Flotsam

[Flotsam is a series of catch-all posts that can include just about anything. If it seems even more random than the rest of the posts, then it'll likely wash ashore here.]

It was summer, so you let your hair grow long

and learned to shout secrets at the starts

spending nights cross-legged in the living room

in sweat soaked t-shirts in a size too big

Until you caught yourself in the mirror

feeling a little bit taller, not quite

recognizing the way your eyes seemed blurred

and how jokes and unrequited crushes aren’t as funny any more

Because you are sitting in a circle with strangers

playing old video games from when you were a child

drinking beer like you are old and grown

and tired when inside you are racing, itching

Desperate to stop (please stop!) and escape

into the sun, to feel the aching burn

against your skin, to be

furious and fragile and free

Big Pink Kraken

Existence Like A Sunset

[Existence Like a Sunset is a continuing collection of pieces with different themes. The hope is that in the end all of these themes will merge into a single unifying one. This is the first part for the theme Alone.]

Alone #1

Sunlight crawls through the vertical blinds landing on a blue wooden chair. The chair sits in a corner next to the entrance of the kitchen. The sunlight having moved throughout the apartment, touching tables and plants, some clothes lying on the back of the couch drying in the front of the fan, briefly examined corners where ceiling meets wall, a stack of books, computer, lingers on a black and white photograph, perhaps recalling the day it created the image for someone, and finally it seems, as if tired of its journey, decides to rest on and around that blue chair. The chair seems to pull all of the remaining, weak light to itself wanting to be noticed. It’s just a chair though. Nothing about it is special. As far as chairs go, you might walk past it a hundred times, dimly aware of its existence. It takes up space after all. You never actually sit, except perhaps on a whim, and then for only a short time. It isn’t very comfortable. On the rare occasion a group gathers, someone may need to sit in it, glad for its presence. They never think about the chair after its purpose is complete nor choose to return to it when those people have moved on and other options exist. Yet there it sits, the blue chair, in the corner beneath a framed college degree. If it were to break or a desire to put something more pleasing to look at took hold, or if something came along with more function, the blue chair would be discarded, perhaps to the trash bin or sat on the curb to find its way to another apartment . There it would sit in a similar corner, surrounded by other plants and books, another couch beside it, different photos on the walls, and when it happens, sat upon when another group gathers, but only briefly. I suddenly have an urge to get up from the couch, cross the room, and sit on the blue chair, but I know I won’t. The light that pools around it is dimming, photons one by one, racing off to dance elsewhere, their respite over. Soon all of the light will be gone and there will be nothing to draw any attention to it, and it will be what it is, always has been, and forever will be: a wooden blue chair tucked away in an unimportant corner of my life.

Untitled #1

I'm working on an idea for a story that came to me while travelling back home from my last visit. The story will probably lean toward the sci-fi genre. It may also be a sloppy metaphor for mental illness and how society perceives those labeled “crazy.”

I’ve just begun outlining it in my mind, but I really like the concept. One of the main characters is bipolar. He is trying to determine if what he’s experiencing is real or in his head. At one point he has a conversation withh a  mysterious figure he meets. The conversation  is about who this mysterious person really is. He claims to be an “angel,” and that he's there to help. This snippet of dialogue came to me while driving and listening to music (as many of my ideas do). It’s lifted from the whole conversation so you don't really get a glimpse into what’s going on, but I like it one its own.

“Where’s your halo? You’re wings?" he asked, not even trying to hide his sarcasm.

“Those are your stories, your fables." the man replied. He paused, as if grasping for something to add, then continued. "Our story is quite a bit different. We are the quantum reality, not separate objective observers of it.”

“Sounds very Zen.”

All humor left the man's face even though there had been none in his voice. “He was you before you ever existed.”

If Travel Is Searching: Alone

[If Travel is Searching is the working title for my part of a collaborative writing project with E T A Nemo and the reason this blog exists. For more information on the project, see this POST]

There is a section in the story that has to do with being alone. Well, to be precise, it has to do with the difference between loneliness and being alone. The character is traveling and he’s thinking back on the moment when the lights went out, when everything changed. I used a moment from my life to get at this

I had just returned from a camping trip with two friends. It was a really crazy, but overall amazing experience. It was one of those experiences that you don't fully appreciate until it's over.

