in the year of the chewable ambien tab (the panamanian child stood at the dowager empress's side)
Oh, you know, I'm this big, snarled mess of wanting, like a wad of hair accumulated in a stomach over years and years, and I don't even know what my wanting's for, I can't even sort frivolous from profound or wicked from noble or sexual from spiritual or cerebral from physical or impossible from obtainable. I just have this undifferentiated rotten-tooth throbbing of need and desire and yearning and loss and restlessness and dissatisfaction emanating from some hollow inner space. Most other people seem to just know what they want, to some degree or another. I'm scared of becoming either tragic or tragically boring (I know, I know, you can roll your eyes at this, but I'm trying to be honest), I don't want to be lonely all my days (though if emotional isolation is your main personal concern, Julia, you are a damn sight luckier than most), I don't want to have all my best life be inside my mind (the mouse who writes to pretend she's an elephant), but I can't actually think of a plan. I'm afraid of the real world. (Oh, you know.) My circuits of angst and self-indulgent fantasy are still wired up like I'm fifteen and a half. I am, therefore, almost justified in giving myself soundtracks.
1. Had a dream, you and me and the war of the end times...Oh, I believe California succumbed to the faultline (we heaved relief as scores of innocents died) and the Andalusian tribe setting the lay of Nebraska alight till all that remained was the arms of the angels.
Calamity Song, The Decemberists
2. How do you move in a world of fog that's always changing things? (Makes me wish that I could be a dog ,when I see the price that you pay.) I don't wanna grow up! I don't ever wanna be that way.
I Don't Wanna Grow Up, Tom Waits
I Don't Wanna Grow Up, Cold War Kids (cover)
3. I have seen insane things, all those grand historic paintings! Morning light on polished swords and burnished brass, anxious smiles encased in whalebone, spines of steel from head to tailbone, cannons poised to blast the turning of the tide! It's a sad thing and a strange thing, but it's time, and I am changing...Into something good, or bad? Well, that's your guess.
It's All Right, Dar Williams
4. I spend my evenings alone (talking to your picture, babe), for love is wrapped around my heart (like a boa constrictor, babe).
Boa Constrictor, The Magnetic Fields
5. Rise To Me, The Decemberists
(Okay, so Colin Meloy wrote this song for his son after the son was diagnosed with autism, and apparently he has a similar type of condition to what I have, e.g. intellectually precocious but still noticeably off in other areas. And knowing that really makes me want to write an inappropriately personal letter to Colin Meloy and family, which isn't the type of thing I'd normally even fantasize about doing, but...I don't know. Just to say something like, This won't be easy for anyone, and it will never really go away. I'm not going to lie to you. But your son isn't automatically doomed or broken any more than the rest of us are automatically doomed or broken, and he's lucky to have a father who's as willing to accept him as a person, whole and real, and to support and encourage him as he grows up, as you apparently are. )
(Also, this has now been confirmed as one of maybe ten or twelve songs that can make me tear up regardless of my previous mood.)
6. Not because you feel something or don't feel something for me, but because-- mass, so big: it could swallow, swallow her whole star intact. (Call me evil, call me tide-is-on-your-side, anything that you want. Anybody knows you could conjure anything by the dark of the moon.)
Suede, Tori Amos
7. Time, Tom Waits
(Speaking of songs that have the unfailing power to make me go kinda maudlin and weepy for the duration...)
8. I can't think of one thing in this whole wide blessed world that's more dangerous and frightening than you when you get bored! We go through scads of money; I don't know where it comes from, I don't know where it goes, and we stare out the window, see the poison flowers the neighbors grow sprouting up in nice, neat rows.
Ethiopians, The Mountain Goats
I keep handing in poetry that I worry is too nakedly confessional and getting back critique that calls it opaque, obscure, emotionally inaccessible and confusing and/or assumes it to be a persona piece. I don't know what to think about that. I mean, no one's saying "this isn't well written" or "this is uninteresting," which is nice, but some of the things that trip people up, and some of the things that people infer from my writing are....ugh. I don't know. I think part of it may be that I'm a very lateral, associative thinker (read: flighty as fuck) with an unusually wide (if not always deep) pool of references and knowledge to draw upon, and so trains of thought that seem completely straightforward to me are, possibly, a lot less easy to follow for people who like linearity, simplicity, and clear arcs. I structure things in a weird way, I mean. Plus, not to be snotty or anything-- which means I'm about to say something snotty, so please forgive me for it--, I don't ever want to patronize my readers/classmates, so I write assuming that my imaginary audience has about as much general knowledge as I have, which does not mean that my imaginary audience is full of geniuses by any stretch of the imagination, but does mean that no one in my imaginary audience would need to look up the word "formaldehyde" or the word "tarot" or get confused when I referred to the moon as a "satellite" because they thought that only meant, like, Sputnik. (And what's weird is when people get hung up on "satellite" but are fine with bilingual puns. The things I think I might have to explain or remove are never the things I end up having to explain or remove.)
My poor roommate! I should probably turn out my lamp and join her in being asleep. I bug her about Turning Out the Lights When I'm Trying to Go to Bed for days and days, and then nights come when I can't seem to get tired or drift off and I just leave things blazing fluorescent. She's an unreasonably good sport.