One and Done

The Steelers stumbled into the SBOWL and with that there remains a game. My commitment to the team this season has involved irrational insistence, commercialized hometown pride, and plain old fashioned sportsmanship. Does some fundamental part of my life thrive on gaming and conflict? Does this cause a shame reaction that has allowed me to deconstruct all of the untrustworthy cues of my modern American privilege? These aren't questions for a Steelers fan today. It is an oddity though, I can quickly determine that shame is the central feeling I should identify with as I willfully expose myself to all the hype, brutality, depraved role models, food, and commercials. Fittingly, I will skip hand in hand with my galfriend into that city of mine, the one I've always felt mixed and uneasy about. The one I swore to not settle in, the one that grows fonder as the heart spaces us apart. I can't wait to whisk a PGH stranger through its streets, wares, and delicacies. I can't wait to reembrace, to navigate neighborhoods I barely know the history of, to look for the landmarks I can ramble on about. Last night we watched a show about the ingenuity of humanity throughout the deserts of the world: the peril and persistence really. Of course my colonial disposition looks for the narrative, the redemption, in the form of a narrated victory, an individual's journey and success, a celebration of people whose hardships could indicate that they have no business, no time really, to celebrate. But of course they do, in their own way, for their own needs. The desert episode focused on water. Life requires water, life does not require chili. The powerful celebration of rain that ends months of drought, children rolling in the water, screaming at the joy of their opening skies. How can I conflate this with my region, the hammered screaming of a competitive conquest. Organized money and falsely fabled athletics. It seizes me with the might that many heavy things in this world would; could it really be as guttural and wrenching as rain.

This America I live in, Louis CK says we talk white people problems here because we don't have any other sort of problems to worry about, and you can't help but laugh at the relative rightness of that idea. Most of my emotions are filtered through experiences I am vaguely associated with, here's a few that come to mind:

1. I lived in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Pgh, PA. We have unity for our sports teams because of a string of victories across different sports in the '70s, coupled with a working class majority during that time period that identified with the grittiness and occasional unity of a hard fought, contact sports effort.

2. Films, sounds, and books (I should qualify, mostly novels). These are my most immediate opportunities to pour some of me out. I was raised by a reading specialist in a secure predominantly white, predominantly financially stable community. This gave me the opportunity to dramatically take in the importance of absorbing the taste for cultural literacy. I also had ample time on my hands because of our stability. All of these tendencies, and encouragement from my parents, were coupled with the rapid rapid development of computers and the internet alongside my growth. I suddenly could participate in an endless stream of introductions, opinions, conversations, and creativity. By proxy I absorbed a temperament that could recognize meaningful and powerful experiences rendered in a medium where I enjoyed the application of my constantly morphing POWERS OF DISCERNMENT. 31i73

3. The news. I was exposed to the conditions and hardships of reality through all sorts of branches of a hungry news media. They were able to expose angles of life, with all sorts of bents, at a steady pace to me. It taught me politics, agendas, and implementation. I learned to take serious the lives of others through an education in politics, journalism, and educational videos. I don't know how to conjure up more about this, it's sort of self evident to anyone who, through extended circumstances, has ended up reading this far into a blog post written by me, Ryan Joseph Gleason of Pittsburgh.

These are just a few off the dome. Okay, plenty of things of importance have happened in my life (and a proportionally appropriate tragedy could happen anytime). There are great examples that exemplify my own emotional challenges, but I don't want to defend them. Instead, I think it is important to identify the degrees to which I am removed from people who are experiencing things divorced from the pleasures and privileges of my stock. This is all jagged and funny at the moment, but I have to take it seriously. I mean, GO STEELERS GO GO GO. What fun to root! But also I mean what the fuck, I can't just be a steelersmaniac every day of my life, I best recognize a life where a steelers victory has little to no overt bearing, and instead, where the existence of things like the steelers and their beloved NATION subtly mean a life in the desert waiting to celebrate the miracle of more rain.

pull pull young riptide

Anticipation then presence. Before I get to whatever I am expecting, I am interjecting my own tale of it. I am shaping my lines, crafting the reactions of others, and often I am really just resigning myself to the obvious script. I think I learned the reality of this approach for me when I used to write jokes. I got a sense of the give and take, I learned to target like a magician who wants their tricks to astound. Disbelief through confidence? Dunno. My dad is a salesman through and through, a real charmer, he wants to sweep you off your feet, direct you, smack of engagement, and he wants it to feel like it's not happening at all. This isn't some tour guide, standing up with a party cone on their head, this is life breathed into conversation, this is the steady camera making layers upon layers of image, suggesting the striking-ness of its own frames with the seductiveness of a hot whisper. This is control. If you're not in the business of controlling, then you don't know it yet. I am, and I am often ashamed. I am formulating how it's going to go down, I am wondering what will rub you the right away, and I am drafting it up, throwing away attempts in my head, something can strike a particular disposition so well, so right, that it's worth it to shape accordingly. To ponder to yourself what will establish your rapport, what interview bullshit tactics are gonna sweep someone off their feet who so casually, aplomb like, just assumes they know you. You don't know me half as much as I make us know each other in a way that I am perceiving, all of you. Ha listen to that ego'd control, if that was a bell and you struck it, what on earth would come back at you?

