as a kid, i never thought it was possible to enjoy giving someone else a gift. i sure as hell never thought i would enjoy it so much, and certainly never thought i'd enjoy it more than getting something i wanted. the gifts i've given that i feel the worst about have been gifts that never went to good and joyful use. but there is nothing like the feeling of matching the perfect gift with the perfect person. of course, i hate paying money -- i am poor, and a pack of gum at the convenient store would sting my pocketbook.............but for christmas, it's worth it. there have been christmases where i couldn't buy gifts, and those have been some of the most depressing, sickening christmases i've ever had.
i love christmas; i love everything about it. i love the broken taboo of red and green right next to each other; i love snow on the ground, frosted windows, the stuff that lyrics to holiday music is made of. and yes, i even love the holiday music. its the only time we ever get to listen to jazz in abundance (and now, whenever i hear jazz of any kind, i can't help but think of christmas), and the greatest vocalists in pop music history always turn up to lend their voices to the season. christmas is perpetual. there is always a Christmas Carole, there are always chestnuts roasting, there is always Peter Billingsly, always roast beast, always a tree that glows in the living room all through the night, the anchor of our christmas morning.
this is the darkest, coldest time of the year, and yet a celebration, a high water mark. and even if we can't count back through each christmas with a perfect memory, still, somehow we know it isn't the same as it was way back when. Christmas is a paradox. it is cyclical, ever returning, but also cumulative. its meaning is abstract from the act, the ritual of christmas; christmas itself is a memory. at its most basic, it celebrates the paradox of the Incarnation -- of God becoming flesh. for two thousand years it has been gaining the momentum of meaning it now has, accumulating barnacles of significance, or thick, twisting ivies that cling and add to the ritual. some argue that it obscures the true meaning of christmas. i think it makes it more interesting, garnishes it, seasons it and, at last allows us to see the nature of something that changes, and is yet perpetual.
sitting here, in an unseasonably thawed buffalo, at my family's house, laughing with the parents i vowed to never speak to again, watching them open my presents on a rainy christmas sunday is revealing. they are older. i am wiser. it is nothing like last year, or the year before it. but today, christmas present, is christmas, and a day of remembering. it is a day of honoring the past, remembering through, and around and with the lore of the season. christmas present is inflected by christmas past, and i hold it dear for what it has been. and i wonder at what a different thing, a changed and new thing it will be, when it happens upon us again.
merry christmas to all, and to all a good night.
Sunday, December 25, 2005
Friday, December 23, 2005
advent
hi folks.
merry christmas.
if you're not christian, merry christmas anyway.
(the thought struck me today that on st. patrick's day, "everyone is irish," and that's ok. "everyone is christian at christmas" is something people have a problem with. i say: just have fun with it. its a good time, a good excuse to eat a lot, a good excuse for presents and days off from work, if nothing else. and oh, the glorious music!)
anyways, this isn't meant to be a long post: i'm just hear to say the blogging equivalent of "i've got a crap on deck that could choke a donkey..." i've been itching to post something here for a few days, and i have either been at work, wishing i was unconscious, or at home, unconscious.
so, things to look forward to at written off:
"the umbrellas of cherbourg"
my friend lauren
ben folds lyrics
seasonal musings
the drama that is my life
and ever and always: more reasons not to have a girlfriend.
stay tuned.
its all coming....
...
....
.......
............aaaaaaaaaaany minute now......
love you
happy high holy days.
-p
merry christmas.
if you're not christian, merry christmas anyway.
(the thought struck me today that on st. patrick's day, "everyone is irish," and that's ok. "everyone is christian at christmas" is something people have a problem with. i say: just have fun with it. its a good time, a good excuse to eat a lot, a good excuse for presents and days off from work, if nothing else. and oh, the glorious music!)
anyways, this isn't meant to be a long post: i'm just hear to say the blogging equivalent of "i've got a crap on deck that could choke a donkey..." i've been itching to post something here for a few days, and i have either been at work, wishing i was unconscious, or at home, unconscious.
so, things to look forward to at written off:
"the umbrellas of cherbourg"
my friend lauren
ben folds lyrics
seasonal musings
the drama that is my life
and ever and always: more reasons not to have a girlfriend.
stay tuned.
its all coming....
...
....
.......
............aaaaaaaaaaany minute now......
love you
happy high holy days.
-p
Thursday, December 15, 2005
...there is also hope where there is no life.
lately, i've been feeling like a sick dog.
i have a friend who told me, recently, that dogs, when they die, try to find the lowest lying ground to lay down and wait. from my only experience with a dying dog, i know this to be true: my dog, sully, spent a lot of time just lying in the basement before he died. we weren't sure what was wrong with him, but a few days later we took him to the vet. when they opened him up, his intestines were full of tumors, and we had him put to sleep. or, rather, my parents had him put to sleep. i didn't know he was gone until he was gone. that was four years ago; i was twenty one; i cried like a baby.
at any rate, i've been feeling like a sick dog, quitting to the basement. i get up, and i go to work, and when i'm there i check my life at the door, because work is stressful enough as it is without loading baggage on top. i am happy at work. when i'm at work, i'm in work-land. life there is simple. get to the tables on time. talk about the specials. bring over drinks. take the orders. send them to the kitchen after calculating how long it will take rose to be ready to cook them and how soon i will need them. whatever other adjustments there are along the way, however often i feel like i'll never be able to get things done in the time i have to them, i know the world inside caffe espresso won't come crashing down. however close we come to the apocalypse at 4401 transit road, all is never lost, and so far i've made it out alive everytime.
i'm more comfortable with situations that threaten my job than i am with situations that threaten my life. there is no cigarette break from life, there is no punching out of life and coming back early the next morning to finish the stuff you left undone last night. anything that threatens the stability of my life amounts to being life threatening...the bags that i walk out of work with, the bags with no other door to check them at, no room to unpack them at. the rest of my life is a juggling act, a gypsy life.
one bag for the social shambles my life is -- the loose ends of ties cut, the search for true friends, and true family, the burden of building a core of people who can really know me, fighting against the lust i have to decieve them, to steer them around the landmines of my personality.
one bag for the spiritual, religious, creative experience that has taken a quarter of a century to start revealing itself to me, that is constantly tearing apart and re-raising what i think my life is, and what i think life in general means...full of secret compartments stuffed with words and the weight of all of their connotative, denotative, historical, etymological, linguistomysticism -- the tools for my self performed, exploratory surgery on the meaning of my life, the bricks and mortar for building my life, the iron girders that allow it to reach heights heretofor only dreamed. the art of my life, to take an old familiar thing and make it new and give it a spirit of meaning, to give it significance.
one bag full of the academic tragedy that was my semester, full of the fear that i won't be able to pull my academic career out of the nose dive i've somehow let it slip into, full of the fear that won't be able to recover, that i will have dashed opportunity into the side of a mountain in the chaos of one semester. my life, my livelihood may not ever recover. i don't want to be stuck in the meaninglessness of a lowpaying job working off a college education that amounts only to a lifetime of debt. i could have gone to grad school, gotten my docorate, and been paid to do it...
one bag full of rapacious sexuality, sometimes just barely in check
one bag full of perpetual financial disaster
one bag full of ego alternating between pride and low self esteem
one carry-on of loneliness; i carry it wherever i go. on planes, i buy it a ticket and sit it in the seat next to me.
i'm tired of carrying this stuff. tired of juggling it. at work i'm hardly bothered by it, but at the end of the day i come home, and i just want some place to store it for awhile.
one day i can't help but think it will drop, all around me; i'll fudge the act, the bags will drop, and my life will come crashing down. it feels inevitable -- you can only have so many things hanging in the air before gravity gets ahold of them. the only time it stops is when you die. you bring your bags to the basement, you stack them in the corner, you wait, and finally, you get some rest.
funny; i've been staying in my parents basement on and off for the past few weeks. it is perfectly dark down there. i could sleep for ages.
i'm not suicidal. but death is the door to new things. death is only half an equation, and yes, it is an ultimate end, but the beginning of some journey that we don't yet know. death as a metaphor fascinates me. death as a potential for reinvention, as a way of coming back, as a route, the only route, to resurrection.
i expect i will be staying down in my parent's basement for a few days longer, until the year dies. i'll come up and out and look foreward to a new year, a new life, more hope, more sunshine, more strength in the bones of my new body to carry my bags, to continue juggling them, to continue on in this gypsy life, and finally make it mean something.
i have a friend who told me, recently, that dogs, when they die, try to find the lowest lying ground to lay down and wait. from my only experience with a dying dog, i know this to be true: my dog, sully, spent a lot of time just lying in the basement before he died. we weren't sure what was wrong with him, but a few days later we took him to the vet. when they opened him up, his intestines were full of tumors, and we had him put to sleep. or, rather, my parents had him put to sleep. i didn't know he was gone until he was gone. that was four years ago; i was twenty one; i cried like a baby.
at any rate, i've been feeling like a sick dog, quitting to the basement. i get up, and i go to work, and when i'm there i check my life at the door, because work is stressful enough as it is without loading baggage on top. i am happy at work. when i'm at work, i'm in work-land. life there is simple. get to the tables on time. talk about the specials. bring over drinks. take the orders. send them to the kitchen after calculating how long it will take rose to be ready to cook them and how soon i will need them. whatever other adjustments there are along the way, however often i feel like i'll never be able to get things done in the time i have to them, i know the world inside caffe espresso won't come crashing down. however close we come to the apocalypse at 4401 transit road, all is never lost, and so far i've made it out alive everytime.
i'm more comfortable with situations that threaten my job than i am with situations that threaten my life. there is no cigarette break from life, there is no punching out of life and coming back early the next morning to finish the stuff you left undone last night. anything that threatens the stability of my life amounts to being life threatening...the bags that i walk out of work with, the bags with no other door to check them at, no room to unpack them at. the rest of my life is a juggling act, a gypsy life.
one bag for the social shambles my life is -- the loose ends of ties cut, the search for true friends, and true family, the burden of building a core of people who can really know me, fighting against the lust i have to decieve them, to steer them around the landmines of my personality.
one bag for the spiritual, religious, creative experience that has taken a quarter of a century to start revealing itself to me, that is constantly tearing apart and re-raising what i think my life is, and what i think life in general means...full of secret compartments stuffed with words and the weight of all of their connotative, denotative, historical, etymological, linguistomysticism -- the tools for my self performed, exploratory surgery on the meaning of my life, the bricks and mortar for building my life, the iron girders that allow it to reach heights heretofor only dreamed. the art of my life, to take an old familiar thing and make it new and give it a spirit of meaning, to give it significance.
one bag full of the academic tragedy that was my semester, full of the fear that i won't be able to pull my academic career out of the nose dive i've somehow let it slip into, full of the fear that won't be able to recover, that i will have dashed opportunity into the side of a mountain in the chaos of one semester. my life, my livelihood may not ever recover. i don't want to be stuck in the meaninglessness of a lowpaying job working off a college education that amounts only to a lifetime of debt. i could have gone to grad school, gotten my docorate, and been paid to do it...
one bag full of rapacious sexuality, sometimes just barely in check
one bag full of perpetual financial disaster
one bag full of ego alternating between pride and low self esteem
one carry-on of loneliness; i carry it wherever i go. on planes, i buy it a ticket and sit it in the seat next to me.
i'm tired of carrying this stuff. tired of juggling it. at work i'm hardly bothered by it, but at the end of the day i come home, and i just want some place to store it for awhile.
one day i can't help but think it will drop, all around me; i'll fudge the act, the bags will drop, and my life will come crashing down. it feels inevitable -- you can only have so many things hanging in the air before gravity gets ahold of them. the only time it stops is when you die. you bring your bags to the basement, you stack them in the corner, you wait, and finally, you get some rest.
funny; i've been staying in my parents basement on and off for the past few weeks. it is perfectly dark down there. i could sleep for ages.
i'm not suicidal. but death is the door to new things. death is only half an equation, and yes, it is an ultimate end, but the beginning of some journey that we don't yet know. death as a metaphor fascinates me. death as a potential for reinvention, as a way of coming back, as a route, the only route, to resurrection.
i expect i will be staying down in my parent's basement for a few days longer, until the year dies. i'll come up and out and look foreward to a new year, a new life, more hope, more sunshine, more strength in the bones of my new body to carry my bags, to continue juggling them, to continue on in this gypsy life, and finally make it mean something.
Monday, December 12, 2005
Friday, December 02, 2005
makin a list...
nice
a rush of newly rehired cute girls at work
naughty
my boss, for being so certifiably crazy, its leaking out her head and infecting everyone else. as much as i love her and she reminds me of my Sitti (also freaking nuts), she is driving me insane to the point that i want a customer to rob us and shoot me in the face.
nice
mom and dad, for helping me out with rides to and from work throughout my town-of-amherst-induced vehicular immobilzation.
naughty
town of amherst, for suspending my licsense, and forcing me to buy over $100 in cab rides in the last two weeks, whose fares often exceeded the money i made at work that day. had i the power, i would condemn thee to the weeping and gnashing of thy teeth in the lake of fire, until thou wouldst beggest of me thy salvation -- and, being the merciful being that i am, i would grant it to thee -- provided that thou still hast the manual dexterity and presence of mind to fill out two forms, arrive at court on the appointed date and time (certain to be scheduled directly in the midst of thy daily tasks of boulder rolling, attempted thirst quenching and liver-pecking), wait one week, call the appropriate office to schedule thy education which shall teach thee how not to get thyself thrown into a lake of fire (as if thou couldst not figure it out on thine own), and, within two weeks of said education session, pay the fine of more-money-than-you-have-dollars, and unreasonable cents. and anticipate no kindness from me towards thee, expect not my favour -- thou hast forced me to get up off of my fat ass for five whole minutes to condescend and talk to thee, thou lawbreaker! -- and when i returneth mine ass to mine comfy, rolly chair, it shall be cold. how dare thee?
nice
my co-worker, kristin, for giving me a ride home the other night, even though she was sick, and it was out of her way. she is a trooper and champ.
naughty
my co-worker, jim, for totally pulling a no-call, no-show that day and making me work a double, so that i had no other options to get a ride home besides a $25 cab and kristin, who wouldn't let me take the cab. also, he is better looking, and younger and more buff than i am. so he can just bite me twice as hard. douchebag.
naughty
my job -- for making me miss school weeks at a time, because i am a nice guy and i bail them out every day because they are short during the day shift, and they take it for granted and i can't get anything done, and this is going to be the worst semester i have ever had in college -- and not just "i didn't get straight A's like i usually do" bad -- i'm talking, "i haven't done this bad since i barely graduated highschool" bad.
naughty
school. for screwing me over and making my life difficult every chance it gets. for: sending my traffic bill to a collection agency. for: not acknowledging when i paid off my account with the collection agency. for: placing my school account on hold because they had not recognized my payment. for: not letting me drop a class that i never took (and will likely end up paying for) because they put my account on hold. for: the mysterious new hold on my account that won't let me register for my spring classes. for: somehow taking just a little bit longer than forever until they sent my loan refunds back to me. for: not sending my financial aid information through on time because somehow i lost status as an american citizen over the summer. for: making me bring in a birth certificate to prove to them i was born in the US of fricking A. for: making me order a new birth certificate from albany, because i couldn't find my original...(guess what i found after paying the fee for the new certificate?) for: putting me in direct conflict with my job, my desire to do well in school, and the rest of my life. thank you, buff state, for being efficient only in the areas of wasting my time, and being whiny bureaucratic pussies. you totally suck.
nice
kiran, for being a guy i would do anything for and who would do anything for me
naughty
the army, for sending him to iraq
nice
Jeniffer Ulrich and Jen Miller for managing to be new friends even though i know they'd rather have more from me.
naughty
me, for unintentionally leading on Julie Randolph...i actually do like her like that, but i can't have a girlfriend right now...and for somewhat intentionally leading on Mary G. sometimes, i'm a bad person.
nice
starting Goethe's the Sorrows of Young Werther
naughty
not finishing Goethe's the Sorrows of Young Werther, even though i only have 30 pages to go. (i am such a yutz. i call myself an english major?)
nice
God, giving me things i truly don't deserve. and seriously. if you only knew. i don't mean this in a cotton candy way, the way everyone else invariably does. this is some for real type shit. like, "vincent, we should be dead, we should be fucking dead."
naughty
not deserving anything God gives me.
nice
my family, in Albany...because i have them
naughty
me, for never seeing, calling, writing, visiting, or anything them enough. sorry. :(
nice
me, for finally figuring out what i want out of life
naughty
the world, for being the obstacle course in that's in my way.
and lastly...
nice
Aaron Sorkin, for having a new play, a new movie, and a new tv show set to release all within one year. i love that guy.
naughty
me, for not being Aaron Sorkin. that guy is such a bastard
and that's m' list folks. i've checked it twice.
a rush of newly rehired cute girls at work
naughty
my boss, for being so certifiably crazy, its leaking out her head and infecting everyone else. as much as i love her and she reminds me of my Sitti (also freaking nuts), she is driving me insane to the point that i want a customer to rob us and shoot me in the face.
nice
mom and dad, for helping me out with rides to and from work throughout my town-of-amherst-induced vehicular immobilzation.
