The Tolerated Masses

pinch your nose discreetly when you walk by me

I never thought the word Tolerance was strong enough when it came to pushing for a larger collective acceptance of social deviates (most often labeled so because of the nearly seamless pervasion of standard and institutionalized "normal" behaviors and values in American society).

So when during the 10.3.08 VP Debate Sarah Palin emphasized her willingness to tolerate "adults in America choosing their partners [and] choosing relationships that they deem best for themselves" it really makes me queasy to imagine anyone would readily identify this as anything but a meaningless, prudent, homophobic, and conservative act of ignoring not only GLBTIQ culture at large but also ANYONE who deviates from Mainstream Americanism through their sex/gender/class/race/sexuality/profession et cetera. How nice to know I'm going to be tolerated like a screaming child in public or a rancid stench on the street.

I also think it's important to note her specifically locating her so-called tolerance to "adults" which, admittedly, could be a result of the context being in relation a question posed about Civil Rights/Gay Marriage; but it could also be indicative of a more worrisome sentiment: that Palin is ready to actively prevent queer youth from having programs and resources and ultimately choices and a voice and in their place promoting conservative Christian values that shame queer youth and criminalize their natural development.

Joe Biden more markedly addressed his Campaign's promise to "making sure that committed couples in a same-sex marriage are guaranteed the same constitutional benefits as it relates to their property rights, their rights of visitation, their rights to insurance, their rights of ownership as heterosexual couples do."

First of all, he made an error. He didn't mean Gay Marriage he meant civil rights as he later clarified he supports those over "redifining from a civil side what constitutes marriage." Regardless, he COMPLETELY fails to identify that Marriage is both a religious and social/political/economic institution rooted in patriarchy. He fails to address how promoting civil rights or even marriage to "committed" same sex couples still leaves the rest of queer culture unprotected, ignored, and compromised.

I don't support Gay Marriage because I don't support the larger institution of Marriage and the role GM has played in mainstreaming queer politics and encouraging an assimilationist attitude towards the very act of living life.

Behave exactly like us and we'll probably accept you and let you in to the party. We will tolerate you!

Piss on that. I happen to think (and I know I am not alone) that the Dems and the Reps are hardly different at all. They're just taking shits in different parts of America's back yard and desperately trying to uphold the same kind of racist, sexist, queerphobic fence. So I would recommend that all of us challenge, push, expand, and define this supposed Tolerance and demand a more inclusive notion of equality across the board. I enjoy the idea of flaunting our deviant behaviors while smartly and unshakingly demanding and promoting rights and liberation. I really don't want to preach in this blog but I'm hoping to at least ruminate, consider, and voice defiance when I feel assertive enough in my positions.

There's a lot of hype about Obama being the next great liberator: America's truely versatile and progressive hope. I'm really not convinced. I've been told I have anarchist leanings but at this point I am very unwilling to identify to any word or set of words (label) that can possibly distract people from having the courage and fortitude to consider the very possibility of change because of misunderstood or lost histories. That said, I am concerned that more and more of my progressive-minded friends can't seem to bring themselves to question the Obama-Biden campaign and the inevitable failure of the two-party political system. I'm sympathetic to the desperation behind this movement, too. After a gross number of years of international descent we're all looking for some kind of transcending hero and it's easy to indulge in that myth. To believe that one person or even one administration can initiate and actualize national and international change where each individual experiences a profound liberty. I certainly don't have all the answers; I have thousands of questions and more importantly an eagerness to engage in conversations that consider and question the issues I've put forth. So respond, call, write, rant, scream-sing-kiss openly and publically and without reservation.

Objects

on moving

It seems I'm what you'd call a natural when it comes to forgetting, intentionally or not, the reappearing part of my disappearing act. But the past 5 weeks have been fast. I can hardly remember where I've been. I only vaguely understand where I'm going.

