Temporary

After I wrote the previous entry, I decided it's time for a break. Shit's been a little dark in my head this month. I've been stressing myself out over all these words I want to write, all these projects I've come up with and all the deadlines I've assigned myself -- when I don't finish something in a matter of days, I get this awful darkness over my head and I can't snap out of it. I just sit there and think about how little I've done. I stay up all hours of the night staring at sentences that I want to believe in, but none of them seem to have any motivation of their own, and I don't have any to lend them.
I thought I had given myself plenty enough time to recover from my stint as a full-time writer, but now I'm pretty sure I haven't even started.
What I've been doing is experimenting with madness, on a level that feels far more serious and permanent than any darkness in my past. Depression is not something I've ever been good at, but I'm looking at it eye-level right now, and I finally understand how it's possible to stay in this state indefinitely. It's almost addicting to watch the world swirl around me while I sit still, waiting for it all to mean something...waiting for something to strike me enough to stand up and join the party.
And I know better than that. I've seen enough people in this state to understand that the thing I'm waiting for won't happen if I'm not standing up to look for it. I understand that waiting for the world to strike me is more selfish than sad, and that depression is what grows in the absence of awe. And jeez, there's just too much of that around me to justify my hiding in the garage this month, claiming a lack of inspiration.

I might still find it in me to write a blog entry here and there, but I won't be writing anything else, nor working on any of the dozens of giant writing projects I've been stockpiling. I just have to turn the lights on for awhile.

Lifetime Guarantee

There's a crack in the bricks.

A space created between
supporting concrete,
where spiders and other
delicious pestilence will
pass through to your sterile bedroom.

The patented mortar fell short  --
"but it was guaranteed
for a lifetime!"

You fell for it.

Of course, you know that a lifetime
didn't mean forever, don't you?
You know you can't take it with you?
There are no guarantees or lifetimes
in the eternity you're sure that your soul will float off to
and that mortar doesn't care what a lifetime
means to you.

Still, we like those kinds of words;
the ones that anchor us
to things we think
are too heavy,
too strong,
too important
to crack
or fail;
to die
and rot.
Like earth and concrete
and the stuff that
glues it all together.

It's not false advertising, you know;
they meant what they said.
At the end of your life,
there will be no need
to shop for mortar.

Guaranteed.

 

I went into the old War Room today.

 A choir of keyboard taps and cellphone buzzes scored the approaching deadline as the musky scent of questionable editor hygiene filled the air. The hiss of that blasted overhead fluorescent light was familiarly missing; an absence that good editors have taken comfort in during after-hours panic sessions. Their faces glowed in the wake of laptop screens, both aware of the other's presence, yet silent in understood acknowledgement.

No other room on earth has the ability to make me more aware that it's Monday. And, boy, did that produce a malfunction in my nostalgia valve.

I didn't miss the room so much as I was overcome with gratitude for the time I spent inside of it; for all the things I learned in it and for all the amazing people I met through it. At its crux, it provided a location for my feet when they had no ground to stand on, during times so unstable and adventurous that I wasn't sure if the whole world had been built on a foundation of eggshells. It was alive and the paint was always wet and willing to be mixed with any color we chose; it was creation and destruction, never equal parts of either, and the scale only balanced once a week when we were reminded that it was our job to produce a newspaper from all that chaos.

And out of that chaos, I came to understand, among other things, what it means to have a case of the Mondays.

For the Love of the Batman

What I like about the Batman is that he doesn't have any superpowers, and neither do his enemies. They've all just been driven mad by their own demons, the Batman included. It's an exaggerated (and beautiful) way to say that events and circumstances go a long way towards building worldviews, and a great reminder that everyone is a human being before they look like the Joker to us. And I think it's an awesome analogy to our two party system in the year of our Lord, 2012 AD.

I hate politics with a greater fury than I hate the Victorian period of literature. As such, this is all I'll say on the matter.

Republicans on the payroll know their voters well, and tend to target peoples' deepest fears/prejudices/issues, and can cast a net to pull in emotionally-charged votes. They're aiming the rhetoric at people who work their lives away for their families, people who either didn't go to college or went with a one-track mind. They're aiming at people who weren't curious/exposed to/didn't give a shit about the roots of human philosophy or science. People who don't think because no one pays them for it. Because they've avoided challenging their long-held notions about the world, those kinds of folks are more likely to have prejudices, irrational fears, and...and, fuck; fuck them for directly appealing to religious people, because devotion to religious law is so often black-and-white, and they know a Christian has to fucking vote for the guy who says "God" more frequently.