naughty
town of amherst, for suspending my licsense, and forcing me to buy over $100 in cab rides in the last two weeks, whose fares often exceeded the money i made at work that day. had i the power, i would condemn thee to the weeping and gnashing of thy teeth in the lake of fire, until thou wouldst beggest of me thy salvation -- and, being the merciful being that i am, i would grant it to thee -- provided that thou still hast the manual dexterity and presence of mind to fill out two forms, arrive at court on the appointed date and time (certain to be scheduled directly in the midst of thy daily tasks of boulder rolling, attempted thirst quenching and liver-pecking), wait one week, call the appropriate office to schedule thy education which shall teach thee how not to get thyself thrown into a lake of fire (as if thou couldst not figure it out on thine own), and, within two weeks of said education session, pay the fine of more-money-than-you-have-dollars, and unreasonable cents. and anticipate no kindness from me towards thee, expect not my favour -- thou hast forced me to get up off of my fat ass for five whole minutes to condescend and talk to thee, thou lawbreaker! -- and when i returneth mine ass to mine comfy, rolly chair, it shall be cold. how dare thee?
nice
my co-worker, kristin, for giving me a ride home the other night, even though she was sick, and it was out of her way. she is a trooper and champ.
naughty
my co-worker, jim, for totally pulling a no-call, no-show that day and making me work a double, so that i had no other options to get a ride home besides a $25 cab and kristin, who wouldn't let me take the cab. also, he is better looking, and younger and more buff than i am. so he can just bite me twice as hard. douchebag.
naughty
my job -- for making me miss school weeks at a time, because i am a nice guy and i bail them out every day because they are short during the day shift, and they take it for granted and i can't get anything done, and this is going to be the worst semester i have ever had in college -- and not just "i didn't get straight A's like i usually do" bad -- i'm talking, "i haven't done this bad since i barely graduated highschool" bad.
naughty
school. for screwing me over and making my life difficult every chance it gets. for: sending my traffic bill to a collection agency. for: not acknowledging when i paid off my account with the collection agency. for: placing my school account on hold because they had not recognized my payment. for: not letting me drop a class that i never took (and will likely end up paying for) because they put my account on hold. for: the mysterious new hold on my account that won't let me register for my spring classes. for: somehow taking just a little bit longer than forever until they sent my loan refunds back to me. for: not sending my financial aid information through on time because somehow i lost status as an american citizen over the summer. for: making me bring in a birth certificate to prove to them i was born in the US of fricking A. for: making me order a new birth certificate from albany, because i couldn't find my original...(guess what i found after paying the fee for the new certificate?) for: putting me in direct conflict with my job, my desire to do well in school, and the rest of my life. thank you, buff state, for being efficient only in the areas of wasting my time, and being whiny bureaucratic pussies. you totally suck.
nice
kiran, for being a guy i would do anything for and who would do anything for me
naughty
the army, for sending him to iraq
nice
Jeniffer Ulrich and Jen Miller for managing to be new friends even though i know they'd rather have more from me.
naughty
me, for unintentionally leading on Julie Randolph...i actually do like her like that, but i can't have a girlfriend right now...and for somewhat intentionally leading on Mary G. sometimes, i'm a bad person.
nice
starting Goethe's the Sorrows of Young Werther
naughty
not finishing Goethe's the Sorrows of Young Werther, even though i only have 30 pages to go. (i am such a yutz. i call myself an english major?)
nice
God, giving me things i truly don't deserve. and seriously. if you only knew. i don't mean this in a cotton candy way, the way everyone else invariably does. this is some for real type shit. like, "vincent, we should be dead, we should be fucking dead."
naughty
not deserving anything God gives me.
nice
my family, in Albany...because i have them
naughty
me, for never seeing, calling, writing, visiting, or anything them enough. sorry. :(
nice
me, for finally figuring out what i want out of life
naughty
the world, for being the obstacle course in that's in my way.
and lastly...
nice
Aaron Sorkin, for having a new play, a new movie, and a new tv show set to release all within one year. i love that guy.
naughty
me, for not being Aaron Sorkin. that guy is such a bastard
and that's m' list folks. i've checked it twice.
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
drawing II
"In order to see that basket, said Stephen, your mind first of all separates the basket from the rest of the visible universe which is not the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the object to be apprehended[....]the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it. You apprehended it as one thing. You see it as one whole. You apprehend its wholeness."
--Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce (emphasis mine)
its not that i like to draw. in fact, some days, like today, i abhor it. i loathe it. some days, like today, i want to gouge my terrible drawings out of my paper with my fingernails, and crush pencils in my teeth. yet no matter how much i enjoy the act of drawing, or hate my final product, it is the gift i got stuck with.
my parents always tell me this story: that when i was two, i took my crayons, and i put them in the shape of an airplane, and that's when they knew i'd be an artist. i don't know why i did this -- i don't know why i didn't just take the crayons and draw an airplane. it wasn't as if the concept of crayons could have been lost on me at two years old; i knew what they were for, and how to use them. i don't know why i chose to make the airplane out of the crayons themselves, instead of with the crayons, but i can take a stab at it.
i almost want to say i could recover this memory -- maybe i have, and maybe i haven't -- but i know what i am like, and how i have been for most of my life, and its safe to say i could approximate the reason for my deviant crayon usage. my guess is that the crayons weren't sharp enough, and i know that i've always hated coloring, drawing, and sketching with worn down nubs; anything less than a perfect point on my crayon or pencil could not be more useless to me. granted, crayons aren't known for the line quality they produce, but at two, that's all i had to work with. and they either hadn't invented crayon sharpeners yet, or i was too young to figure out how to ask for one.
at any rate, i was going to make an airplane. for whatever reason, the shape of an airplane was welling up inside of me, and dammit, i was going to get it out on the page, nubby crayons notwithstanding. i wonder if i thought: "well, the line is going to come out the same width as the crayon anyway," and instead of being hedged into producing a bad drawing because of my poor tools, i decided to put the tools to alternative and creative use. i like to think i decided to do this at two years old because i discovered that a real airplane doesn't actually have a line around it -- that drawing and using lines to produce a picture ultimately falls short of reality, no matter how realistic the drawing. i like to think i used my crayons the way i did to comment on the ineffeciency of the tools of the artist, to mock the inability of my crayon lines, to mock my own ability to draw -- to say perhaps that not only is the line a representation, but in realizing that, i was freeing myself from the burden of realism. i imagine the commentary of critics: "look! look how his work is a comment on the complete mastery of the artist's tool by the artist!" and "see how he is saying that all art is as much an abstraction as it is a representation?"
but of course, i was only two, and i forget that these are things i've only just figured out. still, i have always been frustrated by that line. the line is not real. its not really there. that is not really how we see things. yet, ultimately, it is how we grasp things, objects, reality. we grasp it through that kind of representation. the line is a symbol. it is not meant for revealing what is real, but, in a sense, for containing and representing a visual reality in the best way we know how.
the line is an attempt to join what is internal -- what we see, what is in our heads, what is welling through our hearts -- with the external. to make an object, an artefact that is at once our own, yet universal, accessable to others, ownable, viewable, palpable to others. a way of joining the internal you to the external world, and to a peopled world.
it connects spirit with matter, and in that respect, it is an attempt to create life, to breath our life into graphite and paper the way God breathed his into clay.
and the line itself is false -- derrida's dying metaphor, and nietzche's non-moral lie. it is zeno's arrow, showing us that how we understand and grasp reality is only a mode, a method of representation. all lines -- of a drawing, of prose and poetry -- are not trueness of form. they do not hold Truth. they chip away at it, so that it may take shape, the negative space that allows a block of marble to become the Pieta. the line is another reality altogether. its inability to recreate reality allows it to transcend reality; its shortcomings allow for a transfiguration, allow the not-real to enter the world of the real, allow the spirit of the fantastic to become incarnate. the potential for the line, like zeno's arrow, is eternal, all because of its unreality. the line is a false distinction, only vaguely definable at best. but when the realization creeps in that it cannot truly represent reality, that representation itself is necessarily not the same as what is being represented, then we open a new world for ourselves -- a world of modernist and impressionist and cubist truths that create their own ascended reality...which, in turn, informs and expands the understanding of the vastly profound place that is our reality.
freed from realism, from the pressure of perfectionism, under the realization that all lines are inherently flaws unshackles an artist: he does not have to make anything exact -- because he has no hope of that. he cannot make it exact. but, though inexact, he can still make a beautiful drawing, craft a striking poem, render into language and line something lovely and magnificent. he can even use crayons to do it.
--Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce (emphasis mine)
its not that i like to draw. in fact, some days, like today, i abhor it. i loathe it. some days, like today, i want to gouge my terrible drawings out of my paper with my fingernails, and crush pencils in my teeth. yet no matter how much i enjoy the act of drawing, or hate my final product, it is the gift i got stuck with.
my parents always tell me this story: that when i was two, i took my crayons, and i put them in the shape of an airplane, and that's when they knew i'd be an artist. i don't know why i did this -- i don't know why i didn't just take the crayons and draw an airplane. it wasn't as if the concept of crayons could have been lost on me at two years old; i knew what they were for, and how to use them. i don't know why i chose to make the airplane out of the crayons themselves, instead of with the crayons, but i can take a stab at it.
i almost want to say i could recover this memory -- maybe i have, and maybe i haven't -- but i know what i am like, and how i have been for most of my life, and its safe to say i could approximate the reason for my deviant crayon usage. my guess is that the crayons weren't sharp enough, and i know that i've always hated coloring, drawing, and sketching with worn down nubs; anything less than a perfect point on my crayon or pencil could not be more useless to me. granted, crayons aren't known for the line quality they produce, but at two, that's all i had to work with. and they either hadn't invented crayon sharpeners yet, or i was too young to figure out how to ask for one.
at any rate, i was going to make an airplane. for whatever reason, the shape of an airplane was welling up inside of me, and dammit, i was going to get it out on the page, nubby crayons notwithstanding. i wonder if i thought: "well, the line is going to come out the same width as the crayon anyway," and instead of being hedged into producing a bad drawing because of my poor tools, i decided to put the tools to alternative and creative use. i like to think i decided to do this at two years old because i discovered that a real airplane doesn't actually have a line around it -- that drawing and using lines to produce a picture ultimately falls short of reality, no matter how realistic the drawing. i like to think i used my crayons the way i did to comment on the ineffeciency of the tools of the artist, to mock the inability of my crayon lines, to mock my own ability to draw -- to say perhaps that not only is the line a representation, but in realizing that, i was freeing myself from the burden of realism. i imagine the commentary of critics: "look! look how his work is a comment on the complete mastery of the artist's tool by the artist!" and "see how he is saying that all art is as much an abstraction as it is a representation?"
but of course, i was only two, and i forget that these are things i've only just figured out. still, i have always been frustrated by that line. the line is not real. its not really there. that is not really how we see things. yet, ultimately, it is how we grasp things, objects, reality. we grasp it through that kind of representation. the line is a symbol. it is not meant for revealing what is real, but, in a sense, for containing and representing a visual reality in the best way we know how.
the line is an attempt to join what is internal -- what we see, what is in our heads, what is welling through our hearts -- with the external. to make an object, an artefact that is at once our own, yet universal, accessable to others, ownable, viewable, palpable to others. a way of joining the internal you to the external world, and to a peopled world.
it connects spirit with matter, and in that respect, it is an attempt to create life, to breath our life into graphite and paper the way God breathed his into clay.
and the line itself is false -- derrida's dying metaphor, and nietzche's non-moral lie. it is zeno's arrow, showing us that how we understand and grasp reality is only a mode, a method of representation. all lines -- of a drawing, of prose and poetry -- are not trueness of form. they do not hold Truth. they chip away at it, so that it may take shape, the negative space that allows a block of marble to become the Pieta. the line is another reality altogether. its inability to recreate reality allows it to transcend reality; its shortcomings allow for a transfiguration, allow the not-real to enter the world of the real, allow the spirit of the fantastic to become incarnate. the potential for the line, like zeno's arrow, is eternal, all because of its unreality. the line is a false distinction, only vaguely definable at best. but when the realization creeps in that it cannot truly represent reality, that representation itself is necessarily not the same as what is being represented, then we open a new world for ourselves -- a world of modernist and impressionist and cubist truths that create their own ascended reality...which, in turn, informs and expands the understanding of the vastly profound place that is our reality.
freed from realism, from the pressure of perfectionism, under the realization that all lines are inherently flaws unshackles an artist: he does not have to make anything exact -- because he has no hope of that. he cannot make it exact. but, though inexact, he can still make a beautiful drawing, craft a striking poem, render into language and line something lovely and magnificent. he can even use crayons to do it.
Sunday, November 20, 2005
its a wonderful life
sometimes i wonder if i should pack up and leave buffalo forever; other times i think i should stay and let it burn through me, that i should vandalize it with my fingerprints, catch its crumbling buildings, reraise its falling skyline, become a part of its skyline. and sometimes i just want to shake the dust of this crummy little town off my feet, and see the world. sometimes i feel like this is unquestionably, irrevocably my home, and other times that this home will always be full of strangers.
as an exile, i am unanchored. as a citizen, i am part of the human mortar that holds this city up.
it is either one or the other.
it is always one or the other.
i am standing on the bridge wondering what have i changed? and what change will i make? and right now, the answer to both questions is nothing, and i realize it is because i have been standing on the bridge all this time.
there is a false sense of freedom in the ability to deliberate, but it is in the action of choice that freedom is effected.
as an exile, i am unanchored. as a citizen, i am part of the human mortar that holds this city up.
it is either one or the other.
it is always one or the other.
i am standing on the bridge wondering what have i changed? and what change will i make? and right now, the answer to both questions is nothing, and i realize it is because i have been standing on the bridge all this time.
there is a false sense of freedom in the ability to deliberate, but it is in the action of choice that freedom is effected.
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
two kinds of family...
saturday night, at four in the morning, i said goodbye to my best friend, and i truly don't know for sure if or when i will see him again. this was not the parting of people barely able to maintain even the pretense of a real friendship; it was a long goodbye, but it was not a Long Goodbye, not the long "fuck you;" this was not the burning of a bridge. this was an affirmation of love between two friends, and a recognition of our mutual yearning for each other, and our future together, and the things we hope to and know we will achieve. Kiran is leaving for Iraq in less than two weeks.
he has been living in Colorado for the last couple years at the "request" of the U.S. Army. he's come home when was able, usually every four, five months or so, but his visits are never for long enough, and their brevity makes them feel too few and far between. i have known him since i was twelve, since the sixth grade, and i can remember our first meeting. i had heard of him before i met him: i was told we should be introduced, and i remember being taken aback at just how friendly and socially capable this kid seemed. conversation came naturally to his lips, in his mouth words were only pleasant things; they were not bitter catalysts the way they were in everyone else's usage: to wield, to burn, to precipitate a conflict...Kiran was just...nice. the nicest guy i have ever met. Kiran glides through social situations the same way a dancer dances, or a painter paints, or a pianist sits down at the keys: you can tell he knows what he's doing, he's well practiced. but most of all, it comes naturally to him. a far cry from me, who can manage being sociable, manage it even with some deftness and charm, but who, at the end of the day, can't wait to get away from everyone so the unbearable weight of having to carry, literally carry, a conversation can float off of my shoulders. it is tiring work; i put in a good day, but i celebrate the moment i get to punch out and go home.
this is how well Kiran can get along: at twelve, he could carry a conversation with my parents. or my friend Joel's parents. or your parents. anyone's parents, it didn't matter. the point was they were parents, adults, grown-ups, and i was terrified of them, and sometimes i still am. i can't even carry a conversation with my parents now, at 25. but Kiran is gifted. he's not particularly overtalkative. he's just comfortable.
and he's a great guy. we weren't best friends in middle school, and we weren't best friends in highschool either. at least, not the way we are now. for awhile we lost touch a bit, during the diaspora of the college years, but here, in buffalo...this town has a way of scooping and scraping everyone back together, even if its only for just a short while. Kiran had made it out of RIT alive, but just barely: the ROTC program he used to get some extra funding for a top notch education also required him to put in some hard time as an officer in the Army. who could tell that september 11th would happen, that the Iraq War would spring up, that the whole plan would backfire? i'm not particularly political, and i don't have a stance on the war, but Kiran has to be over there for at least a year, and i'm going to miss my friend.
i love Kiran. you can't not love Kiran, but i love him. he came back to buffalo for a few months after college, awaiting his assignment to Fort Knox for training, and i found him again. there aren't three people on the planet that could have gotten me to come out with him and the ol' Amherst crew, that could make me feel comfortable and included with them the way he did. there aren't three people on the planet i can be so completely myself in front of without their flinching -- all the good, all the bad, all the ugly. Kiran has seen it all and is still the most loyal and encouraging friend i've ever had.
saturday night was Kiran's last night in town before being deployed. he managed to find two and a half days to come home, and have a last hurrah. Katie Hurley and Jeff Addis both flew up and out of NYC to see him off. i had gotten out of work late, and i couldn't make it to Mr. Goodbar until about 1:30, but the usual crowd of Amherst grads was there. i was only supposed to stay for a drink; i had to get up at six the next morning and drive out to White Plains to see my sister Becka as Ezekiel Cheever in 'the Crucible.' but how could i leave? i stayed for an extra drink and made it last until last call -- at around 3:30 in buffalo -- at which point i loaded my car with a drunk Kiran and a drunk Jeff to take them back to their parent's houses. my apartment is only a three minute walk right around the corner from Goodbar. but i would do anything for Kiran. and driving 25 minutes out to the suburbs to drop him off is really not that big of a deal. we let Jeff off first, and i took Kiran to his street, right outside of his building. he told me to park, and we got out, and had the last two cigarettes of the night; it had to be 40 degrees out.
