Dear (______)

Dear Santa,

I know we've been at odds over the last several years.  It's almost going on a dozen.  I don't hate you and you don't hate me.  I remember that year that I wished for only obtainable shiz.  I remember that other year that I only wished for very specific and obtainable shiiii... and I got what I wished for.  I'm back to setting my bars high.  I hope you're back to singing in four four/

Boiling it down:  I will not.  That's all.  There's no second part to it.  As close as we will get.





///what ive been waiting for all years

In the Back Woods and Friendship Tugs of War

Well, I've been gone for a minute, but it's been something of a stroll in the backwoods. The creepy backwoods that are often not to be strolled until the circumstances demand some sort of outing and the only reasonable place to go where you can't be bothered is the back 9 of the mind. Keeping a good clip with poetry. A minor defeat of writer's block that has allowed some things to flourish. I haven't used that word in a while, if at all. Flourish. It has a certain pirouette to it that has to be reserved for unique measures of success.

Success in the face of nightmares. Actual nightmares. Actual moments of the involuntary bridging of dream and real states. Of seeing what is there and what isn't or at least shouldn't be in the same instance of breathing and having to close my eyes and repeat after me "you are safe"s. If repeating is believing. I guess that's one of the reasons why I don't believe in heaven or hell. I've seen them both and they're not what anyone says they are supposed to be. I've been to the end of the world and it's nothing like what we've been told is it? Few things ever are. If I smell a little like death it's because we've been bedfellows on and off recently. A flirting couple that knows neither is really committed to anything serious, but when is play ever except when it is?

So we've pumped and ground and made and done and life has gone on for less and worse and better and blood. The organs still pump and the sound still comes in fountains and so I continue. I continue on in the backwoods and little leaps to foregrounds until, I have come to convince myself recently in the train of reasons to reason in, the day when my life transposes from discrete experiences into a singular piece of poesis. A perfect and sustainable solid state. And then I'll happily call it a day. Not in a bid for immortality because immortality is only to memory and human memory will never break the solid state barrier (so even immortals are no more than incarnates), but in a bid to have become. I suppose there are probably many things I am becoming, but to have definitively crossed that boundary of becomingness to the hell pots of posterity is a thing worth aspiring to if there is anything worth shooting for. Call the stars, or the moon, or glory, or whatever. Incarnations of the become be damned. To have is to have in some way shape and form held in hands so often dropped in emptiness. To have gripped, and not let go even in whatever can be termed death.

There have been joys in the backwoods. Joys tasted rarely in and the travel has been hard and light, but worth it in some ways and a waste in many others. And I don't know why I am trying to see this in two points of view. Oh wait I do! Friendship tug of war. You can pick your nose. You can pick your friends. But you can't favor one person over the other though they both know you in pathetically thin terms. What the hell does it matter, you idiots? I mean really. Can we all just grow up a good four years and call this bullshit a day. Not to rant on so silly a topic. It's just aggravating. Neither one of you could really keep pace with what I'm up to so what the hell difference does it make. Both of you would probably have nothing to do with me if you knew me to the fullest possible extent so can we please all just get along by the terms of the established sensibilities of isness? Probably not.

I have got too much to run from to ever fully open to either so what can I possibly be expected to do when I can't even begin to describe what can be reasonably expected of myself. How can you love anybody when you don't love yourself? Well, it's kind of easy if you try. Just kidding, it's impossible, but still- what the hell. Are my choices really to go hang with the one person who always lies to me and makes assertions they can never back up and keep trusting in them and keep getting screwed up worse than I am, or is it to drag myself across town to hang with someone who has no idea who i actually am and will be put in a weird situation when he does. I guess the one thing I do have to consider is that I shouldn't presume to know people I - don't know. Simply stated. So maybe it's worth a shot. Maybe it's time to bend the orbit a little bit and come in close enough to lay some mathematics and calculus to a potential short rendezvous. Haven't used that word in a while either. Generally reserved for important things. Like scenes from 2001 A Space Odyssey. Elegant things. My staff of scientists are not elegant or important. Their idea of a delicate landing is detonating on the surface. They didn't do so well in school, I guess. If shithead A gets a shot, I think it stands to reason that potential decent friend B should also get a shot to play the table and fit into my arbitrary and ridiculous set of rules for friendship that, I swear these people do exist, few people can seem to fit into. I miss those people a ton. I guess the stupid thing is they'll never know who they are. If they did know they probably wouldn't care what it is they accomplished. Alright I'm gonna pipe this down as I'm making myself slightly depressed. And by slightly I mean massively. It's been a tough week. Sorry I've been away.

