brain comet
Every time I return to this town I am reminded of the ridiculous. Not The Ridiculous, that which Dali claimed that this world needs more of, but moreso: the ridiculous that Australian comedy shows make manifest, the sad sick reality of suburban America; that of which I am both product and reaction.
I visit my divorcee grandmother in her AARP-certified condo, complete with electric fireplace (real heat!) and laser-lighted personal sauna. Impeccably decorated. Her endearing Southern hospitality is unfortunately paired, as it often is, with the perverted fervor of Baptist assurance. I used to see it as self-assurance, then realized that self-assurance is more or less mutually exclusive with religion. Uncertain of one's own destiny, one must place it in the hands of a divine being. Personal responsibility of ultimate ends is eliminated, and personal responsibility of means is simplified by ritual. Go to church every Sunday. Jesus is watching! Look busy! The self actually has nothing to do with it at all.
She sings hymns to herself for hours each day out of fear that, living alone, her voice will die from lack of use. She paints in a basement that has no windows and never removes her finished products, locking them behind a door to which only she holds a key. The nausea of loneliness keeps her from being able to fall asleep alone in her own bed, propelling her to an easy chair; she reads until her eyes tear & wearily close from the strain of reading in the dim light wee hours of the morning.
I see rampant suburban development, and it's sinisterly agreeable, as most beige things are; like the lifeless office lackey it seeks to please, yet knows nothing of real aesthetic pleasure. In modern architecture, as in politics and other forms of marketing, one must appeal to the lowest common denominator. Urban ugliness is real. Overfertilized manicured pedicured lawns multiplied on boulevards are not.
Holden Caulfield is a fucking idiot. If he thought New York was full of "fucking phonies" then clearly he'd never been to the Midwest. New Yorkers may be blunt/love blunts - (surely surprising to the average hick, who craves small talk and has no clue what a blunt is) - but at least their dialogue, if harsh, is directed towards some sort of end. Birds don't warble for shits and giggles. Bees don't fly in futile circles; every movement is carefully planned & intended to relay the distance and direction of pollen to other bees. The very least that Midwesterners, as a subspecies of the illustrious homo sapiens, could do is follow suit in conversational habits. Language exists so that we may communicate our thoughts and ideas to one another. Small talk is thus an abberation of evolution; it is language that lacks content or intent (save the prevalent yet benign devotion to a warped form of politeness), in short - purposeless. It is like the numbing phenomenon of repeating the word "fork" until it becomes a sound devoid of any recognizable meaning; excess blinds any significant perceptions.
I overhear conversations in which one person attempts to justify fucking their cousin while another claims to have masturbated at Denny's. My friends are trapped in relationships with beerbellied sleazesacks that crack raunchy jokes, and hunt & cook squirrels for fun, . Yet none of them seem to be able to imagine anything beyond their trite existence of sitting in waiters' living rooms, playing euchre and drinking themselves unconscious. Where their most purposeful activities are long, calculated drags of their cigarettes.
I seem to slip into an alternate persona when I come back to Grand Rapids, returning to the role I filled in high school: the Alpha female, the instigator, the something in the air. It's not that my personality changes drastically according to my location - I am myself, always - but it's more that my doppelganger was and is inecessitated by the situations I find myself in here, with the fierce face-painted posse I used to command that is now floundering under a lack of direction. Even in my most vulnerable moments they see me as a leader, and I evoke their cries for help; while explaining my neuroses over maintaining and cultivating my being seperate from my relationships with others (a weak point, albeit one that is fortunately fading further into the past) Betsy interrupts.
"Please... write me a how-to manual," she speaks softly, with pleading eyes. "I spend all my time with Nick, but he doesn't spend all his time with me. I can't go to the bar yet. I need something to do while he's at the bar."
Get a hobby, I say. Or a job. Learn an instrument. Read all of these books, I'll write them all down for you. Go on adventures and take pictures of them. Make a blog. Use self-documentation to remind yourself of who you are, and decide if it's who you want to be. Besides, you're never more fabulous then when you're before a camera, at the keyboard, creating your own myths.
I glance at Betsy, who is staring at the Tecate mirror behind the cactus on the other side of the room. She nods halfheartedly and I wonder if she even heard me.
The rift between my past and present lives is becoming a canyon; coked-out tectonic plates trying to meet each other on the opposite side of the earth; I am reminded of Sebastian, who once said: "O but that I had no ears, for then I could smile in a circle."
Now I want to create, and I want to create something meaningful. I'm finding myself fiending, but for what? And so many people here, there, everywhere, don't seem to fiend at all. They don't even deserve the title of zombies; they have no appetite for brainz. The uninspired have conspired, the few inspired have expired. They are passive consumers of hyperactive media.
