Monday, June 27, 2005

So shouldn’t we just stand and speak out and say, “I want to dance!” and then dance dance dance and stop when the time is right? Or maybe, conversely, shouldn’t we also sit, read, sleep, lie, worry, cheat, steal, forgive, repent, seclude, run, fear, love what it is to be tortured and worried and having everything be problematic? For when we are nervous, anxious, distressed, filled with heartache, filled with anguish, angry, tearing away at our own sense of being, are we not the definitive works of humanity? Oh, how merciful God is, to let us be humans.

Although, to tell you the truth, and to step away from all that, I’d probably be a hell of a lot happier being a well-fed puppy.

True happiness is really a subjective little thing a lot of us strive for when we’re alive. Well actually, fuck, I don’t want to say that, it seems so FORCED to say something like that, and I actually did force it, so let me try to be a little more free-flowing natural creekside riverish bouncy dance-like graceful but real all the same.

I had this conversation with my mom a few months ago which went something like this:

Me: “Mom, the happiest of us are right there in the middle. When you’re poor, it seems like the only thing that’ll make you happy is having more money. When you’re rich, the only thing that’ll make you happy is having more money. When you’re sorta in the middle there, things seem to be all right. Of course, it doesn’t work that way, but I like to think it does.”

Mom: “Yeah.”

Having too much worry seems to kill us inside. I’ve often preached about how having a worry-free life would be so blissful and heavenly. I don’t think I totally mean that anymore. Of course I believe it like hell, but I think the perfect life would be that of balance. Not structured, but rather, one where you do what you love doing without having to constantly worry about being okay financially. There are so many starving artists out there, but not that many who seem to be happy how they stand. There are exceptions, and really, it would be love to be an exception. Mrs. Vergis said she thought maybe I would be the one to find the balance in life, and I said, well yeah, I’d love to be the guy that does that, but I think by the time I figure it out, I’ll tell so many people how wonderful it is, that it won’t be so centered on me. I don’t want it to be centered on me, really. The most beautiful thing I could do would be to plant myself in a tree, have everyone breathe my oxygen, and having all of those little children plant themselves in trees of their own and have the rainbow stretch until our tiny eyes can’t see that gold at the end of it anymore.

What I want more than anything now is to have a million goals, to never achieve all of them, but to always be trying. Tony was right when he said that life was about finding something you love and keeping with it forever. I think life is about finding everything lovely (well, everything that really is lovely, not those truly ugly things which I won’t mention here) and trying to eat all the peaches off of every tree, but never really being able to, but hey, at least you ate as many as you could. Peaches are tasty this time of year, which is probably why most people are so happy.

The reason I identify with Catcher in the Rye so much is because it reminds me so much of my childhood. It was the first book I really read and got into, and it seems so fitting. I remember when we were all little kids and we had to dress up as what we wanted to be when we grew up, and everyone dressed up as something which offered some sort of freedom – astronauts, firefighters, policemen, actors actresses, doctors, teachers, athletes, caterpillars, flowers, jump ropes, candy canes, ice creams. There were hardly any lawyers or dollar bills or stock brokers. Sure, it was exciting to get a goddamn quarter every now and then, but that was a different story. It was always nicer to spend that quarter on some chiclets from a toys r us quarter-vending machine. Candy sure was tasty back then, and it still is now. I think candy tastes the best when you’re already happy.

I’m going to drive up to Carmel like my buddy Ansel Adams this summer and take photos until I drop dead. Before that, I’ll get a job at a bookstore or something so I’ll have enough money for the trip. Before that, I’ll learn how to play something beautiful on the piano. And before that, I’ll sleep in my warm bed and try to count sheep like I used to. And maybe before that, I’ll kneel beside my television with my baby blanket, pour myself a cup of hot chocolate, and beam brightly while watching the Princess Bride, which always made me feel warm inside when I was little.