Well anyway, thought I would drop off some graphics. Because what is a road trip without photographs. There are things that live when you sleep that do not sleep as you are living. They wait for you to come on back. Come on home. One more time. You'll not leave this place alive, but you can try. You can try for old time's sake. We'll give you a fit and running start. See how far you go before we are there, sucking the lengths of string of your calf through your heel like fine noodles through a straw of shredded skin. Don't stay up too late.



///The Black Angels - "Mission District" You can sometimes hear it. You can always feel it when it comes beating on your heart like a death threat. You will write or you will suffer in ways you did not know existed, but will become intimately familiar with. And you do it. And you duck away into the grass and you listen to it beat it's way farther along and then it's gone and you can't really tell if you saved yourself or if maybe the entire thing is coming around again and this time at an angle you did not know was possible and maybe you'll hear it. You'll certainly feel it closing in, but how much less warning will there be next time?

Post-Meta-Psuedo Garbage Nonsense

Nearly a year and a half after the fact, I think I finally understand it. A while back, I flew into an absolute rage over an interpretive classroom discussion about Paul Auster's novel City of Glass and how everyone was going on and on about post-modern this and post-modern that and how the book was a post post-modern deconstruction of post-modernism. Then began the talk of the meta-text and the meta-narrator and, for all I care, the twice baked potato and the refried bean. For me, the entire thing hit a boiling point of ridiculousness that has irritated me to this day.

The main thing that absolutely grated me was the lack of creative thought going into the delineation of what is clearly one period of literary construction shifting into a new period of construction. Is the next period going to be meta-post-post-modernism? I feel like a huge part of what is confining the ability to meaningfully describe and analyze literary constructions is that the people who are doing it are being grown into a more and more strictly controlled framework of knowledge. Unfortunately as the tags used to describe the framework are simplified from exacting coordinates into smears of qualitative judgments they become strung together into descriptors for increasingly complex scenarios of literary construction and then you end up with a cloud of tags instead of analysis of an authors's work. And then, peering into the tag cloud and seeing that it is full of largely meaningless word associations in the context of describing what, in this case, Paul Auster's novel does, frustration takes root (at least it did for me).

But also, I think, even more than that, language is becoming more and more compartmentalized so that every single individual scrap of information is developing its own term. Its the opposite of 1984 and Newspeak. I guess as the body of discourse grows, it becomes inevitable that the words and terms and phrases needed to navigate it will grow in complexity and number, but when does that turn into picking tags out of a hat and saying: okay, that's that. That's what it is and it's no longer up for discussion.

That's necessary to an extent because otherwise the body of literary production would quickly out grow the ability to describe its functions, but I suppose my major concern back then was the arbitrary nature of the tagging. The descriptive term seemed to be affixed simply because it wasn't anything else entirely, so clearly it must be post. Which is okay in some respects, but once the thing that was like nothing else began to be emulated how can they also be post-*? They can't be post if they are happening now and in the same vein of the thing like no other thing before it, but like many things after it.