"when i get out of the Army in two years, man, Jeff and i are heading out to L.A., and you know who's coming with us..." it was more of a statement than a question, and anyway, yes, i did know who. "you gotta come with us." that was where it was going to happen, he told me. that was where things happened, and that was where we would go make them happen. "i know you can do it, you have the looks, you have the talent. we're going to go out there. when we get there..." when we get there, we would write. we would make movies, and act and direct, and make it happen. "its not a question of 'if' its going to happen. it will happen." in his mouth, i knew the words were sincere, genuine. true even. it was not a question of if it was going to happen. it wasn't even a question of when. it wasn't even a question. "we're 25. we are so young. we have all the time in the world. and i'm going to come back from Iraq, and get out of the Army, and we're gonna go to L.A...."
i'm glad someone besides me can feel this, the inevitability of it. i am going to create; we are going to create together.
"you and jeff, you're like my brothers. i love you." he said into my shoulder as we hugged; he kissed me on the cheek. "i love you too." i kissed him back. we are brothers. even if any of that stuff never happens. if we never make it happen, if we never get to L.A.; if he never gets out of the Army, and God forbid, even if he never comes home from Iraq, Kiran will be my brother, and my best friend. there is no one like him.
it was cold out, and he was shivering, and we let each other go, and he ran up to his apartment door, and into the apartment like he always does. i stayed to watch and make sure he got in all right, like i always do (because you never know when your parents might lock you out or when you'll forget your key).
and i drove to back to my parents' house, and got down the stairs and into the sofa at about 4:39 to take a nap and get ready for the long drive the "next day" that i meant to start at 6. i thought i set my alarm, but i didn't wake up until 6:30, and i didn't really get on the road for another hour. i had to be in White Plains by 2pm, when the curtain went up on 'the Crucible.' much coffee and gasoline were purchased, and i made it to Manhattanville College by 1pm, which is a time unheard of, and should be logged in all the record books. five and a half hours, from Buffalo to NYC. all on a suspended liscence. and other than the fact that i counted 25 patrol cars on the way there, the other details of the drive are mostly uninteresting.
my sister Rebekah had invited me up to see her in the play. she had invited me months ago. and whenever my twin sisters invite me to their shows i always try to go. i knew this was coming, and i had planned for it, but really, between the loyalties to saturday night and sunday morning there was nothing to do, and no sleep to be had. i was not looking forward to this drive. and i feared the slow creep of sleep that might blot out the performance i was supposed to be watching later. but i had to go; i wanted to go. Beka was in a show, and besides, Rachael would be there too. and i haven't seen my sisters in a year.
i didn't grow up with Rebekah and Rachael. i didn't grow up with Michelle and Autumn and Liz either. the sister i grew up with was Katie; we were both adopted; me at seven weeks and Katie at seven months. about three and a half years ago i found my birth family. i used to think that i never cared to find them, that i was never curious about them. i used to think it was what my parents wanted of me, the duty of an adopted son; that anything else would be disrespect. for years i stifled the desire to know my birth family. people would always ask me: "don't you want to meet your real mom?" and i would lie to them and tell them "no," and i had myself so convinced that the only sign of the truth was reduced to a dark tickling thrill i would smother inside of me and never pursue. "i'll get to meet her one day in heaven," i'd say.
a few years ago, i found them. i had called the adoption agency and asked them to open the files. i knew a little bit of information: my mother had married, and had given birth to two girls, twins. i had twin sisters out there. they would be eighteen now. i couldn't stifle the curiosity any longer. other people take their family, their parents for granted. sure, sometimes you don't get along with them, sometimes you hate them, but if you are particularly stubborn you know which parent to blame for that, or from which parent you get the shape of your lips or the color of your eyes, or your predilection for reese's peanut butter cups. and if you have siblings, you can see what they got, and what skipped you, and it all tells you a little bit more about yourself, and who you are, and how and why you are. other people take that for granted, and i wanted that -- i wanted to know those things. the parents who adopted me, my parents, are great -- they are truly wonderful and loving people -- but we do not get along in close quarters, and if they ever have at all, it wasn't until recently that they understood me on a fundamental level. everyone always tells me that all families are like that, that all children have this problem with their parents. but they cannot know precisely how different it feels from what seems like the norm in everyone else's family. they cannot know how truly bewildering it is, how awkward it is to be of completely different stuff than the people you call father and mother. other people have these problems with their parents, but mine have caused a rift that feels so gaping at times as to seem almost uncrossable.
the lady from the agency called me back one morning. she woke me up out of a dead sleep to tell me that yes she was able to make contact with my family and that she was sorry to tell me that my mother had passed away seven years ago, but that my grandmother was excited to hear from me and did i want to get in touch with her? "of course," i managed to exhale into the phone.
after awhile i recovered this memory: i was fifteen, and i was home from school, alone, in the afternoon. there was a message on the machine, from the adoption agency. "hello, this is New Life Adoption Agency, we just wanted to let you know...we recently heard from Philip's biological grandmother, who asked us to get in touch with you..." i don't remember all the words exactly, but i remember the awkward pause, the apalling 'i don't know how to say this' pause..."...Philip's birth mother passed away last week..........." i don't remember what the rest of the message said, if anything. but i saved it, and pretended i had never listened to it, and later, when my parents came home, i heard them discussing whether or not they should tell me. i don't remember if they did or not, because i could have blocked that too, but i have the distinct inpression that they kept that piece of information to themselves, because i remember now being in the basement and eavesdropping, and being angry about it.
it was strange that the second time i found out my mother was dead really was the second time i had heard it; it came as a shock each time, but i suppose news like that can never become commonplace. i had known her name, and i had searched online records for it, but until now i never knew the real reason behind my unbudging refusal to look for her name in the online obituaries.
and now, all that's left of her are my sisters, and her sisters, and her mother. and part of me is gone, never to be discovered again on this earth, and only now do i realize the irony and the gravity of telling all of my friends that i will leave the meeting of my real mom for heaven. i hate that i said that. i hate that it is true.
what is two hours of sleep and six hours of driving to see my sisters, then? any time i spend with them is too short a time. i know i am my father's son. Rafe is as much of a good guy as he is an asshole, and he is both in his own way. and i am cut from the same cloth, i see too much of the same pattern to even think of denying that fact. and i'm glad that i know it. but i can't help wondering how much, if at all, am i my mother's son, and what parts of me come from her, and if i will ever be able to see them and if anyone else will ever be able to recognize them in me. i want to know those parts of me, to clutch them, to save them from being drowned out of my life and out of the world.
what a pleasure it is to see Rachael and Rebekah. what a pleasure it is to see them laughing and smiling and agitated, and pissed off, and depressed, and hungry, and happy, and talking, and sleepy and anything else they are. i wish i saw more of it. i would never tire of it. i love being their brother. i wish i was more of a brother for them. i wish i was more a part of their lives, a part of them. we are all practically grown now. and truthfully, i barely know them. i can't help but wondering sometimes if its past the point of my ability to create a bond with them. i am so much an outsider. but i love watching them and being around them, and hugging them and playing with their hair. i wish we weren't so far away.
they were only 11 when our mom died. i can't imagine what that must have been like for them. and i can't believe what amazing women they've turned out to be after everything else that has happened between then and now...which is more than i know about, i'm sure. in some ways i am jealous of all of it: the family, the hardship, the loads of well-earned character, and yes, even the pain.
i've never known my own blood before. 'related' has always been what other people were. it is bizzare to me to know that i have that too, that there are pieces of me in other people...that i share something with them. it is nothing short of surreal.
maybe, in a couple years, they can follow me out to L.A. maybe i'll have a play written. if i do i'll save a couple spots in the cast for them, and some room on the fold out couch. or, for God's sake, they can just take my bed; i'll sleep on the couch.
he has been living in Colorado for the last couple years at the "request" of the U.S. Army. he's come home when was able, usually every four, five months or so, but his visits are never for long enough, and their brevity makes them feel too few and far between. i have known him since i was twelve, since the sixth grade, and i can remember our first meeting. i had heard of him before i met him: i was told we should be introduced, and i remember being taken aback at just how friendly and socially capable this kid seemed. conversation came naturally to his lips, in his mouth words were only pleasant things; they were not bitter catalysts the way they were in everyone else's usage: to wield, to burn, to precipitate a conflict...Kiran was just...nice. the nicest guy i have ever met. Kiran glides through social situations the same way a dancer dances, or a painter paints, or a pianist sits down at the keys: you can tell he knows what he's doing, he's well practiced. but most of all, it comes naturally to him. a far cry from me, who can manage being sociable, manage it even with some deftness and charm, but who, at the end of the day, can't wait to get away from everyone so the unbearable weight of having to carry, literally carry, a conversation can float off of my shoulders. it is tiring work; i put in a good day, but i celebrate the moment i get to punch out and go home.
this is how well Kiran can get along: at twelve, he could carry a conversation with my parents. or my friend Joel's parents. or your parents. anyone's parents, it didn't matter. the point was they were parents, adults, grown-ups, and i was terrified of them, and sometimes i still am. i can't even carry a conversation with my parents now, at 25. but Kiran is gifted. he's not particularly overtalkative. he's just comfortable.
and he's a great guy. we weren't best friends in middle school, and we weren't best friends in highschool either. at least, not the way we are now. for awhile we lost touch a bit, during the diaspora of the college years, but here, in buffalo...this town has a way of scooping and scraping everyone back together, even if its only for just a short while. Kiran had made it out of RIT alive, but just barely: the ROTC program he used to get some extra funding for a top notch education also required him to put in some hard time as an officer in the Army. who could tell that september 11th would happen, that the Iraq War would spring up, that the whole plan would backfire? i'm not particularly political, and i don't have a stance on the war, but Kiran has to be over there for at least a year, and i'm going to miss my friend.
i love Kiran. you can't not love Kiran, but i love him. he came back to buffalo for a few months after college, awaiting his assignment to Fort Knox for training, and i found him again. there aren't three people on the planet that could have gotten me to come out with him and the ol' Amherst crew, that could make me feel comfortable and included with them the way he did. there aren't three people on the planet i can be so completely myself in front of without their flinching -- all the good, all the bad, all the ugly. Kiran has seen it all and is still the most loyal and encouraging friend i've ever had.
saturday night was Kiran's last night in town before being deployed. he managed to find two and a half days to come home, and have a last hurrah. Katie Hurley and Jeff Addis both flew up and out of NYC to see him off. i had gotten out of work late, and i couldn't make it to Mr. Goodbar until about 1:30, but the usual crowd of Amherst grads was there. i was only supposed to stay for a drink; i had to get up at six the next morning and drive out to White Plains to see my sister Becka as Ezekiel Cheever in 'the Crucible.' but how could i leave? i stayed for an extra drink and made it last until last call -- at around 3:30 in buffalo -- at which point i loaded my car with a drunk Kiran and a drunk Jeff to take them back to their parent's houses. my apartment is only a three minute walk right around the corner from Goodbar. but i would do anything for Kiran. and driving 25 minutes out to the suburbs to drop him off is really not that big of a deal. we let Jeff off first, and i took Kiran to his street, right outside of his building. he told me to park, and we got out, and had the last two cigarettes of the night; it had to be 40 degrees out.
"when i get out of the Army in two years, man, Jeff and i are heading out to L.A., and you know who's coming with us..." it was more of a statement than a question, and anyway, yes, i did know who. "you gotta come with us." that was where it was going to happen, he told me. that was where things happened, and that was where we would go make them happen. "i know you can do it, you have the looks, you have the talent. we're going to go out there. when we get there..." when we get there, we would write. we would make movies, and act and direct, and make it happen. "its not a question of 'if' its going to happen. it will happen." in his mouth, i knew the words were sincere, genuine. true even. it was not a question of if it was going to happen. it wasn't even a question of when. it wasn't even a question. "we're 25. we are so young. we have all the time in the world. and i'm going to come back from Iraq, and get out of the Army, and we're gonna go to L.A...."
i'm glad someone besides me can feel this, the inevitability of it. i am going to create; we are going to create together.
"you and jeff, you're like my brothers. i love you." he said into my shoulder as we hugged; he kissed me on the cheek. "i love you too." i kissed him back. we are brothers. even if any of that stuff never happens. if we never make it happen, if we never get to L.A.; if he never gets out of the Army, and God forbid, even if he never comes home from Iraq, Kiran will be my brother, and my best friend. there is no one like him.
it was cold out, and he was shivering, and we let each other go, and he ran up to his apartment door, and into the apartment like he always does. i stayed to watch and make sure he got in all right, like i always do (because you never know when your parents might lock you out or when you'll forget your key).
and i drove to back to my parents' house, and got down the stairs and into the sofa at about 4:39 to take a nap and get ready for the long drive the "next day" that i meant to start at 6. i thought i set my alarm, but i didn't wake up until 6:30, and i didn't really get on the road for another hour. i had to be in White Plains by 2pm, when the curtain went up on 'the Crucible.' much coffee and gasoline were purchased, and i made it to Manhattanville College by 1pm, which is a time unheard of, and should be logged in all the record books. five and a half hours, from Buffalo to NYC. all on a suspended liscence. and other than the fact that i counted 25 patrol cars on the way there, the other details of the drive are mostly uninteresting.
my sister Rebekah had invited me up to see her in the play. she had invited me months ago. and whenever my twin sisters invite me to their shows i always try to go. i knew this was coming, and i had planned for it, but really, between the loyalties to saturday night and sunday morning there was nothing to do, and no sleep to be had. i was not looking forward to this drive. and i feared the slow creep of sleep that might blot out the performance i was supposed to be watching later. but i had to go; i wanted to go. Beka was in a show, and besides, Rachael would be there too. and i haven't seen my sisters in a year.
i didn't grow up with Rebekah and Rachael. i didn't grow up with Michelle and Autumn and Liz either. the sister i grew up with was Katie; we were both adopted; me at seven weeks and Katie at seven months. about three and a half years ago i found my birth family. i used to think that i never cared to find them, that i was never curious about them. i used to think it was what my parents wanted of me, the duty of an adopted son; that anything else would be disrespect. for years i stifled the desire to know my birth family. people would always ask me: "don't you want to meet your real mom?" and i would lie to them and tell them "no," and i had myself so convinced that the only sign of the truth was reduced to a dark tickling thrill i would smother inside of me and never pursue. "i'll get to meet her one day in heaven," i'd say.
a few years ago, i found them. i had called the adoption agency and asked them to open the files. i knew a little bit of information: my mother had married, and had given birth to two girls, twins. i had twin sisters out there. they would be eighteen now. i couldn't stifle the curiosity any longer. other people take their family, their parents for granted. sure, sometimes you don't get along with them, sometimes you hate them, but if you are particularly stubborn you know which parent to blame for that, or from which parent you get the shape of your lips or the color of your eyes, or your predilection for reese's peanut butter cups. and if you have siblings, you can see what they got, and what skipped you, and it all tells you a little bit more about yourself, and who you are, and how and why you are. other people take that for granted, and i wanted that -- i wanted to know those things. the parents who adopted me, my parents, are great -- they are truly wonderful and loving people -- but we do not get along in close quarters, and if they ever have at all, it wasn't until recently that they understood me on a fundamental level. everyone always tells me that all families are like that, that all children have this problem with their parents. but they cannot know precisely how different it feels from what seems like the norm in everyone else's family. they cannot know how truly bewildering it is, how awkward it is to be of completely different stuff than the people you call father and mother. other people have these problems with their parents, but mine have caused a rift that feels so gaping at times as to seem almost uncrossable.
the lady from the agency called me back one morning. she woke me up out of a dead sleep to tell me that yes she was able to make contact with my family and that she was sorry to tell me that my mother had passed away seven years ago, but that my grandmother was excited to hear from me and did i want to get in touch with her? "of course," i managed to exhale into the phone.
after awhile i recovered this memory: i was fifteen, and i was home from school, alone, in the afternoon. there was a message on the machine, from the adoption agency. "hello, this is New Life Adoption Agency, we just wanted to let you know...we recently heard from Philip's biological grandmother, who asked us to get in touch with you..." i don't remember all the words exactly, but i remember the awkward pause, the apalling 'i don't know how to say this' pause..."...Philip's birth mother passed away last week..........." i don't remember what the rest of the message said, if anything. but i saved it, and pretended i had never listened to it, and later, when my parents came home, i heard them discussing whether or not they should tell me. i don't remember if they did or not, because i could have blocked that too, but i have the distinct inpression that they kept that piece of information to themselves, because i remember now being in the basement and eavesdropping, and being angry about it.
it was strange that the second time i found out my mother was dead really was the second time i had heard it; it came as a shock each time, but i suppose news like that can never become commonplace. i had known her name, and i had searched online records for it, but until now i never knew the real reason behind my unbudging refusal to look for her name in the online obituaries.
and now, all that's left of her are my sisters, and her sisters, and her mother. and part of me is gone, never to be discovered again on this earth, and only now do i realize the irony and the gravity of telling all of my friends that i will leave the meeting of my real mom for heaven. i hate that i said that. i hate that it is true.
what is two hours of sleep and six hours of driving to see my sisters, then? any time i spend with them is too short a time. i know i am my father's son. Rafe is as much of a good guy as he is an asshole, and he is both in his own way. and i am cut from the same cloth, i see too much of the same pattern to even think of denying that fact. and i'm glad that i know it. but i can't help wondering how much, if at all, am i my mother's son, and what parts of me come from her, and if i will ever be able to see them and if anyone else will ever be able to recognize them in me. i want to know those parts of me, to clutch them, to save them from being drowned out of my life and out of the world.
what a pleasure it is to see Rachael and Rebekah. what a pleasure it is to see them laughing and smiling and agitated, and pissed off, and depressed, and hungry, and happy, and talking, and sleepy and anything else they are. i wish i saw more of it. i would never tire of it. i love being their brother. i wish i was more of a brother for them. i wish i was more a part of their lives, a part of them. we are all practically grown now. and truthfully, i barely know them. i can't help but wondering sometimes if its past the point of my ability to create a bond with them. i am so much an outsider. but i love watching them and being around them, and hugging them and playing with their hair. i wish we weren't so far away.
they were only 11 when our mom died. i can't imagine what that must have been like for them. and i can't believe what amazing women they've turned out to be after everything else that has happened between then and now...which is more than i know about, i'm sure. in some ways i am jealous of all of it: the family, the hardship, the loads of well-earned character, and yes, even the pain.
i've never known my own blood before. 'related' has always been what other people were. it is bizzare to me to know that i have that too, that there are pieces of me in other people...that i share something with them. it is nothing short of surreal.
maybe, in a couple years, they can follow me out to L.A. maybe i'll have a play written. if i do i'll save a couple spots in the cast for them, and some room on the fold out couch. or, for God's sake, they can just take my bed; i'll sleep on the couch.
