Indie's Inanities

IG's FiresideBall Chat Number One


A'ight. As a personal opinon response to the joke ridiculous crap shit going on in our peachy little court system with

(cue booming People's Court announcer voice)

THE NORTH PACIFIC vs. INDIEGIRL

[/fire & lightning sound effects]

I would like to tell y'all a story:

[lilting Masterpiece Theater-type background music]

Once upon a time there was this Girl. She fell in love with a Boy. Who also happened to be in love with her.

The Boy and the Girl met at this really cool place where they both happened to hang out. A small hideout way up in the virtual mountains. Owned and operated by a proprietor who went by the name "Blackwolf."

Said Boy and Girl wound up talking a lot, interacting with each other and becoming rather good friends. Your standard love-prep scenario. Romance and whatnot eventually ensued. But the relationship was not to be. The Girl wasn't completely honest, and the Boy was, in all honesty, a jerk Ass. (Which was ironic.)

The split-up was hard. Miscommunicative, misunderstood, and silent. In all of that quiet and brooding over slighted feelings, the Girl sowed and reaped despair while the Ass bore and nurtured a hairy, growling Grudge. (The Girl should have seen this coming, because the evidence of previous Grudges was scrawled in bloody gashes across several other relationships of his she'd witnessed.)

In the interim of the beginning and ending of this tragic romance, the Girl had encouraged the Boy's removal to her native land, a place called The North Pacific. He came enthusiastically and entrenched himself in the community that was not his land of birth. It was a time of fun and laughter.

But alas, all good things must come to an end. And this good thing ended with a crash and burning. The Girl fled the land, wishing to disassociate her from all the painful memories seared into the things she loved by the taint of his presence. The Ass reveled in his new domain.

Unexpected, and fitfully, (as she was wont to be) the Girl returned. She missed her friends and neighbors. The happy home that she had grown to become a blissful part of. She had wandered far and wide and felt no country with the same draw as the place of her birth. Upon returning, she was quick to realize that the Ass had not forgiven her of their misunderstanding. Every step she took, she was tracked and hounded by the enormous monstrous Grudge the Ass would sic on her. No corner she turned was empty of it flying feral, rabid in her face. It was, for all intents and purposes, uncomfortable. This - piled upon the woe betiding her other life - robbed, raped, and pillaged her once-refuge. She understood that he wanted her miserable. She understood that she would never be forgiven. She was forced to leave again.

She returned: reborn, stronger, more herself, and more ready to face the Ass and his Grudge than she had heretofore been. Once again she was assimilated into the warm embrace of friends and family. She learned to laugh at and ignore the Grudge when she felt its presence nipping at her heels. It had grown fat and lazy in her absence, with it's prey so far out of reach. The Ass however, settled upon his own sarcastic antics to convince the Girl that her presence was unwanted, resented by him. As she talked with, bonded, and befriended the natives; settled in comfortably, reestablishing herself and proving that she had moved on, the Ass nurtured his discomfort into deeper loathing, and sharpened his sting of resentment.

How dare she get over him. How dare she be happy, find happiness, enjoy herself in a home he had very literally fought her from.

And more - how dare she love again. You see, the girl had met a New Boy. An Old Friend, and they talked. They laughed. They flirted, and perhaps, in it, the Ass saw something more real than what he had shared with her as a Boy. He disliked the way she could be herself and still find someone who wanted that. Who grew to know her, and love her in a way similar to his, and yet wholly different. It irked him to see her smiling, and know he had no part in it. To see that the parts of him once carved into her had scarred over and grown smoothe. That she didn't overattend her wounds and keep them open, the way he was so wont to do with his own.

It was this that prompted the Ass to find occasion to remind her of his presence. Of the fact that he had the power to make her miserable. He wanted her failures in her face, and he wanted to be the one to shove them there. He, perhaps without realizing it and in a rather indirect way, wanted to see her hurting. He wanted her friends to see her the way he saw her and to flay her alive with her flaws, with her brokenness. Finagling his way into the cogs and gears of the machines she had to live with.

