You Are Here
I often debate with myself about what it is exactly I’m trying to do or say with this blog, this…writing. In classes what first spoke to me about putting a pen to paper was the realization that I could create something, manufacture feeling, mimic emotion. It’s something about how words look, how they curve or cut across, how they feel between your ears when you’re reading through them silently. But that wasn’t it. I soon realized that writing was more than the sound and feel of crafted prose, it was beautiful, mine, desperate and always tragically incomplete.
I have this thing about timelines. This theory about them. Relationships, philosophies, “worldviews” – it’s funny, they’re all so important until they’re not anymore. But when they are, they’re you. Then you get older. Life happens, and you usually end up looking back and laughing. Like you know better. It’s all a scope thing.
So, You Are Here. Where? After what was and before what hasn’t happened yet, I assume. Before what maybe feels like it won’t ever happen. Before whatever. The sad truth is that “Here” is actually nowhere. Nowhere the same as in how the internet is nowhere, how words are nowhere. The same as in how sadness is nowhere, as in the word “indie” and how it actually means nothing but people always use it to describe music or themselves nowhere. The same as in time and the broken trails of exploding fireworks.
I haven’t written anything substantial in a while. I try and I look at what’s down and none of it makes any sense. It’s all some kind of forced metaphor, some persona, some other person’s voice. For a stretch there I was posting everyday just to prove that I could. It was my newest goal. My newest “what this site should be,” like I had something to prove. And in a way I guess I did. It’s Dustin Hoffman swinging a cross at all the pissed off wedding guests in The Graduate, sliding it through the door handles, locking them in. It’s him making a get-away, taking a stand, getting onto a bus exhilarated, then catching his and breath and coming back down and thinking, “…oh, shit. Now what?” The point is, you soon come to notice something undeniably sad about yourself, about the nature of routines. You notice it after you watch or read something amazing, or terrible, and how your first reaction is to plug it into your blog online, your twitter account. Your timeline. It’s all the same thing. This is me swinging a cross at all the naysayers, all the everyone who holds back a smirk when I tell them I majored in English, then asks if I want to be a teacher.
This is what happened to me on August whatever of 2009. Dear Diary. This is how I felt. This is how I lived. This is me real. Really.
It’s funny, really, this absurd desire we have to be heard, this ridiculous compulsion to have ideas, and record them. I have this constant back-and-forth with writing, this always overarching resentment for it. Ask most people and they’ll say that writing’s cathartic. But I never got that. I got it more as some goal that I was aspiring to. Something I could be good at. Someone I could be, exaggerated and dizzy and everything that is and isn’t actually me.
After my month of posting every day I wanted a return to something more real, something more primal. I wanted to retire from Facebook, never touch my keyboard again and find something to do outside. I wanted to go swimming. I wanted to work out, play softball, sweat. I wanted to look people in the eye. I wanted to drum on buckets in the park.
So You Are Here. In your twenties. In the middle of a TV series. In progressive rock and mellotrons and movie trailers and books. You Are Here. In the Golden Age of television, watching shows like Breaking Bad, Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, Mad Men, This American Life, The Office, Hung, Dexter, Tell Me You Love Me, In Treatment, like you’re in on some ground floor, in the presence of real brilliance, real reality.
This piece doesn’t mean anything again. It’s just another one of my odes to not knowing, one of my homages to time and place and confusion and noise. People are in love and breaking up and far away and longing and opening up and shutting down and making dinner and blacking out. There’s no way to make sense of it. And maybe that’s why “insights” are so interesting: because they’re all so piecemeal, never really getting it all but never really giving up on trying. All there is is TV and soundscapes. If you accept that, then you can really start to enjoy something so simple as swimming. You start to get why so many people love the beach.
I don’t think I’ll be happy until this blog is the most jumbled thing I could possibly make it. Oh, and The Ladykillers sucked, by the way. I’m not gonna write a review on it. And I’m not gonna edit this before I post it, either. I think it’s better that way.
This entry was posted on Thursday, September 3rd, 2009 at 3:54 pm and is filed under creative nonfiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
