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Jun. 20th, 2004 @ 10:10 pm
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I remembered the other day that I had this journal and thought that I ought to post in it more. Just now I wrote a poem, and since this is my uncensored, fuck-you-if-you-don't-like-it journal, I thought this would be a good place for it. Also, I want this poem to be construed mainly as poetry, rather than as bitching about Scott. I didn't write it in a fit of anger or anything, I just got to thinking about "Let's Dance" and the strange effect it has on me, and out popped a poem.
( Poem ) |
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Apr. 13th, 2004 @ 10:09 pm
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I was just looking through some stuff I wrote a while back and came across the following poem, written in Jan. 2003. I really like it, not because it's particularly poetic; quite the contrary. I like how I was just kind of rambling and being really honest and it just happened to come out in poetic form.
the cat is asleep on the bed and i had kind of forgotten this
because if i had realized it i wouldn’t have smoked a cigarette or
maybe i would have at least woken him up and thrown him out first because
when i was a kid my grandparents smoked around me all the time and as much
as i loved them that really wasn’t fair to make me breathe all that when i
didn’t have a choice and maybe that’s why my hands are always cold
now i have a choice and sometimes i choose yes
i want nicotine and carbon monoxide and all the other nasty shit in those little sticks
but just sometimes because sometimes i need to calm down
i’ve been on weight watchers for four days and when i look in the mirror i
think my face looks thinner and that’s ridiculous but it’s what i think but
i also think i’m looking kind of strung out greasy and with dark circles under my eyes
ratty hair like maybe i haven’t been taking care of myself too well even though
i just showered last night
i feel the dark wispy fingers of depression creeping in and caressing my brain
sucking up my serotonin and making me feel like a stranger in my own apartment
and i really wish that just once i could get my shit together and
stop being tortured by my own thoughts
that maybe i could wipe the grape stems off the desk and fold some laundry and just
live like a normal fucking person and fill my brain with
great literature and advanced scientific thought and the like instead of these
ridiculous self-defeating delusions that pop up over and over and over like dandelions
on a lawn except that dandelions are a lot prettier than these thoughts i’ve been having
Today I sat in Panera for about three hours reading and writing. I have a tendency in the springtime to stop going to class and start taking education into my own hands. Quite often I actually make it to campus, only to end up reading in the library instead of going to class.
Today I finished Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. She talks a lot about not making excuses and just fucking writing, which is something I need to work on. In fact, this journal entry is largely a means of procrastination, as I'm about to commence a really challenging project, and I'm rather nervous. Merm.
I started reading Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera today. I had started on The Gift sometime last month, but I just was not in the mood for the denseness of Nabokov's writing. I'm sure I'll come back to it. Laughable Loves is good so far. I'll probably read a whole bunch of it tomorrow.
Okay, no more time-wasting, time to write.Current Music: Oceanside-The Decemberists |
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Apr. 9th, 2004 @ 08:11 pm
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This morning on my way to work I was thinking about my grandpa's Chevrolet Caprice Classic. He got it in the mid-80s I guess, and it was probably a mid-to-late 70s model. It was light blue. And I thought that car was the best thing ever. It was the first time I'd ever seen power locks or windows. I thought it was really luxurious.
Across the street from me lived Richie and Jessi, and my grandma babysat all of us, since my grandparents lived right around the corner. My mom and Richie and Jessi's mom sang in a barbershop chorus together, and in 1987 the chorus went to Hawaii to compete. Grandma took care of Richie and Jessi all week (their dad went to Hawaii too, but mine stayed home and watched me), and in exchange for that they gave her their old Buick station wagon. It was yellow and cavernous and always smelled slightly as though it were rotting. The seats were vinyl and stuck to your legs in the summertime. Once Richie and I were in the very back on the rumble seat - this was before Grandma had it and Richie's dad was driving - and we went around the corner out of the neighborhood and onto US 22, and the door swung open. I screamed and liked to tell people afterward how I would have fallen out if I hadn't had a seatbelt on.
The main thing I think about with that Buick though is that I am amazed that my tiny, frightened, birdlike grandmother ever drove it. That she was ever in control of anything that big and heavy, when so much of her life - most of her life - was completely out of control. Mental illness is the legacy she left me, the tie that binds, the thread of misery that will keep us all connected, that I will probably pass on to children of my own. My mother has told me of times in her childhood during which her mother did not get out of bed for days - maybe weeks - at a time. The house always filthy. This is why my mom is so anal about not leaving dishes in the sink overnight, even for one night.
And I saw it myself, especially after my grandfather died. My grandmother's life was comprised mostly of doing crossword puzzles, chain smoking, watching CSPAN, and complaining about the goddamned liberals. When I was a child we were close, but after he died and she was living here - in the apartment I now inhabit, still using much of her furniture - I found myself avoiding her. She was hard to tolerate. She would corner me and talk incessantly for hours, usually about politics. She really liked Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy. She talked a lot about G. Gordon Liddy. She always stank of cheap cigarettes, and not just because she'd been smoking them, but because she'd been marinating in thick clouds of Cambridge funk produced by a nicotine addiction that demanded near-incessant satisfaction. She was somewhat racist, definitely homophobic, and still believed in a lot of Jehovah's Witness stuff, though I don't remember her ever going to Kingdom Hall, even when I was a child. (I do remember her mother, my great-grandmother, going, and talking about taking me. Thank G. Gordon Liddy she never did.)
The really crazy thing about it though is that this woman was in love - I mean, completely enthralled - with words, language, books, etc. She wrote a lot when I was younger; I remember big binders full of nicotine-stained notebook paper, a novel she was working on. "My China book," she called it; she had a fascination with Asian culture, though I don't know exactly what the book was about. She used to cut the "Words, Words, Words" column by Michael Gartner out of the paper and give it to me when it was particularly interesting. In my Webster's 21st Century Book of Quotations is the following inscription:
Read! Read! Read!
All your life... Anything - everything - every day!
Love,
G'pa & G'ma
1994
She loved etymology, grammar, semantics... I have to wonder what would have happened if sometime in the early 1940s she had been exposed to a linguistics textbook instead of her first husband. And more realistically, I have to wonder what would have happened if I had attempted to discuss literature with her. Surely she would have appreciated Nabokov. I read Lolita while she was still alive, but I don't think I ever talked to her about it. Of course, I'm probably being too optimistic in thinking that she would have gotten past the pedophilia part and appreciated the use of language. But it's possible, and I should have tried it.
So it is a two-part legacy then that she has handed me: depression, anxiety, and all sorts of demons; and reading, writing, and a love of language. She was afraid to leave the house but she traveled to China via pen and paper. (Of course, she also lived in Germany for over a year, something I can't begin to fathom her doing, but she did.)
I could - and will - write a ton more about my grandparents, especially my grandpa. But now it is Friday night and I have places to be.Current Music: Don't Let It Bring You Down-Neil Young |
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