Inconsolable Rage

It happens.

A while ago I decided I wanted to start playing the piano again and I downloaded a pdf book on chords and stuff, how to figure all that out again. The author was adamant in his attitude that piano should be fun and you should play only for yourself. I totally agree and this makes it extremely annoying when people make unsavory comments on what I decide to play, alone, from downstairs in the basement.

“That song sounds like the same thing over and over.” Yeah, it’s almost like I’m practicing. “What’s that other one you play that’s more lively?” The song I want to work on today is slow and has a minor key. But it’s nice (and “but” shouldn’t even have to be said) and that’s why I’m playing it. Get over it. Complexity, optimism and repetitiveness are not qualities I consider when I decide I want to learn to play a song. I don’t play for other people. I don’t want to become the piano man. I hope I never compose a song that gets played by anyone who could be called the piano man. I don’t want any of my music to join the realm of as complete drunken overplayed absence of meaning as Don’t Stop Believin’.

Mowing the lawn today, I thankfully avoided shredding a toad. I was quite happy about this, and the more I think about it the more I’m hoping it has some sort of hidden deeper meaning in the context of the rest of my past couple days. It’s probably because I saw the toad and then swerved to evade it. It didn’t jump out of the way without me noticing. I actively decided not to kill it. I was reassured of my own benevolent power. I was in control.

Recently in a few facets of my life people are no longer seeing eye-to-eye with me and the frustration I feel is immeasurable. When one senses that one’s words are beginning to bounce off walls, it’s important to somehow be reminded that you still have control over something.

Why I Hate Heroes 1

I could go on forever and ever and ever about why this show is so irredeemably flawed. Seriously, it’s like a how-to manual on making an awful show. No, even worse, because it started out okay. It was a decent show that fell apart, and then the pieces fell apart.

Anyway, they’re gonna turn the de facto main character gay. Seriously? There is no way in hell this show will make it to a fifth season. If it does, I will scream. I will do crazy naked things for the Internet’s viewing pleasure.

I’m not a big fan of gimmicks and this is just insultingly obvious. Stop being gimmicky, dammit! Give the characters some real depth for once! Come on! I can barely comment on this. It’s so grating that I’m surprised it’s even a part of my universe at all.

I Hate the Internet

So here are my closed-minded frustrations of the day.

Today one of my best friends was looking at some stories we had worked together on in high school. Naturally they are unpolished, unfinished, and total Mary Sue-fests, but they were fun. Now that we are older, wiser, and better with time management, Ethan decided that we should continue or reboot the stories in some way because there’s no way around it – we like writing fiction and thought the yarns, at their core, were worthwhile.

I saw this as an opportunity to not only develop a sustainable vessel for creativity but also plunge Ethan into the world of social media so I made him make a WordPress blog. It’s linked to over on the right and titled Light in the Abyss.

Once that was settled we had to figure out how we were going to integrate our blogs with the presentation of our creative works.

We considered having a second WP blog exclusively for creative writing. Then I discovered that  the “add page” system not conducive for that, so what we would have to do is make post categories named after each work so you would have to click on them to reel in the chapters of everything. Eehhhhh…

Then I thought of making one new blog for each work, and naming it thusly: http://justgiveup-title.wordpress.com. But you can’t use hyphens in that part of the URL! You have no idea how much that pissed me off.

We wondered if we would have to make a separate space, say on Freewebs, with a page for each work, which is more suited to the serial format we would likely use but still not quite optimal because it is off WordPress and difficult to organize.

Also, did you know that the username “justgiveup” is taken on every website ever except WordPress? Dammit!

I’m going to try to search for some site designed exclusively for our nerdy purposes. There must be something. I’m hanging on to a shred of faith that says eventually, yes, I will out-think the Internet.

Saudade

There’s this word in Portuguese, “saudade”. It means roughly “nostalgic yearning” in English. It’s kind of a sad feeling. But I have no interest in talking about the feeling. Well I do. But not now. Right now my bone to pick is with the word.

