lilted Paolo Musagedes

“I think, as far as openings go, that’ll do,” lilted Paolo Musagedes, a language long dormant under his tongue warping vowels with the acetylene heat of its eastern origins; English was his language now, or perhaps had always been, owing to some bucking and rampant Anglophonic imperialism, he belonged to it, and it belonged to him. The accent was thick, but qualified speech of grammatical, syntactical perfection penetrated the equally thick mustache with reedy, meticulous musicality.

Ivorrs searched for something more than approval in this, but none revealed itself and anyway this wasn’t about fishing for compliments. He shuffled the ragged pages from the tabletop and into the beaten notebook, to a folder behind its front cover, the stray gangling spiraltorn edges peeling up and reaching through one another. Vines of ironed pulp still climbing toward sunlight. He lost this notebook not too long afterward; one night, drunk, in a parking lot maybe, behind a girlfriend’s apartment building, but as he was not yet through a significant number of its pages, and he’d already copied out the most pertinent notes, Sam Ivorrs would try not to think about the secrets he had confessed to it, or that they may be floating out there now, untethered in the reading, folded malignantly in some finder-keeper’s hollow stewardship. He hoped the girl had not somehow found it…

Musagedes proceeded in his achieved English: “My suggestion to you would be not to labor over the minutia, the things you might edit out at some point; typos, clichés, even characters, those things can be excised later. What is important is that you progress through this narrative….” They poked at theory for some time, fanning it out and probing its dimensions until either the one or the other had no more to say, and Ivorrs was ready to indulge his growing compulsion for loneliness in exterior regions, paved, cool, and away from what was becoming a fetid gloam in the noiseful coffee shop. Ivorrs wondered if he had at all concealed the nature of his farewell or his handshake: the one foreshortened, the other contracted. He decided no, he did not, but the air was like warm leaden paint and he let his socially transmitted awkwardness bother him only until he chose a direction on the sidewalk, grinding suddenly now underfoot.

Where to? What to follow? I will go where you send me... north/south? The perfect solar ecliptic of the Parkway? the Department of Works' graffitic sidewalk neon scrawl, this way gas, that electric? But never the twain shall meet...he smiled at the thought of a pleasant blossom of fire. Perhaps God would deign to speak to him from between the wavy petals.

resolves

last bit of schoolwork from this doomsday scenario of a semester: late homeworks under the office door of a professor who is not showing signs of returning to campus before the year's out.

at any rate, i'm too finished with this semester to be looking back. clapping its dust off my sleeves, i'm ready to feel burdened with the things i want to be burdened with. real priorities are allowed to breathe now, and have their due. in the particular order that they occur to me, they are as follows:

- begin writing, again. that is, continue to work on the opus (for which i've found a title), but also be writing. be working with language. set aside regular time during the week for it. once the spring semester starts, i will have three classes at most, though hopefully less, to worry about. it will feel unbelievably light, i imagine. and i have a lust to kick out a draft of this book; it's wrapped around my brain like fierce ivy. i hope to write experimentally and aimlessly as well, as i will have the mental squarefootage for things to begin occuring to me again...

- get this house in order. that equals: the necessities of furniture and belongings to begin appearing in this new apartment of mine. a box spring. curtains. places to sit. things to eat off of. but also, even just as important: a desk or writing station. i am in this apartment because i didn't want to have to carve my own space out of someone else's home any longer, where i would hope, but not actually get around to, sitting down and doing some creative work. its a small place i have, but what little extra room there was ever going to be in whatever place i landed was always already devoted to this...which leads me to...

- the studio. finally unhindered by others, significant or otherwise, i have freedom of space, freedom of motion, freedom of quiet, freedom of late hours, freedom of mess. it takes more than ability to do something creative, unfortunately, but i no longer have to let anything stand in my way, or excuse my inaction. i need some more tools for course, but those can and will be gotten. nothing but myself and the level of my own dedication will be responsible for my productivity...

- the joe kubert school of comics and cartooning correspondence courses. i love comic books. they make up more of my being than the water content found inside every human, and i think that's at something like 90%. i'm so full of superheroes that the first and only very clear career desire i've ever had was to draw comic books. it's an extremely difficult business to break into nowadays; comics are at a peak like they've never been before, and were on the rise even before all these superhero movies came out. few publishers accept submissions anymore. but there are ways to get noticed and i feel an obligation to my eight year old self to take a crack at it, before i shuffle off to gradschool and become a stuffy ol' academic. i will need all the practice i can get, and the correspondence courses offer a perfect opportunity to brush up, as well as a good reason to get my ass in the studio and log some hours doing artwork....


these are the plans i've been developing while my life has been on hold since september. it is coincidental that i am able to voice them and focus on them at year's end. they are not resolutions, they are my resolves. it means the world and all my future to see them through.

sundered, scattered, fleeting

someday i'm going to write a book about all the people i've known -- i mean really known, in the way that two people share something wonderful and inexplicable with each other. those rare connections people fall into that are closer and more tender than anything produced by similar backrounds or comparable stations in life. those connections that arise spontaneously, almost psychically. natural as square pegs in square holes. filling in for you in spaces you didn't know were negative. missing pieces of identity. kindred.

i'd like to write a book about all of those people i've felt that connection with. it would be an interesting book, full of quirky, funny, sweet, intelligent, for-one-reason-or-another-remarkable people.

i would meticulously reconstruct all the laughter, conversations important and trivial, points we agreed or diverged upon; recount all the places we'd gone together, the trouble we'd gotten into, the quiet moments or the movies we'd seen; i would recall the members of their family that i had met, had dinner with, drank with.

