Learn to read real literary Spanish. Learn to write in Spanish to get away from anti-poetic American thought disease. Learn basic French.
Write about myself less. Learn how to establish real characters besides good me and idiot me. Figure out what of what seems internally obvious actually needs to be expressed to make something readable. Conversely figure out what must seem pedantic to those who read it.
Delete self hate and self doubt, if impossible then channel aggressively. Get struck by lightning to become more interesting as a person. If I'm not going to drink I should probably at least smoke grass once in a while. Problem of finding that in suburbia in middle age, and navigating parent paranoia while high; possibly not worthwhile.
Try to write a story ala Keret (in the sense that it is short and sad and magical). Try to write a story ala Cortazar (in the sense that it attempts to map the esoteric worlds within the world/within the psyche that are hard to express but very real).
Ride bike to the monument to Emil Carranza out in the pines. Along the way plan a brief first novel; something like Sabato's the Tunnel in the sense that it is short, that it is inflected with darkness and beauty and philosophy. Write brief novel; around 120 pages, then wait a month and cut it to 99 before letting anyone read it.
Observe self observing son and wife; calculate emotional transformation factor in self and others. Consider other people as lab rats to be fictionalized. Consider self pre and post lightning strike; evaluate on quantitative scales with eye toward statistical significance.
Hire Ghostbusters to extract skeleton menagerie from closet. Exercise more. Hang out with friends for remaining therapy -- actual sporadic in-person conversation beyond nuclear family, as opposed to hiding behind Facebook and mutters to self and repeated refreshes of the New York Times web page... looking for dints of liberal bias past.
Showing posts with label rare moments of self reflection. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rare moments of self reflection. Show all posts
12.23.2009
6.24.2009
cautery
Burning bridges give you even more than burning airlines. Because eventually they can send other planes, whereas a bridge takes time. If you want to be alone, start with the bridges. To burn a friendship fast throw insults, piss on the outstretched hand. To burn a friendship slow ignore it. When your friend drives past, turn off the lights so they can see you hide. Ignore the doorbell. To burn a relationship heap emotional abuse until you've chased the person out of town. Now call her every night and tell her how much you love her. (Tell her you're sorry, tell her you need your baby). Burn away your potential for sorrow, for kinship, for hope for anything beyond a sports score or a boatload of cash. Burn away love so the only other death you ever have to face is your own. Reach out just enough to maintain a perfunctory variable sex life. Burn away potential for emotion as a kind of cautery. Only keep hate, you need that as fuel. The others simply aren't cost effective. There are a lot of ways to burn memories. One technique is burn as you go-- pay no attention to anything that happens and you don't have to worry.
Father's Day night L. and I got a sitter and saw Up. I couldn't stop crying for the whole movie. I was happy to, it's been years since I was able to outside of being maudlin wasted. Part of being able to cry was that it was a beautiful movie, economically edited, exquisitely written, and wonderfully drawn. Another part was what parenthood has done, loving the little one without the slightest hesitation. Part of it is being more open than maybe ever, to the way I feel, the way other people feel. Part of it is that I wasn't eating popcorn or drinking a big fat soda. There was only the movie, and L and I holding hands, and our lives here.
Father's Day night L. and I got a sitter and saw Up. I couldn't stop crying for the whole movie. I was happy to, it's been years since I was able to outside of being maudlin wasted. Part of being able to cry was that it was a beautiful movie, economically edited, exquisitely written, and wonderfully drawn. Another part was what parenthood has done, loving the little one without the slightest hesitation. Part of it is being more open than maybe ever, to the way I feel, the way other people feel. Part of it is that I wasn't eating popcorn or drinking a big fat soda. There was only the movie, and L and I holding hands, and our lives here.