Oh, but it was cunning, wasn't it? The guise so wholly unpretentious - so right. So, so civic minded. How the Ass would enjoy the look at her from horseback, trodding his high road. To see her stripped and ragged, pleaing for some sort of understanding. What a sight it would be, no?
Click to expand...


It's a funny thing, watching a once-friend fall...up. So convinced that weaseling their purposes, machinations, into a full-fledged communal shunning, backed by law and powerful allies somehow makes all that they're doing feel so right to them. To watch them search fervently for the answer, which comes rapping at the door only to hear them shout, "Go away! I'm looking for the answer!" and the answer goes away.

It's a funny thing.

The answer is, at the end of the day, the Ass goes home to himself and his Grudges. And that's the thing that he really resents.
 
r2048252209.jpg
 
Democratic Donkeys:
If Indiegirl (and her current internet boyfriend) wants to air her grievances in public then i'll have to defend myself in public also.
Click to expand...
Psh. Who said it was you? The only reason anyone would know it was you I was talking about would be because you said something, not me. So technically it's not my fault.

Also, I think it's kind of funny that OPA saying "fuck" is more offensive than you insulting my religion. You bitter, angry, sad little boy. Suck it up and stop being such a wanker. Grow some skin and start taking it the way you dish it out.
 
...

*OPArsenal is keeping his mouth shut*

It seems the best thing is to keep quiet.

*OPArsenal starts to say, "Serenity now..."*
 
You know, as there is a story involving Buddha that would offer sage advice about this situation, but I can't remember it.

Let us just assume that once again, I am all knowing and mighty and you are all blessed and enlightened by my words.

*wanders off*
 
I think we have all learned a valuable lesson today. I suggest we ignore it and burn the place down.
 
I am aquiver, I am happy, I am fucking schoolgirly giddy at the prospect of what Tuesday will bring with the launch of the New Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo DS.

(CW)OP out.
 
And some writing from this past week (or two)...


did i tell him
i dreamed of him -
two,
three nights ago?

dreamt of finding
the At Last -
the book

of us together.

i stood with him,
half-clothed in the street.
toes and nosetips
touching,
our fingers all
intertwined.

how carefully
i devoured
his kissing me.

how kissfully we
consumed the last inches
of our closeness,
our clothelessness.

bare at the front
of the world,
we consummated our arriving -

burned our completed
existence
into each grassblade
asphalt air petal eye.

detail and stopping
in orbit beyond us.

we were still,
we were still.

this world
was the spinning.




You had to be a 30 year-old redneck -
the telling will always
begin that way.

Between hand-drawn flags
and soccerfan enthusiasm;
your Orange Park arsenal -
(Sarcasm-O-Blaster set to "rancor")

Dare I say,
you tripped an ego fantastic -
spread-eagle into me.

It was not those things.
They passed with Poe,
her faded Victorian, erm -
brothel?
into twoslit erasing.

So many small importants
of the here, even the now.
What is it we have carved
into the flying calendar boxes?

I glimpse it spinning on the tail-end
of your whispers;
slow-dived between sleeping breaths.

You begged for 50 years,
when I mentioned things like Penny
Arcade, Castlevania, Battlefield 2.

It started as pretend.

The night before surgery,
you begged 50 still,
and I cupped it behind fingers.

I distilled my progressing
with the syrupy peaches -
both put up in September.

Christmas would come soon enough,
I only needed to be jarred
and hid.

Love, you, and your food-storage
scouring.
The way I was sloshed,
dropped into sunlight
on the countertop.

Your hunger so specific
to me and these moments.




We talk, how
do we talk?
We never stop
talking.

It builds, this
thing we carved
and set rolling.
Grown,
growable...
we never stop growing.