When you are lonely, you can only think in the moment. It’s the whole universe you occupy. You are solidly in your own thoughts and anything outside really can't register as real or tangible. You can try to compare what you’re thinking about to other things either past or future, but those things can't penetrate into that place you occupy. If something comes along to knock you out of that Zen like focus, you get carrying away with it. You don’t comprehend that something is here, right now, that has pulled you out of the doldrums of loneliness. You go from one Zen state to another. You ride a high. You don’t even think about where you had been. And then, when it is over, you’re deposited right back to where you were before the experience carrying you off. It actually becomes worse, because now, along with your loneliness you get another thing to viscerally compare it to. You were at one low point, then you were swept up in a moment that was the polar opposite of how you were feeling. Now you are back to loneliness with the awareness of how you could feel, of how you could not be lonely. It’s a shock to your being, your perception of the world. The end result is loneliness worse than the original.

I had been feeling this way before this camping trip was thrown together at the last moment, and it pulled me out of that place and into an exciting adventure with two fun people I cared for. When we returned and they left for home, I was instantly dropped back into the world that was there before I had left. I wandered around my apartment as darkness fell, fighting the all-encompassing feeling. Suddenly there was a blackout in my neighborhood. All the power went off for as far as I could see, leaving me with one half burned candle and a nearly dead flashlight. I paced a bit in the dim glow of the candle. I walked out onto the street, but there were no voices, no people out on their porches. I waslonely. Now I was alone in addition. I was alone with my loneliness. It was one of the most terrifying moments I’ve ever experienced. I walked down the street to get out of the tomb of my apartment. I had to fight off panic as I walked toward the light I saw a few blocks away. Once I entered the glow of streetlamps outside of the blackout, a few people were walking about, unaware of the dead zone I had just exited from. I stopped, content that the world hadn’t abandoned me, and walked back to my apartment. There the feeling descended upon me once more.

I used this to flesh out the character’s experience in the story. Of course, his blackout is all-encompassing and total, but the feelings he recall stem from my own. Loneliness and Alone. Two words we use almost interchangeably. Two words that are connected and sometimes co-exist, but at the core lies the difference between depression and stark, otherworldly terror.

Mix Tape Memories: Volume 1

[Mix Tape Memories is a multi-part series of posts looking at music that is so important to me that it seems to have affected my life or outlook on it.]

“The problem with thinking about your own past is you forget its genesis and start to feel useless awe towards your earlier self.”    - Brian Eno

There are only a few.

Tens of thousands of songs have washed over me. They’ve flitted by barely noticed. They’ve hovered about, hummed, only to continue past on the breeze never to be thought of again. They’ve slammed into me like a hurricane altering my landscape, not always for the better. They’ve wiggled into my brain, despite erecting a tower of iron will to keep them out. And a few…well, it seems a few have woven into the double helix of my being, becoming part of me.

This continuing series will explore some of those few. They’re not always good. Some of them I don’t even like that much anymore. Some I still hit repeat to hear a second time, even though I’ve heard them more times than I can count. There really is no order to these, nothing chronological or theme driven; well, not intentionally anyway. Perhaps you’ll find some along the way.

(I’m fully aware of the fact that a Radiohead song worms its way into nearly every playlist I’ve ever made. I’m also fully aware of how much fun it is for certain people to bring up this fact. To provide joy in your life, I’m committed to placing one in every one of these installments.)

VOLUME 1

“Wave of Mutilation”                                   The Pixies                                                         Doolittle

This was one of those gateway drug songs. I’m pretty certain this was the first Pixies song that I heard and listened to over and over, thanks to Pump Up the Volume. (Oh the halcyon days when Christian Slater was cute and dated Winona Ryder) This led to a passionate love affair with Frank Black/Black Francis and crew. Memories of driving my first car at 16 to the mall in Huntington, WV with my best friend Paul. Cut me some slack…it was Appalachia. Where else do you go when skipping school? It was either that or drinking beers at the local hot spot: the Dairy Queen parking lot.

LYRICS              

                                                   

[POP-UP MIX TAPE]

Pixies front man, Francis, described the song as being about "Japanese businessmen doing murder-suicides with their families because they'd failed in business, and they're driving off a pier into the ocean."

