Category: personal

… because “ringing” just wouldn’t cover it, and I’m not entirely sure what it’s supposed to mean, anyway. I have never, intentionally, “rung” a year, much less a new one. I find that, once they age a bit, their tone improves, so why ring them when they’re all new and shiny? Let them tarnish a bit, collect some wisdom and experience, and then RING THE SHIT OUTTA THEM!!! Evidently, I will clang a new year, which conjures up strange images in my head, and ever stranger sounds. Who knows what that’s all about.

This is a newsy sorta update, and I may be prone to ramble, as I do when I haven’t updated for some time. If you’re looking for something interesting to read, move on. If you find ME interesting, then feel free to stick around, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Christmas, for me, is about tradition. Every year builds on the memories of previous years to help make each year a little more special. The cool thing about traditions for me is that the longer you do them, the cooler they get. I don’t ascribe to religious or spiritual traditions, just the ones that I have chosen to personally adopt into my life, and my favorite of these is probably spending Christmas in Port Townsend. I spent a few with my dad, from time to time, but without siblings around, and lights downtown, and being able to sit on a street-corner and watch random people walking by in holiday bliss, it was never quite the same.

I went to Port Townsend this year for Christmas, to spend time with my mom, my step-dad, and my sister. Coyote had been living in New Hampshire, and just moved back, so this was the first time in awhile we’ve been able to share a Christmas. Holidays in PT are always relaxing, and I get a lot of reading done, sans distractions, which is very nice. I was up there for about five days, blissed out on good food and pleasant company, lots of walks, and red cheeks from the brisk wind blowing off the Sound.

After Christmas, I recuperated a few days in Olympia, then drove down with Theo and Rachel on the last day of the year to celebrate with Jason and Amy in Portland. I have mixed feelings about New Year celebrations. It seems to me like nothing aside from a blatant excuse for EVERYONE to get drunk. I understand the idea of making new beginnings, though I try to be aware, and make beginnings, whenever they need to be made, rather than waiting for a number on the calendar to change. Which isn’t to say that the holiday itself wasn’t charged with revolution.

The first day of the year, I broke a sweet girl’s heart. On the one hand, it’s a horrible way to start a year. On the other, I did it because I felt it was the right decision, and the resolve and courage it took to follow through are not a bad way to make a new beginning. The idea, now, is to maintain this “single” existence, partially because I really do want to work devotedly on making a better me, and also to avoid hurting any more wonderful people. Eight months. It seems so short and so long, and it’s all still a mystery and a dream, an idea that may or may not come to pass, though I declare that something will happen in that time, even if it be not what is planned.

Anyway, I toast you readers, in this New Year.

May it, indeed, rock your faces off.

CLANG!

Perhaps today is the day I finally break my brain trying to think up something topical and interesting to blog about. Perhaps my brain will actually fry, or implode, or create a small but powerful black hole into which all the world’s matter will be sucked. I suppose I could just talk about crocodiles, and their factual or fictual tendancy to eat monkeys. I could even talk about gavials a bit, and try to reason out why our illustrious Archcroc V dislikes them so. Like a coward, I’m sure I could go on for at least two more paragraphs, in a mildly amusing fashion, about not knowing what to blog about. I’ve always enjoyed the irony in that, simple though it is, and if you go back through my archives you’ll notice that I’ve done it at least three or four times. Nothing like beating a joke to death until it’s just … not … funny … anymore.

In the end, and since I have to finish this up in the next five minutes or so, I think I’ll keep this factual and sentimental.

Yesterday I was sick and I called in to work. Then it snowed. So I got a snow-day, with hot cocoa. How fucking rocking is that! Right? Then I got to have coffee and lunch with my sister, who just moved back to Washington. Then I cleaned my apartment, watched a movie, and got my cuddle on.

I’m a snuggler, big-time. It’s ridiculous. This last week I’ve been very happy to have someone, who I think is pretty damned awesome, to snuggle with. And on a snow-day … well you just can’t get more ideal than that.

I wish you all the warmest and happiest moments of snuggle, as this cold weather heightens and persists. Our snow didn’t stick, ’tis sad, but we’ll surely get more as winter sheds its timidity and advances upon us with a libertine smile on its lips.

I’m sleepy and happy today. It’s an obvious, tell-tale condition, and I guess I’m just not that good at keeping secrets. But I’ll be damned if I’m not masterful at vague insinuation. I should take up a career as an professional insinuator, confusing situations to the point of hopeless illogic. What can I say, it’s what I do.

