I feel like a poor symbol for something that should be innate: freedom. How is it admirable to be free as part of a specific ratio of freedom to a current level of constraint? Everything that I believe to be 'real' is a string to which I am attached. My identity leaks through miniscule narrow tubes out to things external. When I move forward, I am slowed by the tug of these constraints, coming out the back of the head. Everything resides somewhere, but does it have to be my head? Is it possible to have these things but not to know them? Other people's expectations are the worst. Fuck you. You don't know me, and when I get sick and say mean things to you because I can't stand being under the constraint of something that doesn't know me, you just see sick. Well, fuck you. It's not your fault, but you're goddamn connected. What I want is the disconnect. I feel most human when I am separated from other humans, or have been for a long time. What I feel is not what you feel. Sometimes there is what feels like it might be a common human emotion like what folks tell me about, and those scare me. I've got my own sets and my own tools and my own boxes and you can't read the labels on them because I've got my own language. My own symbols. My own metaphors. I like it that way. I don't want to be expected to do anything. If you're going to expect me to do anything, expect me to do exactly what you already know me to do. No one does anything other than that, except for when they go brilliant and shock the world. Of course, we've got Youtube now. I don't know how you could shock the world at this point, unless you bested some terrorist in either violence or suppression, and I'm not in that game. I doubt you're in that game. EVERYTHING I KNOW IS A CONSTRAINT. I AM A BLURRED, RECONFIGURED, CUBIST CUBIST CUBIST SYMBOL FOR SOMETHING THAT SHOULD BE INNATE: FREEDOM.
Friday, May 10, 2013
Take this.
I feel like a poor symbol for something that should be innate: freedom. How is it admirable to be free as part of a specific ratio of freedom to a current level of constraint? Everything that I believe to be 'real' is a string to which I am attached. My identity leaks through miniscule narrow tubes out to things external. When I move forward, I am slowed by the tug of these constraints, coming out the back of the head. Everything resides somewhere, but does it have to be my head? Is it possible to have these things but not to know them? Other people's expectations are the worst. Fuck you. You don't know me, and when I get sick and say mean things to you because I can't stand being under the constraint of something that doesn't know me, you just see sick. Well, fuck you. It's not your fault, but you're goddamn connected. What I want is the disconnect. I feel most human when I am separated from other humans, or have been for a long time. What I feel is not what you feel. Sometimes there is what feels like it might be a common human emotion like what folks tell me about, and those scare me. I've got my own sets and my own tools and my own boxes and you can't read the labels on them because I've got my own language. My own symbols. My own metaphors. I like it that way. I don't want to be expected to do anything. If you're going to expect me to do anything, expect me to do exactly what you already know me to do. No one does anything other than that, except for when they go brilliant and shock the world. Of course, we've got Youtube now. I don't know how you could shock the world at this point, unless you bested some terrorist in either violence or suppression, and I'm not in that game. I doubt you're in that game. EVERYTHING I KNOW IS A CONSTRAINT. I AM A BLURRED, RECONFIGURED, CUBIST CUBIST CUBIST SYMBOL FOR SOMETHING THAT SHOULD BE INNATE: FREEDOM.
Monday, March 25, 2013
Jesus, I'm getting fat.
Standing in the warmth of the 5th-floor elevator lobby looking out the bullshit window at the south section of the main body of campus, listening to Lennon pretending to struggle to remember how to play "Working Class Hero," it occurs to me that...
I hitchhiked from Athens, Georgia to Charlotte, North Carolina when I was 24 years old. I had just finished reading Louis L'Amour's autobiography Education of a Wandering Man. Read it. Long tracts just listing books he read during particular periods in life. It doesn't read so much differently from Kerouac's On the Road, but it is a little more consistent, if in nothing more than narrative quality. Now I sit in a cubicle at UALR and teach composition in a department that has been wrested from English literature studies in an ugly divorce that took place in a generation of thinkers before mine, getting paid and drinking wine, and by god, hitchhiking was better. By far. I was alive, and I was my own. And the best part of driving is getting off in the wrong direction, wondering what might happen if I don't get back on track.