What the fuck am I talking about? Read the first three word of this and then watch this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9mvTHSVsEo&feature=related I am talking about being very very bored. I am talking about your established normalcy. The routine that has the right exchanges at the right time, the restrained playfulness, the decorum, the ways we know how to talk to one another and then the subsequent perversion, again the control. I can at will summon what's next for me, I can put the players in reasonable position and then I can direct, I can play. It is terribly painful to feel assured enough to let this happen. My most vivid, countless dreams revolve around encountering the figures of my past, the lines I would be ready to say and my control over their reactions. What infuriating definition, it makes me never want to see these figures of my past ever again. I can't believe that I feel so capable of penetrating people to people exchanges that I am brewing with their lines inside my dreams, that I am shaping their reactions, their typicality and calling it my own to do with as I please. This is the limitation of the isolated life I feel I so easily lead sometimes. Where you swallow up all the world around you, put people in their stations, in their regard for you and themselves, and then let it all get filthy. Let it all defy you in a way that doesn't surprise you, let all the unexpected, spontaneous fury of the restraints you see all around you, only remind you of the cruelty with which you understand people's function, their class, their desires, their disruptions of their own routines.

This is all too much to play upon, to write about really. It is a fearful discovery I have in myself. I mean look at the way I just type feeling like a broken spout, an absent plug, a flood of potential thoughts that lack staying power, that only indicate my own inner workings that are too disparate, unfocused and unhelpful. These ideas have been dripping off my insides, falling into my brain for longer than a week, what a difficult lapse in myself over time. So the thoughts on anticipation/presence (definition/suggestion, control of our assumed surroundings) culminated in me asking my favorite coworker if she thought that the people she was closest to were predictable....awkward out of the blue style, forcing it upon people is probably one way I have tried to deal with my constant framing of potential conversation, although that has become its own sort of expectation of RYAN G. Anyhow, like I said, I asked her what she thought about closeness and predictability, assuring her this was a thought, this wasn't misdirected self help I was asking her for, it was clarification. She said that she didn't think they lived predictable lives in general, but that they were predictable to her. Ahh what a relief to hear that! What sweet reminders of the familiar world we build, like a cruise ship we get to staff and captain ourselves on an ocean that lacks land! Of course you know your friends, of course I know what to say to my boss in the morning. It's the adapting to those others that begin as undefined blobs of people begging to be seen by someone else, all over again, that makes the thrill, the constant of the learning life so astounding. Yet, who wants to settle into knowing the predictable traits of all the people they consider to be around them until something funny or painful enough happens that you have to pickup some sawdust and build a new boat. What the fuck is up with the language I spew, I have no interest in public clarity so much. I just want to force upon the eyes of others the style that spits the most of my noise! What a bitch to move on from that. RP is really actively learning this alongside me, what a nice time! Everyone is gesturing towards access and then digging further into themselves for that diamond that other people just get, beyond the formal constraints of the message. Like pouring a glass of yourself all over the face of someone who is looking up at you. Their mouth pursed at first, while you miss, water running all over their face, making eyes water, nose squawk. And then, if you are serving the right shit, that face will respond to the liquid all over them, the won't push you away, throw your glass in the air, and look for the nearest towel. The pursed mouth will pucker and expand, your pouring hand will get steady, regardless not all of the water is going straight into their mouths, but motherfucker they won't care, you can even trick them into thinking that they did drink everything you served them, bah impossible, that's not how pouring out your PRODUCTIONS works. Watch them get refreshed. Try to make the access drinkable. The next time might be too diluted, or you might try to reach for the face and knock the water over with your own untrustworthy limbs. But as of right now, I am a brewer who has had too many empty tanks, too many mishaps, and too much thinking about serving up tiny vials of my concentrated social self. I need something frothy, believe me this is my frothy side writing here on this page. Enough, I am blowing this feeling into an unreadable proportion. I am done with this thought today, time to experiment a whole hell of a lot.

