Archive for October, 2008
save money, learn to couplet.
A few things have interested me as of late.
One of those things has been how quickly the word “maverick” has spread into popular culture, and how the definition has grossly expanded thanks to Governor Palin, Senator McCain, and SNL. No longer does it hold the singular meaning of an unorthodox or free thinking individual, but the word now brings along with it a host of grey shaded (mostly dubious) meanings. I can’t count the number of times today that I uttered, or heard someone else utter things like “let’s do this maverick style,” “it’s probably because he’s a maverick,” “that’s a little too maverick for me,” “fucking mavericks need to shut the fuck up,” “those mavericks think they own the place,” or more simply, “let’s do this mavericks.”
Perhaps this hasn’t spread all throughout popular culture as much as it has infected the microcosm of life that I have found myself in these past few weeks, but I have a feeling maverick is something that will either stay with me for a long time (“fierce”) or find it’s away into my mental waste basket along with words like “jiggy,” and “dealio.”
The other thing that has come to my attention to today is my aversion to human cruelty of any sort. I suppose aversion isn’t the right word. Aversion would imply that I avoid it, and unfortunately the opposite is most often the case. I somehow found my way onto youtube tonight researching something else I’m writing, and instead found videos of people like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore and pundits like that. I don’t care whatever political views they may espouse, i don’t care what political views you stand by, there’s no excuse for the filth that these people spew in front of television cameras, microphones and the shocking amount of followers that somehow find reason to justify their just plain meanness. Maybe I’m just in a particularly sensitive mood lately, but I find it really hard to understand why people find it necessary to be so evil. I’m probably sounding in large parts both naive and whimsical in my diatribe against mean people, but I just don’t think any degree of cruelty is necessary in situations like that. Meanness should be reserved for fictional characters and people who wear crocs.
But as much as I find it loathsome and despicable, I find myself more and more drawn to just keep clicking on “related videos” and watching more and more of it, and making myself feel really depressed about the state of the human condition. I mean honestly. Think what you like about anyone’s politics, since when has calling someone a “rag head” or imitating their parkinson’s symptoms on your podcast been even close to classy? It’s not. And dagnabit, I think people should just try to be nice if they’re going to disagree with people. Is it really that entertaining to see someone be so mean? I don’t get it. I just don’t get it folks.
I always find interesting breakthroughs in my writing when I realize the characters I’m creating have large bits of myself ingrained in their ugliest qualities. Once I realize that I’m really kind of emotionally purging all over my macbook, things just seem to go much easier. Whoop whoop!
I get more hits a day on this thing because I wrote about a creepy crush I had on Jeremy Roloff. Seriously. You’d be shocked by the amount of people google “Jeremy Roloff shirtless” on a daily basis.
(it’s like fourteen).
… and we exhale and roll our eyes in unison.
It’s interesting that when I think back on my childhood, there is one figure I consistently feel this kind of odd kind of displacement towards. At some point in my gradual maturation into adulthood my relationship with dear old dad stopped being as black and white as “he’s daddy, so i love him.” It never really stopped being that simple I guess. He is daddy, and I will always love him. But the more I grew up the more I realized that I was nothing like my father. And now, having come full circle I guess, the older I get the more I realize I’m more like my father than I would have previously liked to admit.
There was always something detached about my father. there still is. He is the person I have the hardest time trying to find a gift for- resulting, unfortunately for him, in a multitude of fishing ties and “world’s best dad” mugs. I never know what to write in his cards, and I have never been able to say goodbye to him in the hallmarky, father/son dynamic that I’ve always seen reenacted before me since I was a kid. He’s always been this complete mystery to me. The nut I’ll never be able to crack and all that.
But the more I grow into myself, the more I’m realizing I’m growing into him.
Not surprisingly I’ve always related better to my mother. She’s who I inherited my outgoing personality, my effortless ability to talk to whomever I’m around, and my neurotic need to bring a book with me anywhere I go (even if I never actually intend on reading it). All these traits, and many more like them are things my father has never claimed to possess. He’s anything but a people person, and needs little stimulation of any kind to keep himself occupied. My dad is the dad you see at graduation either delegated to hold the video camera, or who is quietly trying to disassociate himself with the screaming bunch of family members sitting to his left. I don’t remember my dad at my graduation. I don’t remember my dad at my last string of theatrical projects, and I don’t remember my dad as being much of a contributing factor to anything in my lifetime. His brand of parenting was conservatism in it’s simplest form, and liberally hands off.
Traveling all over Europe this year, my mind always seems to drift back to my parents. How unhappy I’ve always seen them. How loveless I’ve always viewed their relationship, and how miserable they must be back in the states together, while I’m sitting on a cliff staring off into the Mediterranean. But the more I think about it, and the more I find myself sitting quietly by a window contemplating a complicated set of issues in my mind, a book lying lifelessly on my lap, and my iPod stored safely in my pocket, I realize that the picture I have now become, is the same picture of my father, sitting by my grandparents lake staring out for what seemed like a lifetime while I sat back and wondered how he could be so content with a life like that.