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
reasons not to have a girlfriend: reason #2
i have been having to fight, with all my being, the overwhelming compulsion to snag myself a real live girlfriend. i just cannot have one right now. having a girlfriend right now would be bad for me on so many levels -- not to mention the level on which it would be bad for said girlfriend (who would,as a result, make my life a living, firebreathing, headsplitting hell -- this level is a many-layered one).
oh, i could get one. that is not so much of a problem for me. the problem is that once i get one, and the falling in love part wears off as it inevitably does......well...then what? when you figure out that you're not in love, what are you supposed to do then? or, if it is love...wouldn't you know it? wouldn't you not constantly lament it as a burden? and, most of all, wouldn't you stop wondering what the girl who got the vanilla nonfat latte is like, and what she meant by "thank you," and whether or not she has plans on saturday? shouldn't you stop thinking like that when you're in love?
or is it natural to find other people attractive while you're in a committed relationship? It is, isn't it? i mean, you can't just turn that off, can you? something tells me its somewhere in between, but for a guy like me that just needs answers and is trying to figure out what to do, that doesn't help me too much. "somewhere in between" is where i've been living for the past fifteen years. "somewhere in between" is a sign above the gate on the way into my ranch. its just a euphemism for "weird and confusing."
and maybe its just that i haven't ever found a girl that was ok with the idea of me finding anyone else attractive other than her. and maybe that is the type of girl that i need to find. but to tell you the truth...that kind of weirds me out a little bit too. if i'm going to be in an exclusive relationship i wouldn't want secret weird attractions going on with either one of us, even if they never made past the bouncing around upstairs stage. i myself am not really okay with it.
so why am i like this? have i just not found the one woman who can be enough for me? have i just not yet found "the One?" is that even real, does she even exist? i don't know.
all i know is that there is no one to get mad at me, no one to offend, no one to hurt while i am single; what is a normal and healthy way for a single man to behave is utterly unbecoming in a relationship. what would have made me guilty in a relationship is only normal for me to do outside of it. really, its only fair to any prospective girlfriend that i refuse to take things to the next level....
because of reason not to have a girlfriend #2: i have a wandering eye.
oh, i could get one. that is not so much of a problem for me. the problem is that once i get one, and the falling in love part wears off as it inevitably does......well...then what? when you figure out that you're not in love, what are you supposed to do then? or, if it is love...wouldn't you know it? wouldn't you not constantly lament it as a burden? and, most of all, wouldn't you stop wondering what the girl who got the vanilla nonfat latte is like, and what she meant by "thank you," and whether or not she has plans on saturday? shouldn't you stop thinking like that when you're in love?
or is it natural to find other people attractive while you're in a committed relationship? It is, isn't it? i mean, you can't just turn that off, can you? something tells me its somewhere in between, but for a guy like me that just needs answers and is trying to figure out what to do, that doesn't help me too much. "somewhere in between" is where i've been living for the past fifteen years. "somewhere in between" is a sign above the gate on the way into my ranch. its just a euphemism for "weird and confusing."
and maybe its just that i haven't ever found a girl that was ok with the idea of me finding anyone else attractive other than her. and maybe that is the type of girl that i need to find. but to tell you the truth...that kind of weirds me out a little bit too. if i'm going to be in an exclusive relationship i wouldn't want secret weird attractions going on with either one of us, even if they never made past the bouncing around upstairs stage. i myself am not really okay with it.
so why am i like this? have i just not found the one woman who can be enough for me? have i just not yet found "the One?" is that even real, does she even exist? i don't know.
all i know is that there is no one to get mad at me, no one to offend, no one to hurt while i am single; what is a normal and healthy way for a single man to behave is utterly unbecoming in a relationship. what would have made me guilty in a relationship is only normal for me to do outside of it. really, its only fair to any prospective girlfriend that i refuse to take things to the next level....
because of reason not to have a girlfriend #2: i have a wandering eye.
Monday, November 07, 2005
autumn
the other shoe of autumn has finally dropped here; the leaves somehow managed to cling to their trees throughout the entire month of october, only to be butchered off the bough by wind and rain yesterday. the wind was thunderous, like it had been pushed out of the epicenter of nuclear doom. i went for a walk in it; it was strikingly less cold than it should have been. the sky was heavy, a roiling surge that was a thousand pounds of grey on your eyes, on your head. i would have fallen beneath it, but for the wind picking everything up; raking leaves, hats, trash into the sky. i imagined it rocking the buildings back and forth; apartments that, from the inside, creaked at hidden joints, the wind screaming around it like a trainwreck, or a trumpet-blast.
there were bursts of rain; the rain was cold. the wind had buffeted, beaten the trees, grabbed them by the shoulders like an angry husband. their finery, golden reds and oranges, tingling greens, deep purples and fiery browns had not been given up willfully. on the day before, they blazed proudly, catching light in their upturned palms and roaring, each tree a burning bush, and unconsumed. on the day before, the scant foliage sprinkled at their feet were so many sandles removed on the holy ground of backyards and grasspatches. but the next day, the wind came and plundered them, and the trees that clawed too tightly were left for the rain to pick off. it came in short, controlled bursts, combing through the trees and clogging the trench of the gutters with the dead and dying leaves. the rain, in its short duration, was particularly unmerciful.
i walked in it. why not? i had actually considered driving the two blocks to burger king, i had actually thought the wind, the spotty rain should be enough to make me get in my car. could it be enough, should it ever be enough? what did i have to fear from wind and rain? the sky, the weather, as brooding and violent as it was, was not out for me.
i walked to burger king, and i was only a little bit cold. above me, the clouds tossed and turned and coiled around themselves. yes, they were frightening. they were glowering at me, at the city, and at me, and the wind bellowed. i listened; but my name was not in it.
on my way i turned the corner: the sun dipped down, glazing the shredded trees and their wet black stems in cold light. slices and shafts of light struck the grass, the sidewalk, the wetness in the street, frosting it with a pale but indifferent smile. there was only a moment's worth of cheer in it. i turned my face into the wind, into the sun and thought: that is where this is coming from. the wind was blowing directly out of the sun. the sun, in ancient times, was the source of the wind and weather. it is the source of the wind in modern times too. i fear it doubly; as a modern man i know that we are only ancient men in modern times. it is terrifying: a broken seal, a burning censer, an eye-splitting angel with his mouth pursed on the last horn. today, though, it was not out for me.
i had eaten; i walked to the coffee shop, and it was clogged with customers, as if they too had been raked by the wind, fearing colds and runny noses, and other nameless illnesses no doubt carried in cold air and rain. i took my cup outside, to the empty patio, shivering until coffee warmed me. i read, and underlined, and read some more; "the Sorrows of Young Werther."
[sky got dark here]
the sky got eerily dark, and it was not the darkness of twilight. it was as if the shadow of another season passed overhead. a season of the future? or one already long gone? it was dark, but soon, its eeriness had passed. it was like a breath of winter.
today, leaves litter the streets; their colors are already fading. the trees look bare and sorrowful. do they not know the price they would pay in the coming months to hang onto their leaves, their living pride? winter would crush them, would pull them down in boughfulls, would bury them under the weight of their ragged, snow-soaked garments. they would not live to see a new spring or ever bear new leaves. they should not fear the little death of autumn; there is life after it.
i too am shedding my leaves; i am clipping my hair, and growing a beard of clouds. my spring, i know, will one day come.
there were bursts of rain; the rain was cold. the wind had buffeted, beaten the trees, grabbed them by the shoulders like an angry husband. their finery, golden reds and oranges, tingling greens, deep purples and fiery browns had not been given up willfully. on the day before, they blazed proudly, catching light in their upturned palms and roaring, each tree a burning bush, and unconsumed. on the day before, the scant foliage sprinkled at their feet were so many sandles removed on the holy ground of backyards and grasspatches. but the next day, the wind came and plundered them, and the trees that clawed too tightly were left for the rain to pick off. it came in short, controlled bursts, combing through the trees and clogging the trench of the gutters with the dead and dying leaves. the rain, in its short duration, was particularly unmerciful.
i walked in it. why not? i had actually considered driving the two blocks to burger king, i had actually thought the wind, the spotty rain should be enough to make me get in my car. could it be enough, should it ever be enough? what did i have to fear from wind and rain? the sky, the weather, as brooding and violent as it was, was not out for me.
i walked to burger king, and i was only a little bit cold. above me, the clouds tossed and turned and coiled around themselves. yes, they were frightening. they were glowering at me, at the city, and at me, and the wind bellowed. i listened; but my name was not in it.
on my way i turned the corner: the sun dipped down, glazing the shredded trees and their wet black stems in cold light. slices and shafts of light struck the grass, the sidewalk, the wetness in the street, frosting it with a pale but indifferent smile. there was only a moment's worth of cheer in it. i turned my face into the wind, into the sun and thought: that is where this is coming from. the wind was blowing directly out of the sun. the sun, in ancient times, was the source of the wind and weather. it is the source of the wind in modern times too. i fear it doubly; as a modern man i know that we are only ancient men in modern times. it is terrifying: a broken seal, a burning censer, an eye-splitting angel with his mouth pursed on the last horn. today, though, it was not out for me.
i had eaten; i walked to the coffee shop, and it was clogged with customers, as if they too had been raked by the wind, fearing colds and runny noses, and other nameless illnesses no doubt carried in cold air and rain. i took my cup outside, to the empty patio, shivering until coffee warmed me. i read, and underlined, and read some more; "the Sorrows of Young Werther."
October 26th
...And my lively imagination carried me off to the bedside of these poor
people. I can see with what terrible resistance they turn their
backs
[sky got dark here]
on life...a stranger lies dying.
the sky got eerily dark, and it was not the darkness of twilight. it was as if the shadow of another season passed overhead. a season of the future? or one already long gone? it was dark, but soon, its eeriness had passed. it was like a breath of winter.
today, leaves litter the streets; their colors are already fading. the trees look bare and sorrowful. do they not know the price they would pay in the coming months to hang onto their leaves, their living pride? winter would crush them, would pull them down in boughfulls, would bury them under the weight of their ragged, snow-soaked garments. they would not live to see a new spring or ever bear new leaves. they should not fear the little death of autumn; there is life after it.
i too am shedding my leaves; i am clipping my hair, and growing a beard of clouds. my spring, i know, will one day come.
Thursday, November 03, 2005
Long Goodbyes
my father's side of the family, my biological father's side, likes to make fun of their Grand Patriarch, my Grampa. among the number of things they tease him for, one of them is his penchant for long goodbyes. anytime he leaves someone's house, anytime someone leaves his, it is an issue. really, it takes at least a good ten minutes to say what needs to be said, give two rounds of hugs, say the i love yous, and then say more of what needs to be said. it tickles me to see this, the formality involved in saying goodbye, making it official: this is exactly how i am. i understand the need for closure when saying goodbye. there is a fear that my heart will flutter away without performing the proper ritual. its hard enough to part with people i love as it is; what's worse is the unrest when i part their company abruptly. you need time to prepare; you need time to come down. you need time to say goodbye. finally i've taken mine, so its time to say goodbye to some people with whom i've parted ways, and make it official.
Bill:
first, let me apologize. i know it was kind of a shit thing to do; all in one swipe, just quitting as your 'oldest friend.' i know the deep love you have for your friends, and i'm sure you're feeling burnt by me. i don't blame you. i miss you. a lot actually. but we both have changed. Nyack changed you quite a bit from the best friend you used to be to me; honestly, i didn't mind that so much. you were more or less the Bill i expected you to be most of the time, but Nyack cultivated some of your faults: your obsession and snobery over New York City; your constant grandstanding about Macs and Mac products; your addiction to cloves. i was willing to join you at least partially in these newfound enfatuations, but i can't follow them deep enough. i don't think anyone can, which is why they've become faults for you and jokes to anyone who knows you. you used to see things, i think. and you've come back from Nyack a little more blind. by what, and to what, i can't put my finger on. i know i'm a little more blind now too.
for a long time i considered you the single person who understood me the way no one else ever would. sometimes it seemed we were inside of each other's heads. sometimes it seemed we were two halves a person. i liked that; i was proud of that. i wish we still had that, but we don't any more. i've changed a lot too. thing is, i think of you sometimes as being so much like me in certain ways that i can't handle it, and here's where we come to my main problem.
you are extremely talented. you have loads and loads of raw talent, you have an angularity of wit, an abundance of intellect and you don't use it. you are allowing it to stagnate. honestly, i understand how it is, i empathize. because its me too. i have talent too, talent that just showed up, and i didn't have to do anything to get it. built in tools to make things, to be creative. maybe you aren't confident enough in your gifts to have the revelation that if you don't use them then you deserve to be robbed of them. i know you have done a lot of work for Mosaic and other christian media, and that you probably feel that what i have to say, what i have been saying, is unfair. i've always been disappointed that you felt called to that; i never thought it was your calling. sure, church should be cool, people should want to go, and it should be beautiful and earthshaking when they do. maybe its because i know my gifts are not called by God for that use that i am frustrated that yours are. i struggled with the meaning of art for awhile, its use, how God could use it, and where my vocation and my duty to God intersect. i discovered that they don't. to be an artist 'for God,' is a cop out. i would be an artist anyway, i can't make it count doubly as my devotion to God as well. God doesn't call everyone into a life of career-service, and even if he did, it would be no way around the devotion that God wants from everyone. it is why the sacrifice of Cain was not accepted.
at any rate, these are conclusions i've come to for myself. i wish they were yours too. i don't know if your call is genuine or not, but either way i'll still be wishing that you were motivated to create, to be an artist, to use your talents to make things. we could have made such beautiful things. we never did. i resent you for that.
Jeff:
you're a fucking asshole. i know its not that you didn't have any time to hang out with your friends this summer, and the couple years or so before that; its just that you didn't have time for the single ones, the ones who haven't started a family yet, the ones whose girlfriends you didn't like because they were too young or shy, the ones who don't go to the church your dad pastors, the ones who actually would make creative demands on you, the ones you think are a little too uncouth, unpolished, unshaven for polite company. though i'm sure if i grew up with perfect grades, a perfect family and a perfect life, few things would be good enough for me too.
i feel a little bad for being so harsh. but at the same time i don't know that any of it is inaccurate or undeserved. i have much to be thankful for from you. you were there for some major milestones in my life, and much of who i am i owe to you and your influence. the bands i like, the movies i've seen, the books i've read: almost all of them have come with your recommendation. there is no doubt you knew what you were talking about.
i think i also want to thank you for being there for me during my crisis of faith, and for inviting me over to your house for those awkward dinners with your folks, and for hanging out with me in general. don't think i didn't know how awkward i was most of the time: i was completely aware. it took me awhile to develop my own personality and actually inhabit it around you and eventually i figured it out. and we've been growing apart ever since. not to mention you did what every married person does once they say "i do." sometimes i wonder how often you venture out of the cocoon of that existence, or whether or not you realize that it is what you are in. chances are you realize completely and are in love with every minute of it. God, that makes me sick.
you must be thinking of having kids now with Janine, now that you've got your house and your grown up job. i was looking forward to being an unofficial uncle to them. i'm not seeing that in my future anymore, and, again, like with Bill, what frustrates me the most about what i see in your future is the absolute fumbling of your talent. i can't imagine being as good at anything as you are at music and not wringing out all i could from it. i can't imagine not taking it and running as far as i could with it, as far away from anything that could ever stop me or get in my way. you could have done it. maybe you still can, but something tells me you made an exchange in there somewhere, and whoever you did the deal with swindled you out of your motivation too. i hope its worth it, because (not that you care) it will always be a disappointment to me.
i know, it sounds funny that i should be so critical of you; me, this awkward, little brother of a kid. you were always a better friend to me than i was to you.......in both senses of the phrase, now that i've come to writing it. but still. you should've called. you could have written.
have a nice life, i guess. and say 'hi' to janine for me.