I had some excuse for love at one point, besides that for the air and trees, and the sounds that drive me in the night, and it had no right to make sense. There was nothing correct about it. It was a sickness, and it was a disgusting display of ignorance. I made myself look like a fool, and I smoked cigarettes while I was doing it. And I'm even okay with that now. It's different now, but the thing is, at least I felt something then. Amidst a sea of boring rationality, the irrational was what moved me, and I was even on to something. Might have stayed away. Might have kept traveling. Might have sung more clearly and written better songs. Might have gotten high less and spent more time listening to others' music. Might have paid attention when they sang rather than just waiting for my turn to hold the guitar. Want to be young and do stupid things. Want to look forward to hits of acid and wonder what music festivals are like. Want to hear the sound of an acoustic guitar in a culture where it's neither pretentious nor obsolete. I want to be have carnal fears like, "How long will I be out of water?" and "Will a car stop for me before it gets too cold and dark to keep walking?"
So, the truth is, Fuck You. I mean the general You. I'm not above lying, or being selfish, or walking away from any job or any relationship. I will abandon my own mother to feel in touch with the world again, to feel like we are moving together toward a common goal, and with a common purpose. Any kind of teleology. Fuck. I stopped making good music when I stopped believing in good music when I stopped caring. Now I'm just boring and I complain. And upon reflection, I don't really have a lot of good friends all over the country, because I stop talking to them or I piss them off before I have a chance to stop talking to them. What I remember as faded friendships, upon further reflection, turn out to be rooted in awkward circumstances that were caused by me and never resolved.
I left my heart out on the side of the highway somewhere along the Carolina states' border, and I brought my head back with me. But my head is a nerd with no direction. I read, I learn, and I regurgitate - hell, I even develop some theory and dispense it, but it's goddamn meaningless. There was a time before we knew that blood circulated in the veins. Before that, for all we knew it just sat there and congealed. Well, apparently it does. The creeping, gradual descent into tedium that I heard so much about as a boy, that phenomenon that would never happen to me, well, it's happening, and I can look at it, and scream at it, and complain about it, but for all my songs and all my walking and all of my reading and fucking and crying and smoking and... I haven't the slightest idea how to stop it, or even how to slow it down.
If you don't have a home of your own, if the colleges won't accept you and one of your shoes is broken, if you have a shit job that you don't care about and that pays minimum wage and the customers are all fuckholes, if you have dark circles around your eyes and you have every desire to drink but no desire to copulate, if cigarettes taste bad but music is rich and decadent, and you just can't for the life of you seem to find a destination, take a deep deep breath and savor it. Keep your hair long and your eyes rolled all the way back in your sockets. Keep looking inward as long as you can, because when you don't pay attention to all the gnarly folks parading around in there, they vacate and pretty soon the only "I" you have is held up against cultural definitions, and the history of philosophical theory, and Descartes, and Kant, and Sartres, and it loses substance. And inside, the gnarlies are dead. You become empty. And you fill the void with cheesecake.
Jesus. I'm getting fat.
I hitchhiked from Athens, Georgia to Charlotte, North Carolina when I was 24 years old. I had just finished reading Louis L'Amour's autobiography Education of a Wandering Man. Read it. Long tracts just listing books he read during particular periods in life. It doesn't read so much differently from Kerouac's On the Road, but it is a little more consistent, if in nothing more than narrative quality. Now I sit in a cubicle at UALR and teach composition in a department that has been wrested from English literature studies in an ugly divorce that took place in a generation of thinkers before mine, getting paid and drinking wine, and by god, hitchhiking was better. By far. I was alive, and I was my own. And the best part of driving is getting off in the wrong direction, wondering what might happen if I don't get back on track.