Maybe it's simple and I've just lost my knack for moving. I've never lived anywhere for more than a year since I was 19. Even small moves across portland required a regrouping and a regathering of my things and I was able to sift through most of it and be on my way. Before I left for Barcelona I spent the summer relishing the idea of living a lifestyle that allowed me to pack up and leave, every posession in one car, in a twenty minute time frame. Like some domestic prisoner of war or a young Algonquin. In my mind some brutish man with a moustache tells me I have twenty minutes to decide what will be part of my life and I can choose it all, i've duped them, because I'm so simple and minimal, all I really need and all I really own is this tshirt, these old jeans, a kazoo, and a solid well-read copy of The Poetics of Space!

Prepping for my move to Somerville (which is happening right now), it's laughable, really, to think that I'll ever really achieve a possessionlessness. Instead I pack my books in boxes and wrap old bottles in newspaper and plant lavender in terra cotta pots and fill my old wooden bank crates with old letters and rocks and tins, all in preparation of transfering the objects and things my mother says make me me. I'm equally intrigued and repulsed by the idea of being defined and characterized through objects and spacial aesthetics ("who said that life is not objects? I kill him with one" thank you terita.) Intrigued because I buy it. I understand the reflective abilities of the spaces we create and the political and poetic qualities they embrace or reject. I'm hugely interested in this. Still, when it comes to me and my little room in something of a tree fort in Somerville, MA, i'm queezy with the idea of my things making me who I am. As if without them I am a black slate rubbed over with a wet cloth. Maybe I am. I'm constantly informing myself of who I am by, more often than not, exposing myself to books, materials, images, sounds that enhance what may otherwise be mere tiny seedlings of an opinion or belief. I suppose I'm caught up lately with the idea of redefinition. I want my descriptions to be liquid. Today my nouns are verbing all over themselves and the adverbs run amok and my adjectives hesitate inbetween contexts.

Smoke Bone Salt

Yesterday I went to the ocean. And they were all right, she was right, one feels like a real being, invisible, an amoeba that rides in spit. We can disappear so completely in it, it's like a heavy wing, a great hand of undoing.

Dumb

One week ago I was happy to find myself sitting cross-legged eating a pancake. I take them plain, mostly, without butter or syrup. This one was grainy and had chopped almonds in it, the color was a warm barkish brown and I did not make it. Then I drove and drove for a while--apparently through the town where Stephen King found his bearings in the 1950s and learned to identify hard woman and had the whole echo chamber inside his head blown out more than once.

I can be incredibly interior; which is why during that drive where I imagined Stephen King, yes he, with his penchant for developing characters across and between the thresholds of life and death, the living and dying, it is why I thought that that man understands what it can really feel like to hear the dipteran humming of maine in the summer. And I sat almost completely silent headed towards Portland, my interiors collapsing and reconstructing themselves like living buildings, architectural species transforming corridors and stairwells based on some intrinsic impulse. Similar to this, only more fantastic. Less hydraulics.

Regardless, it's not that I'm oblivious to my surroundings and the company I keep while deliberating intercourse between beetles, but one week ago I was particularly wordless in the morning and would have been happy to lie down, fully conscious, all day, beneath a fan. Not alone, but curled up and bent this way and that. Sometimes I keep the characters in my entries unseen because it feels selfish and too forward to also describe how I appreciated their heavy look while our road matched up with the river and they stretched on for a while, side by side, looking quite similar and neither caring anything of it.

Bear, Bore

This isn't self-deprecating but: I'm a bore. At least as an inter-text. My seldom yet lofty submissions are usually entirely self-absorbed and esoteric. I'm constantly rehashing and reminding myself of the goals I have in maintaining a blog. I want(ed) to:

1. make comments on my surroundings that may be appreciated/cerebrally encouraging to my 1.5 readers, perhaps leading to discussions or exchanges that will allow me to be an even more thorough and informed critical onlooker.

2. allow myself a space for deliberations and communication that didn't have the pressures or standards of academic writing. Exercises in writing that left room for error in a cosmetic sense while stilling helping to keep the chops up.

