fortune cookie
I wonder how skilled you are at living on the edge between the light and dark, between delirious joy and haunted dreams, between forever and never.
--ripped from The Austin Chronicle, 12/7/2001
Have you ever started seeing themes in unrelated, unimportant everyday incidents? Some ideas jump out at me from their positions hidden under song lyrics, in advertisements, anywhere. The one that keeps ambushing me today is how matter-of-fact things can be radical, scandalous, groundbreaking. Things that are normal and simple and easy have alter egos among the great epic last stands and sacrifices, tragic mistakes and heroic declarations. Like love in Meatloaf songs and politics in social allegories. Like causality, according to unnamed intellectual types. I feel bourgeois and self-satisfied. I feel like I'm inches from being "ma'am" and wearing big white t-shirts and leggings and being good-natured and vaguely motherly.
I want to be more than good-natured and competent and comfortable and wholesome. But they're hard things to reject; all that useful midwesternism. What I need to walk is not so much the line between absolutes but the gradations of compromise.
But where are these compromises? I can't call them up from memory; can't mark the crossroads they presented. If there is compromise here it is camoflaged by love, its medicine sugared over by the justification. There are choices to be made, after all, and they involve some sacrifice. The hard choices aren't here yet. Maybe the feeling of compromise is a premonition, a bad dream, a plain ordinary fear.
If it's only a fear I'll be all right. I hope I am completely without precognition. And bad dreams... there are worse. There are always good dreams that could have been.
--ripped from The Austin Chronicle, 12/7/2001
Have you ever started seeing themes in unrelated, unimportant everyday incidents? Some ideas jump out at me from their positions hidden under song lyrics, in advertisements, anywhere. The one that keeps ambushing me today is how matter-of-fact things can be radical, scandalous, groundbreaking. Things that are normal and simple and easy have alter egos among the great epic last stands and sacrifices, tragic mistakes and heroic declarations. Like love in Meatloaf songs and politics in social allegories. Like causality, according to unnamed intellectual types. I feel bourgeois and self-satisfied. I feel like I'm inches from being "ma'am" and wearing big white t-shirts and leggings and being good-natured and vaguely motherly.
I want to be more than good-natured and competent and comfortable and wholesome. But they're hard things to reject; all that useful midwesternism. What I need to walk is not so much the line between absolutes but the gradations of compromise.
But where are these compromises? I can't call them up from memory; can't mark the crossroads they presented. If there is compromise here it is camoflaged by love, its medicine sugared over by the justification. There are choices to be made, after all, and they involve some sacrifice. The hard choices aren't here yet. Maybe the feeling of compromise is a premonition, a bad dream, a plain ordinary fear.
If it's only a fear I'll be all right. I hope I am completely without precognition. And bad dreams... there are worse. There are always good dreams that could have been.