Month: March 2012

Addendum

Posted on by metaphlame

Oh, that sounded rather bad yesterday. I in no way meant that I’m just SUCH a fascinating person as to simply DEMAND an appearance in a story. I just meant there were now enough unique people in my life for me to be able to write about them, without needing to make people up (including myself, or whatever cobbled-together version of myself I used to cram in there).

I suppose the archivist comment sounded a little cruel, too. It’s true, it’s material, but I’m hardly sniffing at the wreckage of this relationship. Others are doing that. I am still too furious about what they did to engage in any fact-finding missions. Hell, I don’t even want to know the facts anymore. It’s only going one way, now, and if it gets to the end sooner rather than later, it won’t change the outcome for anyone.

I thought of all this yesterday but a more timely addendum fell by the wayside when I was witness to a woman having seizure, which resulted in a tremendous sidewalk wound and me calling an ambulance for the first time in my life. I was so rattled I picked up the dogs, walked home and crawled into bed at 5PM.

She couldn’t even form words.

why not?

Posted on by metaphlame

I will do Script Frenzy this year. I care less for the genre than prose but with description, that which I value most, taken out, I know I can plow through a good bit of material without a second thought (and have done so many times in the past).

I don’t even have to try and come up with a plot. It’s all right here. Thankfully there are now enough characters in my life that I know longer have to be one of them. The novels I wrote always ended up troubling me as I wrote them; I tried too hard to become the character I modeled after who I, well, wished I were. I don’t think that will be a problem this time. I have no part in this drama and want none, except that of its archivist.

Unrelated, mostly: Script Frenzy’s site design is very classy. NaNo should take note for this fall.

film festival

Posted on by metaphlame

Watched so many scenes from my city in Tomonari Nishikawa’s “Tokyo-Ebisu.” Felt like dirt. Remembered cousin’s accusatory message: “So are you enjoying yourself at all over there?” Wrote whole blog then to convince myself and others I was, because if you’re not having fun something’s wrong with you.

Cried bitterly through Don Hertzfeldt’s “It’s Such a Beautiful Day.” Hated everyone who laughed. Hoped they remembered this film when their loved ones forgot them. Hoped they cried.

Imagery

Posted on by metaphlame

It doesn’t just happen to girls starving themselves to get movie star thin.

I am watching people construct pinterest boards around a person they aren’t. A life they don’t have but are forcing on others. You can’t make your significant other into Beaver Cleaver’s dad by deluging him with pictures of drooling two year olds giggling. You can’t make Revolutionary Road into a hospitable place by changing the damn drapes.

I wonder if it would have been easier for these people if there weren’t so many channels through which they could wage this this-is-what-our-life-should-be-like war. I know you’d have to go way, way back, and even then you’d still have religious people and family and community members telling you who to be. But maybe if you just didn’t have the images. Maybe it would help. At the very least, maybe you wouldn’t have all this media telling you you could change people. Maybe you’d have the sense not to bind yourself to someone who would set about making you into someone you never were or wanted to be.

Because from what I can see, that appears to be a horrible process.

old emails

Posted on by metaphlame

I kept this folded in the back of a photo frame behind a picture of my dog for ten years, so I’d know where to find it, but hidden so no one could figure me out. It’s part of an old email exchange about a book.

“Absurd

Your life is, without a doubt, out of your control, but that’s not to say that it has a purpose, that you have a destiny. Accident. Chance. Concidence.

So why are we here? The question has no answer. Not only will you never know, but there’s nothing to know.

X: ‘What the hell are people for?’

There is nothing to understand, nothing to know. You can invent reasons, sure. But so what?

Can pursue pure, rational truth (science). Might get facts, but facts don’t tell you anything about life.

Can pursue religion. Relates to life, but religion = lies.

The rational vs the irrational. Absurd actions. X and Y have reasons for doing what they do, but they’re rationalizations more than reasons. Not based on moral beliefs. Even Z’s desired last act is meaningless—because God’s not going to care.

Heck, living is irrational. So what do you have? These options:

Science: No connection to life. No responsibility. No morality. Death.

Cynicism: Main is vile and man makes nothing worth making, nothing worth knowing.

Religion: Lies. Happy lies, perhaps, but lies nonetheless. And it leaves you unable to question why you believe what you do, which puts you in the absurd position of having to ignore A LOT.

Laughter: Recognize the absurdity. Recognize the ridiculousness of humanity. Laugh not at humans (cynicism), but with humans (you are one, after all, and just as prone to irrational insanity as the next). Laugh with humans and keep your own humanity. Remain a part of humanity, not at the distance cynicism imposes. Laugh. And love. And laugh at love. And love to laugh.

A: ‘We are healthy only to the extent that our lives are humane.’”

I reproduce it here because I’ve lost it a couple times, since co-opting the photo frame for something else, and worry it’ll be gone forever. I didn’t carry it around with me for all that time; I kept it elsewhere. I like to flatter myself with the idea that I did so out of a healthy uneasiness with the idea of taking some written worldview so deeply to heart and making it my own. I like to imagine that having read it, and put it aside, finding things out for myself, unguided, was my chief concern. But probably I just didn’t want it to be found by anyone in my travels, since it would make it to easy for people to pigeonhole me, too quickly. Oh, well. There it is. I gave it ten years but I’m still pretty much in agreement with it. And it’s more eloquent—and, blessedly, brief, which any reader here has good reason to be grateful for—than I tend to be, so I didn’t want to lose it.

ETA: Oh, I should add that while I recognized the imperative in the last option at the time, I honestly wasn’t sure I could do that. I was a very lonely kid. I have, happily, been proven wrong.

