Windows into Widows

Since I haven't written in awhile, I took a look at all the things I never finished. These pieces have occupied my mind in many ways...woolgathering on the bus, mind-wandering on the elliptical at the gym...they just never worked out, regardless of my hopes at their maiden voyage. The crux of it is, I'm in love. It's so much easier to write when you are lonely! Like fashioning you own Golemn out of clay and the hours you don't have to spend with a hottie much, much, more animated.

Mercurial U

You enter the tent…and it is so massive inside, and it is intoxicating and exhilarating all in one, this tiny universe that promises to entertain and fulfill. The air is permeated with a blood orange hue, a reflection of crimson drapery and stagelight from the intenser end of the rainbow. You feel a new aliveness, a childish glee as you catch your elongated form in a distorting carnival mirror. Everyone is so colorful and spectacular here…and the volleyed reflection tells you that you, you too, might belong. You force yourself forward, deeper into this strange atmosphere: those previous thoughts of contentedness, the assurances you gave yourself over how happy you already are, are drowned out in a jamboree of horns. A dozen trumpets and tubas and saxophones arc and pitch against one another sounding like they would each rather forge their own melody: but they have come together especially for you, in a tentative cease-fire.

Attachment Theory

On rereading the notes, I may have been writing something through the eyes of a child, a child who does not feel like they are a high priority for their mother. Of course, I’m interpreting my notes through the lens of the title. I’ve already described more than what was there; it could really be any number of cries for help.

Snake Oil

Is there such a thing as religious deprivation? What happens when it is gone? Theology: the promise of a never ending skirmish. Not for the casual; god for the compulsive. Is this about the constructs that we put in place to displace it? The nagator, the deconstructor, the busybodied armchair psychological engineer: the peanut gallery. What do we hate about it? Really.

Sadly, there is not one coherent thought in my notes – but I know that snake oil referred to the recent posturing in atheism, not religion in particular. Ok, I’m an atheist; I enjoyed the 2 popular books that helped reassert it, too. What I don’t get is the preoccupation with it, or why people exert so much energy towards conversion or conviction (apparently, I don’t see why people get so vested in it, since I never finished it). I mean, what is the value to the individual? I didn’t finish “Atheism in the time of Irreverence”, either. I’ve been in forums and seen people passionately argue non-negotiable points. Really, you either prefer the fantastic lie or the plausible lie, and proof carries no water here.

Cassanova

That might be what did it: Hank made a habit of contemplating all the possibilities. He was deliberate – people had to be patient to hear what he would say – because he was imagining all the different directions his words could take. He wanted to be prepared for every possible contingency. Then this one. He couldn’t read her, or she lived outside the world he though he had all figured out. He’d been with many women – so many different personalities and situations – and thought he had it all down, knew how to handle a skirt in any circumstance. At the outset, he tried to play her like any other: he would read her moods and know when to shift into another gear. But this one.

I’m not sure how I feel about my grandfather. On one hand, I’ve romanticized him as this pre-punk figure. I saw a photo of him a couple years ago, and that was my first thought: before the skin heads, before the straight edges, here we had this stove pipe punk. It was a strange photograph of his entire family: someone probably blew two weeks salary to get a picture with a ‘camry’, getting the entire family to pose before the above-ground oil tank. None of which is germaine to cassanova.

I think I referred to this story, at one point, as being about the ‘most selfish person I’ve ever known’ (make that a second). I don’t think he ever worked a day that I existed on this planet, but I’ve heard just enough stories to romanticize his life. This story was about his career (one of very many) as a race car driver in the 50’s. Aaaaand, his abandonment of his wife and children around that same time. I pulled this paragraph from my blogspot notes; I have about 15K words in disparate locations on my pc. I’ve attacked it from so many different angles, and I was challenged by the time displacement and intimidated by failing on something with a tangible tangent to my own identity. I still want to finish it, but I think I’ve decided to wait until my grandfather has passed. What I have written so far, considering the context, felt very weird in the writing of it.

A Soldier’s Things

3. A long metal bar. It was part of a lock to the warehouse we broke into. It was a sweet deal – it was between leases, unoccupied, and the upstairs was like a gigantic indoor skate park. Some friends and I visited it a couple more times, until one day we snuck inside to find the toilet at street level was overflowing, flooding the place. It was creepy, dawning on us slowly that we weren’t the only people invading this place. Endless reams of Asian porn were strewn all over the place, floating in the thin pool.

