eat my dust.

Redacted rants substituted by passive-aggressive folkies who say it better than I could, plus bonus extra tunes..

it's gonna be sudden
it's gonna be strange
i'm gonna turn on a dime
give you 5 cents change
it's gonna be long
overdue
it's all gonna come out
out of me, on to you

out of me
on to you

one of these days you're gonna push too hard
we'll go on like we've always done
till you go too far
one of these days it's gonna reach the top
then it's gonna start to spill
and it's not gonna stop

out of me
on to you...

no more

some people wear their smile like a disguise
those people who smile a lot watch the eyes
i know cause i'm like that a lot
you think everything's okay
it is till it's not

out of me
on to you...

 

out of step

It's only a matter of time before I go ballistic,  it's only a matter of time before I get frustrated, because that's what I do, because I can't keep these thoughts and feelings inside. Because I care about you, because it hurts me to see you get so fucked up and not want to admit it. It hurts me that there's so much good in you but you don't take care of yourself.

And not only that, but over the past month or so since we reconnected, I get resentful of playing second fiddle to your addictions. I like that you respect me but is it so much to demand that you respect my time instead of showing up late or punking out all together because there was something to drink or smoke somewhere else?

And this is normal in this city. This is the way my generation functions when the cost of living is low enough and the standards even lower that this is the recreation of choice for the majority of my peers. I hate this so much.

 I come home and can't sleep and lay there staring up at the ceiling as the wind howls. And I think of my sister and my cousins and my friends from high school and my friends from college and my friends from adulthood and everyone else who has a heart of gold and a fucked up liver and life hurtling towards ruin. Maybe I'm crazy but what I see with my clear eyes isn't good.

 I can't stop feeling, I'm tired of passively enabling and excusing. I won't do it anymore and I can't pretend it doesn't depress the hell out of me. Because if I stop feeling I stop being human, and being human means that sometimes I break down and get angry over shit being fucked up, and sometimes I get depressed because that's a natural response. I can't be calm because I'm no angel, no saint, no bodhisattva. I wish I was. I usually regret what I've said, but this time I wish I had said more, and sooner.

straw men with thin skins

My nose is stuffed up, the plants on the porch are probably wilting, the dog kept me up last night, and it's near the end of the day, and it's beautiful out, but I'm in need of sleep and won't get it tonight.

And I think I offended someone's religious beliefs, which is ironic given that I actually have religious beliefs, and said person doesn't. Most of the people in my world are agnostic or uninterested or unaffiliated or non-theistic, no doubt due in part to the milquetoast catholic schooling we received.

Given that most of my tastes run to the stranger side of the subcultural realm, I'm used to being the only person in any given social gathering who's eating vegan food or nodding along to some doom metal band and then sitting in a pew come Sunday morning and while it can sometimes be awkward, it's something I don't mind. It's a little bemusing to hear the comments about fundies and freakos who believe in skygods who obviously hate everyone and then they realize that you're one of those people and a little weird too, and get the occasion, I hate those people but you're ok, which if directed at some other group would come across as way not okay but whatever.

So I like a good smart discussion because I find others' views interesting and whatnot and generally there's enough history and mutual affection that we'll still be friends by the end of it. Most of the time, we can find some common ground on other things or mutual understanding or what-have-you even if we think the other person is more than a little misguided. I'm used to a certain level of discourse, I guess, and I get spoiled and forget that other people don't take opposing views nearly so well.

But what I don't have patience for is blanket statements that ignore realities and rely on a very narrow view of history. So yes, we can talk about violence in the middle east that's religiously motivated, but heaven forbid that I suggest that in all societies where there's an overarching ideology or credo, that dissenters are stifled either socially or destroyed bodily. And to be offended by a simple disagreement or by raising another point that destroys the framework of convenience, no matter who you are, if you take it that personally, then maybe there's a problem with that belief system.

Whether that's "heretics" in the middle ages or "dhimmi" in Al-Andalus or Shia/Sunni or Hindu/Muslim in Kashmir or Hindu/Buddhist in Bhutan, or the usual scumbags like Stalin or Hitler or Pol Pot. You can't bring up the stake-burners without also acknowledging the genocidaires of atheism, kids. And just because you and I never killed anyone doesn't mean that people haven't died or gotten royally screwed by the actions of those who shared our respective views.