3. maybe, just maybe, click with other pensive furrow-browed twentysomething cutes.

So I say I'm a bore but most random blogs I read are just as tedious as mine. My friends write clever, engaging, and completely accessible blogs that always offer something easily relatable. I'm thoroughly amused by their commentaries and often hysterical observations. Their links are there --->

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I've been overwhelmed with the word Bear. It started in March when I read Faulkner's The Old People and then immediately jumped into The Bear. I enjoyed becoming so tiny a figure in his old semi-infiltrated landscapes. I'd close the book feeling damp and musty. But the image of the Bear kept on. Soon after I kept seeing images of Bears at random. And then I watched a Joanna Newsom video of her performing Monkey and Bear, and then there's always the verbs. To bear, bore. A bear, a bore, my bare, my boar. It's amazing. Sounds, letters, tenses, all changing and mixing, a rubik's cube of meanings. How gorgeous.

Independence Day

I thought I'd get ahead on what I expect to be a full on assault from my fellow queers, jeerers, reformists, and bull-horned progressors on the ridiculous hypocrisy of Independence Day celebration and the annual 1812 overture cannon blows that sound throughout Boston and the televised world. There are millions of topics we can explore regarding this one day, its history, our (alternative) histories, globalization, faggotry, the dead made into fireworks (really!) notions of independence and interdependence, mass media, nationalism, transnationalism, etc. Where will my wailings lie? Let's talk the family BBQ.

Every year my brother is host to a 4th of July backyard BBQ with all the traditional fixins. Paper plates, american flag cakes with blueberries and strawberries used as the stars and stripes, meats cooked in beer, and a firework finale that costs thousands of dollars.

So: every year I find myself in the sticky situation of taking part in a kind of day long ritual I avidly rip to shreds in appropriate settings and compromising my political self with my loyalties to my family. Said brother is fucking amazing. His smile can be infectiously kind and its a true sign of his utterly unpretentious and childishly unjudging character. His goal is to offer a day of gathering; a celebration not steeped in bogart nationalism but rather built on the corporal pleasures of food, summer lawns, drink and socializing. I enjoy the gathered company of family (and some friends) but also hate the ways it makes me feel like my integrity is put on the back burner. Manning the so-called Veggie Hut or Tofu Tent doesn't exactly allow me the kind of relief I desire from mainstream american 4th of July celebration dogma. Still, should there be an alternative celebration hosted by people looking to dismantle the hypocritical trash celebration of Freedom For All! and create an alternative foreigner/immigrant/tranny/queer/manwomanchild/animal/everythingeverythingeverything friendly environment, I'd still have to choose my family on this day. Where my political and philosophical ambitions/beliefs disrupt my commitment to my family I am terribly compromising. Because from them I have received endless love and hardly any judgement. They would kill and die for me and it transcends political context. So on the 4th (I avoided discussing our lack of Independence from corporate America and people who have to work on this day, I might have to) I will be cooking my tofu Pups on the grill and encouraging thoughtful conversation about Americanism when appropriate (I am in the process of trying to re-embody America and American because I am exhausted by the idea of giving up. A firm critic of nationalism I still have spent my life in this system and fuckall if I'm going to join the Move To Canada airplane. This is a country not entirely gone to waste and I want to claim these words and emblaze them in the context of my faggoty little self, more soon!). I won't enjoy everything, I will be grossly frustrated, I will feel somewhat compromised, but there it is, the family.

The Thief

Seemingly significant alterations in my mood are affected by small accomplishments, all of which I can not realize without the help of things like oxygen, the family, castor oil, my body's ability to process B12, and our planet's particular fix in the solar system. Despite these wonders, though, I'm a grump.