Sarah:
Goddamn...i don't know how much more saying goodbye i can handle. just when its getting tough, i get to you and you make it tougher. thats kind of what you do anyway though, isn't it? things always have to get difficult with you before you can bring them back to some normal, rational, reasonable level.
ah, i'm going to stop myself here. Jeff deserves all the shots i took at him, but i'm not writing this goodbye to offend you. i'm going to try to lay off the sarcasm as much as possible, and swallow my desire to really let you fucking have it in the interest of clarity, something we never had in our 'friendship,' often by design. i owe at least that much to the formality of goodbyes.
took me six years to fully understand the subtleties of our relationship which ultimately served to undermine it. don't think you got away with it all unobserved...you're terrible at hiding things. the vehement denials usually give it away. and the feigned ignorance. the feigned ignorance thing kind of makes me smile...that was always your bait...pretending not to understand something just to lure me out, and then completely ripping me to shreds with my own words. pretty clever. i wonder if you do that with tom? anyways, now that i think about it, i should try and use it in an argument some time.
at any rate, we're not friends anymore, and after six years of fake friendship and six months of real not talking to each other, i've managed to piece a lot of things together. instinctually, i knew it all along. i just didn't know how to make it make sense.
this was you and me:
i almost want to say i never had a chance with you, romantically. but what that really means is that at some point in time you decided it would never happen. it was a decision you made, and you made it in spite of how i made you feel and how you sort of felt about me. i'm more clear on the "how i made you feel" part, and at the time, i think you were too. maybe you knew it was fake, and you knew you were using me, because the way i looked at you made you feel beautiful, and the way i treated you made you feel wanted. it came so easy, so cheap: you didn't have to do anything, really, except keep me where i was. i was an open valve inflating your self esteem. i am learning this about women, about how they massage their own egos like this. men do it too, by having sex. women do it by not having sex. women do it by not even kissing. i never kissed you. i wanted to. you knew it. it made you feel attractive, and that's why you kept me around. i was kind of your dog. which i think is where we come to why you decided that you and i would never happen: it killed any respect you could have had for me. you still have none for me, even to this day (and fuck you for that). you could never love me because you had no respect for me.
that makes this part, the "how you felt about me" part a bit more clear now, i guess. you were not unattracted to me, because i am an attractive guy. that isn't enough for you though. for some girls it is; it is enough to make them want to bear my children and do unmentionable things with me. you liked me as a person too, somewhat. you ripped on me for being too dorky. but i admit that part of me, and its never gonna go anywhere, and there are some things about me that offset my dorkiness: i can draw, and you loved to have me draw for you. and i was a nice guy, and intelligent, and a good hang, i like to think. that really isn't enough for you either though. that's ok, some girls aren't into that.
what i don't understand is how it was almost enough for you. how it was so close to being enough and never was. you genuinely did return at least a part of what i felt for you. i know you did. tell yourself you didn't, tell whoever you need to that you didn't, but don't tell me that. i know you did. there are too many moments, too many words between us and you cannot deny what they add up to.
i can forgive you with toying around with me. i can forgive you for all of the friendly "i love yous" and "i'm going to marry yous" and every ounce of their intended ambiguity, every particle of their ambiguity burying them in my heart. i can forgive you for the decisions you made in the face of that ambiguity which pried out every last one of those "i love yous" and "i'm going to marry yous" to expose them as a collection of my shame and stupidity. the shame and stupidity were my fault.
i can't forgive you for the amount of real affection, however small, you had for me that you hid away. if you couldn't guess, this is what has always made me resent you. the fact that i know it is there, and you trapped it, choked it.
i am guilty of using you too, though. i'm not a perfect martyr here. i liked that a hot girl wanted to hang out with me. i used you to inflate my ego when i could; sometimes it backfired. sometimes the only way i could get it to work was to just be a good guy that you'd say nice things about. i did a lot of things to get you to feed my ego. flowers when your dad died, showing up at the wake. i wanted to flatter you, but mostly i wanted to know what a good guy i was. that's pretty horrible, huh? how did i ever get this insecure? ah well.
i don't know. i don't know how to end this one.
we tried being friends for awhile, but you were convinced that we couldn't be, that it was all fake. that hurt a lot: i'm not sure if it was because it was true or because it was the latest in a string of rejections from you. you called it out though: we were still using each other, under a facade of best intentions, under the alias of a real friendship. and it wasn't right; and you were married now, and there is no more room for ambiguity.
i tried to tell you that a long time ago; you said: "it will still be the same."
if i got nothing else out of knowing you, i at least get to be right.
but for the record, i don't think our friendship was completely artificial. i liked you as a person. you liked me. there was some undeniable, some unspeakable connection there. we never got the chance to build on it. we could have been friends. we wanted to be better friends than we were. but all we had was all we had, and after i dropped out and you got married there wasn't room for anything else. in fact, there wasn't even room for all we had between us anymore.
sarah, if you ever end up not married for whatever reason some day, look me up. i don't say "God forbid" because i am selfish, and i have visions of being a real friend of yours one day. but for now, i've got to say goodbye, and make it official. awhile ago, in june, i had a dream that you were dead. i told you about it then as an attempt to reestablish contact, but i didn't realize what it meant: that i must consider you as being out of my life for good. and so you are. that said, you will still receive a letter in the event of my death.
goodbye, friends.
love,
phil
Bill:
first, let me apologize. i know it was kind of a shit thing to do; all in one swipe, just quitting as your 'oldest friend.' i know the deep love you have for your friends, and i'm sure you're feeling burnt by me. i don't blame you. i miss you. a lot actually. but we both have changed. Nyack changed you quite a bit from the best friend you used to be to me; honestly, i didn't mind that so much. you were more or less the Bill i expected you to be most of the time, but Nyack cultivated some of your faults: your obsession and snobery over New York City; your constant grandstanding about Macs and Mac products; your addiction to cloves. i was willing to join you at least partially in these newfound enfatuations, but i can't follow them deep enough. i don't think anyone can, which is why they've become faults for you and jokes to anyone who knows you. you used to see things, i think. and you've come back from Nyack a little more blind. by what, and to what, i can't put my finger on. i know i'm a little more blind now too.
for a long time i considered you the single person who understood me the way no one else ever would. sometimes it seemed we were inside of each other's heads. sometimes it seemed we were two halves a person. i liked that; i was proud of that. i wish we still had that, but we don't any more. i've changed a lot too. thing is, i think of you sometimes as being so much like me in certain ways that i can't handle it, and here's where we come to my main problem.
you are extremely talented. you have loads and loads of raw talent, you have an angularity of wit, an abundance of intellect and you don't use it. you are allowing it to stagnate. honestly, i understand how it is, i empathize. because its me too. i have talent too, talent that just showed up, and i didn't have to do anything to get it. built in tools to make things, to be creative. maybe you aren't confident enough in your gifts to have the revelation that if you don't use them then you deserve to be robbed of them. i know you have done a lot of work for Mosaic and other christian media, and that you probably feel that what i have to say, what i have been saying, is unfair. i've always been disappointed that you felt called to that; i never thought it was your calling. sure, church should be cool, people should want to go, and it should be beautiful and earthshaking when they do. maybe its because i know my gifts are not called by God for that use that i am frustrated that yours are. i struggled with the meaning of art for awhile, its use, how God could use it, and where my vocation and my duty to God intersect. i discovered that they don't. to be an artist 'for God,' is a cop out. i would be an artist anyway, i can't make it count doubly as my devotion to God as well. God doesn't call everyone into a life of career-service, and even if he did, it would be no way around the devotion that God wants from everyone. it is why the sacrifice of Cain was not accepted.
at any rate, these are conclusions i've come to for myself. i wish they were yours too. i don't know if your call is genuine or not, but either way i'll still be wishing that you were motivated to create, to be an artist, to use your talents to make things. we could have made such beautiful things. we never did. i resent you for that.
Jeff:
you're a fucking asshole. i know its not that you didn't have any time to hang out with your friends this summer, and the couple years or so before that; its just that you didn't have time for the single ones, the ones who haven't started a family yet, the ones whose girlfriends you didn't like because they were too young or shy, the ones who don't go to the church your dad pastors, the ones who actually would make creative demands on you, the ones you think are a little too uncouth, unpolished, unshaven for polite company. though i'm sure if i grew up with perfect grades, a perfect family and a perfect life, few things would be good enough for me too.
i feel a little bad for being so harsh. but at the same time i don't know that any of it is inaccurate or undeserved. i have much to be thankful for from you. you were there for some major milestones in my life, and much of who i am i owe to you and your influence. the bands i like, the movies i've seen, the books i've read: almost all of them have come with your recommendation. there is no doubt you knew what you were talking about.
i think i also want to thank you for being there for me during my crisis of faith, and for inviting me over to your house for those awkward dinners with your folks, and for hanging out with me in general. don't think i didn't know how awkward i was most of the time: i was completely aware. it took me awhile to develop my own personality and actually inhabit it around you and eventually i figured it out. and we've been growing apart ever since. not to mention you did what every married person does once they say "i do." sometimes i wonder how often you venture out of the cocoon of that existence, or whether or not you realize that it is what you are in. chances are you realize completely and are in love with every minute of it. God, that makes me sick.
you must be thinking of having kids now with Janine, now that you've got your house and your grown up job. i was looking forward to being an unofficial uncle to them. i'm not seeing that in my future anymore, and, again, like with Bill, what frustrates me the most about what i see in your future is the absolute fumbling of your talent. i can't imagine being as good at anything as you are at music and not wringing out all i could from it. i can't imagine not taking it and running as far as i could with it, as far away from anything that could ever stop me or get in my way. you could have done it. maybe you still can, but something tells me you made an exchange in there somewhere, and whoever you did the deal with swindled you out of your motivation too. i hope its worth it, because (not that you care) it will always be a disappointment to me.
i know, it sounds funny that i should be so critical of you; me, this awkward, little brother of a kid. you were always a better friend to me than i was to you.......in both senses of the phrase, now that i've come to writing it. but still. you should've called. you could have written.
have a nice life, i guess. and say 'hi' to janine for me.
Sarah:
Goddamn...i don't know how much more saying goodbye i can handle. just when its getting tough, i get to you and you make it tougher. thats kind of what you do anyway though, isn't it? things always have to get difficult with you before you can bring them back to some normal, rational, reasonable level.
ah, i'm going to stop myself here. Jeff deserves all the shots i took at him, but i'm not writing this goodbye to offend you. i'm going to try to lay off the sarcasm as much as possible, and swallow my desire to really let you fucking have it in the interest of clarity, something we never had in our 'friendship,' often by design. i owe at least that much to the formality of goodbyes.
took me six years to fully understand the subtleties of our relationship which ultimately served to undermine it. don't think you got away with it all unobserved...you're terrible at hiding things. the vehement denials usually give it away. and the feigned ignorance. the feigned ignorance thing kind of makes me smile...that was always your bait...pretending not to understand something just to lure me out, and then completely ripping me to shreds with my own words. pretty clever. i wonder if you do that with tom? anyways, now that i think about it, i should try and use it in an argument some time.
at any rate, we're not friends anymore, and after six years of fake friendship and six months of real not talking to each other, i've managed to piece a lot of things together. instinctually, i knew it all along. i just didn't know how to make it make sense.
this was you and me:
i almost want to say i never had a chance with you, romantically. but what that really means is that at some point in time you decided it would never happen. it was a decision you made, and you made it in spite of how i made you feel and how you sort of felt about me. i'm more clear on the "how i made you feel" part, and at the time, i think you were too. maybe you knew it was fake, and you knew you were using me, because the way i looked at you made you feel beautiful, and the way i treated you made you feel wanted. it came so easy, so cheap: you didn't have to do anything, really, except keep me where i was. i was an open valve inflating your self esteem. i am learning this about women, about how they massage their own egos like this. men do it too, by having sex. women do it by not having sex. women do it by not even kissing. i never kissed you. i wanted to. you knew it. it made you feel attractive, and that's why you kept me around. i was kind of your dog. which i think is where we come to why you decided that you and i would never happen: it killed any respect you could have had for me. you still have none for me, even to this day (and fuck you for that). you could never love me because you had no respect for me.
that makes this part, the "how you felt about me" part a bit more clear now, i guess. you were not unattracted to me, because i am an attractive guy. that isn't enough for you though. for some girls it is; it is enough to make them want to bear my children and do unmentionable things with me. you liked me as a person too, somewhat. you ripped on me for being too dorky. but i admit that part of me, and its never gonna go anywhere, and there are some things about me that offset my dorkiness: i can draw, and you loved to have me draw for you. and i was a nice guy, and intelligent, and a good hang, i like to think. that really isn't enough for you either though. that's ok, some girls aren't into that.
what i don't understand is how it was almost enough for you. how it was so close to being enough and never was. you genuinely did return at least a part of what i felt for you. i know you did. tell yourself you didn't, tell whoever you need to that you didn't, but don't tell me that. i know you did. there are too many moments, too many words between us and you cannot deny what they add up to.
i can forgive you with toying around with me. i can forgive you for all of the friendly "i love yous" and "i'm going to marry yous" and every ounce of their intended ambiguity, every particle of their ambiguity burying them in my heart. i can forgive you for the decisions you made in the face of that ambiguity which pried out every last one of those "i love yous" and "i'm going to marry yous" to expose them as a collection of my shame and stupidity. the shame and stupidity were my fault.
i can't forgive you for the amount of real affection, however small, you had for me that you hid away. if you couldn't guess, this is what has always made me resent you. the fact that i know it is there, and you trapped it, choked it.
i am guilty of using you too, though. i'm not a perfect martyr here. i liked that a hot girl wanted to hang out with me. i used you to inflate my ego when i could; sometimes it backfired. sometimes the only way i could get it to work was to just be a good guy that you'd say nice things about. i did a lot of things to get you to feed my ego. flowers when your dad died, showing up at the wake. i wanted to flatter you, but mostly i wanted to know what a good guy i was. that's pretty horrible, huh? how did i ever get this insecure? ah well.
i don't know. i don't know how to end this one.
we tried being friends for awhile, but you were convinced that we couldn't be, that it was all fake. that hurt a lot: i'm not sure if it was because it was true or because it was the latest in a string of rejections from you. you called it out though: we were still using each other, under a facade of best intentions, under the alias of a real friendship. and it wasn't right; and you were married now, and there is no more room for ambiguity.
i tried to tell you that a long time ago; you said: "it will still be the same."
if i got nothing else out of knowing you, i at least get to be right.
but for the record, i don't think our friendship was completely artificial. i liked you as a person. you liked me. there was some undeniable, some unspeakable connection there. we never got the chance to build on it. we could have been friends. we wanted to be better friends than we were. but all we had was all we had, and after i dropped out and you got married there wasn't room for anything else. in fact, there wasn't even room for all we had between us anymore.
sarah, if you ever end up not married for whatever reason some day, look me up. i don't say "God forbid" because i am selfish, and i have visions of being a real friend of yours one day. but for now, i've got to say goodbye, and make it official. awhile ago, in june, i had a dream that you were dead. i told you about it then as an attempt to reestablish contact, but i didn't realize what it meant: that i must consider you as being out of my life for good. and so you are. that said, you will still receive a letter in the event of my death.
goodbye, friends.
love,
phil
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
life is hard; post short
i know, 's been awhile, faithful reader.
things have been...geez.
any minute now i'm going to come to the end of the zipper on this one.
i don't know what that means, but...any minute now.
sorry for the not-posting.
here are ten haiku i wrote today; i haven't written any haiku since middle school (ah, those...weren't the days either...)
for you:
ten haiku(s...?)
You think of the sun
As an eye blink’d out by clouds;
Yet, also, we hide
There, the crooked tree
With an old amber kneecap;
Ahab’s wooden leg
The oracle comes,
Slowness of speech folds its words;
It opens with time
The line reduces;
We grasp the world around us;
Zeno points our way
Why, now in autumn
Do you stare close at the ground?
Look up, falling sun!