And speaking of which, I think that a lot of us, the older generation, are finding ourselves wanting to reach out and help the little ones more and more. Our generation, well the youthful of us, we’re really fucking it up. No one seems happy in the end, which is frightful. Of course, there are the exceptions, and the exceptions seem to be coming back. Allen Ginsberg probably would put Uncle Sam hats on all of us and laugh, because he probably knows how political it’ll probably become, and then he’ll make all of us take some sort of LSD, which will make most of us run until we feel like we’re flying when that flight is soft against our cheeks and we can be kites for a while. I’d love to fly like that.

My lovely Dasha did something recently that made me incredibly happy. She wrote me this postcard from the Grand Canyon and in the middle of it was a box in which she wrote “Hi postman!” I know she just meant to be cute, but I know deeper that she really meant it. She really meant to say hi to that old postman and make him feel happy that day, because that’s the type of person she is. What a doll. God, it really made me feel good to think about that.

Interjecting myself, cigarettes have ruined a lot of writers trying to find the balance in life. The problem with cigarettes is that they make us feel TOO indifferent to everything. Sure, there needs to be that harmony in life, but never indifference. Balance is only perfect when it’s leaning one way or the other. I couldn’t stand Jane Austen until the end of Pride and Prejudice, when everything seemed to be balanced. Lizzy seemed the happiest out of everyone, having a little more money than she needed, but still, she had a life so nice.

I really don’t know what I was trying to say, but I think I want to try. Trying is the most wonderful thing people can do. People really need to try more often. It makes people seem so much prettier, don’t you think?

-george

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

I'm keeping a journal for the summer.

I just watched Forrest Gump and I liked it a lot more than I did before.

I had lunch at La Scala.

That about sums up my day.

I'm starting to think that leaves are the only ones that matter anymore.

Wednesday, June 15, 2005

6-15-05
9:51 pm

I won’t lie about it. Whenever I write something, I’ll look back at it a few days later and absolutely hate it. My role models as of right now:

Dasha, for her cosmic pen
Tony, for his sunflower camera and silver-tongued guitar
My photo teacher, K. Vergis, who has the patience of a saint
Teachers in general, who were once kids, but now are dying because of us
Pocahontas, for showing me how beautiful things can be

AND

Natalie Wood, for having big brown eyes that cheer me up every time I look at them

Here is something I wrote (years) a few days ago, which I was really proud of, since I tried to show how exaggerated all of our lives are on paper, and how even in the exaggerations there are stretched truths and scattered breaths. I was also trying to show how in our lives, in Jane Austen’s life, in a daffodil’s life, there’s this balance we’re all trying to obtain, but can never really obtain it. Everything is too extreme. Mrs. V said I might be the guy to find the balance. Well fuck, I’d like to be, but I don’t think I’m even ready to sing yet.

I’ll leave you with this, and a note saying, “I’m not going to write for a while. I’m just going to read and read and read until Santa comes back and rescues me from adulthood.”

STYLES:

A. TRUTH

I’m graduating next Friday. I’m not going to give a speech. I’m leaving everyone I never knew with nothing. No kind remarks, no cruel insults, no compassion, no love, no handshakes, no memory. Three months ago I was so motivated to make everyone around me understand how truly beautiful people are and how we should always be sincere and never sarcastic because no one can be hurt by sincerity. Looking back on the conversation I had with Trish, how happy it made me feel, how motivated I was afterwards, I can’t believe nothing happened. No beautiful works of art plastered on the walls, hanging from the ceiling, no poems or photos or smiles anywhere. No one would appreciate any of it. They would probably even laugh at it. Was I wrong to be so optimistic? I don’t know, maybe. It made me so goddamn happy. I really believed I could make people feel wonderful about life. If not for the first time, when they were children, when there was no prejudice, when smiles where everywhere, when their tiny little delicate little claylike little fingers minds spirits faces clean assholes rupturing from the ground oh god oh GOD… I could feel on my face I could run with my arms spread out like wings and feel like I was flying and people would smile because I was just a kid and you can’t do that when you’re old, but I think you can anyway, I think adulthood is just something we made up when we lost that spark in life.