A waspy critic, though I don't meant that how I would have 2 or 3 years ago when I subversively eyed the WASP looking to memorize it's technique for organizing a spice rack or edge the walkway. Nowadays I feel like a slightly darker, perhaps more alarming bug on the screen though ultimately you can buy an aerosol can of something off-putting and I will go away and be sad in a gutter. I find it difficult to always be specific. My frustrations disassemble into dreamy poetics. I hate Target and the tidal wave speed of commercial plaza construction. I look on, jaded, and think: "I will come back at night and I will steal their shrubbery, and make a garden of love and war." Television is 99% let down so I don't watch it and when I've lived on my own I simply didn't own a tv (how easy!). Still, it's not always easy to compliment my ideals and actualize my politics. I'm an impulsive thinker and can never stand by any one moral with die hard strength; possible fluctuations in circumstance are a regular part of my deliberations and so my equations are always changing. Shape-shifting: perhaps there is nothing I approve of completely and nothing I condemn entirely. Does this make me wishywashy? A weak character? I usually regret operating solely off of impulses because the next day I can scarcely stand by my old convictions, there's been a shift, chances are I've lived another day and slept another night and nothing in the world will ever be the same again.

My Hemorrhoid

The new name for my one man Hammond Organ Band is Hemorrhoid.
And speaking of, I took Saturday night off and called it Disability because I could barely walk and I had already worked 49.3 hours for the week and they frown on server overtime. That said, at this, the cool break of Monday afternoon, I'm a bit better, somewhat tired, and completely at a loss.

To my reader:

Suffice it to say I did not make it into the CoOp because, as a dear friend so candidly put it, Diversity Hates Me. I can deal with that. It's fucked but so is our context and severity begets severity. That's just catch up. Did I mentioned I shaved my head a few weeks ago to scare away chipmunks with my red locks tossed into the garden? They laughed.

I could use a clean room these days. I feel as though I'm in need of spacial sobriety: my room is a sloshy mess and so is my car and I can't seem to read and this is my weak attempt at writing. Give my life B12 because I can't turn a jar lid anymore. What posits me in this place? A partnerlessness? I've whined enough about having no one to read in bed with, so what of it. I would be a dull hermit. Take away my stimulations and I turn gray and flowerless. A plant in springtime trapped under a plank of wood. No light no glory. I'm a needy little planet. But I doubt you aren't. Still, in this round equation friendly age I'm the one actually buying roadside lemonade from middle class kids because I was once that little homo trying to bring in the business with my cartwheels. So I tell them here's 5 bucks, get out of here as fast as you can.

My Anthem

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Old Song

May never fails to be one of my favorite months of the year. I think I enjoy the dawny sweat of its position in the calendar. We haven't completely compromised the summer months yet; winter may have never existed; indeed the ice breaks some time after March and there's no looking back.

And there's always something to have a nervous stomach about, this year being no different. Right from the very first day, as a matter of fact (e-mail pro: they're always dated) I had started a sort of correspondence that's lasted the better part of the month. I hadn't exactly experienced before the fine tuned and surprisingly intimate benefits of letter writing as a means of exploratory courtship and most recently I've had a conversation with a friend of mine about just how compelling it can be.

Alas, who knows where it will go. Maybe it's too much. Sometimes I see myself as a gross consumer of thrills. The past thirty days have been right on the mark in terms of the elated ups and cynical lows. And I don't want that static canicular day to come when I've all but gone to fits. I don't really want to lose this but I'm trying to keep my lesson learned that I should never ever hold on to anything, gravity does all the pulling I should need. It would just be nice to have this stick around a while. Am I really so rootless.

Crumble to the Sea

Last night at a good old fashioned backyard BBQ (backyard for Cambridge, anyway) we joked about gender division. These were good folk but there was still that small twitch in me when it was brought up that the "women" were inside while the "men" stood semi-circle, beers in hand, watching coals burn. The comments were made mostly ironically and our very awareness of embodying such roles implied an immediate dismissal of them. That's all we really have left, I think, a comical awareness of engaging in activities the way we've been shown is the norm. When we're not entirely deviant us twenty-somethings become a pastiche of our parents' generation. And their parents' postwar attempt at classic middle-class life.

