caffeination

Me and neighbor planted potatoes last night in a giant sterilite bin from target because trash cans are expensive, and then I went to the Kentinistas' for rifftraxing of the godawful Star Wars Holiday Special which was astounding in its wtfery. 

A morning of dogwalking and garden stuff, and bike riding to sportsball and getting on base more in one game than I did all of last season, scoring the winning run and feeling awesome, celebrating with gyros up the street before heading out to a friend's wedding when I drank way too much coffee and got profoundly existential by the end of the night thinking about human interactions and the fleetingness of infatuation juxtaposed with the professions of undying love. My body is tired by my brain's still firing like crazy. 

I love you Walker Percy

This might be my favorite part of The Moviegoer

Being a creature of habit, as regular as a monk, and taking pleasure in the homeliest repetitions, I listen every night at ten to a program called This I Believe. On the program hundreds of the highest-minded people in our country, thoughtful and intelligent people, people with mature inquiring minds, state their personal credos. The two or three hundred I have heard so far were without exception admirable people. I doubt if any other country or any other time in history has produced such thoughtful and high-minded people….If I had to name a single trait that all these people shared, it is their niceness. Their lives are triumphs of niceness. They like everyone with the warmest and most generous feelings. And as for themselves: It would be impossible for even a dour person not to like them.
Tonight’s subject is a playwright who transmits this very quality of niceness in his plays. He begins:

I believe in people. I believe in tolerance and understanding between people. I believe in the uniqueness and the dignity of the individual—

Everyone on This I Believe believes in the uniqueness and the dignity of the individual. I have noticed, however, that the believers are far from unique themselves, are in fact alike as peas in a pod.

I believe in music. I believe in a child’s smile. I believe in love. I also believe in hate.

This is true. I have known a couple of these believers…On This I Believe they like everyone. But when it comes down to this or that particular person, I have noticed that they usually hate his guts.

I did not always enjoy This I Believe. While I was living at my aunt’s house, I was overtaken by a fit of perversity. But instead of writing a letter to an editor, as was my custom, I recorded a tape which I submitted to Mr. Edward R. Murrow. “Here are the beliefs of John Bickerson Bolling, a moviegoer living in New Orleans,” it began, and ended, “I believe in a good kick in the ass. This — I believe.” I soon regretted it, however, as what my grandfather would have called “a smart-alecky stunt” and I was relieved when the tape was returned. I have listened faithfully to This I Believe ever since...’

hanging gardens

Police cars in front of the house up the street, an alternate route taken past beautiful Victorians and the coffeeshop where the Albanians hang out, and I admire everyone else's balcony plantings, the sunflowers in 5-gallon buckets and scraggly tomato plants entangling the ironwork, the sweet potato vines dangling over, Babylon this is not, but it'd be nice to have some wonders of the world.

I talk to my mom about gardens and work, and my dad's going in for some kind of crazy heart surgery so he doesn't get clots and die, and then I talk to my dad and we have our camaraderie of rock and roll and God and gleeful morbidness, this is where it all comes from, and I say I want him around as long as possible and he says that won't be all that long. I know it's the truth, and that nothing lasts forever, but it's hard to think about.

There's a vigil up the street for Bridget's friend, and a friend of a lot of people in my orbit that I don't know all that well, but it seems he was a wonderful and full of life person, and I walk past the throngs of people I've seen at shows or out and about, connected enough to know faces, but not enough to hug or stand alongside, to where the candles are on the corner, and I don't know what to think or say so I stand there silently and pray for all these grieving souls around me, the friends and family and for the guy who'll go to jail over this, because I don't know what else to do, and it's too close, but not close enough and I don't want to colonize another's grief. I'm not good at this whole thing, and it seems like people around me are losing people they love all too quickly.

One of my friends lost his best friend to cancer a few weeks ago and is still torn up, a lady at my church who'd been in and out of rehab and jail died last night. I didn't know her well, I had her grandkids in my class, and one time she asked me for money and I said I had none, because it's easy to score drugs outside the doors of my place of worship and I didn't want to be responsible for enabling that. I wonder if I was wrong. An award's being handed out today at the place of employment in the memory of someone I really liked and never got to know, whose memory is used to project an ideal that he would have laughed at.  It kills me how inevitable this mortality thing is, how easily it gets used for this or that or the other,  that it costs so much to bury, and that as we get older, the ashes and the bones continue to rattle in our memory.

gethsemane

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

  Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

  The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

  The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

  The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good. 