Even if we lived in a Crass Crust Punk Utopia of no gods, no masters, no flags, we'd still find ways to kill each other and construct divisions and Others to be enemies and scapegoats. Our early ancestors sure did. And I'm sure people take crap for being atheists, but as far as I can tell, everyone takes crap where they're a minority, see Muslims in NYC por ejemplo. The rest of us really can't complain about non-state persecution or social ostracism, especially among friends and comrades.

the drag

It's the time of the day when I'm most tired, the blood sugar plummets, the caffeine starts exiting the system, and I've been feeling like I'm swimming in a fishbowl way too long, and everything just makes me a little more nervy than usual and I find myself trying harder to maintain this smile, which turns to scowling when crossed with too many space cadets and the usual clowns. I don't want to make conversation, your attempts at chatting up are as unwelcome as a middle finger.  Those who don't know me very well think I'm happy and kind and gracious all the time. I wish I was. That mid-afternoon is always my low-water mark. I haven't been what I want to be, and the harder I try to not be a jerk, the more exasperated I get all around.

I am so tired, and maybe a little burned out. The world depresses me and sometimes it's hard to believe that God is good when I see what I see. I haven't been sleeping well, which doesn't help, neither does the runny nose, the stuffed-up brain, the ennui of winter and illness and not enough sunlight.  So yeah, that double-whammy of emotional and physical and maybe some spiritual weariness thrown in for some good measure.

I am thankful, I guess, for divine intervention into my suckitude, for tuneage, for naps, for herbal tea, for coworkers who are honest enough to tell me when I'm wrong and kind enough to not make me feel worse, who put up with my strange strain of crazy and the fits of melancholia. I'm thankful for movie nights and friends and that soon the days will be longer again. I can't wait for those days. 

bear with me here, or skip this.

quasi-political interjection, skip if you want
So tragedy is numbing to me at this point. We saw it on the news as it unfolded, I find myself more angry than sad, because while it's beyond tragic, I have far greater grief over my complicity in paying taxes that finance drones that kill kids in Pakistan and Yemen and God knows where else than I do for some nutcase with a gun. It's terrible all around, but is a mother's grief in the suburbs worth more than a mother's grief in some village with no running water? I can't imagine the final moments of those little kids, or what their parents are feeling. This has happened in other places too, and I don't have kids, but the proportional outrage involving a crazy guy with a gun compared to the terror that we perpetuate for other kids every day trying to go to school makes my blood boil.

 I ran this by my mom who I disagree with sometimes but who's got a beating heart and a thoughtful soul because I just got blank stares saying this to others, or "well their lives are already hard anyway." It was hard for me to sit in church this weekend (my pastor at the one I go to regularly is Arab so we pray for Palestine and Syria just as much as we pray for our own land) and hear prayers for the families of these children and think about all the other innocent kids (and how angried up does my blood get when even they're regarded as targets?) who die every day thanks to we the people and whose families are constantly troubled by that trauma that continues to repeat itself over and over again to the point where life is impossible to be normal because of the constant zoom of death. Who prays for them here? Even if you see them as your enemy, didn't Jesus tell you to pray for them too?

Maybe it's different for me because in Clevelandia I've met kids who've lost half their cranium to Israeli rockets and have friends who survived civil war in Lebanon and Rwanda who still have flashbacks when they hear fireworks or the airshow and have lost family members to shotguns and machetes. I went to college with a girl who survived Columbine, watched her friends die, but went on to have a beautiful decent life. With our place in the world, it's slightly more possible. It isn't for others.  It hits me in an entirely different place in the gut and it's hard to express that without sounding heartless. I believe that life is sacred and not to be taken lightly, whether that's in the womb or in the next state over or a country across the globe. I don't know what else to say except that I feel so alone in that sentiment.

my bad.