I finger the delicate
lights inside our hands.
Braiding the strands
of him between memory
and moment.

You wrestle it all
into a form of keeping,
of being keep-worthy.

I bury us in me.
So bright and irreplacable.




can i be the poet
so disentangled
in myself to pick
and addle
the cups of some pertinence?

i writhe
in the cradle
of her requesting.

birth one here for me,
now.

her impositious self -
so sure of
my spitting.

so i do.
and it folds
so easily
into the others.

can't the colour,
timing,
make it different?




but i touched nothing,
it was damp.
smelled badly.

i read nothing,
only moved things -
garbage, uselessness.

i wait in the moments
you aren't here
to trim your frayed edges.

your presence during
the amputation...
more traumatic, than
waking to the missing limb.

perhaps my invasion
will motivate your re-ordering
whatever it is, this world.

i will ascribe the value
to your collecting,
if i am the one
providing the boxes.
 
I changed my mind - these are my current favorite songs, by one of my very favorite band/artists: Casiotone for the Painfully Alone


Jeane, If You're Ever In Portland

back in the town
of pulled-out lungs, shot eardrums
misplaced kisses
and someone who misses...
you met me in kansas.

the second i got out of the van
i saw you giving your cash to the doorman
i saw the x on your hand
i knew you were the one
i knew you would understand.

and oh, i wish we could have talked all night
we had to be in illnois by daylight
and what i wouldn't give to be your man
but i can't break up with the band

you see, there must be more than letters and phone calls
you say you'll come see me when the snow falls,
you say you'll come see me when the snow falls.

it was good to meet in kansas,
but that's not home
and we sigh when we're on the phone
but the voice in my ear
says it wouldn't be the same if you moved here
but it's just miles, so many miles
it's just miles and miles and miles and miles and miles



The Subway Home

it gets worse before it gets better
that's what your best friend said in the letter.
and all her pictures are still on the shelf,
you're barely making rent by yourself;
your mom is worried for your health.

you said it right from the start:
these sorts of things fall apart.
you take the subway home after work.
from your job as a retail clerk.

you're spending all the money you saved -
records keep the quiet away.
up all night and sleep all day.
you said it right from the start,
these sorts of things fall apart.
 
Yes it does.

Tycho:
I'd love to say that one of those things was the Wii, but you need to understand that even if you wait in the longest line of E3, investing more than an hour in a kind of convention stasis, there is no guarantee that you will be able to get your hands on the system.  This is because once you have emerged from the initial line, what we might call Line Alpha, you enter another circular line.  And once this deadly spiral has ejected you into their inner sanctum, you enter a series of short living rooms that have no real mechanism for determining play primacy, and beyond them is a room that I initially thought was a simulation of the L.A. Riots, but it's just a cloud of Nintendo acolytes in the house of their Lord.
Click to expand...

I said FUCK YEAH!

I cannot wait for the rediculously-named Wii to make it's true first appearance. Somewhere inside me there's a Nintendo fan that is newly resurrected from the hyperbolic ice chamber that it was in. Currently, it is experiencing the sort of hibernation sickness seen only in the most deep of freeze victims, but soon it will spread its wings, flap them majestically and soar off into the Wii-tinted world of unlimited motion-based possibilities.

But first, I gotta play some Mario. Tomorrow.

(CW)OP out.
 
One time on the Fourth of July,
I went out to see the fireworks fly.
From a hill I could see all the rockets as they flew
from the town below me.
Bombs bursting in the air,
The crowd cheered with every flare,
In the distance the clouds were cracking and flashing,
Mountains shaking with every explosion.
I remembered thinking that night,
As I looked into the sky,
More than pyrotechnics meets the eye.
And the fireworks fly,
And the fireworks fall,
But I have seen the best of all.
And it's true,
After every charge is through,
I can still hear the thunder call.
Glitter bombs turn pasty pale,
Under five-mile electric trails,
Soaring skies and lofty Sierras,
Never looked quite as good in the pictures.
Neon flickers in the haze,
Billboards set to catch our gaze,
So much noise,
Nothing holds our attention,
It has all been done before.
So let the rockets sparkle and fade,
Let the streamers fill the sky,
More than pyrotechnics meets the eye.
 
