I'm back. Can't say I'm better than ever. Can't say I'm no worse for the wear. But I've returned from a distracting week. My eye swelled from bacterial conjunctivitis munctasepular visualdronitis. Something like that. It still itches but the swelling has virtually vanished. What a troubling somewhat familiar experience. I've had a sty before, but not to this degree. My initial thought was that I had somehow mistakenly stored some pretzel salt residue in my eye socket. This brought on a extensive attempt to remove the imagined crystal chunks through rubbing, through flooding, through having a coworker search my eye for the morsel. I now know that all of my efforts aggravated the hell out of my brewing eye staff poisonfection. It's funny when I attempt to self diagnose, or even fit my own take into the doctor's treatment. I get lost in this swirl of pretend medical jargon. The doctor on the other hand is much more direct, "yep that eye sure is swelling [pulls up my lid] it's bacteria alright, here's the medicine that should clear it up in a few days, the best thing you can do is wash your hands." Wow. Thanks doc. I gladly pay for that service and much love to the North Seattle medical center for there extended support network to help the uninsured and impoverished in the area. Truly a community endeavor. Makes me happy. But man, my language seems obliterated in the directness of such a no-nonsense doctor (Doctor Jaffee was the name no less).
It's funny to me how I feel much more inclined to consider the role of vision in my life when it's jeopardized. Like when I first woke up and was the swell of my lid. Understood that it was curving over my line of sight. Knew the extent of its puffiness and the need to intervene. The eye spoke for itself all over me. Then as I had to restrain myself from touching it, from irritating that poor vision giver any further, I came to appreciate the lack of restraint I often have when I feel like my body is in ship shape. The tender care and consideration of infection. The greater regard. I even began to ruminate on blindness. Maybe triggered by my own irrational fear that at any minute I would be sightless for good. I thought about it whenever I had a painful, I feel all my eye, kind of blink. Imagining the door to vision sealing shut for good. I started to wonder if maybe this attention to my eye would eventually turn out to be an overall blessing. A lesson in cleanliness sure, but perhaps a new motion towards bodily vulnerability and transformation. That's vague. I haven't found a new way to accept what my body is capable of, like cancerous cells swarming all over me, multiplying me into nothing. No not that. But witnessing a major, uncomfortable movement of a body part from one shape to another is crucial. I mean I was mostly grouchy at first, needy too, just ask my loving galfriend ("no face smoosh kissing you plaguerat!"), and I couldn't embrace the idea of drawn out healing, of restoration. Fix me now. Maybe that's why we are a panicky culture when it comes to illness, we understand doctor's have extensive training and when we get a chance to see one the expectation is a cure, sort of, well a solution I guess, temporary or permanent. I don't know what all I mean, but I do have an appreciation for the potential flimsiness of medicine of treatment. I mean holy hell look at this article about the helpless quandary behind diagnosing Alzheimer's disease http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/18/health/18moral.html?hp
There is so much obvious aging, so much latent illness, so much that can "go wrong" with our bodies. Careful, that'll kill you. How to go about aligning with that dreaded potential? How to turn it into a message of mutability and inevitable disintegration. We hold onto our physical form, it's really our only anchor sometime, solidness makes thought meaningful in some sensational way. Witness and actor in bodily experience. Don't ask me why I watch sports! Ha, all over the place here. My eye is fine now. I daresay I will forget about this eye until someone is talking about eye problems, or I start to feel that seed I mistake for salt brewing inside of me, a new bacterial junction brewing, bubbling upward. Well, I hope I marvel. I hope I smirk at what's inside my body, what is in fact me that is out of control. That is cropping up, that is waiting to turn deadly. I hope it freaks me out, but I hope it feels familiar. I hope I know it's me. The fragile me that hides behind this veil, perhaps a thick dark curtain depending on who you are, depending on your fear, your regard for your self and your skin, your society, but I want to see that fragile me, that reminder of my temporal existence. May I hold onto myself, may I look through my eye while I can! May I feel myself rot away, feel the snuffing out of me looming all around me and laugh! Laugh that I am involved, that this quivering jumble of formed me is always undergoing something new. Never a static flesh!!
