Friday, November 23, 2007

Waver/Wuthering Heights

The more I read Wuthering Heights, the more I like Heathcliff. The more I relate to him, empathize, sympathize, despise, recognize. I dunno, it's one of those books that draws you because all the characters are repulsive somehow. At least, they are to me. Who knew you could write a story like that? Perhaps that's the draw of it. What makes it literature. Initially, you despise them all. Sequentially, you associate aspects of the self with the loathing, and you end up hating the fact that you like them so much because you feel like you shouldn't, but you can't help it.

Even ugly people have a fascination with mirrors, I suppose.

So, I like Heathcliff. I adhor him.


I've been listening to instrumental music more than anything else lately. Plateau music. I love that idea, the plateau. Jonathan gave me an image to go with the feeling, and I've taken it and run. It's where I am, most of the time, I think. The plateau is how I orient myself. It's a corner plateau. I climb there, and sit with my back against the walls, and survey the landscape below me, like David in his palace.

A time-share condo for the plateau. It's a fantastic idea. We all use it.

Strings, ends of things, you can sit and unravel them, or wind them tighter. Why do I think in pictures? It's how I think. I don't think in words, words aren't colored enough and when I have the picture the words just come. I don't need to think them.


Wuthering Heights, instrumental electronica-type indie stuff that I dig up from interweb corners. What else have I been stuck on this week? I kicked Adam out of my spaces for 4 weeks, it was an ultimatum I gave both of us. That's been odd. I feel like I set myself drifting toward something without anything to drift on but myself. What did Jack do? Lash together sea turtles and ride them in toward the island? Pah. Who wants the island. I like the drifting. I like the lack of control in my drifting. I can be immobile and things will still move me.

It's not true, though. I cling to other things. Stupid things, really. Facebook, for one. Not worth the time and effort I put into it. WoW? The same thing. It's a stupid computer game, and I only started playing it for Adam, but I got sucked in. It's like heroin, only worse for you. You laugh, but it's true. You pour time, energy and money into something completely unreal, you feel accomplishment for sitting on your ass hours at a time and ignoring life around you.

But I love video games. I love the way they pull me from my reality. The life around me is something I often prefer to escape, and video games and music are my only moral options, as far as vices go, and even then, they're not moral. They can be, but they're not. I don't do the drugs that I want to...what're those Neutral Milk Hotel lyrics?

"And the first one tore a picture of a dead and hanging man who was kissing foreign fishes that flew right out from his hand and when I put my arms around him, felt the blushing blood run through my cheeks and an airiness surrounded when his tongue began to speak, he said,'Oh boy, you are so pretty - enough to wrap tight in rice paper, string.' And when I finally kissed him the whole world began to ring, lost like a bell that's tipping over, with two cracks along both sides. And I knew the world was over, so I took a look outside and watched the fires that were reaching up to the weathervane and the tops of trees and the waiting scene and the Sunday dream were all waiting here for me. Deli markets, with their flower stands and the pretty girls and the burning men hanging out on the hooks next to the window displays. And I took out my tongue, tried to move from my place. I crossed the bridge and I crossed the mountains, threw a nickel in the fountain to save my soul from all these troubled times and all the drugs that I don't have the guts to take to soothe my mind, so I'm always sober, always aching. Always heading for mass suicide, occult figurines. And wasted gas station attendants, attending to their job and a nice drive in the country, find a nice cliff to drop off. Oh when this life just gets so grating, all the grittiness of life, but don't take those pills your boyfriend gave you, you're too wonderful to die. And the last one tore a picture from the pornographic page, but all the pleasure points attacking all the looks of love were staged. And it's a lie that you've been given that just hurts you every day, so why should I lie here naked when it's just too far away from anything we could call love? Any love worth living for? So I'll sleep out in the gutter, you can sleep here on the floor. And when I wake up in the morning, I won't forget to lock the door, 'cuz with a match that's mean and some gasoline you won't see me anymore."

The italicized part is what I meant, but I had to present it in context. Someday I'll have a host site or something where I can store all sorts of my music and then you'll get the music too.

I can always find a song to fit. Just can't write them myself, and I read lyrics like that and feel like I'll never do anything half as creative, pull anything near as fantastic and abstract and all-encompassing out of my bag of tricks.

I'm searching the cracks in the walls to remember that the girls in the middle are always the first to fall off for the dregs in the crowd.

Who wants to pull things out of tricks anyway?

Sunday, November 18, 2007

I feel like spewing whatever's in my head tonight, avoiding cautious hyperbole. I enjoy being hyperbolic. It makes life ridiculously bigger, like the balloon Garfield in a parade instead of the chaff of some blown dandelion clock wafting on the wind.

No old guys at work today forgot their passwords. Do you know what I did? I played Scrabulous on Facebook for three hours (I think I'm losing all thirteen of the games I am playing) and then spun my novel a whole new direction: back into myself. Maybe the whole NaNoWriMo thing was a stupid idea in the first place. I'm stuck right now in a mental location where "stupid idea" is as expressive as I get.

Then I read the stuff Jonathan writes when he's not even trying and come to the conclusion that I will never sound original. Maybe the prose is just not my idea medium. Poetry isn't either. I feel mediocre at everything these days and wish that I could find a place where I can adequately express myself.

I still haven't finished the art I promised him, I keep starting over. Maybe I should take the half-done abandonments and turn it into a collage, but it would look as crap and disparate as I am feeling and wouldn't do for anyone's wall, let alone a friend's.

I've been drowning myself in Pink Floyd today. It's what I do when I feel like life is inexplicably dull and, even if it weren't, I'd be incapable of expressing myself or taking advantage of it.
It's been a day for Animals. Pigs on the Wing, part two. What is it that Waters sings in the dark and bluesiness of Gilmour's guitar? You know that I care what happens to you, and I know that you care for me too. So I don't feel alone, or the weight of the stone, now that I've found somewhere to bury my bone. And any fool knows that a dog needs a home, and shelter from pigs on the wing...

So, come. Bury your bones in my. Listen to me singing. Or just listen to me. I wish I were inaudible, or selectively audible, anyway. Can I pick the people who will hear?

I want to hear you. In other places I want to be the things that you need. In this place, I'm not and never will be. Here, I can only draw you in and then disappoint.

Am I in love with distance? I adore the idealism, the intangibility, the potential for perfection.

Instead of the reality of failure.