Every single thing we do in this life

is at someone's expense. Get over it. Every action, while not necessarily being selfishly motivated, comes at the expense of another. There are reasons, and there are results, and the results always involve someone suffering. Once again, suck it up.




I apologize often enough, sincerely enough, to the point that now I apologize with quite enough gusto to blow out a few candles. Birthday?

But I don't inhabit the past.


The past is a narrative that informs my actions, but does not explain them. I try to coexist with my passions, rather than steer them. I try to feel as much and as
potently as I can, and then I try and explain it to others. I don't want sympathy.





I do want to bang some chicks.

Grief isn't shameful. Anger isn't shameful. Jubilation and ennui are not shameful.


I find it the saddest thing, people who can cry, but cannot give any other voice to their emotions. People who say the same things and do the same things, over and over again, all the while prating about the last time. Tell me something wonderful. Tell me how it felt watching a spade bite into grass and loam. Tell me how it felt to scatter ashes. Tell me how it felt to breathe on his or her skin, and what shade of purple her camisole was, and what type of eyes you lose yourself in.




Tell me who you have buried, tell me who you have banged. Because in the end all we are is a loose collection of facts, centered around some animating principle that gives us narrative, life.

And don't you for a second ever thing you have done a goddamn thing on this planet that hasn't caused tears. Because every choice we make, in this life, is at the expense of another.

Thank god Jules et Jim was on tv tonight.

The Oracle of Delphi

"I have no patience for people," she said. Her face was animated, pulling back as she said that, as if to disown the words as they dropped into air.

"Intelligence, curiosity, devotion, love, these are things we look for in dogs." And she drank, at least half of the gin and tonic in front of her.

"It is our nature to love at distances, the closer we come are to something, the more effort it takes to love it. Loving yourself requires the most effort of all." And she started staring at my half finished bourbon.

The waitress came by, and left, neither noticing nor caring about the young ladies empty glass. And I excused myself to go to the bathroom.

"Will you quit smoking?" She asked as I came back, and began to put on my jacket. My hand found the disused coaster, and placed it on top of my drink. My hands felt slick with sweat and my feet were tired.

"I think I see your point." I said.

Further Instructions from the Godhead

I started writing something long and nostalgic, but then I realized that all the things I'm nostalgic for, I'd kill myself if I actually had to live through again.

So instead of the Remembrance of Things Past, I'd like to just reiterate- I am grateful, grateful to be here, and grateful to be writing like I'm meant to-

I'm grateful because I'm talented, and well-loved by good people. I'm grateful for the Alethea Pants, and for Scott Hart's patience. I'm thankful for Xala's humor, and Kelly Robinson's ability to see the world as not nearly as old as it is. I'm grateful for my parents, for my dad's stories, and my mom's understanding. I'm grateful for my brother; we haven't been nearly as good to eachother as either of us deserve, but we have plenty of time to figure it out.

I'm grateful to have had 14 years of living with my brother Aaron, and 25 years of knowing my Grandmother, who is still the most spectacular woman I will ever know. She worked for sixty years straight, raised her sisters and brothers, and then raised my mother and her sisters, and finished it off by being Grammy to all of us grandchildren and great grandchildren.

I'm grateful for my new sister, and my new nieces. I'm grateful that they make my parents young again.

I'm grateful for the store, and the people who call Inman Square home, and Inman Square itself. I have never known a better place- and it will be a sad day that I leave it for good.

I miss a lot of people on that list. I'm sorry about that.

I'm pretty much an asshole, most of the time. I'm not sorry about that.

And I am not happy, and I'm incredibly grateful for that.

Happyness is how you know you're being a sucker.

It turned out to be a good night

Despite everything. The second one in a row. I mean, I've had some pretty good days, give or take, in the past week. But two really good nights in a row? I feel graced. Last night, I saw Jesse Gallagher's (of Apollo Sunshine) Quartet play at the Middle East upstairs. Really fantastic music, and for a moment, I thought "Jeez, Trisha would really like this." Before my mind navigated away from the thought, for the most part harmlessly. I then went up to the Druid to have a pint with Snowball, which is always a good scene. I'm glad I got Snowball in the break, really glad that the square, which seemingly had taken to Trisha better than it had me, has stayed pretty much on my side. So snowball, Mike and I had a pint, and we marveled at Mike's drawings, and his awesome well of talent. I told Mike to hold me to next week as a deadline to finish the novella, which has gone from working title Symposium to working title Post Hoc, The Great Plains, and Fallacy. I think I'm going to settle with Post Hoc until I get some feedback.

The novella? It's going well, when I can focus my energies on it. It's a cutting and pasting process at this point, though I still have one major part to write. It's something I've lied and been silent upon for more than a year, but now everyone who matters knows.