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Friday, December 10, 2010
Touch Yourself
The meowmeow stretches his curvy leg to his mouth. He hooks his sharp little teeth onto his sharp little claws. Everything about this cat is curves. His legs the suggestion of cheetah. He's all hooked into himself, curve locked into curve. He yanks. He tumbles backwards as he pulls with some force. It sounds enough like toenails being clipped, that shell like clip of a noise, but it hardly resembles that $1 clipping tool we all know how to use so well. RP says that the cat does it because he can't stand his too long nails. They stick to everything. He scratches them on any material resembling a rug. He is gripping, slicing, yanking, scratching. But when he tilts back, when he has a mouth full of claw and paw, it's great. It's like watching the seven year old gymnast perform, as instructed by family and friends, to bend backwards, to put her feet on her head, to turn into a crab pretzel. Contortionist contort! Warp yourself for those who cannot! I love when the cat yanks on his nails. I love the way he falls over from doing it so hard. I like the ease with which he understands that this is one way to do what I want for myself. The domesticated meow defying his dependency with some self reliance. I should still probably help out with his sharply curved claws, but sometimes it's just too precious to behold his own little solutions.
A good friend of mine and his girlfriend used to chew on their toenails. Mostly for the sheer thrill I'd imagine. They both grew up in ruralish America so of course we all pinned this on them as an explanation. Gross, uncivilized, folky sorts. What bodily freedom we all mocked. Sure it's hickish on the surface, but that's so located in how I relate to America. Teeth can do so much, may as well gnaw on your nails on a need to need basis. Maybe we were just envious because there was the potential within our own bodies to do the same thing. They were just demonstrating something bodily we share, they were harnessing it into something to do. Hmmm, I wonder how many times we see things that our bodies have the potential to do that bother us, I mean the things that could harm us our obvious, but what about the physical feats, choices really, that are latent within our current bodily selves, do we see these and unknowingly feel weird about them, distance ourselves from them. I think it has something to do with decorum, what we are expected to do with our bodies. Especially in the public/private sense. Picking your nose, ear, vigorously scratching your head etc. Sometimes I feel like I am choosing to do things with my physical self in front of people so I can trigger a reciprocal physical response. Let's discover new places and uses for our bodies. Let's be cats hooking our selves onto our selves and yanking! That is not just masturbation!! I recently had such a wonderful bodily rediscover, it's only happened to me a few times, but it's a great feeling. There's a little dent directly below my tailbone (for n00bs and for me it's aka directly above my butthole) that is just so precious. If you poured a thimbleful of water on it you would probably overflow that dent like crazy. It's still my own little watering hole. I associate it with water because I discovered it in the shower. Everyone knows the shower is the expected place to play body relearn, to find new things, to also be wary, on the lookout for lumps anywhere. It was intensely invigorating to remember this little dent, I was vaguely aware of it I think, and to trace over it, to feel a sensation of me that's been dormant, waiting to be acknowledged. Perhaps a crude example, but we're talking about what bodies are capable of, and touching yourself in new ways that lend themselves to levels of understanding your own capacity for sensation seems terribly crucial. I want people to say, I need to touch myself, there's something I need to know, and not be expected to orgasm or to be a social pariah who reveals too much. Dunno. Keep on chewing on them nails kitty.
I'd like to end on a future reminder about some writing I'd like to do on faith. I am just going to do a brief list of the kinds of faith I'd like to distinguish: material faith, symbolic faith, symbolic order faith, religious/supernatural faith both of which are loosely tied to my understanding of obligations, servitude-diminishing yourself, definition, fervor. The way I listed them is a sort of chain, the first two are sort of subsumed under the third. The final one and its associations is a reaction to the symbolic order faith. The one I want to write about the most, the one I am most interested in expressing is material faith. I don't know what the consequences of trying to depict or capture faith are. I just know it's something I should mull over and something I should be writing about.