Fuck. People don’t need to be saved do they? I’m being stupid. Vivacity surrounds up, can consume us, but I, the deliverer, the one Snow White called the self-titled Savior, cannot even see it, am blinded by my own red-streaked hands. A lot of kids are truly wonderful, beating bleating beeping, look! I can already feel their warmth. Looking up at that big white board with the hangman games scattered all across it – proof of what I thought was lost.

Maybe it’s just these kids, these personalities oh no, am I forgetting…


B. LIES

It snowed last night, but it was warm snow. It wasn’t cold outside, and when a snowflake melted on my tongue it tasted like chocolate and my body tingled. Pocahontas was there too, holding my hand. We smiled together, drinking hot chocolate with the fluffy marshmallows, drinking hot chocolate at the warm hot perfect temperature, drinking hot chocolate that made us feel good.

The moon was smiling at us, smiling its crescent smile, showing us its round face like the balloon I used to ride while I was small the big balloon-faced pig attached to the carousel, spinning me around the world as if it were nothing and I really believed it was and I was and you were. For the first time in my life, I felt alive, not looking at myself in the snow globe but shaking it healthily my heart could beat with the earthquakes and god, I wasn’t Henry Fonda or George C. Scott anymore. I was alive, more alive than Kubrick imagined, and all I wanted was to save it, was to lock it up in a chest and keep it forever, I’d kill John Smith if he tried to take it away, because I was in heaven and I didn’t want to lose it. Pocahontas smiled at me, and my eyes rolled back and I slept.

She kissed me in the morning and then –

Well then, she made me some pretty delicious pancakes.


C. WHITE LIES ABOUT THE LIE.

I first met Pocahontas at that coffee shop down on Second and Main. She was wearing this crazy little Indian outfit- this tight brown dress with all those strings or cords or whatever the hell you call them hanging off the sleeves. I don’t remember how we started talking, all I remember is her giving me her phone number and me thinking, “Wow, this girl has the most gorgeous green eyes I’ve ever seen.”

D. INTERJECTION

Pocahontas is a real person. I have never met her outside of these crazy dreams I keep having. Goldilocks is also a real person, and I have been dreaming of her more and more and more as days go by. Snow White is the only one who comforts me though. Goldilocks threw porridge at my face and Pocahontas is moving to the other side of the country with John Smith. I asked her what she was going to do about the teepees and she asked me to keep them safe until she came back. We’re going out for coffee before then though. I think she likes her coffee with three extra sugars.

E. THE TRUTH ABOUT THE WHITE LIES

The truth was, her name wasn’t Pocahontas, it was Kimmy. She had this raspy smoker’s voice, and was holding her baby in her arms with a lit cigarette in her mouth. She kept on muttering these crazy things like “Oh God, the Reds, the goddamn Reds!” or, “Shit, shit, shit! My fucking baby is eating my fucking arm off!” Christ, she didn’t even have green eyes. She had these awful, beaty looking things, colored like garbage. The truth was, Pocahontas was this girl in a Disney movie I saw a few years ago when things were different. I met her at the premier of the movie down on Main, and I got her phone number. Turns out Kimmy and her were cousins. Unlike Pocahontas though, Kimmy had a hole in her throat. When Kimmy was compared to Pocahontas by those around her, all she could way was,

“Well shit, that fucking bitch doesn’t even have her goddamn period! Fucking Indian bitch!”

F. ONE LAST THING

If at all possible, plant as many trees and flowers and plants as you can, and make it so indoors and outdoors are the same thing. It’s getting hard to breathe in here, but it’s too cold out there. Luke-warm hot chocolate doesn’t seem too good either. I don’t know what I want.