I knew the minute I typed it, you'd put that quote in your sig. And that's just funny to me, because the one quote you put in your sig is actually NONE of the ones you were allegedly going to add to the list.

Blogjacker.



ANYWAY,

It's really windy today, and Chels just got paid. Hallefrickinlujah. She is contemplating a haircut. It currently looks like some bad floppy Hugh Grant hair that is occasionally coerced into a fauxhawk that has become far too big. Pleh. Hair. I forgot how annoying it way to actually have it. The nice think about chemo is that you never have to shave. Mmm. You just puke all the time to make up for it. YAY!

Current Song: Wave of Mutilation - Pixies

I love the Pixies. I heart Kim Dale. She's one of my music heroes. I pondered changing my avatar to her, but haven't yet. It's definitely on the list.

Other news - I have officially acquired a means of transportation. Hooray for scooting. I get approx. 80 miles to the gallon. And I can fill my tank with PREMIUM for less than $4. Also, parking permits at school, for scooters, are FREE. And I can park in ANY of the lots - and all the motorcycle spaces are right next to the buildings. It's a gorgeous thing. I can literally drive up to the back door of the building my class is in, park, and make it to class in 2 minutes, if I saunter the whole way there.

It's great. And apparently guys really like the freshly-scooted, windblown, exhaust-smell look. So yay me.

And now for something completely different:

I love OPA so much, it hurts. :tb2:



That's all. I think. More later on my theory of sub-atomic particles having a state of consciousness.
 
No Ideas But In Things

This week, I've been pondering somewhat extensively the poetry of William Carlos Williams, one of my most favorite poets. I want to share with you the pieces that my attention has been focused on the most:


A Sort of Song

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless
-- through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.




The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens



The parenthetical aside in A Sort of Song: "No ideas but in things" is the part of Williams's writing style that gets me the most. That makes the most sense to me, and it's evidenced in the poem The Red Wheelbarrow. Because The Red Wheelbarrow is not about the wheelbarrow, or the rain, or the chickens, per se. It's about the first two lines. The opening line makes you peel open the layers of rain and paint and feathers to find out just what is being depended on. Wiliams believed in the straightforward conveyance of imagery to tell meaning without actually telling the meaning. I remember a quote by May Swenson, a poet from Logan, Utah, which talked about symbolism in poetry, and how it's crucial to explain your symbol explicitly, but to never tell the meaning. You can hint, but you cannot tell. I will have to search for that one, it was a great quote, and I hardly do it justice.

I have found, for me, that I prefer to convey the meaning of metaphorical images, instead of actual images. Instead of finding the meaning in the small rock on my windowsill that says "compliment" in black letters on it, I come up with metaphors for possible meanings, and compile them. I am fascinated by imagery, but I am equally fascinated by metaphor.

For me, the beauty of poetry lies in its ability to communicate things depending on the reader's perception. In a very real way, almost like scripture, you get out of a poem the things you bring to it. The wonderful thing about poetry is that it waits for you. Novels don't; characters change, but a poem will always wait. I love poetry because it's rereadable, because it's vague. Because you can empty your pathos into its cup, and only those who idenitfy with it can drink it in its entirety. But then, poetry is things you communicate to be related to. We write to know we are not alone, just as we read to know we are not alone, and love to know we are not alone. Poetry it not about loneliness, it's about solitude. It reminds me of one of my very favorite Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes:

"What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and intelligent life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know your duty better than you know it. It is easy, in the world, to live after the world's opinion; it is easy, in solitude, to live after our own; but the great person is the one who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

For me, poetry is exactly that: the independence of solitude kept in perfect sweetness. Though, admittedly, my poetry is not always sweet, it is, in a vitally real way, truth of feeling. I write what I feel. I write how I feel, things that make me feel. Poetry is about relatable feelings. About communicating the unique perspective that you, and you alone have. I share my poetry to connect with to people, and to have people understand and relate to me. Poetry casts light on things we keep hidden. It whispers our inner screams to the passersby.