I’m not a carbon copy of my father by any means. I still can’t quite imagine how he stumbled upon the mess of a life he ended up with, but the mistakes he must have made were probably made with the right intentions that always drove my father to do what he thought was best for someone else. Whenever I find myself at home these days, I’m always reminded of the seemingly endless amount of work my dad does when he’s home. One of the things I’ll always remember about my dad is the planner he’s had since he was in college. One of those refillable planners that you can replace the pages with. I know I probably inherited my insane need for organization from fixating on my dad fixating on his planner day after day. The list has never been empty, and for reasons unknown to me now my dad will always take whatever work one of my family members puts on him. He taught me not to complain. He taught me that all this work, wasn’t “unfair,” but it was just easier to get it done. He taught me to stop using “unfair” as a scapegoat to a life that wasn’t going my way. He taught me a lot of things that I probably won’t appreciate for a much longer time.
I wish I could tell him all of this, but my dad and I don’t communicate that way. We never have, and probably never will. But just as he’s never been able to say “I love you” in so many words, but I’ve always understood, I hope he understands how much i’ve grown to look up to him. I hope he understands all that even if I never find the words to tell him.
happy smiles and laughing yaks
an excerpt from a recent e-mail:
something tells me this is an epidemic.
I’m sitting comfortably in a rather english (if not mostly commercial coffee shop), sipping my macchiato and I feel an odd sense of emptiness that I can’t quite describe. No- it’s not emptiness exactly. It’s more like this vacuum of creativity has suddenly taken up residence in that part of my brain that houses all of my creative muscle. I can feel it withering up there. If I shook my head fast enough right now I almost feel like I would hear a pitiful kind of jangling noise where the most important kind of communications used to reside.
It’s like a void.
I think it’s an epidemic. Hopefully. Not hopeful really, just hoping that I’m not completely alone.
I haven’t been able to pick up a pen, pencil or dry erase marker to write for what seems like months now. Reading back through my last several journal entries everything has seemed fairly forced, and a little bit bland. It’s all I can do write now to try and make this interesting. But admitting to myself in the past couple of days that I have just come into contact with this huge creative road block has helped immensely in terms of remedying the problem. I’m writing now, aren’t I?
It’s scary though. To think that something that has always come so easily to me in the past is suddenly impossibly beyond my reach. I feel stagnant, and I honestly think it’s taking some kind of emotional toll on my psyche not being able to pour out anything- not a note, a rhyme, a sentence of any of the shit that’s been rolling around in my head since I’ve arrived in London. I keep asking myself what’s wrong, and keep trying to just muscle everything out, but it’s been painfully evident that none of that has worked. I’ve been journaling since I was eight, and I’ve been blogging for almost a decade now. Even when I haven’t been able to pull some juvenile poem out of my ass, whip up some fantastical tale or try my hand at theatrical fiction, I’ve always been able to make some kind of feeble attempt at making my daily life seem interesting. But not lately. I’m living in one of the largest and most multicultural cities in the world, just got back from a trip to Athens, and all I can seem to think about is how I can’t talk about any of it.
Maybe it’s all just a bit overwhelming. That seems a bit obvious, doesn’t it? But even if it is (or was, as the case may be) it’s not the least bit comforting. it’s not comforting or helpful to know that I’ve finally reached that point in my life when, faced with something completely untrivial, I can’t make write about it. I can’t reflect about it because it’s too big. Maybe that’s not what it’s about, but if it is I’m fucked. I’m fucked because I’ve built myself such an identity on being this budding writer. An author who sits in coffee shops and writes. Which is what I’m doing right now, sure- but if all I can do is write about life’s minutia, and not about the big stuff than that’s all my stuff will ever be. Small, tiny, unimportant. Pick up a thesaurus and keep going if you want. But any way I look at it, it only makes me feel more inept and incapable.
Life has been pretty happy the past couple of weeks. I’ve built up a nice routine, found a couple of good friends and did some amazing things, and it’s like I can’t write about anything but my own neuroses. I’m sure that’s probably been a pretty static feature of most of artists of the 20th century (and beyond), but it’s kind of gross, don’t you think?
I think ultimately what I’m just scared most days that life is getting too out of hand to write about. That I can’t really button down any one part that seems condensible enough to fit into this blog. And in the end none of it seems all that important. We’re in the midst of a huge financial crisis, a presidential election, and on the brink of world war if things don’t start to calm down over in Eastern Europe. What makes writing a play about a bunch of backpackers important anymore? What makes my stories interesting, vital, necessary? I’m sweating, thinking about all of this is stressing me out so much. I’m sitting in this coffee shop sweating, surrounded by a bunch of London scene kids in their hipster clothing and all I want to do is lock myself in my bathroom and never hear about anything important again. I want to feel like I’m building my life up to something that’s going to be world changing, and monumental and something that will make me feel alive. It’s all pretty grand when I read that over again to myself, but it’s how I feel. When I take all that out of it, All I’m doing is grasping at straws, and I might as well just jerk off all over the pages of my journal, because that’s what I’m going to create in the end.
And it’s all just so scary.