A good friend of mine and his girlfriend used to chew on their toenails. Mostly for the sheer thrill I'd imagine. They both grew up in ruralish America so of course we all pinned this on them as an explanation. Gross, uncivilized, folky sorts. What bodily freedom we all mocked. Sure it's hickish on the surface, but that's so located in how I relate to America. Teeth can do so much, may as well gnaw on your nails on a need to need basis. Maybe we were just envious because there was the potential within our own bodies to do the same thing. They were just demonstrating something bodily we share, they were harnessing it into something to do. Hmmm, I wonder how many times we see things that our bodies have the potential to do that bother us, I mean the things that could harm us our obvious, but what about the physical feats, choices really, that are latent within our current bodily selves, do we see these and unknowingly feel weird about them, distance ourselves from them. I think it has something to do with decorum, what we are expected to do with our bodies. Especially in the public/private sense. Picking your nose, ear, vigorously scratching your head etc. Sometimes I feel like I am choosing to do things with my physical self in front of people so I can trigger a reciprocal physical response. Let's discover new places and uses for our bodies. Let's be cats hooking our selves onto our selves and yanking! That is not just masturbation!! I recently had such a wonderful bodily rediscover, it's only happened to me a few times, but it's a great feeling. There's a little dent directly below my tailbone (for n00bs and for me it's aka directly above my butthole) that is just so precious. If you poured a thimbleful of water on it you would probably overflow that dent like crazy. It's still my own little watering hole. I associate it with water because I discovered it in the shower. Everyone knows the shower is the expected place to play body relearn, to find new things, to also be wary, on the lookout for lumps anywhere. It was intensely invigorating to remember this little dent, I was vaguely aware of it I think, and to trace over it, to feel a sensation of me that's been dormant, waiting to be acknowledged. Perhaps a crude example, but we're talking about what bodies are capable of, and touching yourself in new ways that lend themselves to levels of understanding your own capacity for sensation seems terribly crucial. I want people to say, I need to touch myself, there's something I need to know, and not be expected to orgasm or to be a social pariah who reveals too much. Dunno. Keep on chewing on them nails kitty.
I'd like to end on a future reminder about some writing I'd like to do on faith. I am just going to do a brief list of the kinds of faith I'd like to distinguish: material faith, symbolic faith, symbolic order faith, religious/supernatural faith both of which are loosely tied to my understanding of obligations, servitude-diminishing yourself, definition, fervor. The way I listed them is a sort of chain, the first two are sort of subsumed under the third. The final one and its associations is a reaction to the symbolic order faith. The one I want to write about the most, the one I am most interested in expressing is material faith. I don't know what the consequences of trying to depict or capture faith are. I just know it's something I should mull over and something I should be writing about.
Monday, December 6, 2010
Birth-Whirlpool-Rebirth
Let me start by elaborating on some of my methods. I think people conduct themselves in oddly particular ways, I can feel people trying to be themselves, sometimes they aren't paying attention to one another and their methods shine through, their decisions that most resemble themselves because its the sort of things they do most frequently, it's what they are either telling themselves or keeping quiet about, and by it I mean their daily preferences, the embarrassing rituals, the conduct. I am losing this a little bit. Method. We are capable of noticing our own method and riffing on it, mocking ourselves a little bit. Egging ourselves on to do something slightly different next time. To reconsider. To dispute our own presumed choices, our own so called stylings. It happens every time I write this blog. I think to myself, very quickly, what sort of words to I want to incorporate? What sort of language am I neglecting? And by thinking that question I simply try to surprise myself with my direct effort. This is the living fuel of effort right here, I don't revise these, I just pump them out. My friends and I are sort of talking about what it takes to develop yourself while you are acting it out. When the hesitation and questioning coincides with the production. That's a trick, keeping those two around. Doubt and action as persistent forces in your life, it's like breathing and thinking. I dunno, I just feel that doubt and hesitation are masks I've used when I am being indolent. I want to learn to question my method while making it over and over again. I reread these blog posts, note themes, note emphases, note word choice, notes notes notes, I am a witness to myself. I am also a self detective. I am also the culprit. The exploiter. The rationalizer. It is some treat to realize all the responsibilities involved in making yourself right here right now, ha as I like to say over and over again. What a thrill to take that noticing and questioning and addressing and impacting of the self and sharing it with everyone else.