You see, lusophones (that’s people who speak Portuguese, The More You Know™) claim that “saudade” cannot be translated into English. They propose that there is no word in English that can effectively capture all the subtle nuances of saudade.

This is complete bullshit for two reasons.

On one hand, the linguistic hand, every word is translatable precisely because no word is precisely translatable. Even when two people are speaking the same language their interpretations of the words are going to be different (exactly what makes a particular fire a “blaze”, what makes a person “wretched”) but people are generally perceptive enough to fill in the blanks. This gap-closing sense is what makes “nostalgic yearning” seem to do the job pretty well as far as “saudade” is concerned. There is a magical ability called connotation or, in some circles, thought, that makes the subtle nuances just happen to occur to the person hearing the word. It is the very reason poetry can exist at all.

On the other hand, the asshole hand, the lusophones are making this claim out of a sense of cultural superiority. Only the Portuguese, with their highly-evolved hearts, could feel and thus ascribe a word to an intense emotion like saudade. Just another member of their incredibly versatile language. These are the sort of underhanded ego-stroking techniques that make people with ethnic pride so annoying.

I have a Swedish-speaking friend who prefers writing in English to Swedish because he feels that when he says something in Swedish, he’s saying it the only way it can possibly be said. Food for thought. Two-faced pro-English hypocritical food for thought, but still.

I guess you can consider this last line here a disclaimer that I don’t have anything against the Portuguese or any other culture but I give it begrudgingly because it dignifies any dumbass who thinks I do.

Paranoid Ramblings

There’s a word, apophenia, it means seeing connections where none exist. It makes talking with most people about Lost such a bitch because they will venture the most nonsensical theories.

Having astute powers of observation is a blessing, but it can come with the curse of just being too good. Eventually you drive yourself mad. You know the truth, but they don’t know that you know. It all comes together so well – there is indeed a camera in your ceiling fan and a microphone under your desk.  They are gaslighting you. They moved the furniture and they think you can’t tell. They’re out to get you. They’re going to steal your lunch money and your girlfriend and they’re going to kick you in the nuts.

Remember how I said in an earlier post that boredom can be a blessing because it gives your mind room for dreams? The downside is it also clears out mental real estate for nightmares.

You may be a sort of super-sleuth, and you may be right sometimes, and that information may save your life in some way. But most of the time if you assume the worst in people you will fuck yourself over. Meaningful human relationships are based in trust. Nothing ventured nothing gained. You can’t live putting people under your own personal Patriot Act.

This is one of those ideas that made me hate thinking and like feeling. Sometimes the imagination needs to be reigned in so your senses can appreciate the truth. Truth ain’t always easy but it will always set you free. One of my favorite quotes (and I don’t have many) is by Dr. Seuss. He said, roughly, “you know you’re in love when real life is better than your dreams”. I’ll toast my green eggs and ham to that any day.

Mantra for the Other Man

when i get to typing in all lowercase you know my mind is undergoing drawage and quarteration from important thoughts and i am uncomfortable with just coming right out and catapulting them at you. however what i am currently mulling over is the most critical thing i was taught today and i feel that they must be immortalized lest they be forgotten and i remain forever dishonest and unresolved.

so here are the things that i am repeating in my head, like a rotodiller digging up some peace, joining the likes of “just give up”, “you can’t make a difference” and “everything will be all right”

talk about what happened

separate the history from living in it

it means nothing

you can figure out what people like

appreciate the past for its pleasure

(which sounds so overwhelmingly positive and fluffy i’m pretty sure i just fucked a guy without knowing!)

abandon the mindset of sleaze

no one is competing with you

being weird helps no one

I just realized I’m being a hypocrite with that last one by being all insecure and vague. The virtue I am lauding today is openness. If you’re going to make a big commitment to something, be it an amazing project or goal or a person’s heart, and this something matters to you, you have to confront it openly and honestly. (I can sense myself channeling Pema Chodron again here.) Learn everything you can about it, the good and the bad, the true and the real. Then appreciate it, and let it go. You can’t genuinely enjoy something that matters to you if you don’t know its true nature, or the true nature of your reaction to it. It is what it is, you feel how you feel. And that’s okay.

