Archive | January, 2009

over the ocean

31 Jan

another january, and i survived, and i want a medal. i don’t know what the deal is with people all around me who are constantly saying things like, oh, i would never want to live in a place that is always warm because i love the seasons. i think that is either some type of defense mechanism against the jealousy we feel towards people who have never shoveled a driveway, or just a whole bunch of lip service. because seriously, fuck the seasons, i will never get bored with seventy degrees and sunny. i keep somehow hoping that when i come home the weather will have changed, like how i always hope something will have changed when i get home. but it will still be cold, and life will still be dull.

i am on a plane right now. i have never brought my computer to germany before, it might be useless since i don’t know if pazi has internet. but i sort of like the idea of journaling every day with a keyboard instead of a pen. because i am impatient. and i always forget and i want to remember every excruciating detail. sometimes i get teary when the plane takes off due east, or who knows if it is really east. i haven’t memorized the runways at o’hare though i should probably start telling people i have. they wouldn’t know the difference. i love love forcing profundity, as though taking off and looking down on the world was something that thousands and thousands of people didn’t experience daily, and on more of a regular basis than me. but it is always a thing for me, this leaving behind of things, of people, it is hard for me to care when everything is all right in front of me. oh, an ocean is in between us, now i can really see what it all means to me. it’s silly but true, i have been trying to carve out some kind of theme to all these journeys to the fatherland over the last ten years but all i can come up with is dozens of quasi-belletristic ramblings about how beautiful it all is, but i just don’t know why it is beautiful. earlier, while meticulously folding my clothes and stuffing bits into my suitcase, i had flashes of apathy, of feeling like i perhaps didn’t even want to go, i hate veering from habit, my job and life and sleep patterns. so the next two weeks i will fall asleep with a flicker of excitement in my chest, an anticipation to get home and tell stories and see what has changed and that is maybe the best part. believing that somehow, a trip will make life better while you are away. it has never happened before, maybe i just didn’t notice. time to eat a tinfoiled little dinner tray.

my other car is a 747

11 Jan

too bad i decided one boring august afternoon at the office that i was going to germany next month, because i really need to go back to melbourne to see this production of büchner’s woyzeck, featuring the fabulous tim rogers. woyzeck was probably the first drama i read for my first german literature class. i still have the little yellow paperback in the basement and i’ve been thinking about revisting it. it is a really intense piece of work, and after a few weeks of discussing it during class, ryan and i went up to the library to watch a video of alban berg’s opera wozzeck. i remember sitting there wearing giant old headphones watching it, tense and eager and not just because i am not usually a fan of opera- when it was over, ryan said, ‘man, that really wore me out.’ there is never any release, which i guess sort of makes sense since büchner died before he could even finish writing it. i have never actually seen a production of it so i am going to die because i can’t afford the airfare to australia to see what is surely my ultimate boner jam. believe me, i have looked up fares. my australian visa is still good for three more months.

australia, let’s add that to the list of places i miss more than the brief period of time i’ve spent there merits. lately i have been conjuring up what the humid evening felt like while wandering [/getting lost] around the domain in sydney at night, or- waking up in the morning in melbourne and boiling a kettle, making chai tea replete with spoonful after spoonful of sugar to wash down my iced bun, or- inhaling crisp breaths of seaside oxygen, watching the sun set over port phillip bay.  buying five bags of candy at the queen victoria market like i didn’t have an already-overflowing suitcase that would need to be packed in a matter of days. going to lygon street for italian food like dutiful tourists. finally getting a copy of i am the cosmos in prahran, an album that i could buy in my own city but now i can say, this record came home with me from victoria. in sydney we always sat on the upper decks of the trains, in melbourne i refused to ride trams because i couldn’t force myself to concentrate long enough on the map to understand where they were going. when once the railway network was just a prismatic cartoon of train lines, it became real as we walked from the skybus across the concourse of southern cross station under its undulating roof, and could not discern at which platform we should catch the sandringham line. because i have an almost crippling obsession with that which is ordinary and mundane, these things that i miss the most are the stupid details that i have only ephemeral contact with, like traffic signals and the button-like light switches and the font on the street signs and the flurry of people racing through sydney central station, the things that are part of a resident’s wonted routine but are different enough to me that i realize i am a visitor. i almost forgot, acland street in melbourne runs diagonal, once you pass the shops and cafes the sidewalk turns almost spongy and it is like walking on a tree-lined cloud. oh, the palm trees all over, being a midwesterner i always notice those. i am in love with these things because they are the most permanent, or the least fleeting, and probably won’t change before i go back. i haven’t thought about these dumb things for months, and on new year’s eve luke asked me when i was going back,  as preface to a joke about gecko-smuggling, and i said, next year. hopefully next year.