I am so thankful I can play along with the other people who are right around me. I mean an English major, fuck. This is what I did with a select few of the "great and recognized", the important ones. I studied their making of method in order to meander over to my own. This is just a passing by thought, something to really stare at as it walks past you. Something to take with me and really chew on for awhile. A hunk of cud in my mouth that I can suck on, that I can extract some juices from, it all mingling with my saliva. Swallow some, spit some. It's all hot and frothy, bubbling from that cud of a thought. It's funny how you can sometimes forget that you have a mint or a piece of gum in your mouth. It either shrinks or becomes flavorless. Do something with it. Get rid of it. Move onto another piece. But thought is different in the way I remember things. This blog is a language of gum prints stuck all over my own internet for whoever to see if they want to, if I happen to give them a chance to.
Here's a little inkling of method and ritual of mine to share, maybe inconsequential, but it's mine and it's on the mind. When I go into the work bathroom I have to be prepared. I need a key to access it at all. We share it with the realty office and the dentist. Although the only person I have ever seen it was my boss. Ha, we quickly mumble one another's name and just book it. We are not close to bathroom buds at all. I suspect we won't be. Which isn't surprising or disappointing. I like working around the guy. Anywayyy you want it (better way to say "anyways"). I use my key, enter the baffroom. The automated lights audibly click on. If I have to use the stall it requires some forethought. That's what this is about. It's a monster of an auto flush toilet and it has bested me many times. By bested I mean that I have gone to sit down and it has just fired off a preemptive flush. The toilet swirls its flush over my bare bum. Always catching me off guard that it is going to flush until I am half way into my seat. Sitting atop a hole that is swirling with water doesn't quite do this flush justice. It is a roar. A deafening airplane taking off into the void that is sky. It is like taking ten Halls and seven Ricolas and shoving off the top of a mountain for your first time down a snowy, mogul filled black diamond. It is raging adrenaline in the form of a mechanized, triggered flush. A preprogrammed eruption. In short, it is very uncomfortable to sit above. I have adopted a new method to avoid such a frigid blast of water and air. I stride over to the stall with my long legs, making sure that the final stride squares me directly over the toilet, legs now on each side of the toilet. I am stand-straddling this machine. It's sensor has caught me, but I am not just some passer by, who it thinks has already come and gone, the source of preemptive flushes, I am instead locked into its sights. I can then methodically unbuckle my belt, pull my dance forward and down at the same time in order to avoid skimming them against the white exterior of the toilet. This is probably an irrational fear brought on by the instructions of socially expected sanitary measures. Speaking of which, I wish toilets were found in more colors more often. White dominates and allows for proper cleansing inspections. Once I have got the pants and boxers all the way down I can ease into the auto toilet and proceed as you'd probably expect, ha we'll save that investigation for another time; whenever you are (who are you again?) ready to compare those notes.
That's a method that took some change. I'll change it again before I'm done. I'll take on variations on variations. I'll try to bear in mind my written out stylings, my involvement in the execution. I'll experiment, rearrange. Why why why? It's a sampling of involvement in the development of method that should be happening on every level of who I am. It seems trivial, and I bet you could argue it is, but if I can conduct myself to the level I just wrote above for something on that scale, I believe there is a chance that the real method I am working on, always working on I like to tell myself, will really feel comfortable with itself. Will come into its own and suggest newness (another one of those "my all the time now words") to me voluntarily, aspects of me surprising all of me.
I will spare you elaborating on my difficulties with the coldness of the water in the automated sink, and the wastefulness of the paper I often use to dry my hands. Ha, more parts, more methods, more noticing. Plenty.
I am so thankful I can play along with the other people who are right around me. I mean an English major, fuck. This is what I did with a select few of the "great and recognized", the important ones. I studied their making of method in order to meander over to my own. This is just a passing by thought, something to really stare at as it walks past you. Something to take with me and really chew on for awhile. A hunk of cud in my mouth that I can suck on, that I can extract some juices from, it all mingling with my saliva. Swallow some, spit some. It's all hot and frothy, bubbling from that cud of a thought. It's funny how you can sometimes forget that you have a mint or a piece of gum in your mouth. It either shrinks or becomes flavorless. Do something with it. Get rid of it. Move onto another piece. But thought is different in the way I remember things. This blog is a language of gum prints stuck all over my own internet for whoever to see if they want to, if I happen to give them a chance to.