Posted on by metaphlame

I do hope those few people acquainted with this blog are aware that my cryptic moments are not the spawn of some bizarro literary delusion. I’m being cryptic so no one is mentioned outright, and thus placed in a difficult position. Myself included.

I did not spend four years surrounded by self-proclaimed poets and vainglorious auteurs for nothing. Spewing literary pretension like that undermines your claims. I am never trying to be literary here. I am trying to be earnest, and am by and large succeeding at it. 

mad men

Posted on by metaphlame

I’m dragging myself back to it again because of this article, despite having thrown up my hands in disgust a few episodes in at what I deemed [and still maintain to be] shitty people leading shitty lives. I don’t really understand what I’m supposed to feel here—relief at not having had to be who I am, back then? Pfft. I knew how good I had it. My parents bothered to tell me how it was. Is the whole point just to make me angry at the way things were, and thus to further my resolve to keep it from going that way again? It’s not going that way, so I don’t see that as a valid point. The Tea Party and its druthers notwithstanding.

Pete Campbell as a character, though, is now more depressing than ever, since the people I know whose lives mirror his have multiplied. Him with his stupid gun as his wife berates him, then feeding with watery eyes these demented hyper testosterone fantasies of killing and cutting and being fed the kill by subservient women…ugh. And his “I like doing things for her” is so spot-on, because people do try to convince themselves that this is what they want. You see it all the time. But you can’t make a tinker out of a trolloc. In this, even my psychosis-ridden dog is superior in intellect. Dress it up as fancily you wish, with blankets and peanut butter and pillows and even meat, it doesn’t matter. She’ll know it for the cage it is and chew her way out, even if she has to shatter her teeth and slash her ears to ribbons doing it.

But Draper and Campbell are desperately trying to convince themselves that their petty purchases and bedroom dalliances make the cage somewhere they’re in power, somewhere they chose and would choose again, if given the chance. Perhaps what they really need to invest are some beagles, who would quickly show them the error of their ways…

On Bad Life Decisions

Posted on by metaphlame

People around me keep falling apart, and I am powerless to stop them.

…which sounds really vain (what, like it’s my job to?) and pretentious (what, like I could if I tried?), neither of which I intend.

(I met the person I could’ve become if I’d stayed in my old line of work, and he was a mess, and that was I guess a relief, but I don’t mean him.)

I mean people close to me. They just keep spiraling down. And I’m not actually that close so I can’t really even say anything and when I do it’s just like “hey, you there, you look, uh, in need of more help than I can possibly offer you with my meager years and experience.” EVERY TIME. And then if that prod doesn’t work I flee, so as not to watch it all come to a head. They used to ask for help. It was awkward but at least I had that to work with, had that reason to even open my mouth. Now the decisions are the same but the people are smarter and they feel worse for making them. So they just go down this black hole.

Also, I am surrounded by women who treat the men in their lives abominably. Seriously. What. Is. Wrong. With. You.

On Weightlifting

Posted on by metaphlame

I’ve never liked it this much before. Granted, I had only done it a little, before, and then only as part of a laundry list of physical activities to pursue to make time pass and distract me some. I loathed the slowness of lifting and would vastly have preferred running, but I’d already done that. 

I’m okay with the speed of it now, though, and especially with the results. Probably the more pleasing effect has more to do with  my actually having a list of lifts to make sure all parts of a limb get used (plus the increased weight) than with any diligence on my part, but I was knitting yesterday and glanced past the wrist and thought yep, yeah, that’s still me. Most of my life, my flesh has been a burlap sack that’s dumped over the stuff I value, and it’s scratchy and awkward and people look at it and think “yeah, trashy.” Or fat, or unhealthily pale, or whatever. Now, though, I’m not looking at clothes trying to consider how best to hide that which everyone has some problem with. I think, fuck yeah, those are my arms, and that will sit nicely on them. 

The appeal isn’t, as I would definitely have assumed it would be not long ago, due to perceived power either. I don’t walk around thinking how safe I am because I lift, or that I would be in any way more likely to bust heads if someone tried to fuck with me. (That’s part of the reason I lifted in Japan, too, and we see how much that mattered when someone actually tried to fuck with me…yeah.) It has nothing to do with a comparison with men or even with other women—I neither know anyone near me who likes lifting (or me) enough to talk about it with me, nor can I make presumptions based on the build of this or that person, and compare myself with the thusly revealed regimen. I’m viciously competitive and I’m relieved that competition has no part of this, as souring a motivator as it eventually turns out to be.

I think it’s that for the first time my body is actually doing things I want it to. How long do you spend bowled over by it? Turned from a spry little kid into a lumpen mess of a teenager whom even your own grandmother sees fit to poke and prod and pronounce unfortunate, then shoved off into peer groups who’d slit a goat’s throat on a mountaintop if it brought them closer to The Vaunted Tit, whereupon you are deemed old enough for the whispered haranguing to begin: maybe you should let your body drag you through more unknown clusterfucks; maybe you should get pregnant and see how THAT goes, don’t you see how everyone but you would enjoy that? Bodies, temples, magic, babies, rah rah rah.

Fuck you people, I’ve got arms with muscles now. They’re there because I put them there, not because some wretched cocktail of hormones and peer pressure dragged them into existence. Somebody else can pump themselves full of silicone then have the babies then wear the spanx to pretend they didn’t have the babies then sweat and starve away the physical reminders of every meal they ever ate, all while striving desperately not to upset (or outshine, strengthwise) the fragile self-conception of their partners who incorrigibly equate masculinity with the kind of body they too will never have, further snowballing this hurricane of mental and physical fuckeditude. 

I will be quietly lifting weights in the wee hours of the morning, and marveling at the body’s ability to rise to the demands you—I—place before it.