I have a box of momentos. One day I decided to perform an inventory. Other items of note: Sandman, from Star Wars. Rosary Beads. A Slot Car. Numerous concert tickets. My Huskies Watch, my bolero tie (hey, I should bust that out!). I think the absence of things in my momento box says more about me than what’s actually in it….

The Third Son

Isaac could not be deterred. Fervent imaginings had lit a fire in his heart, and his mind was boiling with many hopes and possibilities that could arise from this venture. He shared them with his father, and he made known his frustration at the sole gray path marked for him should he stay. And Lott understood, and Lott let himself be proud of his son.

I might finish it. It’s a facile rewrite of the bible. You want the firstborn to follow in your footsteps, and the second born will be a great backup if they don’t go off to war and die. But there is no clear destiny for the third son…which is why we have priests and musicians.

Roe v. Wade

…is blank! But I remember my intentions. I wanted to review the judicial argument, which, by the way, is inadequate and flimsy. I understand the right to privacy, contingent on other SC rulings…but since I’m not going to ever get around to this, I highly recommend you read it for yourself. Then read a couple others, just to garner some idea what a logical conclusion should look like. My fear, and preoccupation with this, lies in knowing that the ruling was tailored not to constitutional grounds, so as much as it was designed to appease popular opinion at that time. And by saying ‘at that time’, I’m implying that popular opinion changes.

What we really need is an amendment, a caveat indicating that life is not precious or sacred.

Flip Your Wig

But what does this have to do with wigs? Well, I’ve been making allowances for them lately. The do what wigs do – distort, embellish or misrepresent – and though my communications with them has been minimal, they’ve manifested over the past couple months as really bad ideas I either indulged or humored a little too much. Here’s the net-net: they’ve made me either deny/confirm, or explain away, my behavior. This is an embarrassing, undeserved, inconvenience to me.

I try to avoid being personal. This invective is more or less complete, though unpublished. Kind of sad, since we tend to be funny in our mean-spirited moments. Rolling this rag about 2 wigs who don’t know each other but share lying compulsively in common was therapeutic…though I think if I met a Crackwig or Mindwig tomorrow, I’d probably make a snap judgment about her.

Structure

Each day becomes more and more submerged in detail. My time estimates are in blocks five minutes each. This isn’t good enough; my focus can be derailed in five minutes.

I’m not sure what happened here. The notes are copious and nonsensical. I may have been suffering from insulin shock. This is one of my symptoms of the shock by the way; an obsessive micromanaging of moments. Don’t laugh, it will happen to you right before you die, I just get the opportunity to live the moment on unplanned occasions. There’s more:

When codifying behaviour, do we go too far? How do we know when to stop? What values are in place? Is this serving self, or something higher than self? An immediate self, or a self conscious that it reaches into the past and future? Isn’t the very defining of structure something I do in an inspired moment, something I do because I want to do – an impulse? What am I positing, knowing that it is in the face of what I may be inspired to do tomorrow? Why is one compulsion more virtuous than another?

Perhaps I wanted to look at the transience of our compelled transcendence. There are a lot of words here. There are also a lot of references to killing squirrels; I kid you not. It is broken up with the statement: “Provide an itinerary. Here.” No reference to what the itinerary should serve.

Fan Boy

Anyways. Secret Wars sounded a death-knell, and as DC minimized it’s number of universes and Marvel decided to expand theirs, I found I wasn’t enough the passionate archivist to keep up with numerous cross-overs. Even books I liked were being marred with disjointed one-offs, forced storylines that made no sense inside a comics’ gestalt.

Meeting Howard Chaykin was a great moment for me. Even Christina & Otto, standing right next to me, couldn’t gauge the synapses in my brain doing a spastic bumper-caring off one another. Even as I walked away from my fanboy moment, my nerves were calming down as enthusiastic, tiny metal Pachinko balls, might do. I was short-tongued and nervous the whole while.

There’s no good excuse why I didn’t finish this one. Fanboy would never be approved by my internal Vatican…y’know, the ones who decided the story where Jesus turned into a goat shouldn’t be included in the Bible? Or was it fucked a goat? It’s all academic now, anyways.