Yehuda Amichai once said, "Our despair is domesticated and gives us peace. Only the hopes have remained. Wild hopes, their screams shatter the night and rip up the day."

No ideas but in things. The challenge: be an observer. Look for the meaning in things. Only by setting down the very fundamentalness of things can we truly split them apart in detail and understand them.


And now for something completely different:

It's been a long week, and it's only Tuesday.

Yesterday I got The Office (BBC version) on DVD and watched the first season. But it was only on the first episode of the second season that I realized Dan (my coworker/etc.) is Gareth. They even have the same freaking haircut. (Nearly) It was the rendition of the Muppets' Mahnamanah song that made me finally realize it. Because Dan comes into work every day and sings that song. It freaked me OUT, dude. Pleh. Posers.

Today I feel...blah. My poem is being critiqued in workshop today, and I'm feeling rather trepidatious. Also, I'm wearing a shirt that says, "Don't Make Me Get My Wookie" on it. And I decided that it's a good thing I'm wearing a jacket.

It's so nice outside. I want to go outside and play. I want to go up the canyon by the water storage tank and roll down the huge grassy hills. Or throw rocks at the tank, because it's makes the coolest ping-y Star Wars(tm) blaster-fire noise ever.

There are some days when I really miss being a kid. I miss only having to worry about penmanship homework and complaining about bedtime and vegetables. I miss playing red rover. My cousin and her husband just had a baby recently, and he's the tiniest, perfectest thing I've seen in a long time. So much dark hair and dark eyes and he's just gorgeous. It made me sad. Sometimes I really, really want one of my own. And lately I've been wanting that a lot. I suppose it comes from being the oldest of 6 kids. I've been a "parent" since I was ten. And now that the youngest is turning 5, I miss having a baby around the house. I dunno what it is.

All my friends are getting married. It's getting really annoying. I think that inadvertently, I've surrounded myself with an inner circle of friends who are all pretty much bound and determined to remain single - mostly because they all love each other and it's a mess. It frustrates me. People in general have been frustrating to me. I don't seem to be able to relate to anyone around me. And the one person who I do understand, appreciate, relate to, and love happens to be several hundred miles away. After the last one, I swore that I wasn't ever going to do a long distance relationship again, but this experience has been so wholly, completely different than that one. Where I was infatuated, obsessed, I'm now in love and wholly devoted. It sounds cheesy, I know. But it's like...there's a whole different part of me that suddenly came alive. Some underlevels in the mechanisms of my heart that have whirred awake which I am finally aware of. I never knew it could be this good. That it could be like this. That so much understanding, and...sweetness...could come from a relationship. I've never had a boyfriend who has truly been sweet to me.

Now...I do. And it makes me giddy. I know I say it a lot, and that it probably gets old to those of you who are "watching", but I love him so much. He makes me happy, when no one else can. Laugh, when nothing else does. I would be miserable without him. He fills and comforts me.

I need him, and I like the way that feels.
 
Okay, so in Poetry Composition today my verbiage was torn apart and I was told that focusing on abstractions only says that I waver with the absolute horror that I'm going to be misunderstood.

It was an interesting class. We workshopped my poem "flush." I was told that an image can give you all that you need for a poem. And that in this particular instance, my responsibility is to the snail. She made me write that down and underline it. And she screamed, "STOP!" and waved her arms violently when I went to explain that it was about confessing - ...and she said that I could hint, but I was never allowed to tell. Because your reader will NEVER understand you the way you want to be understood, which is why the aim of poetry is to convey the reader to the reader, and not the artist to the reader. (Which I happen to have said before...) I dunno. It was a poem I had submitted because I knew it needed a lot of work.

