A · Tragical · Mirth, · Tedious · and · Brief

At eight years old, I was a little overdramatic kid in love with a story. I tried to share my story with others. They responded with confusion and mild derision, and thus I learned the lesson that passion makes you vulnerable. 

There's a reason I learned that. 

I suppose somewhere along the way I got so quiet and so insular that I convinced myself that if I could just drum up my courage and express myself, things would be better. People would understand. The fear was the problem, and the fear was mindless, useless.

The fear was there for a reason.

I have something of a controversial statement to make:

I don't plan on having children. However-- given that the future in ten years, much less twenty, is unpredictable-- I don't think I can say that with absolute certainty. It isn't something I've thought or daydreamed about, ever, in my life -- or even something I really can muster up any desire for right now-- but I'm not my 34-or-44-year-old-self; I don't have her life and her perspective. I simply can't tell one way or another.

What I can say is this:

I will never have biological children.

There are many actions I could take to help the environment and humanity as a whole which are suspect. Recycling, organic farming, avoiding certain consumer choices-- I'm sure these help on some level, but it's difficult to tell which level sometimes, because their outcomes are often dubious. I can be sure that I am helping the situation by ensuring that I do not contribute to the escalating consumption of resources, and by helping with the redistribution of wealth by adopting a child that needs a home.

I don't need my particular set of genes to be passed on. It's just not necessary. If you protest that "the stupid people are procreating!", I will promptly direct you to a good geneticist, who will then metaphorically kick your ass for being classist and probably racist on some level. I want my potential children to live in a world with plenty of nature to experience and observe-- a world where people can set aside their natural instincts for the sake of humanity as a whole.

I recognize that there are moral issues at stake with adoption as well (and as i haven't seriously pursued adoption as a topic, I don't know a whole lot about them). There are also issues of the viability of not having children as a method of population control. So, if you have any information on the subject, I'd love to hear it. Although I've made my decision, I would like to know what other people think about it, and hopefully find more information on the subject. It should go without saying that I am not personally condemning anyone who wants biological children, but I don't want to shy away from the ethics of these kinds of choices.

So am I the only person for which the difference between "identification with" and "attraction to" is negligible? 

I sympathize toward the people I am attracted to (that is, I see myself in them). I am also awed by their Other-ness -- but that often leads to my wanting to be like them, as well as to my admiration. Does that make sense? It seems to creep people out.

(i.e., in addition to wanting to jump David Bowie's bones -- David Bowie the icon, not the person, of course-- I would love to be a sleek, beautiful, otherworldly chameleon. Though of course this applies to friendships as well.)

It's a strange continuum. 

"It's been so up and down. Like, going to New Orleans was the best worst time ever. Even the terrible parts have been awesome, in a way."
- A friend's very apt description of the spring and the year thus far.

And when we're running out of the drugs
And the conversation's grinding away,
I wouldn't trade one stupid decision
For another five years of life...

I am suddenly, strikingly horrified at a universe that would let my brother's dog disappear. That little thing even won me over with her sweet nature and silliness, and I'm easily exhausted by dogs.

My point is, I forget sometimes because my life is good, but terrible things happen. I shouldn't forget.

Ah, job-seeking, job-seeking, job-seeking. The practice of choosing a place to spend a good chunk of your day, if not 8+ whole hours of it, and then living with it.

So dull and so crucial. I need a new job.

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And on and on and on. So tired of this. Grad school is, at least, a copout-- worth quite a lot in some respects, truly.

Houston has urban wildernesses, expanses of nothing or nothing-in-particular which extend long into the horizon. Especially near the Ship Channel, where no one works or lives... you could mistake the landscape at some points for some country road, save for the skyscrapers on the smoky skyline. Yesterday I went on a group bike ride and we found ourselves surrounded by this sort of landscape: a long stretch of grass and trees, a shady club called "El Club" with blacklights, a "spa" guarded by four rottweilers and bolted up, an official, token and deserted "Ship Channel Observation Center" (we could've been the only visitors-- ever-- I wouldn't be surprised). Most of all, for me, the rusting train-bridges, the sudden pockets of nature, a bend of water or twisted underbrush or a tiny forest.

It was totally undefined space, is what I'm trying to say. Disorganized. Imaginatively fertile. I'd been tossing the idea around for a while, but Houston would make a good locale for surrealist stories, or urban fantasy.

Biking in Houston is odd. Because of the lack of zoning, and because of how it lolls all which ways, because its idea of a bike path is a random, arbitrary sign which says "Bike Path," it lends itself to isolated exploration. It's not like you see people out of their cars, and it's not like you often see other bikers, but my god. So many unplaceable sights, so many different things. Possibility everywhere. I'm not saying that cities should be like Houston, but because it is here already I am glad for its oddness.