I know everyone is responsible for their own morality and information, but the truly religious are a lot more complicated than that. For instance, those Christians who actually are Christ-like...you know, the ones who devote their lives to God and not CNN...they hear Romney say he's against killing babies, and that the incumbent is somehow not against it, and that is a clear-cut choice. No matter what bottomless puddle of shit flows from anyone's mouth after that, the Christian is going to vote for the "not a baby killer" and go back to his/her life of quiet devotion. Good people get good things from the Bible, but goddamn if I don't wish Eve's apple had come from Some. Other. Fucking. Tree. And, well, the political Christians deserve whatever hell they believe in. I hope it's worse than they think.

All the while, Dems over here are cursed with that blasted "greater good" handicap that assumes people would help somebody in need, if given the chance. A la the Batman. Ever notice that the Batman is always up against a bunch of brainwashed and/or rich cronies along with the supervillain? The greater good is something everyone agrees with, but when it comes to saving one's own ass, everyone's just gonna assume Batman's taking care of it. Which he usually is, with the help of technology, engineering, billions of dollars, one old Alfred, and...knowledge. And he is not thanked. They aren't without their flaws, the donkey asses; but shit, I'd vote for Bill Clinton again over these two.

It sucks that he had to remind everybody that we're all growed-up now -- we can stop spitting spitballs at the other side of the room now, but now everybody get out your kinder-mats because it's naptime. Jesus.

The thing that makes it a handicap in this political climate is the charged atmosphere. Republicans are now vying for emotional votes IN LIEU of intelligent and informed decisions, because if they scare their target audience enough, those people will be voting in some sort of survival mode in a world where money is evaporating and they'll have to pay for everyone's birth control -- surely, in that world, being taxed for a more egalitarian society sounds like crazy talk, because it means they'd have to change their entire worldviews to be happy with it. Wars are started and cultures are vaporized over challenged worldviews, and the elephant in the room says it's the only thing that can save us from actually pursuing real knowledge. God for...bade, I guess.

Most lifelong repubs I know are acting like...fucking, Reivers from Firefly or something! They, like the Reivers, have gone to the edge of the universe, and have been driven mad from staring into the abyss for too long. When they read anything good about Obama -- or even just his name -- I could swear it wasn't this bad before. "He's a Muslim! He aborts babies! He gives all my money to black people on welfare because I'm a racist! [b]Shoot 'im![/b]" It's like Obama is the Viet Cong or some shit, where the US soldiers had to strip an entire nation's population of their value as human beings and simply called them all "Charlie," because that's the only way they could live with themselves after killing mothers and children. Obama isn't booby-trapping the rainforests in Viet Nam, but he gets unchecked hatred from the ever-forgetting elephants. Without all that time-consuming fact checking, of course.

I'm not campaigning for Obama or anything, even though he's asked me to dinner a billion times this month, but that kind of behavior from the conservative side says a lot more about today's Repub mindset than it does about Obama's first term. If I didn't know anything Obama did in his four years, I'd see Jesus regretting his crucifixion at the sight of the disgusting horde he died for, and I'd fucking vote for whoever they aren't supporting. It's repulsive. And with a sack like Romney, pushing the country into thinking America is falling apart is really his only fucking shot at it. A man with no provable moral character, no regard for facts, and no plan to help anyone other than himself.

I'd compare the Joker to Romney as an analogy, but I like the Joker too much. At least he admits he's fucking shit up because he doesn't believe in anything, and he'd never run for POTUS in a million years. I respect that in a man.

I'm Gonna Leave With You

in the summer that you came there was 

something eating everyone

in the sunshine fun was low

we couldn't greet you

with a simple hello

and the watchers of the flood

were busy in their chambers

making sure there was new blood

to sustain their dying veins

but i believed you

no need for further questioning

i'm gonna leave with you

you can teach me all you know

which way will we go now

in our trip to higher windows

i really don't know now

i really don't know

These Are A Few Of My Favorite Things

1. Cold snaps; the kind that really do feel like a "snap;" they remind me of snapping light sticks on night hikes during Girl Scout camping trips. When the weather changes here, it shocks people into saying more interesting sentences. I say far more interesting things when the temperature has just dropped 20 degrees, and people I bump into are more likely to start interesting conversations. As a result, I start thinking about all the wonderful, interesting people in my life that I haven't had recent one-on-ones with, and that makes me realize how many wonderful, interesting people I have yet to meet. The nugget I always end up with is a delightful crescendo of appreciation for the world, and humanity at large; optimistic to a degree capable of drowning out the negative parts -- all the "what is the world coming to?" that has carbonized in the heat of summer.