Well, Xala knew well before now, but a different version of the same events. Speaking of which, tonight I hung out with Shannon and Xala, and Shannon's boyfriend Greg, and we played Singstar, which was an awful exercise for someone as tone-deaf as I am, and drank some, and then I drove back to Carver, back to Boring-as-Shit-town.

Things could've been worse.

Now I'm going to take some Vicodin and fly into sleep.


The difference between guilt and shame is that we only feel guilt to an equal measure as delight, we only feel guilt in the amount we feel pleasure at having transgressed. Shame is pleasure-less. If I felt anything, it was only ever guilt, commensurate with great delight.

Elaborations

I was CC'd on an email promoting this blog, just the other day, and was amazed that my publicist, the incomparable David Marshall, thinks of this site as "Personal Rants" and it's sister as "Literary Merit." Now barring the fact that I would be in a rare mood to describe anything I do as having literary merit (and it is the rarity of those moods that leads me to proclaim, when I'm in one, my own awesomeness), what struck me as interesting is that this site is given over to personal rants. Now, this isn't about ranting. This is about exploring in prose the phenomenon I encounter in day to day existence. Not a diary, as a diary is less planned, and everything I write here is planned, and (poorly) edited.

Now. After saying that, I have to prove it. So here is a post Trisha free. Whole new years resolution, and that. So I am going to give brief overviews of the writers that interest me right now, and why they interest me.

Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan

Ostensibly a book on the consequential, improbably, unpredictable event, this book ends up being a philosophical treatise of a rare breed- it actually has an application for decision making. Most philosophy, these days, is either focused on whether or not decisions exist, determining the linguistic implications of decisions, or retroactively justifying decisions because, well shit, one had to do something, even if that something is nothing.

Taleb uses as a starting point a division, between the world that physics, statistics, and probability describe, and the world that defies such description- what acts in a manner predictable, with regular distribution, and what doesn't. From here, Taleb takes us on a tour of ways we confuse, and mis-inform ourselves, by thinking all of our world fits predictable models. He takes a dash to the problem of induction, but mostly focuses on the inadequacy of predictive models- basically he holds that we don't have the math to predict events, while we continuously think we do.

Where I think Taleb gets interesting, however, is on the topic of cause and effect, what he calls the "narrative fallacy." Any given effect has an infinitude of causes, and that it is in our nature to overlook this fact, and focus on a single cause. Because we think backwards, we think that things like Pearl Harbor, and the Stock Crash in August, were entirely predictable. And people did in fact predict those things- in fact, for every single action through history, someone has probably predicted it- but if you have a large enough population of speculators, one will be right, regardless of their level of expertise. In retrospect, we call these people "visionaries," when all of their incorrect compatriots also were visionary. We should merely call those accurate predictors "lucky.

Strident and repetitive, Taleb is interesting, and provacative, to the point of being totally inconsequential. Which is, ultimately, our loss.

Iain M. Banks Matter

Iain Banks writes claustrophobic, confused literary fiction that funnels the reader into small, small people with their small, small tragedies and sins. Iain M. Banks, the very same author, with an addition of a middle initial, writes expansive space opera, dripping with socio-political commentary, all structured around character stories decompressed from Shakespeare and shaped to a galactic scale.

In which case, this book is Banks stealing from Hamlet and Titus Andronicus, a family tragedy, siblings striving for vengeance, exiles and ghosts, in a novel that takes every opportunity afforded it in this maligned limb of fiction to reflect back on itself, to afford every opportunity for a spark of wit or a clever inversion. Banks is quality.

Jules Renard Journals

The back of my copy says that Susan Sontag once gave this book to someone, who gave it to someone else. Doubtless someone with a PhD would recognize either of those two somebodies. Me, I just flipped through it to know I wanted it. Renard's journals are not diaries. They are sketchbooks, quick pictures framed in prose, most of which are dead ends, some of which may have grown in his imagination to have become the novels that now no one reads.

What's interesting about Renard is not who has read him, but what he hasn't written. Every page has a dozen good, abandoned ideas. It's probably the most inspiring graveyard I've ever seen.




So that's what I'm reading. Yes, I know I'm brilliant. I squander potential like you throw away candy wrappers.

In case you were wondering

my new years resolution was to expend no more effort on a failed enterprise.



And to not quit smoking.

Things we've lost

I save a lot. I try and hunt down missing memories and hope to give them all the power and beauty that they initially had. I'm writing down everything, every single thing no matter how damning it might be to me or her, and it's helping. Every day is a little bit easier. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche wrote that we only have words for that is already dead in our hearts- and it is along those lines that I'm writing, writing, writing as much as possible to get all of this out of my head, out of my heart. Did she blame me for not getting into Harvard? I cannot say. I cannot say what the difference between her playing 23 games of freecell in a row, after getting the Harvard news and quitting her job, and my playing solitaire all day long through november because my voice died. I can't write cause and effect, I can't draw conclusions, and I cannot use this particular past as a guide to the future. But I can write what I knew happened. These things happened and they were beautiful and they meant something.