Here's a little inkling of method and ritual of mine to share, maybe inconsequential, but it's mine and it's on the mind. When I go into the work bathroom I have to be prepared. I need a key to access it at all. We share it with the realty office and the dentist. Although the only person I have ever seen it was my boss. Ha, we quickly mumble one another's name and just book it. We are not close to bathroom buds at all. I suspect we won't be. Which isn't surprising or disappointing. I like working around the guy. Anywayyy you want it (better way to say "anyways"). I use my key, enter the baffroom. The automated lights audibly click on. If I have to use the stall it requires some forethought. That's what this is about. It's a monster of an auto flush toilet and it has bested me many times. By bested I mean that I have gone to sit down and it has just fired off a preemptive flush. The toilet swirls its flush over my bare bum. Always catching me off guard that it is going to flush until I am half way into my seat. Sitting atop a hole that is swirling with water doesn't quite do this flush justice. It is a roar. A deafening airplane taking off into the void that is sky. It is like taking ten Halls and seven Ricolas and shoving off the top of a mountain for your first time down a snowy, mogul filled black diamond. It is raging adrenaline in the form of a mechanized, triggered flush. A preprogrammed eruption. In short, it is very uncomfortable to sit above. I have adopted a new method to avoid such a frigid blast of water and air. I stride over to the stall with my long legs, making sure that the final stride squares me directly over the toilet, legs now on each side of the toilet. I am stand-straddling this machine. It's sensor has caught me, but I am not just some passer by, who it thinks has already come and gone, the source of preemptive flushes, I am instead locked into its sights. I can then methodically unbuckle my belt, pull my dance forward and down at the same time in order to avoid skimming them against the white exterior of the toilet. This is probably an irrational fear brought on by the instructions of socially expected sanitary measures. Speaking of which, I wish toilets were found in more colors more often. White dominates and allows for proper cleansing inspections. Once I have got the pants and boxers all the way down I can ease into the auto toilet and proceed as you'd probably expect, ha we'll save that investigation for another time; whenever you are (who are you again?) ready to compare those notes.
That's a method that took some change. I'll change it again before I'm done. I'll take on variations on variations. I'll try to bear in mind my written out stylings, my involvement in the execution. I'll experiment, rearrange. Why why why? It's a sampling of involvement in the development of method that should be happening on every level of who I am. It seems trivial, and I bet you could argue it is, but if I can conduct myself to the level I just wrote above for something on that scale, I believe there is a chance that the real method I am working on, always working on I like to tell myself, will really feel comfortable with itself. Will come into its own and suggest newness (another one of those "my all the time now words") to me voluntarily, aspects of me surprising all of me.
I will spare you elaborating on my difficulties with the coldness of the water in the automated sink, and the wastefulness of the paper I often use to dry my hands. Ha, more parts, more methods, more noticing. Plenty.
Friday, December 3, 2010
Coffin Match
There are so many different people on the streeets. Some sort of a way to feel newness all over again. When I was walking around on the streets today I felt like falling over from laughing so hard, laying down in a sunny spot and just laughing and laughing until someone felt obligated to do something with me. I don't have the stamina to carry out such an imagined version of myself. It would be too hard, I'd try to think myself out of falling over and laughing in publick like that. The reason was what I said before, the people, the people, the differences in the people. Some people look so funny to me, it reminds me of the parts of myself that feel weird and different that I often skim over, some people are squat, like little packages, their features are all rounded and rosy, some people where intimidating sunglasses and have hair that stretched out of them, flows all over their back and torso like the most complex string instrument ever played. I want to convince someone to sit down real still like so I can pretend to play them, pluck their hairs like a guitar. What people choose to wear, or the way they look when they put little effort into their appearance before stepping out the door. All of these facets, they're allll such marvels. It makes me giddy, and I would be no good at telling all the people rushing past me these sorts of things, so instead I feel this laugh surge through me (It just struck me that Saul Bellow's novels are all about this laugh, pretty explicitly actually) and I just want to express it, feel it bubble out of me and pop on the people passing by me, but before it pops they can see through the glossy bubbles, and they'll see what I see, all the funny quirks and adornments, the physical features that make them a single person, a one body, but also humanity hence the mutual recognition. Oh man is it silly or what.