To the point though, I finally understand it. The tagging is not necessarily an effort to describe the thing it is affixed to, as it is an effort to DATE and LOCATE the thing and establish it's relative relationship to the other things surrounding and drawing from and contributing to it. And that's why calling something post-* meta-* and "whatever else describes a relationship of one thing to another"-* is important. The volume of things being produced and the ever increasing pace of new voices and shared information and production is why they are largely meaningless as explicit descriptors beyond the simplicity of "this came after that, but before the other thing." Their use and over use is more a symptom of growth and discussion than it is an indication of a lack of questioning contributors or thoughtful contributors more interested in the material being analyzed than sounding vague chic.

When you get into a group discussion about these things, over simplifications happen and thats when the relational tags begin to be characterized by their interpretive content instead of their connective tissue and you run into things like "that's what it is and that is that", where the things identity is really a matter of opinion and not a matter of course. With relational things it's a matter of perspective. Am I looking north or am I facing south, am I upwind or downwind or in another state altogether. When questions start to point to things like what does it smell and taste like, what does it do, what does it make, what is the sum of its pieces, relational orientations (and by extension the tag system) isn't much help, but is easily misappropriated and taken to task on issues and ideas it might've been meant to solve at its start, but issues and ideas it is hard pressed to positively impact now.

I hope I put my revelation into some meaningful sentences. At least now I know why I was so angry and disappointed almost a year ago. Sometimes it takes a while to see the value in what you would flush away as a token gesture. Sometimes there really is no value and it's a virtual artifact that's simply comfortable to the touch, but once in a while as you turn it over in your hand it becomes clear, at least to you, why it's still circulating from one hand to another.



So Paul Auster, I apologize. You're not a hack. You just filled the plate with more food than people could digest and some of them threw up. You're not around to clean it up, and you shouldn't have to. Governing an audiences reception and analysis of what you do is about as realistic as driving a car by standing on its roof rack and pointing your fingers. The best any of us can do is to let them drive where they may and, if it get's interesting, hold on for the ride.

///Talvin Singh - "Light" Bubbly, but smooth, like a mimosa. Pleasant and unobtrusive and better than that track on Classical Thunder your mom sent you in the hopes that it would somehow feed your brain with genius. Turns out the jewel case made an okay mouse pad once it got good and scuffed from performing coaster duty. Put away the mail order meditation music. Pick up some Singh and enjoy your working, hopefully fizzed, lunch break.

posturing 06/17/2007

Subject : posturing
Posted Date: : Jun 17, 2007 11:29 AM

i hate posturing. i hate posturing more than a lot of things in the world.... or at least more than a lot of things in america. posturing is the root of so many problems. think about it. if politicians never postured you'd know exactly what was going on in the world at any given moment. if party people didnt posture you'd know at a party who was there just to have a good time, who was there a flirt a little, and who was there to slut it up. you'd know who you should talk to and who you should avoid talking to. if professors didn't posture you'd know what you needed to do to do well in their classes without having to decipher what they were really saying. you wouldnt have to do bullshit work tacked on to meaningful course work to make their class seem harder than it is. if car companies didnt posture you'd know which cars were the safest, or the best value. if bosses didnt posture you would know that a job was essentially slave labor with a stipend. you could work as hard as you needed to and not an hour more without worrying about getting fired. you would know which business owners were really about the well being of their laborers and which ones would grind you into dust if it meant an extra five dollars in their pocket every week.

posturing makes people idiots but also makes idiots out of other people. its simply not fair to anyone when posturing comes into play. highschool is so miserable for 3/4s of the people who go through it because 1/4 of the people in charge and at the top of the food chains are only concerned with appearances... and its bullshit. dont get me wrong... posturing has its place. in comedy, in sports, and in all things that are performances (even blogs sometimes) posturing plays an enormous and useful role. but life aint one big performance. some of us are more concerned with honestly living it as fully and contentedly as possible than tap dancing our way through it to hollow applause.



///dj rap - "good to be alive" not here to judge. im just sayin shit is fucked up sometimes and it doesnt have to be.