Saturday, June 04, 2005

Preview as to what's to come:
Mars Volta concert - dancing in the pit with buff guy, negro dancers, the girlfriend who was in a state of euphoria moving her little hips harmonizing with the rhythms while falling in love with cedric
tonight - fun with crayons
past: when i used to sleep in that room with her. we held each other, i remember

Wednesday, June 01, 2005

Emily Dickinson

I Heard A Fly Buzz When I Died
Poem lyrics of I Heard A Fly Buzz When I Died by Emily Dickinson.

I heard a fly buzz when I died;
The stillness round my form
Was like the stillness in the air
Between the heaves of storm.

The eyes beside had wrung them dry,
And breaths were gathering sure
For that last onset, when the king
Be witnessed in his power.

I willed my keepsakes, signed away
What portion of me I
Could make assignable, and then
There interposed a fly,

With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz,
Between the light and me;
And then the windows failed, and then
I could not see to see.

---------------------------------
Essay: Buzz
Time written: 40 minutes.

In this untitled poem, Emily Dickinson looks into the future at her death, as if everything were in the present. Through the use of two trademark themes - nature and death, Dickinson paints an elaborate portrait of the moments of her death and depicts to the reader with clever diction, imagery, and tone, her vision of what essentially, would be her last moments of consciousness.

Throughout this poem, Dickinson depicts the image of a fly buzzing around the room where she lay, using onomatopoeia to instill in us the lonely sounds of an insect, and how although she is now dead, the fly continues to buzz. She employs a sullen, yet tranquil and harmonious tone throughout the piece to portray her own peaceful but sad and questioning feelings towards her death. She says "the Stillness in the Room was like the Stillness in the Air," capitalizing Stillness, Room, and Air, showing further unity between the three ideas, that in her state of nothingness, there still exists a luculent world of peace around her.

As Emily progresses through the frail image of her funeral, she shows that although she had "wrung" the eyes of the others dry, providing some sort of intimate, human connection with them, she begins to see them as strangers waiting for "the King" to come and show his grace, when they really were supposed to continue to remember and mourn. She signs away her keepsakes, saying to them, "hey, take what you want you unspiritual assholes!" knowing that the physical imperfect materials of life are worthless, and starts to become more aware of the spiritual quietude awaiting her.

Twice in the poem Emily uses the word "Between" to show distance and time between the beginning of life, where it ends, and who she is in the middle of all of it. She starts to depict herself as the world, saying at the end of the poem that there was a "Blue (morose), uncertain stumbling Buzz between the light (afterlife) and me (the unification of her body and her environment - the world which she has become a part of).

As she knowingly becomes one with her surroundings, she of course, has become one with the fly. And as she unifies with the fly, the once "quiet room with a loud pin falling to the floor" of a buzz becomes a sad, and emotional "Blue" buzz. When Emily finally understands her harmony with the universe, her "Windows", her eyes, disappear, and she is able to drift into an unconscious state where she can see true life, and not see just for the sake of looking. "and then I could not see to see".

-----------------------------------------
My commentary at the top of the page (to the teacher, right after I had written it):
Note to Ms. L - I start calling her Emily (instead of Dickinson) because I started to fall in love with her. Fuckin' crazy. Crazy Emily! Crazy me! Give this paper a five!

My teacher's commentary to me:
George-
You really had a feel as to what she was trying to express, the unexpressable... which is, of course, poetry.
Grade: 8- (Out of 9. AP scoring)

Her commentary to what I had written at the top of the page:
I was hoping you would (fall in love with her). I find her so terrifying and real & disturbing. (Yeah, that ampersand was there.)

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My aftermath commentary: The reason I wrote this all down in my journal was because it made me happy to finally write a semi-decent essay for once. It was pretty motivating. I, of course, being the shitty writer I am, let my heart get in the way of things a couple paragraphs in and sort of lost sight of the entire thing.

Also, I'm writing a story right now which involves a lot of themes spoken about in this poem. It'll probably have a filler page in the beginning including this poem.

To Dasha:
I'm sorry I did this. I know it seems condescending. I love you though.