If the sun were made of marmalade …

… I’d need a much, much bigger slice of toast.

As it is, I feel like butter spread over just enough bread.

I was forced to post or forfeit my life, so if this rambling makes no sense to you, blame it on my antagonists.

—

Five years ago and change –
and if you were here now …
things would not be as they are.

Well, maybe that time you got killed by orcs.
Sorry about that.

—

I bought a typewriter on ebay the other day. It’s not just any typewriter, either. It’s a Hermes 3000 and it’s going to completely change the way I type my writing. Watch out, world!

No, but I got it specifically for writing letters. There’s something about the way a letter written on a typewriter looks. It’s classy without being impersonal, eccentric without being trendy-eccentric. To be honest, there is one letter that I need to write, to release, to send out into the world. And it couldn’t be done, honestly – it couldn’t be done at all if it weren’t done on a Hermes typewriter. So, there you have it. I’m sentimental. I cry during movies, I’m moved by music, and I buy typewriters to send letters that are long overdue.

I don’t know what good may come of it. Perhaps none. It may, before it has even begin, be a futile gesture. Nonetheless, I will persist. Sentiment beats reason, everytime.

—

I wish you all the very best of Thanksgivings. I met a lovely girl, who charms the hell out of me. So much for being vague. 🙂

Oh, and just so the universe knows:

I make the best blackberry pie, ever. People WILL attest to this, perhaps even in writing and not at gunpoint. Just wait, I’ll post pictures as proof. My lattice-top crust is awe-inspiring!

Yesterday, I was struck with the realization that at some point I began to apologize for myself. It’s not that I wasn’t happy with who I was, but that I became afraid, I think, of what other people would think of me. It’s strange to have these realizations about yourself, that you might have been doing this for so long and not even been aware of it. I think that my tendancy is to try and adapt to situations, and I don’t always know if that is the best course of action. And perhaps there are situations where it is almost never the correct course of action. I’m speaking of relationships.

I’m fairly sure, and I say this without any blame, that I really started this practice in earnest during my relationship with Emily. I’m equally sure that I had this tendancy long beforehand, pretty much as far back as I’ve been dating. And it sucks. The truth is, nobody is going to like everything about me. I’m a heap of jumbled wires, a mass of contradictions, a logician and a dreamer rolled in nori and rice with a large dose of wasabi. The thing is, that’s fine. Without sounding arrogant, I like me. And that’s more important to me than if you like me, or anyone else likes me, or anyone at all likes me, honestly.

I don’t remember becoming so concerned about popular opinion. I’m unsure when it happened. I suspect it rolled out of a sense of self-consciousness brought about by home-schooling and a constant feeling of being different. And not really different in a “you’re unique, a beautiful flower with its own, joyous blossom”. More like a “well you’re a weird one, aincha?” sort of unique. I guess the weird part is that I was never very conscious of it. How the heck did that happen?

The goal, now, is to embrace my multitudes, I suppose. I’m a gamer-geek. I do, really, like to play video games. Sometimes for hours, and even days, on end. I’m a grammar nerd, and I’ll hesitiate for long minutes over a comma; sometimes I’ll haphazardly throw in a semicolon for the sheer sense of danger it gives me. I’m a cinephile and a romantic; a caustic cynic who is endlessly acerbic to his friends and who would do anything for them without them even having to ask. I will never ask for reciprocation. The thing is in the doing. I will not ask for permission to be myself, or hesitate away from my own honest opinion. Emile Zola said, “I am here to live out loud.” And I am. I don’t like television, and I don’t like ignorant people. Still, I’m endlessly forgiving, and I don’t think I’ll give that up. I have a gaggle of interests, and you don’t have to like all of them. They aren’t all very exciting. Vocally, I don’t always tell stories very well. That bit I’m working on. I’m listening to comedy so I can learn how to tell a joke, and I think it’s working. I will work each day to become something new. Something better. Life is just a process of clearing away all the clutter and grime we attach to ourselves, to rediscover that shiny core underneath.

I have my faults, too, but I’ll take them. Who knows, maybe one day, I’ll find someone else who can take them too.

Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone — those that are now, and those to come.