It’s okay. It doesn’t matter if your feelings are too irrational, too wrong, as long as you can acknowledge and forgive yourself for it. It doesn’t matter if ideas similar to yours have failed before, because they might have led up to this moment where yours can flourish. It doesn’t matter if your dad used to be an asshole if he no longer wants to be. And when I say doesn’t matter I mean doesn’t have to matter. It’s a choice. It’s okay to feel unreasonably jealous, reluctant, and fearful. It really is. There are people who get by with worse flaws than yours. Don’t feel guilty. Don’t hate yourself for things you don’t hate other people for.

A Perfect Circle – Gravity is a moving song about this topic. It’s about being flawed to the point of imbalance and accepting it in the sense of letting its importance waste away to nothing. Just let it go. You don’t have to play basketball against anyone who isn’t on the court.

In the interest of practicing what I preach, I’m going to, uh, practice this as soon as I can. The people you love and the dreams you have deserve your authenticity. They deserve your walls knocked down. This harkens back to my post about never wanting to be on TV. This unresolved tension, this crushing drama sustained to keep viewers interested. In real life, you can’t hide from what you need.

Bubble

I just started The Wisdom of No Escape by Pema Chodron and it is amazing. I will probably soon be consumed by a desire to talk about it. Between that and tonight’s work on Fear.less I have a lot of new words to deal with. Thus I want to get at least one post up inspired by my weekend in Duquoin before my mind is taken. Without further ado, here we go.

I talked about decadence a while ago, in a post that I believe was tittled, fittingly, Decadence. Well now I have discovered something about decadent people – they know a lot about things the rest of us don’t, but all they know is that.

Sometimes a lifestyle can be too exciting and the setting is to blame. On the extreme end there’s living in a gunfire-raked hellhole, constantly fighting for survival in wars you didn’t clamor for and genocides you don’t understand. At the other end you have a pretty typical town where, for whatever reason, what a lot of people do for fun a lot of the time is illegal and affects the brain in neat ways. It’s a sludgy, trippy backdrop for stealing street signs and reveling in childish irreponsibility.

It’s also all you ever think about.

When your life is too exciting it takes over you. This is understandable when you’re escaping the secret police for obvious reasons, but if you’re a regular low-life kid you’re probably just full of yourself because you don’t have access to rewards other than those that come from breaking rules. Either way, your preoccupations stunt your existential growth. You’re in a bubble. You can’t analyze anything other than in the context of your own experiences. You reminisce a lot because you are colored only by concrete events in the past, and appreciate them only for their concord, not contrast, with the present you. Your appreciation for beauty is superficial and it never occurs to you to comment on the funny design on the restaurant napkins. You don’t aspire (and why should you). You don’t dream.

I sympathize with the refugee representatives of this state because they have a lot on their plate. The fortunate, peace-blessed side is just shallow and annoying and they cover it up with pompous lyrics from the song that was playing in their basement while they huffed paint instead of going to work. They may take road trips (which means they have a vague idea of the appeal of getting out of Dodge), but only to stain their facetious tapestry with the same numbing experiences as always. Do you know how long it takes to become familiar with a city? One day. In one day you can acquire so much knowledge about how the streets are laid out, where to eat, where to dance, where to sleep. If familiarity to you means more than this, if you are so bored that you notice the particular way bank tellers address you here as opposed to there, then you are not in the bubble.

I think that if you don’t have vices to resign to, you carve out meaning in places where there seemed to be none. Sometimes when you have nothing to do, you look outside at the trees and sky and come to understand not just how it makes you feel, but why, and what that means. You look somewhere else and realize why you would rather be there than here. You don’t live in the moment, the moment lives in you, because you ate and are digesting it. It’s easiest to start thinking outside the box when the inside of the box is uninteresting.

Pema Chodron actually seems to agree with my color wheel idea: “people discover the same truths through many avenues”. A lot of low-life philosophy boils down to “people suck”, the one truth that everyone ever in the entire world has figured out. Why undergo so much harm to mind, body and spirit in order to understand things a bunch of boring people can tell you is plainly evident?