Later in the night I had a conversation with a girl and she was kind enough to listen patiently while I spewed on and on about queers and marriage. We ended up having a good conversation about how societal pressures to be a certain way, have certain things, and have accomplished certain achievements (i.e. supportive consumer, 401k + baby, college diploma) are directly related to age and aging and the formulas our elders used are completely useless and irrelevant. We are the generation that's been told we can do anything and now it seems most of us have no idea what to do. Furthermore, that puckish sentiment isn't substantiated by the irresponsible, discriminatory pandering of our government. The old paradigms aren't going to work for us but we're being told it's our only chance. Get that Roth IRA in place, buy your house, grow that baby! or else when you're 45, 55, 65 you're going to be fucked. Maybe it's true, but the solution is not for all of us to find a tidy little 9-5 and small boxy house; rather, somehow we need to make the system meet our needs. Obviously this is a painfully old idea, changing the system to help the people instead of the people folding, squeezing, and transforming to fit into its parameters has been part of the general progressive agenda for decades. But what the hell, MA now insists on health care yet does little to make it affordable to the poor and working classes; higher education is ridiculously expensive and especially for us Liberal Arts kids the going really gets tough when we hit the job market. Makes sense I suppose, why would the US want to give high wages to people who've made it their job to think critically about the world around them? Big money is in Big business is on the Web and in your Big car. Good thing about the web though, it's still, for the most part, up for grabs. So grab it and shake it and paint it something ugly.

Down Boy

It's really no wonder I'm drinking tea and honey by the litre trying to shake off nerves. Leisure time has become something of a swelling up of some of the more sensational anxieties I have living in this environment at this point in my life. But before I digress into the reasons and causes for my still being here after exactly one year I'd rather take a moment to comment on, try to bring words to, what I have so much trouble explaining to my family and a few of my friends. The actuality of human displacement and the gross occupancy of so much space by corporate convenience marketing, chemical landscaping, and the general homogeny of human experiences in media (with the absence countercultures creating an entirely new public "reality" people breathe, buy, and poop in here in Suburbia). In other words, feeling left out in the midst of CVS, TruGreen Lawn Care, and family movie night with Comcast On Demand.

Last winter I tried writing about what seemed to be the most obvious demographic being sold to via Holiday TV commercials. I actually watched television for the purpose of making notes on the advertisers' manipulation of images, cast ethnicity, and historically capitalist notions of the American Dream mainly in order to determine if (and subsequently how and what) gays were being sold to. No significant piece of writing came from the exercise but I know that it was spurred by the sense of being alienated in every context I had available to me living in a middle-upper class town where gay community must be logged into with a name and password on the internet. And it was no wonder that that dark, callow, fiber optic space did little to palpitate any part of me looking to pulsate a little. I also remember feeling conflicted about my status as a white mid-twenties male with a college diploma and slew of past experiences made easily attainable due to unearned privilege. I did not, and still don't, want to approach criticism of the world around me with the name tag of "Victim" and I especially do not want to exaggerate my experiences, reactions, and sense of displacement knowing full well that mine is FAR from the saddest story. But I also maintain that being part of a privileged demographic often does not mean that the privileges/acceptance of that group means shit. Ultimately, I think I never wrote anything very intelligent about Christmas Commercials and the Gays because I ultimately didn't care that I didn't see queers being sold diamonds, folgers coffee, and cars.

So here I am, a few months later, not exactly concerned with having no sense of place in the midst of chemical lawn applications but lonely as hell and somewhat incapable of explaining to my family that I love them and I love that they love me but that I am grossly dissatisfied with the reality they participate in and the reason we cannot agree on what movie to watch is because it makes me sick to my stomach to see another disgusting portrayal of human experiences as told through heteronormative, classist, racist, and sexist paradigms of mainstream cinema. They think I'm extreme in my politics enough that I'd probably just alienate them further from the common ground I'm struggling to create by explaining that I'm sick and tired of the male hero, white people, heterosexual love stories, the re-imagining of history with blatant western capitalist undertones, and violence that is unrighteous, loveless, and practised not for saving the world but for saving the American notion of the world (save the nuclear family, save Jesus, save Constitutional freedom). So I end up playing the Hammond Organ while they turn on the Red Sox.