i would do this for no other reason other than to simply remember; who they were, what we had; confirm its incidence.

because i don't know any of them anymore...

at a pace that could best be described as 'at a dog paddle'

...i am still working out my hatreds and my loves...

i will write whatsoever i goddamnwell please

1/24/07

In, from the front porch, and the cold follows me through the door. I am thinking: somewhere, in the sky, there is a new moon floating by that I can’t see. The shadow of my soul, going by; your face, turned away from me. Hot chocolate is not as good as coffee with a cigarette. Through them both I can taste my dinner; mostly the red wine marinade I made. It sticks, distinct, lingering on my palate. Like a crown of blood around my tongue. You know those stories of people that die of heartbreak? That will never be me. I think of you, when I think of the moon – your face is like it, beyond touching. Whatever beautiful light it casts down at me, though I might chase it through its own thrown shadows, I won’t catch it. It tingles on my skin, like aloe on a sunburn. I want to eat it, the peppermint moon, but…that is absurd. You’ve heard the stories of those people…the elderly, the aged, living full, married, childed lives of umbilical devotion to each other with silver anniversaries to look forward to. And then, one of them dies, and the other doesn’t know how to live or what else to do but to follow. That will not be me. I will have driven all the miles around the moon and back, listened to as much music as one could stack, know every distant inch between here and the moon before that is me.
When I die, it won’t be of old age and because of emphysema. Whatever chance I will leave behind a well worn corpse, it will be because of some great grace, but God knows I’ve lead a less than graceful life. When I die, it will not be because her spirit beckons me, no. that passes me every night. I am well acquainted with her leaving, I know her only by her going. I will not die because of some spirit I’ve lost. It will be because of a spirit I’ve finally found. When you die, you find yourself truly, and once you’ve found yourself, you are truly ready to die. It happens like that. You may not get the chance to say goodbye. It happens in pre-mortem comas, or in the eternity it takes for one to breathe his last, the exhale into infinity. You do not get a chance to bear the secret out into the fleshly life; it is not a secret the fleshly life can discover. When I go, I will have struck the gold of my soul, finally. A life’s work…completed in death. By dying. The loadbearing cornerstone of life. I will give my life to complete my life. I will die because of the soul I’ve found. I will follow because its truth beckons me. I think: she will continue marching black across the night shining light on far shores, and I cannot follow her with my death. I’ve only got one death to die. The task of my life awaits me, here, on this veined, life-glazed ground. To her I cannot cleave and die. Perhaps I do not love her enough for that. I do love her some; I love her still. But to die, it will not be to follow her leaving; it will be to finally meet my becoming.

...darker with the day

listening the end of the Nick Cave album "No More Shall We Part" as i start this...its mostly a winter album, or an album for sad days. today is close enough to both, and so it fits in the right places where you need to hear it; if you listen closely, you can hear lines like incisors, backed by rows and rows of thunderous and passionately delivered performance...it is sad, yet somehow bouyant. not hopeful, necessarily -- or at all, even; that certainly wouldn't do. i wouldn't enjoy listening to it half so much if that were true. there is no resolve to its sadnesses; rather, it just pushes through them, it continues. coincidentally, the line that plays as write this: "i was lookin for an end to this for some kind of closure, time moves so rapidly i had trouble keepin track of it."

perhaps there isn't much closure; perhaps there is no end as long as time keeps moving so rapidly.

i was in love with a girl for about ten years who grew to hate me so much that she has nothing but malice for me now in her crooked and abusive heart. i'm not sure what to do with that, and i wonder: how could i have misjudged somebody so completely? how did i ever think i wanted a family with someone so thoroughly disappointing? what was it that i saw in her in the first place? i guess even love at first sight is not beyond making an occasional joke. one of the last things i said to her was that i was afraid to lose her because i couldn't see how i had anything good to look forward to after her. she told me that it wasn't fair to put that kind of responsibility on her. it wasn't. but it was what i've felt for so long, i suppose the 10 years of hope and expectation were too much pressure as well. yet there was no one else with whom i wanted to share good things with more than her; the let down was almost too much to handle. now, i only wish her all the emptiness and misery she has wrapped herself up in.

now, she is taking me to court, for being mean to her; ironies abound. i find it almost funny that she was the one to cross lines of appropriateness when it came to what we said to one another. the hateful, evil things i've heard come out of her mouth were nothing short of astounding. i tried to call her out on it several times, but she either apparently thought she was justified in telling me she hoped i fucked around, caught aids and died, or she just didn't think it was an awful thing to say. more surprising was when she couldn't understand how furious it made me when she said she may be pregnant but that i would never know my child. how someone so psychologically and verbally abusive has the stones to take me to court for harrassment is just another pearl of shit on this string of reprehensable, conscienceless behavior. the other irony? just as i start waking up without the sickening, laser focused hatred for her blazing through my brain every morning, she slaps me with this legal bullshit, which will only now draw out the process of letting go that much longer. it is nothing but sheer malice on her part. she has no qualms about the serious harm she does towards other people as long as it serves her own ends. i want to be done with her as much as she wants to be done with me...there are other, new, and better people to love....for God's sakes, there are better people to hate; she is just vacuum and void.


so. maybe there is no resolve to this sadness; that i haven't been able to tidily package up and store the old hurts doesn't take away from the necessity of starting new and beautiful things, nor does it detract from their sweetness. their may be no resolve to the sad realities that grip me now other than that time passes quickly, and it may fade into the background behind what is next, what is new, what is more deserving of my attention and talents....where i put the past isn't nearly so important as where i put my feet, and what i point them toward...

seized today

i am incapacitated.