poetry experiment

What if I started posting actual poetry here...or what if I used this as an experimental poetic thought space. Poems-in-process, not quite edited, just fresh out of the scull like new brain matter. Just like all of stuff I spew in this space it would be unedited, unrevised, a place for first attempts and half-baked musings. Thoughts and words on the quick. Not perfect but thick in inspiration.

I knew him
there
and there, my mind had prefabricated
every possibility.
The wedding or the parting,
the grandchildren or the awkward goodbye email,
you could be the one or you could be another one.

These cutouts in which we place wished-for lovers,
what if the part can never be played and it is only
when for an instant we stop playing
stop fitting
let it go

and it arrives. Whatever "it" is, the bright eyed
recognition and empathy you seek.

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Well that two minute half poem half advice column thingy was done on a very hungry belly...it is early and I need coffee and carbohydrate nourishment. Mmmm. :)

Current song:
http://popup.lala.com/popup/2810527646861754578

Current mood:
motivated, content

script in my head

I seem to be good at...
showing my mind to people like a movie - see the latest episode of my life, friend, here: and then the spiel unwinds. Soon, the close friends who see the show of the episodes of my life that I render in words are asking about the sequels and continuations of the same plot lines, they're asking the same questions, they want to turn the pages. I'm a pretty good self-narrator, narrator of myself. Or at least a pretty consistent one. It's funny when friends run into you at the same time and they are asking about the same page-turning moments in your juicy thriller of a life.
How important is it to be of entertainment value to others? Do we all want a thrilling novel of a life after reading so many succulent renditions of how it could be. Or a thrilling film that shows instead of telling...there is no time to tell a thing in a film unless it's closer to theatre with asides and soliloquoys and a thought-connection with the audience.
The umbilical cord between my brain and those I talk with is mediated by words that wish to be Salinger and Vonnegut and Gluck with some Vygotsky and Durkheim and Foucault....and Freud of course. Do not scoff at Freud if you haven't read him, btw, he remains brilliant.
I know that because I have hardly the time lately to write what I wish to write I have become an endless out-of-breath list of things. I can't get them all in, can barely cram in all the matter, and no time to go back and edit for clarity. Write, write, right.

move

So hello. I'm here but I can hardly catch up with myself. Deadlines come and pass like street signs. Who am I again? What's the point of all the incessant moving...there are days when I have sat in my car inbetween things for several extra minutes, not wanting to go on to the next destination, and then the next. The car a kind of limbo space, a liminal space of escape between all the points of responsibility. Moving, moving, moving...

hilarity and jenga dating

I played a game of "Jumbling Towers" (knockoff of Jenga) last night. I won. And then I won again. And then I won at Chinese Checkers. It looked like an absolutely unoriginal dive bar EXCEPT it has tons of board games, random ones. It attracts an older businessy crowd, and just a middle-aged Chicago crowd. And there I was on yet another "date." Squirming, uncertain what this latest member of team testosterone wanted or didn't want as he caressed my leg and made incessant half-funny comments and quips and soliloquoys flavored with something like a weird blend of intelligence and ignorance. How can people be so intelligent and so ignorant at the same time - I think the sheer ridiculous ratio of intelligent-funny-ignorant had me laughing. This dating thing, it is such a put-on in this obnoxious country. Yes America, I have qualms with you sometimes. I'm beginning to think that WASPy men always have ulterior motives, and the sooner you find out what they are, the better. Relations between men and women are so convoluted, there is constantly some kind of bizarre social and sexual and commitment calculation going on between the guy's brain and his royal member, lets call the royal member Bob and the Brain Bill. Imagine a conversation between Bob and Bill... (forget Ego, Superego, Id, just Bob and Bill)

ACT 1: The One and Only Act

Bob: Ass, I see ass, hot, hot, I want!
Bill: Yes, yes, I want to touch, but....
Bob: Oh Bill, don't be a pussy! Go for pussy!
Bill: But Bob, you know I do think she's hot...but what about Karen?
Bob: Fuck Karen!
Bill: Maybe you're right Bill, I want, I want...
Bob and Bill: We want, we want, we want!!!
-a few hours later-
Bill: Bob, I don't know I have thoughts, and they scare me.
Bob: Ignore them, Bill, they will kill you.
Bill: I have thoughts and insecurities, and, and, and-
Bob: I'm done with you, you wanker.


END

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I wasn't expecting to go there, whoa...but I can say that every day lately has moments when something or someone pulls out that last Jenga block and everything collapses to humpty dumpty smithereens. Except there's only me to pick it all up, and if I really can't stand it, at least I can turn it into caricature. At least I can laugh! When life isn't beautiful, it can still be beautifully funny.

to sleep, perchance to scream

I'm starting a secret blog (that will purge away secret stains and pains and drains on this finicky life,) you'll never find it, maybe you will. I'm staying up and not working, not working, because home sometimes just wants to mean a glass of wine and a sigh of release.

Can you hear it? I can't. I haven't had a released moment in ages, this heart is always beating too attentively, every instant is pitter patteringly hyperactive, manic, maniac, maaaaaaaaama?

This is when the child cries for help, "save me from the unmanageable world, Mother, who hath brought me into this unfortunate struggle where I pee on myself and my stomach hurts and then..."(and yes with a Stewie-like British accent)...but forget receding into infantile helplessness, how about, how about, slowing down this over-stimulated nervous system. Less coffee more REM? Less stress more sex? Less late nights more massages and long walks on Greek or Italian or French or Brazilian or Caribbean beaches, peaches, soft yellowish relaxation zones.