“A Better Son/Daughter”                            Rilo Kiley                         The Execution of All Things

  

The unofficial anthem for Depressives since 2002. I already loved this song, but when in one of my “delicate states” during the ’08 election while working in Ann Arbor, MI, one of my organizers took me to see Rilo Kiley after work. I was barely holding it together, working 12-16 hour days, six days a week, travelling between five cities running offices, and technically not even having a permanent address for six months. Seeing this song performed live somehow struck me like a tuning fork. I swam in it. Time slowed and the song stretched and warped and created a bubble in time. All of this and I was not even on drugs. To this day, when I hit one of those “lows  so extreme that the good seems fucking cheap,” this song holds as much a chance of pulling me up as a handful of Klonapen.

                                                                      LYRICS            

                                          

[POP-UP MIX TAPE]

The album that “A Better Son/Daughter” appears on, The Execution of All Things is strung together by a song that is broken into pieces and that trails between several tracks. Called "And That’s How I Choose to Remember It", it tells the story of lead singer Jenny Lewis' childhood and her parents' divorce. This theme is visited throughout the album, which is lyrically filled with childhood recollections of loss, displacement, anger and hopelessness.

“Everybody Wants to Rule the World”               Tears for Fears             Songs From the Big Chair

One of the earliest ones. A hot summer, one of those impossible summers that only exists in the memory of your childhood, endless and full of those things that have become clichés to our adult selves. Music was playing. A festival. I was painfully shy. Thousands of people. Excitement and fear mingling impossibly together. Bright banners or possibly flags. My first encounter with people from another country. And that music playing. Background really. Until this song somehow cut through all of the chaos and possibility. I don’t remember actually stopping and listening to it exactly. It just was. And is.

LYRICS        

[POP-UP MIX TAPE]

Ironically, considering the song's overwhelming success, "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" was somewhat of an afterthought during the recording of Songs from the Big Chair. According to Roland Orzabal, he initially regarded the song as a lightweight that would not fit with the rest of the album. It was producer Chris Hughes who convinced him to try recording it, in a calculated effort to cross over into American chart success.

“Nemesis”                                        Shriekback                                                      Oil & Gold

If my brother is responsible for introducing me to the love of and depth and breadth of music, then “Nemesis” was my training wheels to explore on my own. The solid base he provided led me to explore early 80s Goth and Industrial. I also found my first way to communicate with others with some measure of confidence.

I met brothers Scott and Todd, friends of Jason, the de facto leader of my band of misfit toys. I instantly was enamored with the two of them (my proto-straight boy crushes). I had no way to connect with them. What did I have to talk about that they would find interesting? My foray into discovering new music on my own had produced Sisters of Mercy and their album Floodland. That was to become my currency. The brothers were music geeks, and I offered Sisters of Mercy. They re-paid with Shriekback. “Nemesis,” it turned out, was more than a fair trade. My first transaction complete, I opened up and made friends with two people I had previously elevated far above me.

LYRICS       

[POP-UP MIX TAPE]

The song "Nemesis" is apparently about the hypothetical star orbiting the Sun, although the video makes it clear that the comic-book anti-hero Nemesis the Warlock was also on the band's mind.

“Subterranean Homesick Alien”                Radiohead                                      OK Computer

My first Radiohead entry (and obviously not the last). The narrative of this song is what struck me. The dreamer is granted an amazing experience and on return is not believed. Upon first hearing this song, I instantly related. I may or may not have played it while “on a country lane, late at night while I’m driving.” Oh, who are we kidding? Of course I did.

One part of the lyrics has always stuck out to me and stymied me as to the meaning. I see two options, but it’s most likely I created the second option:

“Take me on board their beautiful ship

  Show me the world as I'd love to see it”

Now the obvious choice, I think, is that he sees the world from high above, from a perspective only ever imagined. I like to think, however, that it also means they show him the world in a better state, more peaceful, with meaning and hope. I suppose it could mean either or both. It’s one of those things I don’t want to know the answer to or even if there is an answer. Each time I drive down that country lane, late at night, with just slightly more than a casual glance at the stars, I want to hold that sliver of wonder.

LYRICS

[POP-UP MIX TAPE]

The title is a reference to the Bob Dylan song "Subterranean Homesick Blues", and the science fiction-inspired song describes an isolated narrator who fantasizes about being abducted by extraterrestrials. The narrator speculates that, upon returning to Earth, his friends would not believe his story and he would remain a misfit. The lyrics were inspired by a school assignment from Thom Yorke's time at Abingdon School to write a piece of "Martian poetry", a British literary movement of works that humorously re-contextualizes mundane aspects of human life from an alien "Martian" perspective.