I had some excuse for love at one point, besides that for the air and trees, and the sounds that drive me in the night, and it had no right to make sense. There was nothing correct about it. It was a sickness, and it was a disgusting display of ignorance. I made myself look like a fool, and I smoked cigarettes while I was doing it. And I'm even okay with that now. It's different now, but the thing is, at least I felt something then. Amidst a sea of boring rationality, the irrational was what moved me, and I was even on to something. Might have stayed away. Might have kept traveling. Might have sung more clearly and written better songs. Might have gotten high less and spent more time listening to others' music. Might have paid attention when they sang rather than just waiting for my turn to hold the guitar. Want to be young and do stupid things. Want to look forward to hits of acid and wonder what music festivals are like. Want to hear the sound of an acoustic guitar in a culture where it's neither pretentious nor obsolete. I want to be have carnal fears like, "How long will I be out of water?" and "Will a car stop for me before it gets too cold and dark to keep walking?"
So, the truth is, Fuck You. I mean the general You. I'm not above lying, or being selfish, or walking away from any job or any relationship. I will abandon my own mother to feel in touch with the world again, to feel like we are moving together toward a common goal, and with a common purpose. Any kind of teleology. Fuck. I stopped making good music when I stopped believing in good music when I stopped caring. Now I'm just boring and I complain. And upon reflection, I don't really have a lot of good friends all over the country, because I stop talking to them or I piss them off before I have a chance to stop talking to them. What I remember as faded friendships, upon further reflection, turn out to be rooted in awkward circumstances that were caused by me and never resolved.
I left my heart out on the side of the highway somewhere along the Carolina states' border, and I brought my head back with me. But my head is a nerd with no direction. I read, I learn, and I regurgitate - hell, I even develop some theory and dispense it, but it's goddamn meaningless. There was a time before we knew that blood circulated in the veins. Before that, for all we knew it just sat there and congealed. Well, apparently it does. The creeping, gradual descent into tedium that I heard so much about as a boy, that phenomenon that would never happen to me, well, it's happening, and I can look at it, and scream at it, and complain about it, but for all my songs and all my walking and all of my reading and fucking and crying and smoking and... I haven't the slightest idea how to stop it, or even how to slow it down.
If you don't have a home of your own, if the colleges won't accept you and one of your shoes is broken, if you have a shit job that you don't care about and that pays minimum wage and the customers are all fuckholes, if you have dark circles around your eyes and you have every desire to drink but no desire to copulate, if cigarettes taste bad but music is rich and decadent, and you just can't for the life of you seem to find a destination, take a deep deep breath and savor it. Keep your hair long and your eyes rolled all the way back in your sockets. Keep looking inward as long as you can, because when you don't pay attention to all the gnarly folks parading around in there, they vacate and pretty soon the only "I" you have is held up against cultural definitions, and the history of philosophical theory, and Descartes, and Kant, and Sartres, and it loses substance. And inside, the gnarlies are dead. You become empty. And you fill the void with cheesecake.
Jesus. I'm getting fat.
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
The Pistol Kid.
I wake up, I shower and have my coffee, I apply talcum powder and put on my thermals cuz it's cold as shit outside, I feed my cat and eat breakfast, I get dressed and fight with my tie til it's something close to correct, I drive to school and teach, and learn, and study, and study, and study, and teach again, I tell students I'm proud of them when they do an awesome job, I tell them to shut up when they need to shut up and pay attention, I go to the gym, I come home, I write music, I play music, I record music, I get stoned and write better music, I play music, I record music, I write about music, I take ridiculous photos, I hang out with my roommate and visit my neighbors, I drink a beer and go to sleep.
Yeah, it's not all that bad. But it is time-consuming. I don't have time for shit that I still haven't learned to deal with. That's why I don't make time for it. There a number of things that I know how to do quite well, and I'm focused on those. Ask me to do other things, and I will probably fail sixty-seven times before I get it right. So if you do ask me to do other things, better be prepared to be patient, cuz it's gonna be a long ride.
Shit.
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Brain on Fire
That's exactly how it feels. 13 graduate hours, teaching one Comp II course, launching the placement program for Co-op, composing the Cactus Town country album Come on Kid, preparing to record The Cosmonaut, waiting on the master of the Those Idiots from Earth album, and a growing propensity for finding newer and greater music all the time. I'm not sure what the fuck is going on. I'm up and Kendall's asleep, and it feels late because the lights are off, but the truth is that she went to sleep early. The world is amazing, and I've got no time to sleep. I don't want to miss. Anything.
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