Cold is between us,
So my arms wrap around you…
Winter makes us warm
Days fall from the sky
Like our ornery children;
Bury them and mourn
Night sails in the sky
Blow your breath into his wings
singing songs with friends
There is no woman
With power, when you’re resolv’d;
Yet you look at her
Age falls down my face
Gently, like a steady rain
Until it cracks me
things have been...geez.
any minute now i'm going to come to the end of the zipper on this one.
i don't know what that means, but...any minute now.
sorry for the not-posting.
here are ten haiku i wrote today; i haven't written any haiku since middle school (ah, those...weren't the days either...)
for you:
ten haiku(s...?)
You think of the sun
As an eye blink’d out by clouds;
Yet, also, we hide
There, the crooked tree
With an old amber kneecap;
Ahab’s wooden leg
The oracle comes,
Slowness of speech folds its words;
It opens with time
The line reduces;
We grasp the world around us;
Zeno points our way
Why, now in autumn
Do you stare close at the ground?
Look up, falling sun!
Cold is between us,
So my arms wrap around you…
Winter makes us warm
Days fall from the sky
Like our ornery children;
Bury them and mourn
Night sails in the sky
Blow your breath into his wings
singing songs with friends
There is no woman
With power, when you’re resolv’d;
Yet you look at her
Age falls down my face
Gently, like a steady rain
Until it cracks me
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
a villanelle
i wrote this; it is a poem
In This Wise Did He Appear
like an angel, flying, dragging his feet
as if between two worlds he must weigh all things
between the sky to reach and the ground to meet
I am two halves a man and incomplete
like a minotaur: a monster and son of kings
like an angel, flying, dragging his feet
or a king that is thrown from his royal seat
whose seven years of feathers have not yet become wings
between the sky to reach and the ground to meet
two voices for my voice compete;
it wrestles between the songs it sings
like an angel, flying, dragging his feet
what the earth comes down to is a prison on Crete
on the horizon I search for the strings
between the sky to reach and the ground to meet
though clayfooted, and kicking through the street
yet my seven years to the wind still clings
like an angel, flying, dragging his feet
between the sky to reach and the ground to meet
In This Wise Did He Appear
like an angel, flying, dragging his feet
as if between two worlds he must weigh all things
between the sky to reach and the ground to meet
I am two halves a man and incomplete
like a minotaur: a monster and son of kings
like an angel, flying, dragging his feet
or a king that is thrown from his royal seat
whose seven years of feathers have not yet become wings
between the sky to reach and the ground to meet
two voices for my voice compete;
it wrestles between the songs it sings
like an angel, flying, dragging his feet
what the earth comes down to is a prison on Crete
on the horizon I search for the strings
between the sky to reach and the ground to meet
though clayfooted, and kicking through the street
yet my seven years to the wind still clings
like an angel, flying, dragging his feet
between the sky to reach and the ground to meet
(see reverse side)
i'm realizing now that my most recent posts have been a bit, shall we say, dismal. its true, i have sometimes been labelled as pessimistic, characterized as gloomy, and treated for being mildly depressed. but i beg to differ with and barely understand those who point out my more saturnine qualities as being strange or defective from the norm. firstly, why do people insist on walking around being fooled by mantras and medication into thinking everything's ok? if you need those things to help you believe that, isn't that the only proof i need to point out that you're wrong? secondly, people misjudge me for being merely bitter, just because they haven't a palette refined enough to sense the sweet. i am no different than a hershey's chocolate morsel, for use in cookies, cakes, and other baked goods (see recipes on reverse side of package).
they say its about perspective; i can hardly disagree. that the world is as you see it is a hard thing to contest. but i guess i'm not as interested in removing myself from what i see to examine how i see. and what i see is that it is the world, more than i, that is bittersweet. there is goodness, there is badness, and the fine lines inbetween become a hatchwork of grey, of mingled and only minutely distinct strokes that go one way or another.
ultimately, for me, its not what i see or how i see, but what i make of it. what i make is the key. the trapped debris in the junkyard of my brain is not so important as what i can make out of it. there is lots of ugly, lots of pain, lots of gloom and sadness. and even if that's all i see, i believe i can redeem it, i can create something with it, and that thing can be beautiful.
i'm neither a pessimist nor an optimist. i'm not even a realist. i'm just looking for recipes on the other side of the package.
they say its about perspective; i can hardly disagree. that the world is as you see it is a hard thing to contest. but i guess i'm not as interested in removing myself from what i see to examine how i see. and what i see is that it is the world, more than i, that is bittersweet. there is goodness, there is badness, and the fine lines inbetween become a hatchwork of grey, of mingled and only minutely distinct strokes that go one way or another.
ultimately, for me, its not what i see or how i see, but what i make of it. what i make is the key. the trapped debris in the junkyard of my brain is not so important as what i can make out of it. there is lots of ugly, lots of pain, lots of gloom and sadness. and even if that's all i see, i believe i can redeem it, i can create something with it, and that thing can be beautiful.
i'm neither a pessimist nor an optimist. i'm not even a realist. i'm just looking for recipes on the other side of the package.
Sunday, October 16, 2005
Atlanta, GA
just a few notes i brought back with me from my trip to Atlanta:
-- i lament marriage. its not just because i had a bad time at my cousin's wedding. its not because i think i'll probably never get married. its because marriage is so good at stealing people away from the world around them. i find it difficult and troubling that one other person can be your life's answer. that doesn't make sense to me. it doesn't make sense that when you get married you can't do anything by yourself, and you have to trade in all of your single friends for married ones. most of all it doesn't make sense why anyone would willingly walk into that situation knowing that is exactly what will happen. i want my cousin to be happy and i hope her marriage is everything she dreams it will be. and if it is, then all the better for her, but i'll still lament marriage. Jessica is the second of my cousins in my uncle's very large family to get married; she is my sister's age. Malinda, who is my age, was married about three years ago -- she just had a baby. every time my family has gone to Atlanta to visit, my sister and i have never failed to have a bonding experience with them. with the exception of this time. now they are married; starting families...creating lives of their own. no longer seeking or searching out themselves and the world around them. that is a part of their lives that they have chosen to set aside, and it is the very same part i've decided to devote my life to. i feel as if i can no longer connect with them...
-- i never resent growing up in buffalo more than when i go to atlanta to see our family there. the only family members my sister and i ever had that were anywhere close to our age were Malinda and Jessica, who are our age to within a couple of months. visits only took place about ever two or three years -- airfare was expensive, money was always tight, and my grandmother could give my mom a headache over the phone, much less in person. i always loved going. we went to atlanta so few times i have a vague recollection of my first meeting with my father's mother: no, your grandmother does not want to be called 'grandma,' she wants to you call her 'Sitti.' Grandaddy was always Grandaddy, but Sitti was lebanese, and in lebanese, grandmas were called sittis. she was the grand matriarch of my father's family; she was amazing; overly dramatic, often drunk, always eccentric and forever the most madly outrageous,hysterical, enchanting and generous person i will ever meet. this is the first time i've been back to atlanta since her funeral and its just not the same. Grandaddy gets along ok, Malinda and Jessica still live in the area, as do their parents, and their syblings, my nine other cousins (Steven, Esther, David, Joseph, Lela, Christina, John, Suzannah, and Emily).......but really, Sitti was the lynchpin of the family. She always made herself the center of attention, andwhatever frustrations that might have caused people in the past, now that she's gone we've lost the center around which we now realize we've loved gathering around. everytime i've been to atlanta, i've thought about moving there -- there is family, a beautiful city, no lack of entertainments...i had fantasized about hanging out with Sitti and Grandaddy, eating endless meals of her gourmet cooking, getting close to my cousins. and now...Sitti is gone, my cousins are married off, and the family feels disbanded. we all share a name, but now, at family gatherings, there will always be a reason for someone to leave early, a new baby to attend to, another holiday party they have to make...their lives shredded and tossed over a field of commitments with no hope of ever recovering the old, if uncultivated bonds we had formed as kids. i took a nap on Sitti's bed, it was the first thing i did when i got to the house -- my grandparents always slept in separate rooms, and my Grandaddy has kept her room exactly the same since she died. i laid down on it and i wanted to cry. i did, almost. i hate growing up. i hate getting older. i hate it when people die, i hate it when things change. and everything in atlanta has changed. all these people are my family, and i hardly know them. my Sitti is dead, and my cousins are married...what can i do now? i wish i could listen to Sitti's stories about Europe in the 50's, and my dad as a kid. i wish i could still revel with Malinda in our shared black-sheepery in the Bowman family. i resent never having any family bonds, the way other people have. i missed out on the cousin/best friend, and dinner at grandma's on sundays. i missed out on knowing my own family. i don't know my own family and it is a sin. it is something i hate, and am ashamed of and jealous for, and now there is nothing i can do about it.
-- i lament marriage. its not just because i had a bad time at my cousin's wedding. its not because i think i'll probably never get married. its because marriage is so good at stealing people away from the world around them. i find it difficult and troubling that one other person can be your life's answer. that doesn't make sense to me. it doesn't make sense that when you get married you can't do anything by yourself, and you have to trade in all of your single friends for married ones. most of all it doesn't make sense why anyone would willingly walk into that situation knowing that is exactly what will happen. i want my cousin to be happy and i hope her marriage is everything she dreams it will be. and if it is, then all the better for her, but i'll still lament marriage. Jessica is the second of my cousins in my uncle's very large family to get married; she is my sister's age. Malinda, who is my age, was married about three years ago -- she just had a baby. every time my family has gone to Atlanta to visit, my sister and i have never failed to have a bonding experience with them. with the exception of this time. now they are married; starting families...creating lives of their own. no longer seeking or searching out themselves and the world around them. that is a part of their lives that they have chosen to set aside, and it is the very same part i've decided to devote my life to. i feel as if i can no longer connect with them...
-- i never resent growing up in buffalo more than when i go to atlanta to see our family there. the only family members my sister and i ever had that were anywhere close to our age were Malinda and Jessica, who are our age to within a couple of months. visits only took place about ever two or three years -- airfare was expensive, money was always tight, and my grandmother could give my mom a headache over the phone, much less in person. i always loved going. we went to atlanta so few times i have a vague recollection of my first meeting with my father's mother: no, your grandmother does not want to be called 'grandma,' she wants to you call her 'Sitti.' Grandaddy was always Grandaddy, but Sitti was lebanese, and in lebanese, grandmas were called sittis. she was the grand matriarch of my father's family; she was amazing; overly dramatic, often drunk, always eccentric and forever the most madly outrageous,hysterical, enchanting and generous person i will ever meet. this is the first time i've been back to atlanta since her funeral and its just not the same. Grandaddy gets along ok, Malinda and Jessica still live in the area, as do their parents, and their syblings, my nine other cousins (Steven, Esther, David, Joseph, Lela, Christina, John, Suzannah, and Emily).......but really, Sitti was the lynchpin of the family. She always made herself the center of attention, andwhatever frustrations that might have caused people in the past, now that she's gone we've lost the center around which we now realize we've loved gathering around. everytime i've been to atlanta, i've thought about moving there -- there is family, a beautiful city, no lack of entertainments...i had fantasized about hanging out with Sitti and Grandaddy, eating endless meals of her gourmet cooking, getting close to my cousins. and now...Sitti is gone, my cousins are married off, and the family feels disbanded. we all share a name, but now, at family gatherings, there will always be a reason for someone to leave early, a new baby to attend to, another holiday party they have to make...their lives shredded and tossed over a field of commitments with no hope of ever recovering the old, if uncultivated bonds we had formed as kids. i took a nap on Sitti's bed, it was the first thing i did when i got to the house -- my grandparents always slept in separate rooms, and my Grandaddy has kept her room exactly the same since she died. i laid down on it and i wanted to cry. i did, almost. i hate growing up. i hate getting older. i hate it when people die, i hate it when things change. and everything in atlanta has changed. all these people are my family, and i hardly know them. my Sitti is dead, and my cousins are married...what can i do now? i wish i could listen to Sitti's stories about Europe in the 50's, and my dad as a kid. i wish i could still revel with Malinda in our shared black-sheepery in the Bowman family. i resent never having any family bonds, the way other people have. i missed out on the cousin/best friend, and dinner at grandma's on sundays. i missed out on knowing my own family. i don't know my own family and it is a sin. it is something i hate, and am ashamed of and jealous for, and now there is nothing i can do about it.
Monday, October 10, 2005
reasons not to have a girlfriend...
...a new series.
every time i see a beautiful woman with a big rock on her finger giving me "the look," all i can think of is : "yeah right, you look at me like that right now, but the fact is you have a big rock on your finger because that's what you wanted, and if you really wanted me you probably could have had me...
...but i wait tables for a living; i drive a car with a busted window; i live in a dank, moldy, uncomfortable hole of an apartment...and you are fooling yourself if you are thinking right now that you would actually go for me. "
which is fine, ladies. i understand that. honestly, why would you waste your time with someone who can't give you what you really need, no matter how cute i >ahem< he is?
i'm sometimes tempted to begrudge your attitude. mostly because i don't come from money, i don't have money, and its a serious question whether or not i ever will. and its not so important to me. i don't need things i don't need. it seems somehow unfair that the lack of money can make me a less desirable companion for someone, despite the other, more important aspects of who i am.
on the other hand, i understand it: you want someone to be able to take you out, for drinks, for dinner, for anything fun -- and lets not kid ourselves, fun don't come cheap. i understand wanting to do fun things with your man, and wanting to have a man who can do fun things. its only natural.
i've had girlfriends i've adored. i would have given them everything they ever wanted. they were not demanding girlfriends, but i would have given them more than everything they wanted, more than they knew they wanted; i would have given them things they deserved just for being the wonderful people they are. i would have taken them to expensive resturaunts. i would have taken them to soirees, and "functions," and "fund raisers." i would have taken them to new york, and to europe, and to my cabin on the lake in canada, and to the beach house in key west. i would have taken them to france on their birthday, to italy for christmas. i would show them off draped in all of the fine things i bought them. the truth of it is, even if i never did those things, it would still take money to do the normal things, the sweet things...the nice guy things. coffee, dinner, drinks, dancing, movies, flowers, gifts....my girlfriends didn't deserve to miss out on those kinds of things, and maybe if i could have afforded to pay more attention to that stuff....things might have been better, easier. i could feel like man who can take care of his woman rather than a boy being taken care of by an indescribably sweet and generous girl.
sure, money wouldn't have kept my relationships from imploding. it would not have been able to step in for my non-financial failures as a boyfriend. it would not be able to sustain the relationships that were fundamentally flawed. it would not even be able to make me treat them right.
but damn. it would have helped.
reasons not to have a girlfriend, #1
i have no money.
every time i see a beautiful woman with a big rock on her finger giving me "the look," all i can think of is : "yeah right, you look at me like that right now, but the fact is you have a big rock on your finger because that's what you wanted, and if you really wanted me you probably could have had me...
...but i wait tables for a living; i drive a car with a busted window; i live in a dank, moldy, uncomfortable hole of an apartment...and you are fooling yourself if you are thinking right now that you would actually go for me. "
which is fine, ladies. i understand that. honestly, why would you waste your time with someone who can't give you what you really need, no matter how cute i >ahem< he is?
i'm sometimes tempted to begrudge your attitude. mostly because i don't come from money, i don't have money, and its a serious question whether or not i ever will. and its not so important to me. i don't need things i don't need. it seems somehow unfair that the lack of money can make me a less desirable companion for someone, despite the other, more important aspects of who i am.
on the other hand, i understand it: you want someone to be able to take you out, for drinks, for dinner, for anything fun -- and lets not kid ourselves, fun don't come cheap. i understand wanting to do fun things with your man, and wanting to have a man who can do fun things. its only natural.
i've had girlfriends i've adored. i would have given them everything they ever wanted. they were not demanding girlfriends, but i would have given them more than everything they wanted, more than they knew they wanted; i would have given them things they deserved just for being the wonderful people they are. i would have taken them to expensive resturaunts. i would have taken them to soirees, and "functions," and "fund raisers." i would have taken them to new york, and to europe, and to my cabin on the lake in canada, and to the beach house in key west. i would have taken them to france on their birthday, to italy for christmas. i would show them off draped in all of the fine things i bought them. the truth of it is, even if i never did those things, it would still take money to do the normal things, the sweet things...the nice guy things. coffee, dinner, drinks, dancing, movies, flowers, gifts....my girlfriends didn't deserve to miss out on those kinds of things, and maybe if i could have afforded to pay more attention to that stuff....things might have been better, easier. i could feel like man who can take care of his woman rather than a boy being taken care of by an indescribably sweet and generous girl.
sure, money wouldn't have kept my relationships from imploding. it would not have been able to step in for my non-financial failures as a boyfriend. it would not be able to sustain the relationships that were fundamentally flawed. it would not even be able to make me treat them right.
but damn. it would have helped.
reasons not to have a girlfriend, #1
i have no money.