Our culture values positivity to its detriment, not that wallowing in a sea

of sorrow is somehow better but, the people I know who seem most disturbed by my 

tendencies towards melancholia as some kind of spiritual ailment and exhort me to be 

more positive, because God wants me to be happy, because this is what's taught to us

from birth it seems. 

And yet, since my lapsed-Catholic soul is still attuned to liturgy, I think of 

the verses of the Lord as a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, who agonized

and sweated drops of blood seeing the impending pain. There's nothing in there

about keeping one's head up, but an acknowledgement of the reality that shit is 

fucked up and something needs to be done to put it right, and this sentiment is borne

out in psalms and lamentations and cries of rage and grief from prophets and regular folk.

Because there is only so much much that we can do besides the golden rule basics 

so hard to follow as it is, and it seems that every other religion tells you to 

suck it up or just try harder and hope that maybe things work out because you're 

not as bad as that other person. 

If we pretend that this pain and suffering and just plain wrong things aren't there,

we simply deny the reality of human existence in a world wracked with entropy,

where we all see through the glass darkly though some try to tint that unknowing

with shades of green and rose. And maybe I'm just crazy, but I can't help but wonder

if I'm in good company here. 

love in the ruins

 “For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel, half beast, but no man...

In the rust belt where I dwell, the academics ramble on about 'ruin porn' and suburban crackers finding joy in derelict surroundings, something I find a bit obtuse, given that my compadres from the hood are just as into this stuff, hanging out in the abandoned Glenville mansion playing the grand piano collecting dust in a forgotten living room, cutting class to climb the stairs in the now-demolished abandoned hotel by the highway, climbing up into a church built only in the last century but feeling so much more ancient.

I think there's a universal human thing for old places that are forgotten. I was enthralled as a kid by Egyptian pyramids, Mesa Verde, and Angkor Wat. My friends whose pets I watched just got back from swimming in the ocean and hiking through the remains of Mayan temples, the Romantics painted Greek columns and memorialized broken statues of long-gone empires. Perhaps the waning days of empire have something to do with the nostalgia and fascination with gloriously crumbling structures. The landed gentry liked to build 'follies' on the outskirts of their fields for the illusion of ancientness and days gone by.

My roommate and I explored an abandoned amusement park together that's now being torn down and dismantled in delusions of development in a part of the state that seems to lend itself more to methamphetamine production and feral felines. Others had gone before us through the human-sized holes in the fence, and the concrete path throughout the park had not been overgrown yet. I didn't have a camera then, but I had a box cutter in my hoodie in case we ran across any deranged psycho killers though I'm surely too chicken to have actually used it, but considering that we were knowingly walking into the plot of a slasher film, I wasn't going to stake a good outcome on virginity alone.

 We hoped that the footprints we saw in the mud weren't too fresh, and that there wasn't anyone lurking in the old stands on the fairway or in the ballroom with the collapsing floor. The mosquitoes were dense and even though it was hot, I had a hoodie on with the hood pulled up and over as much as I could, hands in my pockets. It was the first of many trespasses, now more or less ended after the legal and societal implications of interracial friendship and private property meant some degree of hassle by The Man. Upon such hassle, I learned that most forgotten arteries of the city are technically off-limits from a legal standpoint, railroad tracks and riverfronts, all the places that me and my camera went.

Now, I've gone back to living vicariously, because there are parts of the world I will probably never see. Abandoned Russian camps, Italian villages and Khmer city states, forgotten utopias and playgrounds, catacombs and burial mounds and movie palaces succumbing to the elements, the debris of empires both collapsed and collapsing. Look on my works ye mighty and despair laughable, history as cyclical like Shiva's wheel, grinding down each generation's dreams.

it's not how it looks

Interactions don't come as easy some days, the words are clumsy, the patience short and I'm relieved to retreat to the sanctuary amid boxes of ephemeral materials and old photos to listen to tunes and admire long-gone Egyptian Revival structures since torn down in the name of progress, immortalized in slides an inch or so across.


Someone calls me a saint today for keeping my cool and I think of how often I don't, that I freely confess to moments of fleeting fury, unacknowledged bitterness, and frequent agnostic emotions. I believe, help me in my unbelief could be the story of my life, because I all too often don't live like I do. Maybe no one does, and it's not the point, and maybe the perfectionism comes from seeing the mistakes continue to reverberate. I sometimes wonder if I make the gestures of peace to calm my soul alone, because so often we'd rather exist in the discord.