“Settle matters quickly with your adversary... Do it while you are still together on the way... "
 
So I got a little huffy with someone today, and while they were being a little ridiculous, I totally didn't treat them with the respect that I should treat even the most absurd people with to the point where even Randal said I screwed up. It was that stupid. So on top of feeling like a hypocrite (because I've been known to call out my comrades in customer service on this and students who get into arguments with our more mentally unhinged regulars), I feel foolish and jerky and everything I can't stand in other people. I know this is probably overreaction and not the end of the world, but I hate when I do this and upon regretting what I say, I apologize, and own up to my lack of kindness. This goes unheeded and so hopes of resolution are at the very best deferred.

Do not judge, or you too will be judged.  For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?  How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?  You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.


Even though this isn't a big deal in the great scheme of things, I still feel awful. I don't want to deal with Powers That Be on this though it may not even reach them (though she seems like the type that'd go to the top). For all the thousands of interactions where I'm a class act and then some, it's going to be That One Time I Fuck Up Every Three Years that overshadows all other things.The Powers That Be tend to turn every molehill into Everest, especially when image is tantamount. Being so low in the hierarchy, it's hard enough when it's your word against someone higher up in the foodchain when you're in the right, let alone when you're dead wrong.

"...Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry,  because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires..." 

 I wonder how many less hurt feelings and frayed dynamics there would be if I just learned how to shut the hell up once in awhile, keeping those thoughts in check. It's hard not to extrapolate this into some of the other relationships I've had where one the or another has happened and the tongue-lashing begins. Most of the time I regret what I have said more than what I haven't. I just hate when things get volcanic. 

So yeah, Reflective Powers... learning to not let it happen again, to be more gracious than automatic, to treat others the way I want to be treated, and not beat myself up too badly for not being perfect all the time. It's hard as hell, but at least it's not the end of the world like some things could be.


 

When it's all worn out, I'd rather go without...

I don't know if it was something I did or something I said except for maybe blurting out in a conversation among many of us that I wasn't sure I felt at this point like I was wanting to be tied down to anyone currently in my world, that I'm still trying to sort through all the feelings of prior losses, but since then the communication has lapsed completely, and in one way maybe it's a relief, and in another I wonder how many other things I inevitably implode with verbiage, but then I wasn't sure what to feel if anything, there were so many unsureties all the way around, attempting to figure out how to conform to norms and relationals that make me skittish by default. Not so much a breakup or a bang but a whimper and I still say this is better.

congenitally fractured anyway...

There are times the patience grows thin, and the lack of words is preferable to the usual kvetching. It must be the hormones, or the frustration with our perpetual brokenness and the baggage accumulated upon ten years of adulthood and the first tastes of heartbreak and things not working out the way we thought they would.

Some jumped in too fast, and now have the consequentials, and others of us crawled out from the wreckage, or saw enough of the damage surrounding to steer clear, but still there's that sense of longing, instilled by quasi-platonic ideals instilled all to young of missing halves, of fairy tales and platitudes, and destiny or whatever. It's always what we don't have, or what doesn't seem to be ours to possess isn't it? So as we get older, you'd think we'd grow up a bit, but this adult thing seems to elude us as a whole.

So my biggest pet peeve is to hear this laundry list of what the perfect girl is knowing damn well that such a person probably doesn't exist, because we all have our bad days and our not so bright moments and the times when we get PMS and aren't much fun, and c'mon dudes, you have bad days too, who are we kidding?.

And I hear the bemoaning of the lack of smart women or women who like good music and it's hard for me to take this seriously, because dude I'm standing here right in front of you and I'm waxing rhapsodic about galaxies and literature and history and bands that even you who reads the blogs on the Internets haven't heard of and not using it as social capital but just a wanting to share the sweetness that I've found. Oh yeah, and I can cook pretty well, and I can understand and enjoy sports even if I'm clueless about videogames, and I'm not going to make a fool of myself in public. But if you don't get it, than it's not worth my time, it says more about you than me.