So, that said, here's the original, and then where I'm at with it so far:

flush

a snail discovered
midst repose
in its shell.

truth doesn't let
sad, small things
posess their dreams.

each moment
of soft hopes snatched
by that rush of tide,

and broken:
thrust upon
reality's shoals.

the waves
will never care.

birds peck at, eat
the remains of what
they cannot understand.


flush 2.0

a snail discovered
midst repose
in its shell,

curls so unassuming
between cobble and
cobble and
cobble.

it shivers
in the descent-gallop
of a careless wave.

snatched asleep;
how clear, but silent
an eggshell fortress
succumbs

to the unwhim
of water and insistent
rock.

after wet retreating -
on sunburnt stones -

birds peck at, eat
the remains of what
they cannot understand.



Which do YOU think works better? Why?
 
Ah, Chels, you take me baclk. Freshman year. Poetry 101. My professor was an acclaimed poet in his own right, and the first class was a discussion to answer the question "What is poetry?"

The answer that rang true to me was "Poetry conveys human experience." It may or may not be the actual experience of the author, indeed, to surmise so would be to commit the dreaded "Intentional Fallacy."

The Red Wheelbarrow is a sweet poem. What I like about it is how it uses very few well-placed words to be good. It is stripped of all dead wood. Adjectives are used only when essential.

I think so much of writing good poetry requires finding the exact word that makes it work. You must sometimes use the discipline of a mathematician to construct it well. And like a math problem, when its done, you know it. You can put a circle around it.
 
Thanks for the comment, Mum! I really appreciate that. And I like that - "Poetry conveys human experience."

I've been browsing poetry quotes all day today...these are some of my favorites:

Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.  Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.  ~Carl Sandburg


Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.  ~Percy Shelley


Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.  ~Plato


Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.  ~John Keats


Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.  ~Percy Byshe Shelley


Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.  ~James Branch Cabell


The poem is the point at which our strength gave out.  ~Richard Rosen


It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.  ~Stephen Mallarme


Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.  ~Novalis


Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement.  ~Christopher Fry


The poet doesn't invent.  He listens.  ~Jean Cocteau


Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that.  Poetry is as precise as geometry.  ~Gustave Flaubert


Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.  ~Salvatore Quasimodo


Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young.  ~Sainte-Beuve


Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.  ~Thomas Gray


Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.  ~Robert Frost


A poem is true if it hangs together.  Information points to something else.  A poem points to nothing but itself.  ~E.M. Forster


Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.  ~T.S. Eliot


Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.  But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.  ~T.S. Eliot


Poetry is ordinary language raised to the nth power.  Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.  ~Paul Engle


The poem... is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.  And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see - it is, rather, a light by which we may see - and what we see is life.  ~Robert Penn Warren


You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it tick.... You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words.  The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in.  ~Dylan Thomas, Poetic Manifesto, 1961


Mathematics and Poetry are... the utterance of the same power of imagination, only that in the one case it is addressed to the head, in the other, to the heart.  ~Thomas Hill


The crown of literature is poetry.  It is its end and aim.  It is the sublimest activity of the human mind.  It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy.  The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.  ~W. Somerset Maugham


Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.  ~Rene Char


Poetry is nobody's business except the poet's, and everybody else can fuck off.  ~Philip Larkin


Poetry comes with anger, hunger and dismay; it does not often visit groups of citizens sitting down to be literary together, and would appal them if it did.  ~Christopher Morley


Poetry begins in delight and ends in wisdom. ~Robert Frost


Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.  ~Sigmund Freud


A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer.... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.  A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.  ~E.B. White


Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.  ~Rita Dove


A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.  ~Salman Rushdie
Click to expand...
 
Thanks for the advice, Opa. I'll see what I can do about that.


Sigh.