Every day I try and balance the part of me that winces with every familiarity and every ghost of remembered embraces, and its constant screaming for vengeance- and the desire to honor what happened, how I behaved and how she loved, with all due diligence. Making every effort to enshrine this heart as an artifact of what had happened, however briefly.

We are foolish people and our past mocks us.

idanceliketaffy: you are you beautiful.
idanceliketaffy: i cannot imagine you not being by my side.
idanceliketaffy: i adore you.

***update***

idanceliketaffy: it isn't just lip service.
idanceliketaffy: it isn't just to placate someone else.
idanceliketaffy: or say something because that is what you're supposed to say.

It's been a month. Healing is a sucker's game.

Nostalgia

It's just stuff really, and it can set me off mid-sentence. A rearrangement of stuff is needed. These unprompted Via Dolorosa need to stop- these freighted objects that mysteriously appear in my way between the hopeful morning and shivering midnight. These happenstance sufferings of radio and silence.

Adam's Curse
WB Yeats


We sat together at one summer's end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, 'A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.'

. . . . . . . . . And thereupon
That beautiful mild woman for whose sake
There's many a one shall find out all heartache
On finding that her voice is sweet and low
Replied, 'To be born woman is to know-
Although they do not talk of it at school-
That we must labour to be beautiful.'

I said, 'It's certain there is no fine thing
Since Adam's fall but needs much labouring.
There have been lovers who thought love should be
So much compounded of high courtesy
That they would sigh and quote with learned looks
Precedents out of beautiful old books;
Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.'

We sat grown quiet at the name of love;
We saw the last embers of daylight die,
And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by time's waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years.

I had a thought for no one's but your ears:
That you were beautiful, and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;
That it had all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.


I miss grocery shopping. I miss all the crap she'd buy. I am 26 living in my parents basement with no higher skills than the ones I employ as I write this and I live also amongst the discarded shoes of my former love, or not really former, but of my love, that is no longer mine; I attempt to write this poison out of my system as quickly and often as I can, the misplacement of that damn augustana song may require hundreds of words to displace in my mind, and heaven forbid I have a swedish fish in my pocket. I told the lady down the street she needn't give me them anymore- I just throw them out now. I once texted a bit of the poem above to her. To be honest, I had sent or quoted that poem, incompletely, at plenty of girls before then, and yet only she got back to me with the following lines. And that had to do with a little part of my loving her. It's nostalgia. It's nausea, needless and noxious.




And then it's the dreams. I dream Brideshead. I dream over and over again. I dream a story that begins on a drive to New Hampshire with a call and I do not stop dreaming it. I wake and choke back tears and curl myself tight and will myself to sleep, will it so hard my eyelids hurt and my back shivers like a coil, break myself back into sleeping again. And if that doesn't work, theres always Chapter 7 waiting like a spider, it's fangs dripping. You just alight on that web an you're stuck.



I crave silence and dreamless nights.

Gestures.

It starts with four paintings, hung two by two at right angles, but really, one single piece. Let's call it "Eraser," with a slight pun, unintended, when you break the syllables after the 's'. It starts with four paintings that used to be the beginnings of a thought, an ill-thought mishmash of inadequate attempts. A gesture, sterile, but meaningful. Now a gesture, pregnant, but meaningless. Contextually meaningful, but empty of information otherwise.

See, it's about choices. It's about narrative. The empty statement of facts- meaningless gestures constructed in a linear fashion to become a history of what we were; the choices of interpretation.

There are no causes but the causes we make for ourselves, and these are often either random choice or consoling lies. We do and we don't, and then lie to ourselves to absolve us of having done or not done whatever we did: the reason comes after the action. It is post hoc ergo proper hoc.

So, empty gestures become meaningful because the witnesses to these gestures ascribe causes to them- the viciousness of a hurt animal, the emptiness of an ill-lit basement room, these become nodes in a narrative, and so we build a story around the harmless movement of particles in a vacuum, the soulless rearrangement of objects.

See, it's about narrative. It's about the lies we tell ourselves to keep going; or the lies we tell to tear ourselves limb from fucking limb.

Is it

a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, or just heartbreak?

I'm moving.

4 days till I move for the sixth time in a little more than a year.



Thats a depressing thought

Revisions

Nope, 2009 just as shitty as 2008. I'm a goddamn mess.

two oh oh fine

Brand new year, and a whole lot to forget before it's done. Hope you all have a good one. Me, I'm hoping for streaks in the sky sooner rather than later.