And I've got friends who are like this too, but even if we're cute, because we don't look like that centerfold you drool over or That Hot Chick In That Band that got profiled in Revolver, or that girl who posts pictures of the doves tattooed on her hipbones on facebook, somehow we don't count, because we're not just getting our hair done and retouching our makeup, we're rocking out next to you, and therefore we're either one of the dudes more or less or there's the unspoken assumption that we probably swing the other way, and let's be real, those girls wouldn't hang out with you anyway, or it'd get old fast. You say you want a chick who likes the power chords? Especially in Clevelandia, raised on classic rock and grunge, we're out there, we just don't look like Angela Gossow or Cristina Scabbia or Zooey Deschanel, justsayin'... but who does?

And maybe we girls are guilty of this too, but I think it's easier for us to eventually get smitten by a good personality and a sense of humor and a general sense of decency or something, we're willing to take the chance that the attraction might come later, but perhaps we're expecting a bit too much to think that you'd be the same.

To find a way to turn the signal back to heaven sounding blue

A detour off the ramp because the front end was dragging on the ground, trying to find a parking lot to examine the damage in a neighborhood of abandoned buildings and skeezy strip clubs, and everyone's cars look better than mine in the hood so The Local Kids were scoffing and the men in cadillacs disdaining at my duct tape repair job (incidentally Family Dollar sells the duct tape in the automotive section so there!), but we turned around and got to the museum where the Finster exhibit was everything I hoped for and more, paintings on mirrors with truck enamel, cheetahs as guardians of paradise, visions of spaceships and the towers of Planet Heaven, whimsical hellfire and brimstone, an exuberant and consistent strange vision part Flannery O'Connor, part William Blake.

We decided to make a day of our time down south of Clevelandia, and detoured through lands of strip malls that haven't changed since the 1960s to Grace Cathedral, home to the local toupeed televangelist who's gotten a bit senile in recent years, and despite scriptural admonitions about gluttony and greed, has a buffet and gift shop full of cornball crystal jewelry, sentimental tchotchkes, and shrinkwrapped tissues for when the sermon gets emotional I'm guessing.

I only had the giant camera, and said gift shop, buffet, and wax museum were closed and despite theoretically worshiping the same God, we probably looked more like snarky jaded heathens than actual acolytes, and so we headed north to Kent, land of bibliotheque school and frat party rioters extraordinaire.

Much of downtown has been torn down and redeveloped and while I'm generally not a fan of destroying old buildings, there's actually stuff downtown besides Bars for Bros and aging punk townies. The best burrito place ever satisfied our hunger, we ambled through sundry stores and then down to the river where the sunlight filtered through the trees,  the honeysuckle smelled incredibly good and there were teens being angsty under the overpass spraypainted with graffiti.

 (as I didn't get the pictures off the memory card, this photo is courtesy of someone on flickr)

We drove up through Ravenna, hometown of a certain singer, marveled at the signage and the proliferation of non-vacant storefronts and this strange sculpture on the children's elementary school playground.

 Someone's not Thinking Of The Children.

Drove back through the darkness and the heat lightning, spent the next day errand-running and filling out the garden with okra plants and mini pumpkins and hanging out at my favorite record store talking about literature and outsider art and listening to the Rolling Stones before heading up to the lake on Sunday to hang out with the family and sit alone on the breakwall in the darkness with the swirling of the waves like a Winslow Homer painting, to contemplate and re-examine some already existing sad things that swirled to the surface in the past couple of days that have left me a little wrecked and questioning every interaction and motivation. It's not that it isn't good, it's just that this growing up thing is really hard and painful. 

that's why flags are such ugly things

Taking off yesterday to decompress and think and plant, reading Dorothy Day to get some perspective as to the living out of principles, because I have no use for platitudes, have seen too much to be an idealist, and want to know what the hell I should be doing or how I should be responding to the way that things are going here.


I can see through this expression
And you know I don't believe...

 We have a short historical memory as a country. The same things that are said about people in the Middle East are what was said about the Japanese sixty years ago, and it's often forgotten that FDR signed an executive order to intern thousands of citizens based solely on their race rather than anything else. To this day, there is next to no evidence that any of these people detained who lost almost everything were doing anything wrong or "unpatriotic."

But they hate us. You can't reason with people who blow themselves up for a cause. 