No grip on the reins but still stuck in the saddle, hurtling onwards at breakneck speed...
I visit my divorcee grandmother in her AARP-certified condo, complete with electric fireplace (real heat!) and laser-lighted personal sauna. Impeccably decorated. Her endearing Southern hospitality is unfortunately paired, as it often is, with the perverted fervor of Baptist assurance. I used to see it as self-assurance, then realized that self-assurance is more or less mutually exclusive with religion. Uncertain of one's own destiny, one must place it in the hands of a divine being. Personal responsibility of ultimate ends is eliminated, and personal responsibility of means is simplified by ritual. Go to church every Sunday. Jesus is watching! Look busy! The self actually has nothing to do with it at all.
She sings hymns to herself for hours each day out of fear that, living alone, her voice will die from lack of use. She paints in a basement that has no windows and never removes her finished products, locking them behind a door to which only she holds a key. The nausea of loneliness keeps her from being able to fall asleep alone in her own bed, propelling her to an easy chair; she reads until her eyes tear & wearily close from the strain of reading in the dim light wee hours of the morning.
I see rampant suburban development, and it's sinisterly agreeable, as most beige things are; like the lifeless office lackey it seeks to please, yet knows nothing of real aesthetic pleasure. In modern architecture, as in politics and other forms of marketing, one must appeal to the lowest common denominator. Urban ugliness is real. Overfertilized manicured pedicured lawns multiplied on boulevards are not.
Holden Caulfield is a fucking idiot. If he thought New York was full of "fucking phonies" then clearly he'd never been to the Midwest. New Yorkers may be blunt/love blunts - (surely surprising to the average hick, who craves small talk and has no clue what a blunt is) - but at least their dialogue, if harsh, is directed towards some sort of end. Birds don't warble for shits and giggles. Bees don't fly in futile circles; every movement is carefully planned & intended to relay the distance and direction of pollen to other bees. The very least that Midwesterners, as a subspecies of the illustrious homo sapiens, could do is follow suit in conversational habits. Language exists so that we may communicate our thoughts and ideas to one another. Small talk is thus an abberation of evolution; it is language that lacks content or intent (save the prevalent yet benign devotion to a warped form of politeness), in short - purposeless. It is like the numbing phenomenon of repeating the word "fork" until it becomes a sound devoid of any recognizable meaning; excess blinds any significant perceptions.
I overhear conversations in which one person attempts to justify fucking their cousin while another claims to have masturbated at Denny's. My friends are trapped in relationships with beerbellied sleazesacks that crack raunchy jokes, and hunt & cook squirrels for fun, . Yet none of them seem to be able to imagine anything beyond their trite existence of sitting in waiters' living rooms, playing euchre and drinking themselves unconscious. Where their most purposeful activities are long, calculated drags of their cigarettes.
I seem to slip into an alternate persona when I come back to Grand Rapids, returning to the role I filled in high school: the Alpha female, the instigator, the something in the air. It's not that my personality changes drastically according to my location - I am myself, always - but it's more that my doppelganger was and is inecessitated by the situations I find myself in here, with the fierce face-painted posse I used to command that is now floundering under a lack of direction. Even in my most vulnerable moments they see me as a leader, and I evoke their cries for help; while explaining my neuroses over maintaining and cultivating my being seperate from my relationships with others (a weak point, albeit one that is fortunately fading further into the past) Betsy interrupts.
"Please... write me a how-to manual," she speaks softly, with pleading eyes. "I spend all my time with Nick, but he doesn't spend all his time with me. I can't go to the bar yet. I need something to do while he's at the bar."
Get a hobby, I say. Or a job. Learn an instrument. Read all of these books, I'll write them all down for you. Go on adventures and take pictures of them. Make a blog. Use self-documentation to remind yourself of who you are, and decide if it's who you want to be. Besides, you're never more fabulous then when you're before a camera, at the keyboard, creating your own myths.
I glance at Betsy, who is staring at the Tecate mirror behind the cactus on the other side of the room. She nods halfheartedly and I wonder if she even heard me.
The rift between my past and present lives is becoming a canyon; coked-out tectonic plates trying to meet each other on the opposite side of the earth; I am reminded of Sebastian, who once said: "O but that I had no ears, for then I could smile in a circle."
Now I want to create, and I want to create something meaningful. I'm finding myself fiending, but for what? And so many people here, there, everywhere, don't seem to fiend at all. They don't even deserve the title of zombies; they have no appetite for brainz. The uninspired have conspired, the few inspired have expired. They are passive consumers of hyperactive media.
No grip on the reins but still stuck in the saddle, hurtling onwards at breakneck speed...