I don't watch movies like 'Precious' for the same reason I don't go to the Holocaust Memorial. I can't compartmentalize the emotions, I can't get the distance right. The horror and the anger and the sadness and the fear becomes my own and I don't know how to leave it at the door and walk back out into my life. Extreme emotions change me the way that extreme pressure melts rock.
I lack something that other people seem to have. Is it a switch? I don't understand how people can watch realistic abuse and then go to the grocery store, out to dinner, home. I can't seem to tell myself that it isn't real, that it is Hollywood. Replica airplanes, fat suits, child actors. Wasps for other people are bees for me; I am stung and the barb stays with me, embedded.
I try not to feel too deeply. I exercise a lot. I try and get regular sleep. I don't drink too much now. I used to feel wildly. Enormous fluctuations from high to low. Unbridled happiness at times, passion, lust, euphoria. But I would also feel such sadness. There was no room inside my chest for all of my sadness so it spread and touched everything that I touched. And I made the people around me hurt and miserable. And then I got older. I aged out of my hysteria and my joy and my sadness. I aged out of my crazy self and into a stranger. A stranger that exercises and sleeps and doesn't drink too much.
I am an emotional creature, as Eve Ensler would say. I can feel the things you feel inside you. I feel things that are not even real, emotions created on a sound stage in California, in a music video, a commercial for coffee. I am afraid that this makes me crazy. Akin to hearing things that are not real, seeing things that don't exist. I feel insane as myself so I've traded for contained estrangement. I choose exercise and sleep. And I don't drink too much. I don't laugh too loud. I don't say the first thing that I think of. I don't watch PETA commercials. I don't make eye contact with the homeless. I don't read about the war. I don't look at pictures of the Gulf. I don't. I turn away. I turn off. I exercise. I sleep. I don't I don't I don't. I don't exist too much.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Monday, June 14, 2010
notes from a journal/how to kill time
can't seem to get things started at work so I am taking a break. Here are some sketches/notes/thoughts from my writing journal.
A woman goes missing. Her car is found near a popular suicide spot but her body is never found. There are multiple sightings but no confirmed encounters.
A doctor falls in love with an anesthetized patient while operating on him. Feels he will never touch another person as intimately again.
A girl believes that as long as she doesn't open the Christmas present from her grandfather, he will never die.
A fish falls in love with the moon and it is caught on a silver lure.
A package never arrives.
###
"The world is not beautiful, therefore it is."
###
You ever seen pictures from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, people burnt, in pain. Terrible images. One picture, forever on display in a dark hallway of my mind: steps, a black smudge resolving itself into the outline of a man. A person incinerated, only his shadow left behind, burnt into the stone.
"We are the light of the fucking world. U.S.A! U.S.A! If we're so god damned awful, why are there so many fuckers killing themselves to get here?"
The brightest lights cast the darkest shadows.
###
Outside
the birds chirp
they sound like lasers
I gather information
like I am building a wall
but all it is
is throwing cutlery
at a home invader
you won't stop them
but you might
draw blood
ultimately
you just piss them off.
Outside the car
the soft static of rain
###
my grandma cut cantaloupe
and sat down in the pale
yellow kitchen
when she looked up
she didn't know herself
###
The immigrant experience of Army brats. Some people grow up in a different country. I grew up on another planet - a new world. There were no fathers in this world. Just grown faceless men - square jawed, buzz cut, sharp edged intermittent others. There was a lawlessness particular to groups of inadequately supervised children. We did what we wanted and we didn't have to be home before dark. There was physically no way we could stray too far.
###
"The term 'beasts' belongs properly to lions, leopards and tigers, wolves and foxes, dogs and monkeys, and all others (except snakes) which rage by mouth or with claws. They are called 'beasts' from the force with which they rage; and they are termed 'wild' because they are by nature used to freedom and they are motivated by their own free will. They do indeed have freedom of will and they wander here and there, going as their spirit leads them." - Peterborough Bestiary
###
I am small and soft, flesh and blood
and his heart is an axe
that strikes to the core of me
A woman goes missing. Her car is found near a popular suicide spot but her body is never found. There are multiple sightings but no confirmed encounters.
A doctor falls in love with an anesthetized patient while operating on him. Feels he will never touch another person as intimately again.
A girl believes that as long as she doesn't open the Christmas present from her grandfather, he will never die.
A fish falls in love with the moon and it is caught on a silver lure.
A package never arrives.
###
"The world is not beautiful, therefore it is."
###
You ever seen pictures from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, people burnt, in pain. Terrible images. One picture, forever on display in a dark hallway of my mind: steps, a black smudge resolving itself into the outline of a man. A person incinerated, only his shadow left behind, burnt into the stone.
"We are the light of the fucking world. U.S.A! U.S.A! If we're so god damned awful, why are there so many fuckers killing themselves to get here?"
The brightest lights cast the darkest shadows.
###
Outside
the birds chirp
they sound like lasers
I gather information
like I am building a wall
but all it is
is throwing cutlery
at a home invader
you won't stop them
but you might
draw blood
ultimately
you just piss them off.
Outside the car
the soft static of rain
###
my grandma cut cantaloupe
and sat down in the pale
yellow kitchen
when she looked up
she didn't know herself
###
The immigrant experience of Army brats. Some people grow up in a different country. I grew up on another planet - a new world. There were no fathers in this world. Just grown faceless men - square jawed, buzz cut, sharp edged intermittent others. There was a lawlessness particular to groups of inadequately supervised children. We did what we wanted and we didn't have to be home before dark. There was physically no way we could stray too far.
###
"The term 'beasts' belongs properly to lions, leopards and tigers, wolves and foxes, dogs and monkeys, and all others (except snakes) which rage by mouth or with claws. They are called 'beasts' from the force with which they rage; and they are termed 'wild' because they are by nature used to freedom and they are motivated by their own free will. They do indeed have freedom of will and they wander here and there, going as their spirit leads them." - Peterborough Bestiary
###
I am small and soft, flesh and blood
and his heart is an axe
that strikes to the core of me
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