alien she

Out of step/with the wor-rrrrld.

I seriously feel like Unfrozen Cavewoman these days, or maybe some not-so-senile old bat who has been cooped up in her house since the sixties. The old grey mare, she ain’t what she used to be. Culture baffles me. (Or maybe it’s just too easy to understand? At any rate, I don’t relate to much of it.)

I don’t feel like I’ve stopped relating to the important people in my life, or being able to empathize/identify with folks in general, but the social organization thereof?

I suppose this is what comes from doing my own thing, playing by my own rules. I haven’t ever achieved this level of just-not-giving-a-fuck-about-things-that-aren’t-important-to-me before, so I’m chronicling this phenomenon for my own good. It isn’t bad at all – in fact, I see it as a pretty positive change. If there is objectivity, I appear to have achieved it at least for use as a tool in certain situations (as per Book Club discussion last week).

Of course, of course, situations and perspectives change constantly, and I may find myself back in the thick of things soon enough. Still, this is an interesting – and different – vantage point I have right now – good for writing.

plague of frogs

I have a new favorite political radio show: This is Hell.

Website has archives, headlines, podcast, so-on-and-so-forth.

it’s a hard world sometimes for little things

I just gave myself a fucking adorable haircut and no longer resemble the woman from Dilbert.

Cool.

(Inertia is not going to get me. Viva la revolucion.)

I can’t articulate how much I’ve changed in the last week, so I suppose we’ll all have to watch this unfurl.

hungry ghosts

(Thinking: events in the middle east; safe and illegal abortions; money money money money; the first and second rapes; women in a factory in China make fifteen cents an hour making mardi gras beads which end up littering the streets after the mass hangover begins; dull headache; listening to Les Rallizes Denudes at TOP FUCKING VOLUME is very satisfying; Ferlinghetti; Beowulf and Grendel; the monsters of modernity; bite your tongue?)

It is not necessarily true
that a war needs to
be writ large
to make the news.
(Numbers help: it’s in
the public interest.
Newsprint on the fingertips,
talking heads and static
in dry mouth. She’s been drinking
since three thirty
and it’s only made the
five-pointed star
inside her chest
burn dull.)

Split the sky, bone
cleaved by metal,
bloody-oh and why
we swear our loyalties.
Gunshot wound to the head.
(He missed: whatcha
gonna do? His aim
was true; either case
breath escapes.)

There are no heroes:
war all the time
in the hungry ghost realm.
Sometimes we forget about the missile,
go about our daily business
as if we could not do bodily harm.

propaganda songs

I saw one of the women who had been involved in Jane: Chicago speak today, and it broke my heart again and again. First, that women were ever in such a position: that one’s choices, upon being fertilized, were reduced to 1) possibly fatal danger or 2) motherhood (these and only these); second, that people in this world are doing their best to see that that binary choice returns; third, that that reality is a legislative slip of the tongue away (one Mississippi). And fourth, that women could overcome their personal differences to make a localized yet meaningful change in others’ lives: that ordinary people could see around and through the system to the skills they needed to acquire, that they did not let their fear stop them from doing what they believed was right.

Though there is no grand narrative, no pattern, no meaning save the arbitrary granted wish, I want to make the most of my time breathing in this body. I want to make this incredibly fucked-up world a tiny bit better for at least a couple of other people. I want to do what I can.

And I will not let my fear stop me from doing what I believe is right (though I am not THAT bull-headed and I will compromise. I have my ethics, though, and I will stand by them).

Sometimes, though, I get very sad and tired. One of the women in the Jane documentary said something that resonated with me: that doctors had some training in professional distancing, which is something she’d never learned to do, and that eventually seeing all that suffering (no matter whether she had a part in ending it or not) began to bruise her.

I can’t remember a time I haven’t known evil like that, that I haven’t seen suffering.

Sometimes I wish I was better at distancing. Sometimes I get very tired.

Nothing is really binary, not truly. All those shades of grey like car exhaust, toxic. Exhale, inhale: everything gives you cancer, but there’s always a chance you’ll be the lucky one this time. In hope, fear. In fear, hope.

Holy shit.

what makes a man start fires?

There was this woman on the bus yesterday who kept cackling in a raspy, throaty manner. I don’t think she was talking to anyone; nobody was talking to her. (I can’t be entirely sure as my eyes were closed.) It was fairly disturbing. One expects laughter to have an object.

She got off at Cabrini Green (the proximity of which to the Gold Coast has always been of note to me; Chicago is a fairly segregated city, even still. That’s built into the grid).

If I was more superstitious, I’d have thought she was a banshee.

kill the racehorse

I swear, I do, I do solemnly swear that I will actually post some creative writing in this fucking blog.
I’ve hit a point with this one story I’ve been working on where it sits in my hard drive, slowly maddening. Every day, I stare at it, I make a few edits, I am unsatisfied. Something isn’t hinging. I need to take a little time off from it and come back fresh, I think.

I’ve been thinking a good deal about ethics and responsibility. I was always taught to take responsibility for myself, but where does the self end and the community begin? K always tells me that I don’t have to save the world, after all.

I cannot carry blame around. It’s heavy and my back is already sore. I have no use for it. I have no use for assigning essentially arbitrary ‘good’ and ‘evil’ tags to the people and events in my life. That kind of sorting and categorizing is inherently human – it’s how we navigate the world – but it seems to have consequences far beyond. We make small things mean too much – at least I do.

Kind and soft, sharp and small.

A couple of musical notes:
1) Keiji Haino/Sitaar Tah! is the best double cd to fall asleep to;
2) I like des_ark despite myself;
3) New Criminal Damage is so anthemic;
4) I’m buying a four-track this weekend.

A couple of literary/political outside-the-text-box notes:
Anyone interested in the American health care crisis should read this and this. If you’ve got time and are interested in Mayahana Buddhism and/or psychology, you should read this – it’s in pdf format.