Thursday, October 06, 2005
drawing
i've been drawing since i was about two. i'm pretty good at it. i don't post my drawings here because a) it would be a bit time consuming to try to do from school computers, b) i don't know how to do it, and c) this blog is about my foray into another art field. using language as an artform fascinates me. drawing is my natural response to the world -- that is, i didn't have to learn that instinct, or even the mode of drawing, really. its just there. i'm not the greatest draughtsman in the world -- there are plenty of people who draw better than me, and sometimes i'm ashamed that i am not as good as i could be. i could be great. i could be spectactular; but i'm not. there are lots and lots of people better than me. granted, they've all gone to artschool, and have recieved formal and proper training. i have the chops to get into artschool, but i never had the money, and i don't draw every day. its not that i don't want to be better; but the structure of formal training would help me immensely, and i don't have that.
i've been gifted with a perfectly fine talent. it the company of my peers it has always made me stand out. it has come far more naturally to me than writing does. so why turn my attention to this?
i'm not sure really. maybe this is true, maybe it isn't, but it seems to me that pictures come first to everyone, and language comes second. language has to be learned, and pictures, as long as you are born with working eyes, are just there. you don't have to learn pictures. you don't have to learn the act of seeing. you don't even have to learn the instinct to represent what you see in a drawing either -- we all do it as kids, naturally. its why they make crayons.
language on the other hand has to be learned, taught; almost invented. it takes the abstraction process further, requires more sophisticated mental functions. it is not immediate. this doesn't make one necessarily better than the other, thats not what i'm getting at.
the primitivity, the inherent quality of pictures is primary to all of us. but the fact that it is specifically primary to me, isn't that an argument that it deserves more of my attention? shouldn't it take precedence for me over the secondary less naturally occuring structure of language?
maybe i shouldn't generalize. language is as naturally occuring a phenomenon as seeing -- while there is something contrived about language, something about it that needs building, that doesn't mean it is unnaturally occuring. but it comes after pictures, for everyone. and certainly, specifically for me, it comes after pictures as well. so again. why am i writing? why am i trying to be a writer?
i don't know, truthfully. when i started writing (mainly painfully bad poetry) it wasn't any good. i kept it up...because of the encouragement of people who maybe didn't know that it was bad poetry, or thought it more important not to care (God bless them). i don't really have any idea whether any of my poetry now is any good; i like it at first, but after a week or so i end up hating whatever i've written. but that's not as important as the fact that i'm a much better writer now than i was then, and some people tell me i'm a pretty good writer now. which makes me believe its really about practice, and a drive to do well, to chase quality, to put quality influences into your head and pull out a quality something.
i had an earlier start with pictures than i did with language. my writing is still in its infancy, in a lot of ways. ok, maybe in its terrible twos. but that doesn't mean i can't be good at it -- that i can't be great at it someday -- it doesn't mean that i can't be as natural and talented a writer as i am an artist.
initially, in their primary stages, pictures and language are about expression. later they evolve -- or we come to realize through the use of them -- that they are about representation. which is only a little bit different, but makes all the difference in the world.
i've been gifted with a perfectly fine talent. it the company of my peers it has always made me stand out. it has come far more naturally to me than writing does. so why turn my attention to this?
i'm not sure really. maybe this is true, maybe it isn't, but it seems to me that pictures come first to everyone, and language comes second. language has to be learned, and pictures, as long as you are born with working eyes, are just there. you don't have to learn pictures. you don't have to learn the act of seeing. you don't even have to learn the instinct to represent what you see in a drawing either -- we all do it as kids, naturally. its why they make crayons.
language on the other hand has to be learned, taught; almost invented. it takes the abstraction process further, requires more sophisticated mental functions. it is not immediate. this doesn't make one necessarily better than the other, thats not what i'm getting at.
the primitivity, the inherent quality of pictures is primary to all of us. but the fact that it is specifically primary to me, isn't that an argument that it deserves more of my attention? shouldn't it take precedence for me over the secondary less naturally occuring structure of language?
maybe i shouldn't generalize. language is as naturally occuring a phenomenon as seeing -- while there is something contrived about language, something about it that needs building, that doesn't mean it is unnaturally occuring. but it comes after pictures, for everyone. and certainly, specifically for me, it comes after pictures as well. so again. why am i writing? why am i trying to be a writer?
i don't know, truthfully. when i started writing (mainly painfully bad poetry) it wasn't any good. i kept it up...because of the encouragement of people who maybe didn't know that it was bad poetry, or thought it more important not to care (God bless them). i don't really have any idea whether any of my poetry now is any good; i like it at first, but after a week or so i end up hating whatever i've written. but that's not as important as the fact that i'm a much better writer now than i was then, and some people tell me i'm a pretty good writer now. which makes me believe its really about practice, and a drive to do well, to chase quality, to put quality influences into your head and pull out a quality something.
i had an earlier start with pictures than i did with language. my writing is still in its infancy, in a lot of ways. ok, maybe in its terrible twos. but that doesn't mean i can't be good at it -- that i can't be great at it someday -- it doesn't mean that i can't be as natural and talented a writer as i am an artist.
initially, in their primary stages, pictures and language are about expression. later they evolve -- or we come to realize through the use of them -- that they are about representation. which is only a little bit different, but makes all the difference in the world.
Friday, September 30, 2005
plunking down a post...
when i saw this, i just had to say something...
a website full of West Wing fans devoted to cancelling the West Wing?
priceless.
nice to know there are others out there who feel the same way about Sorkin's work -- namely that calling anything "the West Wing" after season 4 ended is the equivalent of blasphemy of the Holy Spirit...i.e., earns you a non-refundable coach class ticket directly to hell, with extra salty peanuts and no beverage cart.
a website full of West Wing fans devoted to cancelling the West Wing?
priceless.
nice to know there are others out there who feel the same way about Sorkin's work -- namely that calling anything "the West Wing" after season 4 ended is the equivalent of blasphemy of the Holy Spirit...i.e., earns you a non-refundable coach class ticket directly to hell, with extra salty peanuts and no beverage cart.
Thursday, September 29, 2005
i have ideas for TV, part II
i'm realizing, just now, that the two ideas i have for TV are actually just series "sequels" to shows i've enjoyed, and i wonder if they have any creative merit to them at all. anyways, they're my ideas, and they're what i've got.
IDEA 2:
"Three Rivers"
remember the show "My So-called Life"?
it was on about ten years ago, for a whole season, and then it was cancelled. it was where Claire Danes got her break (as well as Jared Leto -- possibly the hottest man in the universe) . Until Aaron Sorkin created the West Wing, it was the best show that had ever been on TV. it was created by Winnie Holzman, who co-wrote that show thirtysomething (which aired past my bedtime when it was doing its thing), and was involved with the show "Relativity" which was also quickly cancelled, though not as painfully as "My So-called Life"
that show was my hero in highschool. it got so many things right. and the writing was just breathtaking. ten years later, it still holds up. i miss that show like nothing else. it makes me all nostalgic and melancholly for the time i spent writhing in agonizing hatred for my highschool and the highschool personalities i dealt with every day. weird, eh? anyways. the show ended after a season, and everyone was upset; there was a big internet movement to get it back on the air, but it was just not in the cards, in the stars, nor otherwise ever meant to be.
a lot of the show was Claire's character, Angela Chase, just figuring out life, and her parents trying to figure out how to deal with someone figuring out life. it was so completely the suburban middle-class experience that those of us who've lived it now try to hide.
it took place in a fictional suburb of Pittsburgh, PA, called "Three Rivers".......if you've ever been to Pittsburgh, and i have, you'll notice three things, which i did: 1) it is a hill-ridden city, which makes it more interesting right off the bat (you know what they say about cities with topography)...2) its got some suprisingly interesting architecture for a steel-town, and 3) the city is carved up by three charming rivers running directly through it, and it is beautiful in that old rust-belt city with character kind of way. and this is where the fictional suburb gets its name; and everything about it is perfect -- it catches all the quaintness, all the romantic everyday-ness that My So-called Life so expertly captured. which is why i think it would make a fine title to the follow-up series.
as a weird aside that i'm sure i'll regret having people know about, i somehow always identified more with Angela's character than any other (except for maybe some of the awkward sensitivity of Brian Krakow)...she made so much sense to me, like i had lived the boy-version of her life....which i think now is due to the fact that the show, and its writers, managed to tap into something universal about the teen experience that it transcended so many boundaries. at any rate, not because the lead teen character couldn't be a girl, but because i am an ego-maniac, it would star a young male character based largely upon yours truly. if a 15 year old girl can be universally accessable especially to someone like me as a teen, then someone like me as a teen could probably be universally accessable as well. and besides, the first rule of writing is "write what you know," and, well, what i know is me.
in my first idea for the follow up series, the adult lead originally was going to be based on my high-school guidance counsellor who was actually a very cool woman, and contrary to the stereotype, really did give some sound advice -- i was just too stubborn to listen (if i had, i probably wouldn't be the lovable loser i am today). her name was Heidi Glick-Kerr. i kind of had a crush on her too; she had great legs for a guidance counsellor. she was not, in any way, your typical marm manning the guidance office. she was young and tough and full of you-know-what and vinegar. but best of all, she was confident in me, and that was strange and helpful and comforting all at the same time. and the adult lead can still be more or less based on her, but i'm thinking less now that she should be an official guidance counsellor. my roommate had a fiery activist History/Psychology teacher in highschool that meshes well with the type of character the lead should be: perhaps an English teacher who was an English and Psychology double major in college, who, because of cutbacks, has to take on a small percentage of the guidance counselling duties. and there is where we get the two leads together; a student-teacher dynamic duo, pupil and mentor both full of potential. we follow the teen lead through the labyrinth of the universal teen experience, and the adult lead through the complex life of the Gen Y-er ascending into the role of real, live grown-up -- two journeys that are both very near and dear to my heart.
then the idea struck me: what the hell is Claire Danes doing now? she made one good movie after she left MSCL, and a pantload of crappy ones, and then fell off the face of Hollywood. Rumour has it that the real reason MSCL ended as quickly as it did was because Claire would have rathered do film than sign away the next howevermany years of her life to tv. which is fine except her movies sucked. she's a great actress, but...come on...Brokedown Palace? the Mod Squad? hardly the meaty material she was being dealt on a WEEKLY basis @ MSCL, the kind of stuff real actors would kill for. so...why not give her a second chance?
for years, i was against the whispers of MSCL revival that tickled the edges of the internet -- you can't go back. the series was its own thing, a phenomenon that, in trying to revisit, to recreate that world, would ultimately fail: you can't go back. that ship has already sailed. the writer in me recognizes that the best you can do is create something new that holds to the spirit of the series -- new characters tapping into the same universal relatability that made MSCL as spectacular as it was. i still am against the idea of "revival" of the series. but the writer in me now is looking at the neatness, the cleannes of dropping a grown up Angela Chase into the role of funky English teacher/counsellor, and it is outrageously appealing. a great way to tie it back to the old series, i think, without trying to relive it: you can't go back -- but you can move forward.
now all i need is ten days in a cabin, a computer, and the number for Claire Danes' agent.......
IDEA 2:
"Three Rivers"
remember the show "My So-called Life"?
it was on about ten years ago, for a whole season, and then it was cancelled. it was where Claire Danes got her break (as well as Jared Leto -- possibly the hottest man in the universe) . Until Aaron Sorkin created the West Wing, it was the best show that had ever been on TV. it was created by Winnie Holzman, who co-wrote that show thirtysomething (which aired past my bedtime when it was doing its thing), and was involved with the show "Relativity" which was also quickly cancelled, though not as painfully as "My So-called Life"
that show was my hero in highschool. it got so many things right. and the writing was just breathtaking. ten years later, it still holds up. i miss that show like nothing else. it makes me all nostalgic and melancholly for the time i spent writhing in agonizing hatred for my highschool and the highschool personalities i dealt with every day. weird, eh? anyways. the show ended after a season, and everyone was upset; there was a big internet movement to get it back on the air, but it was just not in the cards, in the stars, nor otherwise ever meant to be.
a lot of the show was Claire's character, Angela Chase, just figuring out life, and her parents trying to figure out how to deal with someone figuring out life. it was so completely the suburban middle-class experience that those of us who've lived it now try to hide.
it took place in a fictional suburb of Pittsburgh, PA, called "Three Rivers".......if you've ever been to Pittsburgh, and i have, you'll notice three things, which i did: 1) it is a hill-ridden city, which makes it more interesting right off the bat (you know what they say about cities with topography)...2) its got some suprisingly interesting architecture for a steel-town, and 3) the city is carved up by three charming rivers running directly through it, and it is beautiful in that old rust-belt city with character kind of way. and this is where the fictional suburb gets its name; and everything about it is perfect -- it catches all the quaintness, all the romantic everyday-ness that My So-called Life so expertly captured. which is why i think it would make a fine title to the follow-up series.
as a weird aside that i'm sure i'll regret having people know about, i somehow always identified more with Angela's character than any other (except for maybe some of the awkward sensitivity of Brian Krakow)...she made so much sense to me, like i had lived the boy-version of her life....which i think now is due to the fact that the show, and its writers, managed to tap into something universal about the teen experience that it transcended so many boundaries. at any rate, not because the lead teen character couldn't be a girl, but because i am an ego-maniac, it would star a young male character based largely upon yours truly. if a 15 year old girl can be universally accessable especially to someone like me as a teen, then someone like me as a teen could probably be universally accessable as well. and besides, the first rule of writing is "write what you know," and, well, what i know is me.
in my first idea for the follow up series, the adult lead originally was going to be based on my high-school guidance counsellor who was actually a very cool woman, and contrary to the stereotype, really did give some sound advice -- i was just too stubborn to listen (if i had, i probably wouldn't be the lovable loser i am today). her name was Heidi Glick-Kerr. i kind of had a crush on her too; she had great legs for a guidance counsellor. she was not, in any way, your typical marm manning the guidance office. she was young and tough and full of you-know-what and vinegar. but best of all, she was confident in me, and that was strange and helpful and comforting all at the same time. and the adult lead can still be more or less based on her, but i'm thinking less now that she should be an official guidance counsellor. my roommate had a fiery activist History/Psychology teacher in highschool that meshes well with the type of character the lead should be: perhaps an English teacher who was an English and Psychology double major in college, who, because of cutbacks, has to take on a small percentage of the guidance counselling duties. and there is where we get the two leads together; a student-teacher dynamic duo, pupil and mentor both full of potential. we follow the teen lead through the labyrinth of the universal teen experience, and the adult lead through the complex life of the Gen Y-er ascending into the role of real, live grown-up -- two journeys that are both very near and dear to my heart.
then the idea struck me: what the hell is Claire Danes doing now? she made one good movie after she left MSCL, and a pantload of crappy ones, and then fell off the face of Hollywood. Rumour has it that the real reason MSCL ended as quickly as it did was because Claire would have rathered do film than sign away the next howevermany years of her life to tv. which is fine except her movies sucked. she's a great actress, but...come on...Brokedown Palace? the Mod Squad? hardly the meaty material she was being dealt on a WEEKLY basis @ MSCL, the kind of stuff real actors would kill for. so...why not give her a second chance?
for years, i was against the whispers of MSCL revival that tickled the edges of the internet -- you can't go back. the series was its own thing, a phenomenon that, in trying to revisit, to recreate that world, would ultimately fail: you can't go back. that ship has already sailed. the writer in me recognizes that the best you can do is create something new that holds to the spirit of the series -- new characters tapping into the same universal relatability that made MSCL as spectacular as it was. i still am against the idea of "revival" of the series. but the writer in me now is looking at the neatness, the cleannes of dropping a grown up Angela Chase into the role of funky English teacher/counsellor, and it is outrageously appealing. a great way to tie it back to the old series, i think, without trying to relive it: you can't go back -- but you can move forward.
now all i need is ten days in a cabin, a computer, and the number for Claire Danes' agent.......
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
i have ideas for TV
please don't steal them. please do feel free to hire me and give me lots of money.
i know i wouldn't be thinking of actually working on them if i wasn't doing school right now, but right now, school is a drag because it is making me think of all the good ideas i have that would be a shame to never write. or a shame to never write first -- because if i don't get around to doing them, someone else will end up doing something similar, although less brilliant, and recieve all the accolades that should rightfully be mine.
just so that you know i had these ideas first, i'm going to write about two of them here. i can't hold them in my head, but i don't have the time to just sit down and pound out a script for the pilot episode of one idea or personally animate the first episode of the other idea. perhaps, if i'm unlucky enough to find out that someone stole these ideas from me, i will be comforted with the fact that i could sue their ass hole off and live comfortably in ireland working on the book that will make me a major literary figure from now until the english language dies. you all will be my witnesses to the fact that i had these ideas first. my expert legal team will be sending you notification of your court dates shortly. we already have your addresses.