I horde things. I pack them away in boxes, store them in attics, hide them under beds, and treasure them in my heart. I’m an afficianado of personal memorabilia. I must have the best, for only the best will do. Among the treasures most valuable to me are the many letters I have kept over the years: postcards, holiday greetings, announcements, letters of love, and letters of brokenheartedness. Being that we now live in a digital age, on top of my collection of letters, I’ve horded away a much larger collection of emails. Since Hotmail archiving sucks, and used to suck much more, and it’s the email client that I used, this unfortunately only goes back to around June of 2001. Even so, I printed out most of the important emails from before that, and put them with the letters.

Every once in awhile, and fairly often when I’m feeling introspective, I’ll shuffle through these artifacts and try to repiece the memories of past loves, triumphs, and failures. I have every written correspondence between Margaret and I (the printed emails) from India to France. I have Prairie’s letters of the Summer of 1995, from Colville to Port Townsend. Perhaps most poignant of all, I have the letters that Amanda Stevenson wrote me as she was bouncing around the country looking at colleges. She wrote letters that were works of art, and if I were to publish an autobiography I would include them solely on the merit of literary perfection. Her last letter, hurt and angry and confused (and rightly so, unfortunately), contained a sticker sheet of gold stars (“for my achievements”) and a condemnation so pure and powerful that it actually changed my life. Almost exactly six years later, and I still feel my stomach churn when I think of how I acted then. I’m slightly comforted in the fact that though I absolutely acted stupidly, I never acted maliciously.

Existence flows past us like a river: the “what” is in constant flux, the “why” has a thousand variations.

Sometimes I pore over the emails between Emily and I, trying to find the crisis point; trying to recreate an entire relationship through the brief thoughts we would send each other day after day. I don’t do this with regret, though nor can I claim that I examine them with any sort of detatched intellectual curiosity. All of it, in the end, is in the hope of personal salvation; the idea that if I put my failures under the microscope, I will be able to see how they came to be, avoid the same mistakes in the future. And even here while I call these moments “failures”, like some mad scientist trying to create life, the word feels false. Perhaps they weren’t my best moments, and they certainly aren’t my happiest memories, but who is to say that the end of a relationship might not be a triumph? Certainly, leaving Ohio was one of the best things I ever did, which isn’t to say that moving there was bad, but that enough was enough. I don’t know if I could have lasted another year there, sane.

Nothing is stable, not even what’s right here. The infinity of past and future gapes before us — a chasm whose depths we cannot see.

The past is a blur filled with brief moments of stark clarity: that night by the river with Prairie and Cree; waterfights in the summer in front of Jamie’s grandparent’s house; Monday, 1st period, getting pulled out of Biology class by Sara completely unaware that the world was about to give me the first of many lessons in “fuck you”; sitting on Kas’s roof singing “semi-charmed life”, and the walk that followed; the night, too nervous to sit, when Amanda and I listened to bull frogs and counted shooting stars; all of the various dances Margaret and I went to, and many of the nights of tears that I tried so hard to understand; the day Emily drove away in the back seat of a rented car; our early, failed games of chess, and the day I drove away and felt more liberated than bereaved. Perhaps, as a whole, I’ll never understand my past. I’d settle for understanding those few moments that seemed so lucid that they couldn’t have happened any other way. I’d settle for really, truly understanding any one of them. And it’s terrifying and exciting to think of a future as full of these moments as the last ten years have been. Will time slow down as the years go by? Will those clear moments of the past fade away as the new ones occur less and less frequently, until finally I look back on my life and see only a blur of faces and events, none distinct from the others?

So it would take an idiot to feel self-importance or distress Or any indignation, either. As if the things that irritate us lasted.

Honestly, I don’t worry much about the future. I tend to think a lot about the past, though, trying to find answers and insights into who I am. The problem with looking into myself in this way is that I don’t know if I looking at who I am or who I was, or where the two might merge. Every once in awhile, though, these musings lead to a cathartic sort of revelation, sometimes loud and sometimes subtle, that takes a strange weight off my mind, and for a moment makes my heart feel whole. And for these moments, it’s all worth it. Because the things that irritate us don’t last, but those few, clear glimpses of beauty in this world, those last forever.

Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone — those that are now, and those to come. Existence flows past us like a river: the “what” is in constant flux, the “why” has a thousand variations. Nothing is stable, not even what’s right here. The infinity of past and future gapes before us — a chasm whose depths we cannot see.

So it would take an idiot to feel self-importance or distress or any indignation, either. As if the things that irritate us lasted.

-Marcus Aurelius