It's one of those days, you know. Been one of those weeks, actually. The sense of settling into contentment with some aspect or other of your life that really, you shouldn't be content with. At least, not content with leaving it as it is, instead of elbowing it into some semblance of progression.

I spent the weekend baking cookies for sad friends, beating Republic Commando for the umpteenth time. Scrubbing a bathroom that my sister had supposedly cleaned all last month, but sure didn't seem that way.

Then yesterday, I had to give an impromptu Sunday school lesson, because I thought that we split lessons by odd/even numbers, but apparently it's split on the every-other-Sunday basis. So... last week's lesson was an even number, which is what I usually teach, and it was Mother's day, so no one was in the singles' ward, because we all went to church with our families. And I just figured that I got to skip a week, which was fine by me, but it turns out I was wrong.

And what was I supposed to teach about? Judges. From the Old Testament. However, apparently I'm a marvelous teacher because the lesson turned out fabulous, and I am a genius. No, not really. Well, I just felt like I was standing up front babbling, and wondering to myself why I was talking, and confessing to any number of heinous stories from my past... but at the end of the lesson, this guy, Irving, who doesn't come to Sunday school much, came up to the front while I was erasing the board and he gave me a hug and said that he was so glad that I taught today and that I had said some things that he really needed to hear.

Can I just tell you how satisfying it is, as a teacher, to find out that what you're doing actually touches people? I love my calling. I love teaching Gospel Doctrine, even though we're covering the Old Testament this year, and it's usually a bugger to help people understand or motivate them to read. However, not only am I an exceptional teacher, I happen to be a master chef, and for all intents and purposes, I could get them to memorize War & Peace for my cookies if I wanted to. So who says that God doesn't utilize ALL of our talents? Hah.

So, at least the spiritual aspects of my life are doing spiffy. They'd probably do better if I could curb my swearing, but at least I don't swear when I'm teaching. And I've done a good job the past couple of weeks of keeping the words in my head, instead of streaming out of my mouth. Which means I'm pretty much screaming obscenities constantly in my brain, but at least no one can hear them.

This past week really sucked. I mean, honestly, it did. And I don't really know why, because it wasn't like some great, traumatic crap happened. I think it was just a whole jumble of little grievances that by Saturday turned out to be one big hairy Ball o' Grief. Do you ever feel like you have so much you'd like to talk about, but you don't know how to word it, or who to tell it to? That's how I feel. I feel all... knotty inside. And I can't untangle it because I don't have long enough fingernails, or a fork handy, and all the people who keep trying to help me are just making the knot tighter and bigger and more frustrating.

I feel like I'm missing some crucial person in my life at the moment... the problem with that being the fact I don't know who the hell it is.

There's a hole in my bucket, dear Liza. A hole.
 
Okay, we shall see if I can amble out a decent rantish blogging of sorts in the next...er...eight minutes of my break time alotted.

First up: New poems from last night.

Supped

bare is my end
of this oak table,
dreideltip patience
hovering
for the assault
of your dishes.

what was once-set,
now digested,
not a place
of your concerning.

a long-clotted stain
by the lathed leg
retreates
into shadow as sunset
sidles along
the cottoncrease
of an oxblood curtain.

neither its - nor fixture -
light reflects
faithfully
in my downcast eyes.

some speaking
of courses,
so coarsely.




Licked

you coarse sugar dwindled,
shrank at my tonguetip.
to dissolve these sweet things
i drown you, awash in saliva -
in the acid of all my tasting.



echo

come hither mildly adoring
acceptance is fleeting like you
made your bed, and still the need to sleep again.

go gaze
out your longing window. oh
tell it to the birds.
about your blankets & burdens.

the feverish just so - and sweat
out any complaints.

you know i've always been down here.
that i
prefer to feel cold, because it's closer
to what's true.

not waiting; surprise never asking
for you.

my melancholy looks a lot like allure.

i see red
drama and dark clouds
from my scope.