Final image: Downtown Seattle McDonalds. Giant island in the middle of the place, bar style tables surround it. There is an aquarium thrust into the middle of the island, eye level. Flimsy salt water scene. Kelp tendrils sway, broken coral like a scrap yard. There's frantic blue and yellow fish, born in a McDonalds I'd wager, wondering what the hell they are, bumping into sea vegetation and glass, eyes rolling around in a state of emptiness, scaled bumper cars. And then there's old man scorpion fish, he gets a gender because all the quills look like some far reaching wispy beard, think Asian Combat Master. Think curvature of the spine, the fear of that plight still sticks with me past childhood. Think deep fried MCFISH, KING AND QUEEN OF THE CRISPY SEA. Old man scorpion says it all. He is so hunched, so drooping. He literally looks like he could be melting and dissolving into the water, ready to vanish into a sea ghost, into sea litter, at any second. I mean you got to see this fish. The threat of barbs is long gone, doesn't have one erect quill, one sharpened needle, one deadly prick left in him, he is combed back, he is bobbing in a aquatic shaped cell. In spite of this, scorpion remains thoughtful, he scorns the frantic Finding Nemo cast and sets his ponderous eyes upon the frantic humans stuffing their faces with instantaneous meals, the ones that surround his watery island. He looks at the staff of minorities who hang all over themselves, covered in headsets and deep colored uniforms. He watches them playfully serve a nonexistent line, watches them await their money by the hour. I had to leave McDonalds, can't stomach this sort of fish for long. Argh Seattle, what you getting at, I don't want to go anywhere, you've been showing me much, and there's more to store in me that is happening here. I walk past MICKEY DEES and see through the glass of the window the glass of the aquarium, and there's old scorp bobbin up and down. Maybe they have a stock of his kind somewhere in the fast food headquarters, maybe he's delicious deep fried, maybe his limp quills are remarkable pens. All right folks, time to watch me get poisoned with writing. Somethings going down with me like it hasn't before, I am right with it.

back turned

Too much time. I've been around and then down. Feels like I'm infected with the city. It's cold external windows my eyes. People roaming around on the inside, keeping busy, getting paid. They're touching computers. They're shuffling around me. It's hard to separate myself from this urban feeling. I can't relocate. Separation feels like fat rising to the top, skimming it off, discarding or saving for later. A yellow, vulnerable skin of cream. That's me imagining any sort of separation. Discard it, it's not possible. The clarity surrounding Seattle is such an odd taint upon the crowded in corners, the crosswalks and their beckoning flashes, the huddled up bus stop in the morning. First, stand at the bottom of a city hill. Darkness, no cover. I look out at the lake and the space needle. Watch traffic roar by on the highway with enough distance that it looks like it is all inching along. Like the suddenness of realizing the sun has risen without telling you. The bus startles me in the same way. My frantic scramble to leave the house means I have this gapped-tooth of a moment before I have to move onward. From the bottom of a city hill to the floor of a city. Floor of the city is soothing, I can feel it getting all wound up nice and tight. Clicks of a studded circle, slowly cranking toward release. Then dizzy dizzy crowds. Bus roars and steps, everywhere people and objects are crawling up and into each other; steps steps steps. Time to leave the city floor. The time when that happens should be indeterminate, the bus being so unpredictable. But I have a place to be, coffee to make, voicemail to hear. So I know to check my cellphone. I know to be disinterested but aware of the mumbling of my fellow bus waiters. The feeble dissent that always results in boarding another bus, moving along, forgetting the waiting because it'll just happen again, out of control for you or me todaytomorrow. Then I'm blazing out of the city and into the bubbled edge of city life. The outskirts that can call themselves community. Magnolia. Take a bridge, verify you aren't in seattle with that cityscape view. That neighboring titan of mountain rock that frames your life and erases it. I see all of that on my bridge into the bubble's edge. It's an edge because there's water, it's an edge because there's sky or woods or more mountain or less people or bigger cars. It's just an edge for me today, get it. Then I'm on the top of a hill, rolling downward to the Magnolia village, the land of the job. From on top I can see a line of mountains and a horizon of water, ocean, but like lakes for a droplet like me. The mountains stretch sideways, hover over the buildings, but just barely. It's almost that imagined Germanic quaintness, constantly dwarfed by the snow and the slopes, the peaks and the rustic architecture. For some seconds it really is almost all that. But as I move down that steep steep hill into Magnolia Village, into the neighborly heart of this curve of the bubble, the mountains disappear, and the houses on the hill closest to them overtake 'em, rise up and chase 'em down. I almost remember the poem I needed to write in my head this morning when I made this happen with my walking:

The houses pound down
on Mountains

Till they're down down
in their bellies.

The houses make my borders;

Light peeking through them,
Lines coming out

Forming shape out of houses and light.

The light is the empty shape, and
The houses are the world we'll make.