Sunday, November 14, 2010

stop making sense.

whenever the world stops making sense, i find myself on the automatic easy; just getting through the hours at work and taking sleeping pills at night, standing in the shower for hrs on end and locking myself up in the few spare moments i can find away from the hum drum dazzle of the day to day, just to get a moment where i can stop holding my breath and just think of something whole and wonderful— some brimming and beautiful image that can put the separate parts back together, if only for a moment. i feel like i’ve been on a god damn plane all year and if i really think about the brass parts, the only real difference this year is that my grandmother died and i’ve lost 30 lbs, leaving me to only be able to wear 1/6 of my wardrobe, which ¼ of is stuck somewhere in the heartland. 

i cannot imagine wearing those clothes right now anyway. the clothes i want to wear i haven’t made yet— they are part of those images still in my skull, the ones i think about in the shower for hours or when i paint my nails on the bathroom floor and ignore the telephone. they are the clothes i wear on some big ship on the sea where i can lean over and the ledge and touch a whale and some man with a beard and a hat and a pipe seems way high up somewhere smoking and laughing at me, even though he does not want to. even though he probably hates that he thinks i’m so funny. or it is the bathing suit i will wear on the french rivera, or half a bathing suit, smoking a cigar and watching the women in enormous hats and lipstick make there way to the bar. god the world is such a comic and tumbling thing and it is impossible to take yourself too seriously. it is impossible to make a serious decision. it is like locking your head in a box.


though this weekend has been about ignoring the world. it has been completely about locking my head in a box. but only these two days. whenever the world stops making sense, and i can finally have some span that is unaccountable to anyone else, i find myself at the library for hours, looking for reasons to be. i find films and tomes and things i think are going to matter things i think are going to make sense. then i lock myself in my house with these things and the whiskey i hid at the halloween party and the sleeping pills and the journals and all my little stories and i do not come out. i just do not. because the point is, the real point, is that if no one i know makes sense and if nothing i have done makes sense and if the entire god damn structure of how we communicate and how we attempt to faultlessly connect if none of that makes any sense whatsoever and it seems easier to just die (not in the actual, but in the rilke DIE BECAUSE WE HAVE KNOWN THEM idea like give up the fucking ghost finally) then i have to take it to the books because my time is letting me down my culture society is letting me down the hidden head hunters are letting me down everything everything everything is a goddamn letdown and i have to fix it or the suffocation and all the black parts will just come tumbling in

and i hate those tremendous shadows on the walls, the ones i even have to fight in my sleep with my fists just constant knots. and giving up or falling backwards or pretending not to feel or do is not me. i never get worse for it. not ever. my friends who think these hardships are not quite comic but i make them cry sometimes on accident my friends keep telling me i am building character and my mother keeps telling me i am living that i have stories but really the honest god damn truth is, i only write myths. i only write the stories i do not live or cannot live the stories that do not fall short i write stories that keep the grip till the end that just suffocate with goodness and sadness i do not write about the things i know i only write about the things i imagine i write about the pains of being pure of heart i write about something that is dead something that is lost something that will not exist anymore something i have never seen something i attempt, painstakingly again and again, to find over the whole wide world. always on that damn plane that tomb that time capsule with my notebook and my stories coming home with all these stories and all these dumb things i did just to get away just to kick out the walls. stories that are perilous and wild and only make sense because the thing that was supposed to make sense was untrue and void. the world may not be a labyrinth at all maybe only my world is and maybe it is only this way because i just cannot stand the other way. maybe i am the most mad person you ever knew because i do it, always, i always do what i mean and i do what i say and i find myself in some pretty rotten places because of this because most everyone i meet, they are definitely not mad like i am. not even close. i am terribly young for this. but not quite young enough to explain all of the parts of myself away. i rarely give up anything of myself.  


so now it is back to the island back to the typewriter and the tome on the history of southern literature back stories and submissions and kittens back to riding my bike home at 4a in my party dress, shoes in the basket. because it never really gets cold here. because i know at some point someone is going to be as mad as me and is going to want to rip down the walls and have the beauty and simplicity of heart and mind to do it and mean it and follow it to the end and still and still after that fight to fight the repeat of history and bring in the myth find the line and not rip it off but mean it. always mean it.

i swear i am always going to believe God is a sailor. which definitely reinforces my sense of absolute reckless abandon and makes me mad for the world and the things i know i can get from it and make from it and pull from it until i am in the ground and even then it won't be the same. even then i will still be on that damn boat touching a whale with some tugboat captain that refuses to laugh at me.

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