That is what was happening, right?   Kamikaze pilots were the suicide bombers of the 1940s. Kids were raised to die for an ideology if need be. People still justify the nuking of two cities, and no one remembers the devastation of the firebombing of Tokyo. Now things are more or less okay between our two countries, if only because history on both sides has been swept under the proverbial rug.

And we love to wear a badge, a uniform
And we love to fly a flag
But I won't
Let others live in hell
As we divide against each other
And we fight amongst ourselves

And I'm reading about police brutality, about scapegoating of anyone and everyone for the convenience of having a bogeyman, because in every movement, be it animal liberationists, Occupy, pro-lifers, whatever, there will always be unstable violent people that make everyone else look bad.  The faces might change, the movements have different names, but these principles are still the same.

Man's freedom stems from his free will, and he must respect the freedom of other men because they are made to the image and likeness of God and are temples of the Holy Spirit. To build up fear of other men is to build up hatred too. "Perfect love casts out fear." Such a witch hunt as has been set loose in the country today, serves to distract the mind from our own militarization and enslavement, our growing materialism, and to set us in the self righteous position of rooting out the evil in other men, paying no attention to the beam in our own eye. It is always so satisfactory to find a scapegoat on which to heap our sins. During the depression it was the international Jewish bankers. Now it is the communist.

And depending on what side you are, this scapegoat could be someone with an Arabic last name, the crusty punks on the public square, or the evangelical Christian with some weird views on fetuses and how the world came to be that you read about on the Internet and revile because you don't actually know any of these people in real life. 


The teacher is afraid to speak of interracial justice, of peace, of social justice these days, for fear he may be considered subversive. Loyalty oaths are beginning to be required at some state universities before a speaker can give an address to the students. This last month, Fritz Eichenberg, Quaker, who does magnificent illustrations for The Catholic Worker, refused to take the loyalty oath at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn where he teaches. I suppose that means he loses his job. One must accept voluntary poverty these days to keep his integrity.

I used to roll my eyes at this rhetoric when I was in college, but then I see this fly the flag and show your loyalty to the state business that's been resurrected and it starts to not seem so crazy after all. I stopped saying the pledge long ago, because I don't need to pledge allegiance to anyone's damn flag, because what it stands for goes against everything that I believe, cultural religious trappings be damned. One nation under God? The whole damn universe is, not just us, and not everyone believes in said higher power anyway. Liberty and justice for all? Ya think? And so I live here and obey the laws that don't go against my moral code and do my best to treat others the way I'd like to be treated, treat the land with respect. In theory this should make me a good citizen, but I'm sure that others would dispute this.


The occupied countries became the occupied countries because people were terrorized into saying yes, when they should have said no. Hitler and Stalin, Mussolini and Franco--this is the age of repression and McCarthy, in the guise of fighting Communism, is finding it in any honest criticism of the status quo?

Neither system proposed by the overlords or the economists or the protestors is working. Humans as a rule are broken, and therefore it's inevitable that our systems are too.

Angry words won't stop the fight
Two wrongs won't make it right
A new heart is what I need
Oh God, make it bleed
Is there nothing left?

we wear them til we cannot see

Well didn't you like what I said? Didn't it make sense?

First of all, those insecurities are painful to watch, and secondly, no I don't agree. I know my soul is contrary and I hold out little hope for the human condition, believing not in the evolution to higher selves or the panaceae of more education and more money. Not that money is unnecessary as a root of all evil and a way to pay the bills and not that education isn't a beautiful thing, but the people who do the most damage to the rest of the world are people with education and money, so no. And while technology has evolved to the point where more good and more evil can be perpetrated in all sorts of new and inventive ways, I don't think human nature's changed at all.

But don't you think I'm right?
No, and even if I did, does that make you any less wrong? Truth is true whether it's assented to or not, and on the things that we don't know or share the same views on there will be inevitable disagreements. If anything I assume that others will disagree with me, because even those who see through the same lens see at different angles, and also because I don't see anyone's -isms as a way of making the world a better place.

But I liked what you said!
That's all well and good, but if you liked it, you weren't really listening.