deliver us from the impersonal, no thankyou
for the bucket, but
my love will be down

in oh
well.



crush

you conjugate verbs, unite
words that breathe out
finally, they are together.

i have not
everything to say dark put lightly
keeps it going and then
some.

a love like this is called
blasphemy.

telepathetically, it goes -

bonespeak
the whisper of marrow to calcium.

this way please, if you
will
looking elsewhere is too deliberate
not to. all these ways are taking

me on my own. i know
to make colors of it. open
the new tube baby. i'll show you how to paint
a candle glow.

try
pay attention to some anything else, you
say nothing
to me

it's everything.





Alright, that's done.

Um, I don't have much to say. Today is better. However, I'm broke and need gas for the scooter. Yes - I'm so broke that I don't even have the three dollars required to fill my tank. Plus I have to run home before class and print off some homework, which I have yet to do still. But which I'll probably do once I get back to work.

And for my notorious SPF, I would just like to say, you have not been a jerk. I have been rather jerkish. Not just to you, but to every aspect of my life in general. And I know it's not PMS, because that was two weeks ago.

I think I'm being devoured by my writer, and when she roars into such prominence, I withdraw and lash out. For that, I am sorry.

It is hard. So much hardness, so many rocks I seem to notice in all the wide open paths. I had forgotten the difficulty of these things in longs months of misty nostalgia. In regret, and disappointment.

It is worth it. But it is a hard thing.






My problem is that I seem to do so well at running when things get hard. And I don't want to run, but it just seems to happen.


Hold me, even when I say I don't want you to. I need you so much, to keep me here. To help me see.
 
More poems from this morning and this afternoon...

sit still now

you are her unicorn
she is telling people,

how long she has had to hold that
horn steady
while the glue is still drying
on your forehead.

you are covered in holes
from the women who have loved you.
the ones who make you into the mystical beast
who
can't afford his own thinking.

i have died by your philosophy of our quiet everlasting.
probably will do, again
tonight.

pass through the trees like your lovely
apparition.

and you

may steal your eyes full,

without
her damn permission.



flameworthy

i throw you
to the ground.
on fire;

burn your image
in singed carpet.

forever

on the floor
i find you

spilt.

frantic apathy
mines the doubt
of your intentions,

proof

of its product
in all your

good things.



incomplexity

cower your brand
against my lining;

recoiled,
i tense again -

spring.

always i extend
into neverstraight

lines.

eager
your misconception
curls

within helltaut steel.

the spiny
irresolve

in my bending.
 
"Today his mind is perplexed and he looks into the perfect, cloudless, empty blue and wonders what all the bruting and furor is below, what all the yelling, the buildings, the humanity, the concern - 'Maybe there's nothing at all,' he divines in his lucid pureness - 'Just like the smoke that comes out of papa's pipe' - 'the picture that the smoke makes' - 'all I gotta do is close my eyes and it all goes away.'"

-Jack Kerouac, Visions of Gerard
 
Synopsis: Hate job. Feel like crying, don't know why. Also feel like hitting things. Probably more likely to hit things. Starving. Grabbing lunch, and then heading to class to once again flaunt my poetic genious (<-- facetious).

More on this later.

I love OPA.


Just, you know, FYI.


He makes everything better.
 
Yesterday I got The Office (BBC version) on DVD and watched the first season. But it was only on the first episode of the second season that I realized Dan (my coworker/etc.) is Gareth. They even have the same freaking haircut. (Nearly) It was the rendition of the Muppets' Mahnamanah song that made me finally realize it. Because Dan comes into work every day and sings that song. It freaked me OUT, dude. Pleh. Posers.
Click to expand...

:rofl: If he answes the phone with his name, you owe it to the world to call him up and replay the classic
Gareth answers phone: Gareth Keenan?
Tim: COCK!
Click to expand...
moment! do it! do it now!!


:hug: thanks for being one of the decent people
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top