This whole situation has recently been exacerbated by a brief stint in Maine where I felt more myself than I have in months. Friends old and new offered conversation that made absolute sense to me and I didn't even need to explain something like patriarchy or the word queer in order to begin, rather I had the enormous pleasure of being around people I can learn from which, for me--it doesn't really get any better than that. I turned good dirt and I wasn't shy my nails were dirty and it was somewhat like being back one year ago when I was in a position to feel like there was ample room for me to exist, coexist, and evolve without hesitation or restriction. My family accepts me unconditionally. My friends accept and understand me unconditionally. The difference is significant at a time when I'm itching to evolve and talk about books and music and vegetables and men and women and cocks and fire.

Where will I go from here, where I am at this hour. I'm not sure. Maybe a co-op but they haven't written back since our first exchange and I don't know enough about them yet except they're all vegetarians too and make lovely dinners. That's it for now.

Animal

I know that my family has been at unrest for a number of years now. It's been a slow budding that's brought most, if not all of us, to this hard pause. But what I really need to do at this point is break down my own defenses, decontextualize my mother and father, allow the image of us all to be rendered without edits and escapist discontinuity. I've always looked down my nose at the emotive (re)claiming of one's identity as a means of self-affirmation and empowerment. But I might need a little help with this. I can roar and I can weep to great effect. More than grace I hope I can do this with animal sensitivity. I move stoically through these days with a gnawing fear that one day I will experience without restraint the whole capacity of my love for my family. So I work, constantly, to avoid it. I conjure false intimacies. I can not sit still in one room so I move from one to the other and keep on foot.

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Originally this was going to be some kind of story, or narrative, or more simply, a recap of the past 3 years. I wrote and wrote but the entire deposit is too much to take the day after. So this is it for now. My animal at bay. He plants his seeds and keeps his bees one by one by one.

Shame, a Hymn

This might be another post I delete before publishing. It's happened 5 times since I last allowed myself to simply give in to submitting photos as a means of entry. As I expected, I've become terribly self-conscious about this whole thing.

Just today, for instance, looking to divulge into what I hoped would be a somewhat well-informed tirade in response to Esquire magazine's recent article about how Jessica Simpson has managed to stay out of the hollywood gutter by never putting out and keeping her panties on, I ended up reading a more interesting article by Chuck Klosterman that is best summarized with the subtitle: "Hannah Montana would be nothing without the internet. In fact, she is the internet."

The article went on to discuss how our internet alter-egos (no matter how sparsely, thoroughly, falsely or genuinely we pepper them with the honest-to-god 'real' qualities of ourselves as living breathing people pooping real poop in a real room) often compel us to reconcile the same kinds of identity issues celebrities must in terms of public image and private self. Stepping away from that point, Klosterman's analysis generally made me more leery of blogging and my intentionally constructing an electronic representation of myself.

With myspace, facebook, etc. I justify membership in the name of convenience. How else would I maintain a sense of connectedness with people I know but do not care to talk to? Wouldn't I be considered even more hermitic than I already am if I also wiped myself clean off the face of the web? And what of the few people who I do maintain some kind of contact with via these sites. Do I maintain membership because I am ultimately grossly and weakly afraid of being alone? The old void filled up with fluff. I also justify membership because of what I do believe are somewhat notable benefits. I have actually shared and had shared with me worthy links to essays and articles, compelling images and art forums, the occasional video made with something like integrity. Also, I've always fancied myself as straddling the line between a forward thinker and conservative nolstagist. I could not care less about blackberrys (blackberries?) but I'm fascinated with Reactable Tables and the opportunities that lay within the realm of vast and live media forums. I don't want to be left behind. Then again, I do. I want out of the mess. I want to live in a neighborhood, literally, where neighbors act neighborly and know each other. I want the world to get bigger because my surroundings are okay with thinking smaller. When I fly across the planet again I want it to mean something that I call, or write. I want it to be a little tougher to get from here to there. I do not want to always feel like I am running technologically, emotively, and cognitively out of time.