2. Conversations in which I end up accidentally teaching myself something; the ones where, in the heat of advice-giving, I hear something come out of my mouth that I've never thought before that moment, and something clicks in my head and I realize I've just given myself an explanation that I didn't know I needed. Tonight, I answered a question about myself that I'd never thought to ask before. Josh disputed my comment that I like the history of music more than I like the music itself (which I had also just realized). But because he challenged my statement, I was challenged to explain what made it true -- why am I so interested in the making of music when I rarely remember to turn on the radio in my car?
After a few half-sentences, I said, "Because I'm interested in human history, and our history is hidden in music...it sings our own history back to us."

3. Waiting tables. So I might have gotten lucky with the place I work. The service industry is so famously disgruntled, and behind the safety of kitchen doors, those who haven't been on both sides of them are always blamed as the enemy. After seven years on both sides, I don't see it that way anymore.
Sometimes, I think the reason servers get so angry is because the American gratuity system doesn't allow us to consistently earn what we think our time is worth -- in fact, there are times when there's absolutely nothing we can do to earn a decent tip from a cheap table -- and the server rage only festers when we begin to let ourselves think that a tip is a measure of our worth. I've been treated like a child, a heathen, a leper, a slave, an idiot, and a female object in my years as a server, and I went through a period when my self-esteem would plummet when an unassuming friend would say something like, "How hard could your job possibly be?" It was hard to face the futility of explaining how hard my job could possibly be to someone who has not only never done it, but had no real desire to understand. Until a person has been on the standing side of the table, they'll likely never grasp the experience of a job that essentially requires you to walk up to a group of hungry strangers and ask them to judge you on any criteria they desire, decide what "your job" entails, and then pay you at a rate of their choosing, anywhere from eight to 20 times a day.  "Your job is just to bring people their food and refill their drinks, right?"
Even though it sucks sometimes, when a table engages me in a more thought-provoking conversation than many people get from their closest friends, I feel like I have the best job in the world. And instead of the normal grumbling about a mediocre tip as I clear their table an hour after closing time, I'm reminded that real human connections can't be bought, and that the conversation I've just had with a few strangers should never, ever be judged in dollars.
I'm not sure when it changed, but a low number on the tip line doesn't do anything to me anymore -- at least not psychologically. I might leave a five-hour shift with three bucks, but watching a normally civil human being as he justifies (or doesn't think anything of) his sub-human treatment of a stranger in public is the real gold I leave with -- he has taught me something about humanity that he won't ever understand, because he'll never be brave enough to put an apron on and look it in the eye.
For instance, tonight I waited on a guy who told me he thinks people who don't like the Beatles are uncultured idiots, due to the factual superiority (record sales) of the Beatles discography. I told him that if he's using record sales as a measure of how great a band is, he'll probably never be proven wrong, but only because nobody buys records anymore.
He said, "Yeah, so I'm right, right?"
I saw the exchange, and the ensuing lame tip, as ever more proof that monetary exchanges can't possibly reflect the worth of a human being -- not creative talent, musicianship, nor work ethic; not argumentative prowess nor character -- which is something a lot of people say, but waiting tables has shown me that very few people truly believe it, and even fewer realize the extent to which they've bought into the opposite. Some customers get such a thrill from knowing they control their server's income, I wonder what hell their private lives are.
Perspective is humanity's true currency, and though the service industry isn't the only way to earn it, I'd have a lot less of it if I'd gotten some other job when I was 19.

Blue Moon

The hurricane has gone, left us with new dead wood to sand down into nostalgia nightstands that will later hold our room-temp coffee over rehashed stories. When the wind is at its strongest, so are we; and when the debris is settled against our bedroom windowpanes, begging for amnesty, we lie here in our bed next to each other, commas in a world otherwise pauseless.

I have loved you all my life.