Longing. That's the word racing through me today and last night. What to do with longings. Last night I realized most of my longings are for people I used to have in my live and direct life. My family is number one on that. The way I felt last night was basically what I said to my galfriend, that I go home (there are lots of homes mind you, but home numero uno, my family's home) and I do the things the family want me to do, get shuffled from one familial obligation to the other, I mean I don't mind it, I want to see these people, but it's a shuffle. It's news when I'm in town, I am news. I am novelty. That was how I said it to my galfriend. I feel so dusty when I am standing in front of someone who I now stand in front of rarely. We used to stand in front of each other alot alot and now what? Indirect, overlooked longing. Last night inside my head I told myself that these old memories or models get buried in shallow graves. I am just full of all these shallow graves. On a lighter note, that's how I feel about trivia, it's also how I feel about the books I read. Anything can happen to those shallow graves: zombies can come out of them, I can go into my own graveyard in the secrecy of dark and exhume those memories, look for jewels or clues or just something resembling familiar, but also that graveyard can get flooded, water just rush over it, and then a jumble of memory limbs and chunks of memorializations are just sticking everywhere. The shallow graves are in ruins and I lose some things for sure. I am my own undertaker and I have to rebuild those memories. I am also constantly, NONSTOP, getting new bodies to deal with; I don't think I am the sort of gravedigger who currently has the luxury to burn anything, to scatter it and call it done with. The losing of memory doesn't feel up to me. For now this is the closest I want to get to sketching out the longings within me. They are insatiable, but describing them helps. Talking to my galfriend about how I surprise myself by how much I miss my family sometimes, how shocked I am by where I am and what exactly I am doing, that helps. It catches me off guard, but I am going to understand my longing through these shallow graves for now. I have lots and lots of work to do.
On a quick last note I am listening to my Pittsburgh musical ally GIRL TALK's new album. Not only do I feel like a kindred spirit to him because we are from the same city and had the same radio stations, but right now his patchwork of musical chunks, pop music chunks really, that make up his flow feels like such a triumph of channeling memory to make a new present tense. I am very proud of his new album, it is so clearly moving through so many timelines. His new album ALL DAY is just the epitome of what he's been trying to do all along with his style. Much word props Greg Talk.
Longing. That's the word racing through me today and last night. What to do with longings. Last night I realized most of my longings are for people I used to have in my live and direct life. My family is number one on that. The way I felt last night was basically what I said to my galfriend, that I go home (there are lots of homes mind you, but home numero uno, my family's home) and I do the things the family want me to do, get shuffled from one familial obligation to the other, I mean I don't mind it, I want to see these people, but it's a shuffle. It's news when I'm in town, I am news. I am novelty. That was how I said it to my galfriend. I feel so dusty when I am standing in front of someone who I now stand in front of rarely. We used to stand in front of each other alot alot and now what? Indirect, overlooked longing. Last night inside my head I told myself that these old memories or models get buried in shallow graves. I am just full of all these shallow graves. On a lighter note, that's how I feel about trivia, it's also how I feel about the books I read. Anything can happen to those shallow graves: zombies can come out of them, I can go into my own graveyard in the secrecy of dark and exhume those memories, look for jewels or clues or just something resembling familiar, but also that graveyard can get flooded, water just rush over it, and then a jumble of memory limbs and chunks of memorializations are just sticking everywhere. The shallow graves are in ruins and I lose some things for sure. I am my own undertaker and I have to rebuild those memories. I am also constantly, NONSTOP, getting new bodies to deal with; I don't think I am the sort of gravedigger who currently has the luxury to burn anything, to scatter it and call it done with. The losing of memory doesn't feel up to me. For now this is the closest I want to get to sketching out the longings within me. They are insatiable, but describing them helps. Talking to my galfriend about how I surprise myself by how much I miss my family sometimes, how shocked I am by where I am and what exactly I am doing, that helps. It catches me off guard, but I am going to understand my longing through these shallow graves for now. I have lots and lots of work to do.
On a quick last note I am listening to my Pittsburgh musical ally GIRL TALK's new album. Not only do I feel like a kindred spirit to him because we are from the same city and had the same radio stations, but right now his patchwork of musical chunks, pop music chunks really, that make up his flow feels like such a triumph of channeling memory to make a new present tense. I am very proud of his new album, it is so clearly moving through so many timelines. His new album ALL DAY is just the epitome of what he's been trying to do all along with his style. Much word props Greg Talk.
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