IDEA 1
ok, i realize its a little dorky -- but i love He-Man. i grew up with He-Man. the moral code by which i live i learned from watching He-Man. ok, that's not really true...at least, i don't think...having recently seen some of those moral bits that ended every episode, it makes you wonder.....anyhow. from the time of my earliest memories to when i was about nine years old and ashamed to admit it, i passionately loved He-Man. i know, i know...its a crappy cartoon, laughable really...so badly done. but when your four, you don't care about that. you just want He-Man to punch things, and chop up robots with his sword. the one thing that sticks out in my mind, and that i still manage to find not so crappy is some of the character design. Skeletor especially. i loved Skeletor almost as much as i loved He-Man. that green, glow in the dark colored skull...the face only a mother, or me at four years old, could love. such a cool looking bad guy. you don't get meaner than having a skull for a face. his voice sucked, but he had such a badass look going for him. and then, what always mystified and yet made strange sense to me, was his association with Castle Greyskull. a guy with a skull for a head would naturally want to be running a place that basically had his face carved into the front of it. what i never understood was why it was the 'home base' of the good guys, and why they wanted to keep it if it looked like Skeletor.
anyways my idea is this: a second generation He-Man cartoon that takes place in a politically distraught Eternia, 20 years after the original series. ok, right now i'm regretting making the original series sound so corny, and it will be hard to talk up the reasons why my idea would be cool. maybe its just because he has been ingrained in my brain since childhood, but i feel as though He-Man got the short end of the super-hero stick -- he occupies the same upper echelon of herodom in my mind as Superman and Batman do. He-Man could have been a major player if he were handled as more than a device to sell toys. some of the design and thought that went into He-Man was pretty ambitious for a cartoon, and some of the guys that worked on it went on to do the work they're famous or semi-famous for now(see here and here for Paul Dini, and here for Bruce Timm).
So my idea, again, is this: you take it to the next level. Eternia is basically in the midst of their World War II -- the bad guys have taken control of Castle Greyskull, in which Evil Lynn lives, with her son Ozrik, who is the heir of Skeletor (yes, she and Skeletor made a little baby). Skeletor is dead, but that hasn't saved Eternia from any danger, because Evil Lynn and Ozrik are each twice as ruthless as he ever was. what's more, He-Man has not been seen in twenty years. Prince Adam, the former He-Man, has never revealed his secret identity to the public, but has ascended the throne of Eternia. despite his coming to power, he has never been able to show the same fortitude he did as Greyskull's protector, and it is all he can do to keep Eternia locked in the stalement it has been since Greyskull was overtaken. Teela, who Eternia generally assumes to be dead is actually on the lam -- she is the rightful sorceress of Castle Greyskull, and is being hunted by Evil Lynn's minions. Teela does, however, have Duncan to protect her, though he is no longer Man-At-Arms, and is technically no longer alive -- he is a cyborg, the brain of Duncan in a robotic body. Before she faked her death and took off, she had a child with King Adam, who was hidden (a la Star Wars) because it was feared that this heir to Eternia's throne would be attacked by Skeletor's forces, and that the only chance in overcoming Skeletor's reich lay in the possibility that this little prince grow up to assume the mantle of He-Man. His name is Seth. initially he does not know who his parents are -- and he is shepherded by Orko, no longer the bumbling magician, but the greatest sorcerer in all Eternia. only Orko knows the significance of Seth's existence, and knows how important it is to introduce him to the role of He-Man before all hell breaks loose. Orko plays a Gandalf-type, a wizard of Dumbldorian proportions; extremely wise, and unimaginably powerful. but he realizes the need for a new He-Man, and the first episode begins with him leading Seth to where he's hidden the power sword, and revealing the truth about who he is and where he comes from. the rest of the series would be mainly about Seth's internal struggle with trying to assume the role of He-Man, and the external struggle of He-Man verses the forces of Evil Lynn and Ozrik.
fwhew. that was a mouthful. can you believed i typed that all with one breath? well, not really, but then, you'd never know, would you?
i heard a while back that John Woo, who i could give two shits about, was thinking of doing a He-Man movie, which i could give many, many shits about. chances are i'd be pretty disappointed with his attempt, and normally i'd dream about directing the movie myself except for the fact that if this movie ever gets out of development it would open the market for this cartoon idea. all i would want really are a few seasons of seven to ten minute episodes, something like Tartakovsky's Star Wars: Clone Wars, or the Maxx, from MTV's Oddities. short. sweet. to the point. leaves you begging for more. i would totally love to see it as an internet cartoon, but i don't know any animators, and i don't know Flash, and i don't know anyone willing to do it or learn and then work for me for free. if i had money, time, and more money i'd buy a high end computer and Flash and other various animation software, and do a whole ten minute episode myself. but unless it starts raining rare civil war collectables, thats never going to happen.
(stay tuned for IDEA 2 -- right now its my bedtime)
i know i wouldn't be thinking of actually working on them if i wasn't doing school right now, but right now, school is a drag because it is making me think of all the good ideas i have that would be a shame to never write. or a shame to never write first -- because if i don't get around to doing them, someone else will end up doing something similar, although less brilliant, and recieve all the accolades that should rightfully be mine.
just so that you know i had these ideas first, i'm going to write about two of them here. i can't hold them in my head, but i don't have the time to just sit down and pound out a script for the pilot episode of one idea or personally animate the first episode of the other idea. perhaps, if i'm unlucky enough to find out that someone stole these ideas from me, i will be comforted with the fact that i could sue their ass hole off and live comfortably in ireland working on the book that will make me a major literary figure from now until the english language dies. you all will be my witnesses to the fact that i had these ideas first. my expert legal team will be sending you notification of your court dates shortly. we already have your addresses.
IDEA 1
ok, i realize its a little dorky -- but i love He-Man. i grew up with He-Man. the moral code by which i live i learned from watching He-Man. ok, that's not really true...at least, i don't think...having recently seen some of those moral bits that ended every episode, it makes you wonder.....anyhow. from the time of my earliest memories to when i was about nine years old and ashamed to admit it, i passionately loved He-Man. i know, i know...its a crappy cartoon, laughable really...so badly done. but when your four, you don't care about that. you just want He-Man to punch things, and chop up robots with his sword. the one thing that sticks out in my mind, and that i still manage to find not so crappy is some of the character design. Skeletor especially. i loved Skeletor almost as much as i loved He-Man. that green, glow in the dark colored skull...the face only a mother, or me at four years old, could love. such a cool looking bad guy. you don't get meaner than having a skull for a face. his voice sucked, but he had such a badass look going for him. and then, what always mystified and yet made strange sense to me, was his association with Castle Greyskull. a guy with a skull for a head would naturally want to be running a place that basically had his face carved into the front of it. what i never understood was why it was the 'home base' of the good guys, and why they wanted to keep it if it looked like Skeletor.
anyways my idea is this: a second generation He-Man cartoon that takes place in a politically distraught Eternia, 20 years after the original series. ok, right now i'm regretting making the original series sound so corny, and it will be hard to talk up the reasons why my idea would be cool. maybe its just because he has been ingrained in my brain since childhood, but i feel as though He-Man got the short end of the super-hero stick -- he occupies the same upper echelon of herodom in my mind as Superman and Batman do. He-Man could have been a major player if he were handled as more than a device to sell toys. some of the design and thought that went into He-Man was pretty ambitious for a cartoon, and some of the guys that worked on it went on to do the work they're famous or semi-famous for now(see here and here for Paul Dini, and here for Bruce Timm).
So my idea, again, is this: you take it to the next level. Eternia is basically in the midst of their World War II -- the bad guys have taken control of Castle Greyskull, in which Evil Lynn lives, with her son Ozrik, who is the heir of Skeletor (yes, she and Skeletor made a little baby). Skeletor is dead, but that hasn't saved Eternia from any danger, because Evil Lynn and Ozrik are each twice as ruthless as he ever was. what's more, He-Man has not been seen in twenty years. Prince Adam, the former He-Man, has never revealed his secret identity to the public, but has ascended the throne of Eternia. despite his coming to power, he has never been able to show the same fortitude he did as Greyskull's protector, and it is all he can do to keep Eternia locked in the stalement it has been since Greyskull was overtaken. Teela, who Eternia generally assumes to be dead is actually on the lam -- she is the rightful sorceress of Castle Greyskull, and is being hunted by Evil Lynn's minions. Teela does, however, have Duncan to protect her, though he is no longer Man-At-Arms, and is technically no longer alive -- he is a cyborg, the brain of Duncan in a robotic body. Before she faked her death and took off, she had a child with King Adam, who was hidden (a la Star Wars) because it was feared that this heir to Eternia's throne would be attacked by Skeletor's forces, and that the only chance in overcoming Skeletor's reich lay in the possibility that this little prince grow up to assume the mantle of He-Man. His name is Seth. initially he does not know who his parents are -- and he is shepherded by Orko, no longer the bumbling magician, but the greatest sorcerer in all Eternia. only Orko knows the significance of Seth's existence, and knows how important it is to introduce him to the role of He-Man before all hell breaks loose. Orko plays a Gandalf-type, a wizard of Dumbldorian proportions; extremely wise, and unimaginably powerful. but he realizes the need for a new He-Man, and the first episode begins with him leading Seth to where he's hidden the power sword, and revealing the truth about who he is and where he comes from. the rest of the series would be mainly about Seth's internal struggle with trying to assume the role of He-Man, and the external struggle of He-Man verses the forces of Evil Lynn and Ozrik.
fwhew. that was a mouthful. can you believed i typed that all with one breath? well, not really, but then, you'd never know, would you?
i heard a while back that John Woo, who i could give two shits about, was thinking of doing a He-Man movie, which i could give many, many shits about. chances are i'd be pretty disappointed with his attempt, and normally i'd dream about directing the movie myself except for the fact that if this movie ever gets out of development it would open the market for this cartoon idea. all i would want really are a few seasons of seven to ten minute episodes, something like Tartakovsky's Star Wars: Clone Wars, or the Maxx, from MTV's Oddities. short. sweet. to the point. leaves you begging for more. i would totally love to see it as an internet cartoon, but i don't know any animators, and i don't know Flash, and i don't know anyone willing to do it or learn and then work for me for free. if i had money, time, and more money i'd buy a high end computer and Flash and other various animation software, and do a whole ten minute episode myself. but unless it starts raining rare civil war collectables, thats never going to happen.
(stay tuned for IDEA 2 -- right now its my bedtime)
Monday, September 26, 2005
writing the legend of Frank Fanara
-- for the past few months on random sundays, me and my roommate have been doing some songwriting. for those of you who might be curious, i quasi-count this activity as a writing exercise (i semi- or fully count it according to how well i keep up with my independent writing). writing lyrics is a whole different animal. i'm not great at it, and i'm not sure i ever will be -- but that's ok, i'm not a musician and i won't have to do it if i don't want to i guess. still, its pretty interesting. its obviously not like writing prose, but it isn't like writing poetry either.
emily and i have started a new song, "the legend of Frank Fanara," and so far, i have one, single, solitary line:
"its three in the morning, i'm walking; i walk when i don't know what else to do."
.............and that's it. that's all i got. but the guitar part is fantastic, and it deserves to be finished, to be made into a real live song.
now i've written my share of poetry. granted, i've done it with mixed results, but i'm familiar with the form -- i've written sonnets, haiku, cinquain, sestinas, etc., and some of them were even good. and you'd think that writing song lyrics is really only just a variation of that process. and then you'd try it, and you'd realize that you were wrong. "but lyrics are just poetry set to music" you say. well, allow me to retort: no.
poetry has only words, phonetic music, the knotwork of meaning, the challenge of subtlety...it is only words, and you can use as many or as few as you feel are necessary. you are decidedly less burdened with poetry as opposed to lyrics -- poetry, of course, has to be beautiful, or profound, some quality of it has to escape definition, has to transcend, has to make sense and do better than make sense. this isn't to say that lyrics don't do that or that lyric-writing is a debased form of poetry, a failure of words that relies on a melody. not at all. but you are more limited in how you achieve those poetic goals. the fact that words are all you have to work with when writing poetry actually relieves the load of considerations you encounter when attempting to write lyrics. in composing lyrics, you are bound by the other half of the song -- the musical half -- and that is a limiting factor. another limiting factor is that you don't have the same vocabulary of words available to you as you do with poetry -- its important to remember that a singer has to be able to sing these words, that they have to not have so many syllables, and that they have sounds in them that sound 'right' when they are sung. for instance, the word 'Starnbergersee' works fine in a poem. but unless you're german, and even then, you probably wouldn't ever want to have to sing it or hear it sung.
so once they are finished, lyrics are often considered as poetry, or as having some poetic quality -- but when you peel the curtain back, you'll find a completely different wizard at work.
the best lyricists, in my opinion, are Gordon Sumner, aka Sting and Ani DiFranco -- whose songs exemplify what lyrics can be at their best. i love music, but i don't herald other musicians' lyric-writing abilities the way i do theirs. i am told Bob Dylan has written a good lyric or two, but tend to avoid him for reasons i won't go into now, and thus can't say one way or another if i think he is any good. sometimes Leonard Cohen is a good lyricist -- sometimes he's an amazing lyricist, but sometimes he is terrible.
there is something about lyrics that requires that you fit something profound into them -- a profound thought or use of language -- and you have to do it in a nutshell. the rythm of the lines has to be cooperative with the music, the theme has to be tightly gathered, easy to follow -- there is no room for meandering. and you have to wrap it up in about fives stanzas. it doesn't have to be complex, but it should be compelling, it should capture something. its a tough gig. its a bit like a puzzle, piecing words into phrases, and phrases into turns of phrases; making sure they match the measures of the music. a song is its own little universe, its parts need to add up to its perfect whole; my favorite lyrics are kind of self-referential, they maintain and refer back to their established patterns, or stories or themes. its hard, to tie something up that neatly.
and despite all of this great advice i'm giving, i still haven't been able to do it yet -- i still haven't finished a song, and failing thus far to write Frank Fanara's legend isn't inspiring any confidence. i mean i've tried everything i could think of to come after that first line, and nothing works, i've got a million dead ends.
one day i will be singing it in a bar, and people will come up to us and ask who Frank Fanara was, and we'll tell them all we know about him, and his tragic death, and Frank Fanara will be remembered in Buffalo, though not as the real Frank Fanara...
but between now and then, i've got a lot of work.
maybe i'll go for a walk. at this point, i don't know
what else to do.
wish me luck
emily and i have started a new song, "the legend of Frank Fanara," and so far, i have one, single, solitary line:
"its three in the morning, i'm walking; i walk when i don't know what else to do."
.............and that's it. that's all i got. but the guitar part is fantastic, and it deserves to be finished, to be made into a real live song.
now i've written my share of poetry. granted, i've done it with mixed results, but i'm familiar with the form -- i've written sonnets, haiku, cinquain, sestinas, etc., and some of them were even good. and you'd think that writing song lyrics is really only just a variation of that process. and then you'd try it, and you'd realize that you were wrong. "but lyrics are just poetry set to music" you say. well, allow me to retort: no.
poetry has only words, phonetic music, the knotwork of meaning, the challenge of subtlety...it is only words, and you can use as many or as few as you feel are necessary. you are decidedly less burdened with poetry as opposed to lyrics -- poetry, of course, has to be beautiful, or profound, some quality of it has to escape definition, has to transcend, has to make sense and do better than make sense. this isn't to say that lyrics don't do that or that lyric-writing is a debased form of poetry, a failure of words that relies on a melody. not at all. but you are more limited in how you achieve those poetic goals. the fact that words are all you have to work with when writing poetry actually relieves the load of considerations you encounter when attempting to write lyrics. in composing lyrics, you are bound by the other half of the song -- the musical half -- and that is a limiting factor. another limiting factor is that you don't have the same vocabulary of words available to you as you do with poetry -- its important to remember that a singer has to be able to sing these words, that they have to not have so many syllables, and that they have sounds in them that sound 'right' when they are sung. for instance, the word 'Starnbergersee' works fine in a poem. but unless you're german, and even then, you probably wouldn't ever want to have to sing it or hear it sung.
so once they are finished, lyrics are often considered as poetry, or as having some poetic quality -- but when you peel the curtain back, you'll find a completely different wizard at work.
the best lyricists, in my opinion, are Gordon Sumner, aka Sting and Ani DiFranco -- whose songs exemplify what lyrics can be at their best. i love music, but i don't herald other musicians' lyric-writing abilities the way i do theirs. i am told Bob Dylan has written a good lyric or two, but tend to avoid him for reasons i won't go into now, and thus can't say one way or another if i think he is any good. sometimes Leonard Cohen is a good lyricist -- sometimes he's an amazing lyricist, but sometimes he is terrible.
there is something about lyrics that requires that you fit something profound into them -- a profound thought or use of language -- and you have to do it in a nutshell. the rythm of the lines has to be cooperative with the music, the theme has to be tightly gathered, easy to follow -- there is no room for meandering. and you have to wrap it up in about fives stanzas. it doesn't have to be complex, but it should be compelling, it should capture something. its a tough gig. its a bit like a puzzle, piecing words into phrases, and phrases into turns of phrases; making sure they match the measures of the music. a song is its own little universe, its parts need to add up to its perfect whole; my favorite lyrics are kind of self-referential, they maintain and refer back to their established patterns, or stories or themes. its hard, to tie something up that neatly.
and despite all of this great advice i'm giving, i still haven't been able to do it yet -- i still haven't finished a song, and failing thus far to write Frank Fanara's legend isn't inspiring any confidence. i mean i've tried everything i could think of to come after that first line, and nothing works, i've got a million dead ends.
one day i will be singing it in a bar, and people will come up to us and ask who Frank Fanara was, and we'll tell them all we know about him, and his tragic death, and Frank Fanara will be remembered in Buffalo, though not as the real Frank Fanara...
but between now and then, i've got a lot of work.
maybe i'll go for a walk. at this point, i don't know
what else to do.
wish me luck
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