c’mon, i like the dark

10 Jan

i want to write it all down, but i am usually driving. or on the verge of slumber, that old curse. i want to write it all down but there isn’t much to be said these days of my town and its potholes that could devour my bright blue car- why did i buy such a conspicuous vehicle when all i’ve ever wanted was to be invisible? so, last weekend at the bar, this guy comes over and slides next to me without invitation. no one ever sits down next to me, i meant for it to be that way. what would someone expect me to say if they sat next to me? i have successfully convinced myself that i am so different from them, because i go to bed at nine, because i’ve never held a bottle of beer, because i look right through the mirror when i’m in front of it. now- it was like being transported back in time to sophomore year, when i would sit alone at some dirty table in the lunchroom and wait for this tall kid with a thicket of blonde hair on his head to come around the corner- yeah, it has always been a thing- i didn’t know his name and only ever saw him at that time of day. that is what you do in high school, and i have always been a fan of ritual. interrupting my sick irrational teenage anticipation was this other boy who would approach my table to talk to me and all these years i have been sure he was antagonizing me, though i’ve heard recently that he was only trying to be my friend. still, that bred my infamous shield, disquietude disguised as contemptuousness. i am just dramatic, i don’t remember what he said- the whole experience is simply fodder.

so, last weekend at the bar someone played a sleater-kinney song on the jukebox. it was a song that i, a girl with a sleater-kinney tattoo, hate and never listen to. that band is fucking sacrosanct to me and whenever i say their name i am met with blank stares and shrugs from everyone who asks about the tattoo. i meant for it to be that way. my perpetual quest for another perfect song and another perfect record goes beyond just finding things i enjoy listening to; i’m carving out this little identity, i’m disengaging myself from most other people who i think are boring. so when i am trying to find some relatively arcane wilson pickett song on the jukebox and some guy appears behind me asking, in a skeptical tone, which song i am choosing, i can spit my words back into his face. a song you don’t know, asshole. my life is a song you don’t know. 

lately the days of cold and banality are so enervating that i can’t even bother to come home and attempt to make something pop out of these lettered keys, it is just too much. or not enough. these days i am so bored with music and i’m so bored with american television, but that is just another differential that i’m working really hard on. that is the only thing i add up to these days. i don’t even want to leave the house because i am grievously prosaic. so if you sit next to me at a bar, i will probably just stare at you and you might not be able to tell if i am aghast or perturbed or indifferent and i am probably all three but really i am just thinking about what song i am going to put on when i get in the car to drive home to cleanse my eardrums of the aural rubbish to which they’d been subjected. i apologize, my whole problem is i can’t seem to shake the feeling that someone is playing a joke on me. it is all in a dialect i can’t understand, let’s not change it.

i never even got to say goodbye

1 Jan

when the countdown was going and everyone around me sat next to their paramour in anticipation of midnight kisses, i felt a little bit sad because i had sunk myself into the corner of the couch, the lone one out, and then i tried to remember the new year’s eves past when i had had someone to kiss, and i couldn’t recall them at all. take that, the memories are finally dispersing.

i am locking 2008 in a vault for now. the year of the same old.  the year nothing happened. the year of stagnation. the year of my continuing ungratefulness. the year i didn’t even walk down my own street. the year i didn’t need any doctors. the year i started drinking coffee. the year of anniversaries. the year of east, west, north and behind.

i hate this time of year. all these burdens make my head start to hurt and the solution is climbing under the covers: the pressure of having to buy the perfect christmas presents and having to act like your holiday houseguests are interesting, the pressure of having the most fun new year’s eve yet and of finding things about yourself that need changing so resolutions can be made like the new year is really some kind of profound new beginning and not something that is governed by the movements of the sun or the moon. i hate futility, i hate wavering on a precipice- if i know i can’t do something, i won’t try. that is a horrible attitude to have, i’m sure, but i wish the hoards of idiots who will no doubt besiege my gym for the next two weeks thought that way as well, because i am going to lose my shit when i’m not able to use my treadmill because some neophyte is clopping along lazily, paging through last summer’s magazines. please, give up before you start. instead of resolutions, what i want to do in 2009 is the same thing i have been doing for awhile now: sitting around and coming up with the best ideas for things that i will never accomplish or even bother to pursue. not for lack of motivation or resources, but because for me abstractions are more fun than materializations. 2009: the year of the hypothetical and conceptual. the year of imagination. the year of absurdity. this blog does not exist. this is all theoretical. this year will be perfect.

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