In a recent issue of Poets and Writers, nestled amongst ads for writer's conferences and MFA programs and profiles on recent small press publishings, is an article on how boring writers are these days.

The conclusion, essentially: no-one pays attention to writers anymore, and small-press literature is only read by other writers, and so writers must toil in silence, writing their work on the sly during one of their two day jobs. Maybe every once in a while they'll poke out to go binge drinking at a dry hipster bar with their MFA buddies, but that is all. (They don't stay out too late. They've got to write tomorrow before work.)

This is, of course, compared with the notorious (or at least fascinating) lives of writers in the pasts, the Hemingways and Poes, who made such good biographical material. This should, I think, be compared even to the lives of the Brontes and Hawthornes, who sure as hell didn't get out much, but whose inner lives were nuanced and deeply cultivated.

I'm not happy about this. Clearly. I am a bit of a writer, and for me, there is no separation between life and art. My life is something I attend to like an artist (and then write about). I don't claim to be a well of insight, but I do claim to have experienced a few things in intriguing ways, and I certainly admire that in others.

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I am eating watery, tart, and exquisitely piercing pulsing pink-red raspberries.

Their taste (I swear) feels infinite.

It seems such a miracle that I can take them and put them into my mouth and experience this. That my body will absorb them and make them my energy. You know?

So odd to make a judgment like that. We have no frame of reference by which to judge life, no other life to compare it to. We are this life. But it feels like some fucking miracle.

Tell me how your life is going.

I mean, really tell me, even if it is muddled and confusing.

Post anonymously or screen as you like.

EDIT: I'm gonna screen comments. Post anonymously anyway if you want. Just post, please? I need to catch up.

I think of the people who have had a profound impact on me as constellations, myths that I set in the stars.

Sometimes the profoundest beauty seems to me to be a surprise-- for example, when I was tracing the lines of someone's back, and the waist arched so elegantly and deeply that I was startled by it. "Nothing could be that lovely," I thought for a moment. But it was.

"The passing of time and its sickening crimes is making me sad again..."

I'm not sure what to write here: I'm not sure what I want to write.
Of course there have been thoughts, and eventful happenings,
and potentially artful expressions of them; but all of my musings seem to me redundant and unsatisfying to crystallize.

I am doing and thinking the usual things,
whatever that means.

I feel left behind,
as though I stopped to watch the trees somewhere
and everyone kept moving on, and are beginning to forget a little.

There's talk of lj imploding, which depresses me somewhat. I've wanted for a while to create a more polished sort of blog, but it seems like blogs typically center around a subject and commentary. I like the freedom of lj, of not pretending that any of this is more than my little thought-collection which only specific people might be interested in. If I had a blog it would have to be something different entirely, something that proved I could offer a larger world something.

I don't know if I can do that yet.

Hmmm.

"Hear my voice in your head, and think of me kindly."

I would like to create something about the experience of going to a house many times older than you are, the house that your parent grew up in, and sensing all of that history behind the concrete and brick. The mixture of safety and mystery: shelf after shelf of old books, my mom's old room, the room of my uncle who died just as I was born -- they let me dig through one of his journals, one of the safter ones-- and the yard on a vast hill full of greener plants than I'd ever seen in my life and with the most beyond-picturesque view of Puget Sound and Mt. Rainier that you can imagine. I went there and I thought, no exaggeration: "magic exists." 

So my kind, reserved, fragile grandfather died, and it was a long and unhappy death-- fortunately preceded by a very full life. He was a quiet and very generous person to me in all senses practical and emotional. I don't know what to say. This isn't a memoriam. I miss him. When you live far away from your relatives and they die, it feels like they are still there, somewhere, in the horizon of your perception.

What I've been mourning, though, lately, is that house. My grandparents moved, and their new house is small and cozy and full of the menagerie of small magical things that my grandmother assembled, but it's not the same, it's not the same yard which was the scenery of so much contemplation and games. I dreamt of it a few nights ago and I thought, "I hope there is magic to replace it." I thought about what has happened, and I decided there has been, though I was still sad.

In that dream, I think I understood something about why haunted houses are such a compelling trope. That house is still there, somewhere, crafted out of my dreamstuff. It isn't the same as the actual house, being gone forever, and the actual house is not the same as it; but if you were to walk in my inner landscapes you would probably stumble upon that house, made up of dream-stuff and secrets.