LISTEN

C sharp or B flat

Imagine your whole life up to this moment. All of the places you’ve been, people you’ve met, experiences, sounds, sights that words cannot begin to describe. The foods, the smell that magically warps you back to an earlier time, the solitary moments – those of almost Zen-like stillness and those so terrible they shake the core of your existence. The teacher that struck a chord so deep it never existed until that moment of awakening. The sublime, the banal, the mundane, and the transcendental.

Now, which of these are so integral to you, so woven into the “you,” that if they were suddenly erased, you would be a different person?

There’s probably many. And there’s probably many that you don’t even know affected you so deeply. And there’s probably many that you would list that actually didn’t have as big an impact as you think.

Today I was coming back from the store and listening to music. For some reason, I started imagining that I was playing each of the songs to someone I didn’t know. A combination of wanting to impress this person and showcase important songs that meant something to me began to shape. This led me to think about songs and artists that were part of the fabric of “me;" music, if erased from my past, would inevitably change who I am today.

I’ve decided to put together a list of some of these songs. I’m hoping to break it down into several chapters consisting of about ten songs and a little about each one. It’s actually a lot harder than I thought it would be when I came up with the idea, to distill down to the songs that really fit. Hundreds of songs come to mind, but do they really mean so much that they helped shape who I am?  Well, let’s give it a shot. Probably not. It may end up being a shorter list than I imagined. The first chapter will follow as soon as I finish obsessing over the first list...

The detour widens . . .

In my last post I promised to expound a bit on where I think my propensities for narrative and observation stemmed from.  I've spent most of the morning procrastinating on follow-through because I don't want this to sound cloying or self-pitying.  Apologies if it does.  Here goes . . .

A brief detour . . .

Along with BP, I also only have the vaguest idea of what exactly this project will turn out to be.  All I can say at this point is that it speaks to two of my favorite things; narratives, and observing.  I plan to elaborate on this in a future post but, as a colleague of mine once pointed out, there is a fine line between being a misfit and the field of Anthropology.  In order to escape loneliness and isolation I took refuge in creating stories in my head that often served as commentaries of a sort on the world around me.  I also took joy in observing my classmates during recess, running through green and possibly tick-ridden fields, actually enjoying the opportunity to race and play sports.  During high school this would continue as I observed my more extroverted friends (or the closest approximation of "friends" thereof).

Perhaps this project will serve as a way of articulating these points.  Perhaps it will be an exercise in crafting a narrative.  Perhaps it will be both, or neither.  I'll probably find out at about the same time BP (and the rest of you, whoever you may be) do.

E T A Nemo

And We're Off

The road meanders on and on...

A conversation begins here. I don’t know where it leads. I don’t know what it will be about. It will be a back and forth between myself and E T A Nemo about writing primarily. It will also be a rant, a re-telling of a dream, a query, a random firing of tired synapses. At some point it will be a shopping list. It will be honest though. Or as honest as honesty gets..

When I was young, I shared a bedroom with my older brother. Occasionally, he would come over to my bed and tell me stories. A window was across the room from my bed, and when the moon was bright, its light would spill onto the wall beside me. This became the canvass for many of the stories. My brother would cast shadows with his hands, arms, or whatever cast aside toy was in reach. These shadows came to life on that pale screen and meandered from tale to tale. He narrated the stories. Sometimes I would sit and listen to him, silent, my eyes wide. Sometimes though, his voice would fade away and I would breathe story into the images myself. The shadows rarely looked like the things he described (especially the bald-headed, electrical, tree sitting newt). It didn’t matter. I remember one night in particular when magic sprang from the elm tree outside the window as the spring whirlygigs (a scientific term) drifted down and cast their shadows on the wall, a snowy backdrop for the creatures leaping about.

What is this road and where does it go? Where will it take me?

I don’t know where it ultimately leads. I’m certain at some point, I’ll take a side point and wander down another road leaving this one to continue without me. I think the road will turn out to be like those shadows dancing about on my childohood wall. Our conversation will cast the shadows, and if anyone happens to be lying under the window, they will make their own story from it.

Let’s start walking.

[For a little bit more about the genesis of this project, read this POST, or you can read them in order and come to it on your own. Either way, enjoy!]