Finally, I've reached the pinnacle of the turmoil, and of course, it churns and spins back to some simple and pathetic issue of identity-conflict. Typically, I do not think of who I am now. I don't enjoy the experience. Instead, I divulge in possible futures built on somewhat institutionalized constructs of personality types. Shall I be some kind of vague brooding figure in the city with an impressive back patio garden and a knack for making lady baltimore cakes or will I raise a witchy garden near the ocean and sell jars of jam? I'm too conflicted, passive, indecisive, and honorably uncompromising to be satisfied with my own type-cast projections.

I suppose it's not so hard to understand. I don't know what I am doing right now. I serve fine food and hate every word I have to sputter to people. I have a degree whose meaning I can barely and only vaguely identify. I know that I love to think critically about the world around me, but I scarcely have the sense of being part of that world. When I am not one step critically removed from it I am daydreaming in the middle of it. It's a rather dumb weedy state I'm in right now. And to boot ( I must allow myself this desire ) I'd love to have someone to open the car door for. I feel like a stone faced statue in some town common, desperately trying to look dignified in my singularity. I fear I am cold to the touch. All around me are couples. Couples who read good books and discuss them; who go to the gym together; who sit side by side in coach on a plane crossing the country; who live together; who make weekend plans and thrill at the sudden clearing of one's time so romantic spontaneity can ensue.

"That keeps me searching for a heart of gold, and I'm getting old. "

Serious Morning

When I come to you this is where I come from.

The Monkey Paw

on love and other things

And in a spitted sentence I claim it.

I took him for a working-class dinner. I ate fried cheese and potatoes dipped in hot oil. And next I suggested photography blurted out incorrectly in a two-hour period and kept my shoulders lenient. I've come to notice what it means to touch in the electronic palaver we've come to call dating. So it was done; a coat that couldn't keep warm anyway offered up like a gypsy: completely misunderstood, a history wiped off the slate and laughed at quietly, gold teeth making a perfect frame, and compromised. I could have liked you and I will not always look like this; I know I won't. That is, I think, a damn great smile you have.

I'm padding through this, numb-pawed, an idiot. I watched a special once about apes. One's mother died and so he perched himself on a tree above her quiet body and wept and shut his eyes and went to sleep and noticed the sun and the shadows and slept, did not eat or drink and died right there, unmoved, 10 feet above, went to sleep on and on. Right there. Dumb with love an animal just finished himself off right there.

The Withered Hand

We're going to see how this goes. The prospect of writing multiple complete sentences on a regular basis is unsettling. But I will give it a go and I will do my best not to rely too much on blatant lying, self loathing, and the making of unsubstantiated comments to get me through the majority of my entries.

This is a first post. Maybe of just a few. I thought I would creep out here quietly at first, avoiding fallen branches, see what the weather's like. I am, in part, confronting a phobia and can't help but wonder if "blogophobic" has yet been entered into some recent edition Dictionary whose most recent entries involve the up and coming lingo of this, the electronic information age. I always felt terribly self-conscious keep journals. My language came off as forced and contrived, as if read aloud: I couldn't help but hear it cinematically and imagine the beginning of a saccharine and sweetly nostalgic movie where an old yet enduring voice reads from an adolescent diary that has flower petals pressed between its pages. It made me feel gross. And this does too, a bit. Nervy, in fact, for expecting people to listen. For assuming my vapid rambling deserves space, even free electronic space.

But I'm interested in spaces. And how we occupy them. So in this moment of self-affirmation, with my chin smelling handsomely of an after-shave balm and my little lamp ablaze, I am going to claim this space, and occupy it, and be okay with it.