As I mentioned in The Color Wheel I have no problems with being a rambunctious jackass in and of itself, but I know people only do it because culture glorifies it and shoehorns people into it and I am so very against that. Perhaps the guy sitting outside on his boring suburban porch would learn to appreciate not napkins or sunlight or art but weed, bondage, vandalism, throwing Monopoly money at hobos, anything. But he would appreciate those things instead of feeling like he could go nowhere else. He knows what he wants.

For several months recently I decided that I hated thinking, believing that a propensity for it had stuck me in a mire of depression and uncertainty, and then I was all about feeling. But now I know where too much feeling gets you. Overthink and you become sheltered, overfeel and you become a screwup. And thus I have no choice but to come to a conclusion that I had probably secretly always known. It was confirmed when I noticed that love is beautiful precisely because it is a choice and also because it’s not.

Passion and reason in perfect balance.

Commercial for Cake

To me it means something a little different than luxurious chocolate cake. I have a friend that actually used to think “decadent” was synonymous with “luxurious”. That’s how often that word is used to describe chocolate cake. That’s how often the appeal of sin is used as a marketing tool. Try as they might though, no restaurant will ever make me feel guilty about eating chocolate cake.

I have an odd relationship with decadence. I feel a warped sort of envy for those who partake in traditionally deviant behavior, even things I wouldn’t partake in myself, like humongous tattoos. Maybe it’s because decadence is a scar, literally or not. It’s a badge commemorating your experience, your descent into the hole.

If this isn’t a cultural thing, it’s a me thing, but I think a lot of people think this way in some form or another. These people seem more venomous. They seem like they have discarded meaningless constructs like common sense in order to appease their fascination. They seem jaded. With their veins as a subway tunnel they have commuted to infernal places far more interesting than Earth.

The effect is amplified the younger the person is. And I don’t mean the occasional outburst or two that should be expected of any teenager. I mean it becoming a lifestyle. Surely the line of innocence must be crossed at some point, but maybe that line should be a gradient? I don’t know how young people doing drugs and committing crimes and going wild makes me feel. I just don’t know. I stare at the wall. It disturbs me whether they’re male or female, rich or poor, whether they live in urban squalor or the middle of nowhere. I have difficulty reconciling this with my attempts to be open-minded. I can’t help but think it’s too much and that kids in this situation are having something taken from them. I kind of wish I had done it myself just so I could know the truth. How would I feel about life if I had experienced more drunken police escapes, street sign thefts and one night stands? Who knows if I would even remember it anyway.

I want to be friends with a porn star just to see what kind of person it turns you into.

A lot of them either realize how contrived it is, or die. Maybe if we all had some chocolate cake.

I’d like to close with one of my favorite songs, which discusses this topic in rather explicit terms if you still have no idea what I’m talking about. It is Placebo – Commercial for Levi.

Puzzling Behavior

Envy is the biggest problem with living relative to others. But sometimes, you’re not comparing yourself to someone else, they just swoop on in and usurp you. This is fine in professional sports and whatnot but competition is a little different from this.

Last summer I started a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle late one night. I rummaged through the pile of cardboard, snapped together the border, and went to bed. When I woke up the next morning, assorted family members had finished half the puzzle. They had decided to adopt it into a collaborative effort, except without me collaborating.

This is so stupidly senseless I shouldn’t even have to make a post about it. You don’t sneak into people’s studies and studios and finish their novels and paintings for them. You don’t raise other people’s children. Fuck people who steal other people’s opportunities for fulfillment and joy, robbing it of all relevance and educational value.

It feels perverted to write about this because it’s as obvious to me as “don’t eat the banana without peeling it”. Be a libertarian for once in your inconsiderate validation-starved life and leave people to do their thing. Let them have their experience. Let me do my goddamn jigsaw puzzle!

In other news the new method of editing Fear.less stories is going well, except I have a smaller workload than I thought.