in

"I was watching an artist on my staff working on a painting when I felt a desire to emulate him. The finest place in the middle of a wall he selects for a picture to be executed to the best of his ability; then he fills up the empty spaces all round it with *grotesques*, which are fantastical paintings whose attractiveness consists merely in variety and novelty. And in truth, what are these *Essays* if not monstrosities and *grotesques* botched together from a variety of limbs having no defined shape, with an order sequence and proportion which are purely fortuitous?"

– Montaigne, "On Affectionate Relationships."

in

"There are few grounds for hoping that, in any immediate future, there will be any recovery of social sanity. It would seem that the vicious circle must become yet more intolerable, more blatantly and desperately circular before any large numbers of human beings awaken to the tragic trick which they are playing on themselves. But for those who see clearly that it is a circle and why it is a circle, there is no alternative but to stop circling."

— Alan W. Watts, THE WISDOM OF INSECURITY

plastic catharsis

in

Her apartment is empty, ready to rent, ready to leave, and only trash cans – no, a trash can, though maybe two – and a plastic-wrapped mattress and boxspring remain (will get the latter out this weekend).

And glitter on the floor; there might be a roll of toilet paper left too.

Left the washer and dryer, compliments of the estate of.

It looks the same on the inside in the same way that everything looks the same in the little matchbox apartment development: as my grandfather said when we first moved her there, I'd hate to be drunk coming into this place; I'd never find where I lived.

(To this day, two years after she moved there and almost a month after she died and after a month of me going there almost every day I still can't remember where the apartment is until I'm almost past it.)

My relief remains unchanged, my only sadness being that she made it impossible for me to miss her; I want to miss her, I wish I did, but I don't: seeing all the trinkets and couches I slept on and upon which developed PTSD because I didn't sleep for a month, listening and waiting for her while she was sick years ago and the beds I had to re-assemble more times for reasons a kid never should have to and the Christmas decor tubs that I'll never have to lift again and the memories of the Christmases near the end of the ill-fated and ill-suited partnership that produced me that made me hate Christmas and seeing all that go into the back of the white van for the tax-deductible donation being nothing short of catharsis incarnate.

I remain fascinated that the most difficult things to dispose of are trash cans and mattresses and bad memories.

links/20220519

in

a thing about being less online written and shared online if only for my own records and quasi-satisfaction

in

Shifting the thrust of this site to being more (thoroughly undeveloped) writing and brainscrap and less Tumblr-y – no matter how much I love the Tumblr-weird and do, terribly, miss its glory days.

Moving forward: all postings – image or text (though predominantly text) the occasional music rec / Bandcamp embed and/or links post – will be directly from my brain (except the music and links, of course) and my life, for better or for worse, and not the "repost fascinating weird shit to no one in particular" version that's it been for the last few months.

Had fun with this space's previous, but it’s time to step back even further and do something different: I seem to have entered this merciful mental state of "I'm going to do whatever the hell I want and I don't care if anyone reads it or cares" and this is the way I prefer to present that to the world, even if it's for my own amusement.

(And now, having written all the above, expect the floodgates to open and the "far less frequently" to be rendered moot but oh well; further massive writing changes will be incoming throughout the summer: Brainfreedom has a way of doing that..)

a random collection of passing thoughts recorded here if only for the purposes of my own amusement and/or processing

in

  • A sudden fear that if I ever get to return to a city I'll be the epitome of yokel: it's been more than a decade – I've never even called an Uber for fuck's sake; I'd be the idiot waving my hand at every yellow car that crosses my path.

  • My only sadness in all of this post-mother-death stuff remains that, over the last 25 years, she made it impossible for me to miss her now.

  • The most exhausting part remains, similarly, that, whereas I only had to lie / act to her about my feelings during her life, I now have to lie / act to everyone who – and I know they all mean well – texts and calls and sends cards about the same in death. I'm somewhat terrified now that some of them will find this space (and have a feeling that some have) but I won't censor myself here – this is where I can be myself, the truest version, for better or for worse.

  • (This quandary is, notably, not found in the funeral home's handy ten stages of grief packet)

  • But I'll give the lie/act six months. 26 October, it's done. Anyone approaches me afterwards, they get the unvarnished truth.

  • It has been nice, I'll admit, to see pictures – slashing my stepfather out of the ones he graced with his sneering, bile-infused presence – of the life my long-departed animal companions of youth led after I had run away to Boston. I wish I could have been there with them, but it was made impossible for me; I would have ended up a suicide statistic.

  • At this rate, I could have taken the bar and seen to all of these court-appointed administrative tasks myself.

  • But at the same time, I recognize – begrudgingly – that not everyone moves at my pace. That doesn't mean I don't hate having to wait on other people. I MEAN REALLY FUCKING HATE WAITING ON OTHER PEOPLE just want the boxes to be checked, i's crossed, t's dotted, all that. Show me where to sign please.

  • BOSCH: LEGACY is much better than any spinoff/continuation has any right to be. Relief to be free of the LAPD politics that subsumed the last few seasons of the original.

  • I'm still finding glitter on my person from having to move all of this seasonal decor; it's like Tinkerbell puked everywhere.

  • If you're looking for a solid, mindless, and gloriously insane action flick, check out LOST BULLET on Netflix: loved it.

  • I am bored with my current selection of music and need new music send more, send something different please.

convergent divergences and divergent convergences and other work-related ruminations

in

Over the last few days, I've returned my attention (MainFictionThing required a period of percolation) to a script that I've long been noodling with: something wild and crazy and fun, a love letter to the cinematic and cultural influences of my study-in-contrast grandfathers mixed through the lens of a challenge to myself because someone far more capable (and inspirational) than I admitted to me that it was the one thing they couldn't crack, my "accessible look" - to steal a term from MAKING THE CUT - divergent convergence and/or convergent divergence from the inaccessible "literary shit" of MainFictionThing (I admitted to myself long ago that I will never be considered mainstream or accessible and I'm great with that) but I'm at something of a crossroads: is it worth my while to continue working on something that will require someone(s) else to see to fruition? Do I want to continue to allow myself this dream, this inevitable heartbreak of incompletion and total lack of eventual consumptive form? Or do I say fuck it and roll with enjoying myself, writing something for the sake of writing it because I want it to exist and worry about the rest of it later?

Clearly, I've landed on the latter: I don't know what the future will bring and, honestly, in these sacred hours of The Work, I don't particularly care – if it becomes more than a script, great; if it remains that, fine: I don't need to pander (not that I ever did: that was the vulnerability exploited by media social in a decade of "joblessness" when what I was really doing was exploring my calling and moving forward with life on my terms) and I don't need to prove myself to anyone but myself.

And with what I'm working on now, I've finally embraced that.