That's what this life requires perchance. A chance to dance, to dance, to dance.

lets talk about sex, american style

Hypothesis: White (straight) american men are more insecure (on average) when it comes to the bedroom, the bra, and the boob. Than whom? Probably than almost everyone else. I wonder if educational achievement correlates with sexual dysfunction? Maybe for some men.... The "smarter" and better in one achievement area, the dumber in the other. The more seemingly secure in intellect, the less secure in lack there of. What if intellect is just totally over-rated when it comes to pure physicality, what if we just disconnect with our bodies and become scared of them? How absolutely awful. Although it depends on the kind of intellectual practices one is socialized into, as well. This could go the other way too, education could open sexually, the right kind of education. So I'm talking Puritan-descended American mentality. If this generalization holds any truth, it all comes down to specifics. The body should be hidden, the body reeks of sin and skin.

This goes for women too. This is a societal problem. More specifically though, it could just be a WASP problem too, the common occurrence of identity diffusion in Wasps is something I'm pretty certain of. So we're talking Christian and mainly European descended, super-mixed descent to the point of almost impossibility to identify with one original cultural group, 1/124th this, 1/18 that...a fraction problem.

(I'm thinking anomie, and the wonderful Greenfeld again.) Anomie, namelessness, the inability to know who and what you are, the inability to locate yourself culturally, spatially, physically, mentally, socially. You have 37.8 careers every minute, you flip your brain like a tv set with 100+ channels, you flip your thoughts at the speed of google - which is why you need to be constantly hooked up to google, your fingers are always picking at your I-phone, you can't make constant eye contact, you can't focus on one lover, one job, one thought, one thought, one thought. You have given yourself ADD when it comes to knowing what you want and when you look in the mirror which face do you see? I am talking about a typical WASP problem.

On a grander world scale, I think Europeans, Aussies & Kiwis, South Americans, etc. are better off than Americans...I think the less regulated dating interactions and the more comfortable the society at large is with bodies and physicality (enter dreaded puritanical history) the better. I think the more socially-regulated and metricalized and fearful of offense and morally and legally inhibited people are in sexually-related interactions, the worse the likely outcomes. If you throw all this grammar between us, between every touch, and interpret in a myriad ways the most seemingly animalistic of connections, you're well...screwed. I mean the more we overthink the more bodily warmth and flow gets sectioned off into over-regulated little boxes. Soon, we could draw a flow chart of the date, and that would seem more sexy than the date itself. Or here's a better idea for regulation: write me sonnets, dream your Petrarch dreams, the metricality of romance is artistic-encouraging of creativity, and with that we have passion and a striving instead of constriction and fear.

Favorite defense mechanism in this life: Intellectualization

Super weapon of choice: charm, intelligence, and fairy tales

And then, the smart little lady lived happily ever after, pursuing thoughts,

those balloons that flow ever upward and offer their stringy little hands

up, up.

it all comes down to escapism

I realized that today...I didn't want my hot little date to be over because a date, and another person, particularly one that has nothing to do with my academic/professional world of warfare, can be such an amazing escape. Another world that has nothing to do with this one. This one which is overwhelming (mentally fulfilling yes,) but draining, and Protestant Ethic crazy...except alas ironically the man himself is a monk of sorts too and ran off to pay his ever-churning dues to the Faustian machine.

Another world I say:

Vacation = another world, but this concept has been sitting officiously in my thoughts ever since Liah Greenfeld's amazing Modernity seminar years ago...one of the students did her paper on the modern concept of vacation, the bourgeois routinization of reality avoidance.... You change location and activities for a specified period of time, so this is the most obvious as escape yes? You vacate your yearly routine, and this is the acceptable way to "stop the clock" and open the wallet or whatever. Time and space are altered, the wristwatch removed, the tummy filled, the skin tanned, the brain emptied like some kind of overfull receptacle of shit. Clean your hard drives ladies and gentlemen.

My point? You probably guessed it, everything except the dreaded (whatever your most constant existence happens to be,) is escape. Everything. This blog, almost everything about the oh-so-efficient but reality-consuming internet, movies, novels, coffee time, tea time, lunch time, booze time, drug-of-choice time, conversation of almost any kind unrelated to "it"...it just depends on how badly you wish to escape from "it" and how much of "it" you do every day. In the neuron-killing dead end jobs of my past, I remember bathroom breaks being escape too. I remember going to the bathroom and hearing my boyfriend's mocking voice in my head "at least they pay us to take a shit, hahaha." - and this was the sad solace of office work for me. The smugness of being paid to take a shit. Any wonder I'm in a monastic, bombastic, soultastic, starvation-causing, existential crisis-inducing, nerve-wracking, brain blowing, PhD program now?

Now too, with the overwhelm that comes with this year, everything that isn't my work is escape...people and places and movies that conjure other worlds all provide pleasures guilty and wonderful. At least the work is delicious if totally terrifying because as you can see I'm a rambler. My ideas coagulate and clot. I have to make sense of them and stick them into academicese. Easier to just be a poet? Probably. Not that poetry is easy, not the kind that gets chopped up on market blocks to fit parameters of editors who are looking for the latest fetishistically styled lines. Little meat parcels, little sushi lines that used to make sense as perfectly good verbalized soul

food.