2.18.2009
what have we learned
a. South Jersey and the South Bronx aren't proximic.
b. Drinking yourself to sleep every night is only viable for 15 or so years.
c. Experimental rock won't sustain a family.
d. When you have a kid, it gets easier to understand the decisions your own parents made.
e. That said, never let your kids sense that one parent is strongly considering murdering the other. Even as a joke.
f. Diet Mountain Dew doesn't promote weight loss. Also, drinking eight cans a day makes your piss glow in the dark.
g. If you hide from everyone you know, you'll feel lonely.
h. Having had one bad shrink doesn't justify losing your mind in isolation.
i. Internet scrabble, web porn, and panicked scanning of the Times for disasters aren't effective forms of therapy.
j. It's okay to leave some folks behind, but those make stronger ghosts than they ever were friends.
k. Mr. Ramsay doesn't make a good model for a father. Working 60 hours a week doesn't make for a good father (provided you don't have to to sustain your family).
l. Religion is weird, sure, but it ain't worse for you than cable TV, free market economics, or getting your face ripped off by a chimp.
m. The media hasn't given sufficient attention to the loneliness of that chimp's death, out of his head on Xanax, shot by the pigs, limping back to the familiar to curl up and bleed to death, stranded between the world of beasts and the world of men.
n. Avoid nonprofit Kool-Aid and you may be able to sustain a home, personal, or artistic life.
o. If you work in workforce development, don't regard the workers with contempt. You're useless, you're retrograde, you're a sack of shit if you think the people you're trying to help are inferior and somehow to be saved by your brilliance.
p. Employers can't take care of their low-income workers. Neither can rinky-dink worker associations. Unions can.
q. That said, weak unions, unions destroyed by in-fighting and cow-towing to employers, are useless.
r. All you need is love. And money.
s. And artistic fulfillment.
t. And an end to that feeling that things are hosed, off-kilter, headed south.
v. Friends and family. Music, books, and movies.
w. Your child's smile. Your partner's sense of humor.
x. A vast moving to the left of the American political landscape, caps on income, free health care, jobs for everybody, etc., followed by a sincere effort led by the U.S. to actually better the world, rather than bullshit/seemingly failed anyway efforts to liberate the strategic oil value of Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.
y. A bullet in the brain.
z. Just kidding. but to, you know, put that death wish into it's proper context.
b. Drinking yourself to sleep every night is only viable for 15 or so years.
c. Experimental rock won't sustain a family.
d. When you have a kid, it gets easier to understand the decisions your own parents made.
e. That said, never let your kids sense that one parent is strongly considering murdering the other. Even as a joke.
f. Diet Mountain Dew doesn't promote weight loss. Also, drinking eight cans a day makes your piss glow in the dark.
g. If you hide from everyone you know, you'll feel lonely.
h. Having had one bad shrink doesn't justify losing your mind in isolation.
i. Internet scrabble, web porn, and panicked scanning of the Times for disasters aren't effective forms of therapy.
j. It's okay to leave some folks behind, but those make stronger ghosts than they ever were friends.
k. Mr. Ramsay doesn't make a good model for a father. Working 60 hours a week doesn't make for a good father (provided you don't have to to sustain your family).
l. Religion is weird, sure, but it ain't worse for you than cable TV, free market economics, or getting your face ripped off by a chimp.
m. The media hasn't given sufficient attention to the loneliness of that chimp's death, out of his head on Xanax, shot by the pigs, limping back to the familiar to curl up and bleed to death, stranded between the world of beasts and the world of men.
n. Avoid nonprofit Kool-Aid and you may be able to sustain a home, personal, or artistic life.
o. If you work in workforce development, don't regard the workers with contempt. You're useless, you're retrograde, you're a sack of shit if you think the people you're trying to help are inferior and somehow to be saved by your brilliance.
p. Employers can't take care of their low-income workers. Neither can rinky-dink worker associations. Unions can.
q. That said, weak unions, unions destroyed by in-fighting and cow-towing to employers, are useless.
r. All you need is love. And money.
s. And artistic fulfillment.
t. And an end to that feeling that things are hosed, off-kilter, headed south.
v. Friends and family. Music, books, and movies.
w. Your child's smile. Your partner's sense of humor.
x. A vast moving to the left of the American political landscape, caps on income, free health care, jobs for everybody, etc., followed by a sincere effort led by the U.S. to actually better the world, rather than bullshit/seemingly failed anyway efforts to liberate the strategic oil value of Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.
y. A bullet in the brain.
z. Just kidding. but to, you know, put that death wish into it's proper context.
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