Albert Camus

“A person’s life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art, or love, or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened.”
(image via)

Lenny Hearts Eunice

But I just wanted him to take care of me some more. Joshie has always told the Post-Human Services staff to keep a diary, to remember who we were, because at every moment our brains and synapses are being rebuilt and rewired with maddening disregard for our personalities, so that each year, each month, each day we transform into different people, utterly unfaithful iterations of our original selves, of the drooling kids in the sandbox. But not me. I am still a facsimile of my early childhood. I am still looking for a loving dad to lift me up and brush the sand off my ass, as English, calm and hurtless, falls from his lips. Why couldn’t I be raised by Joshie? “I think I’m in love with this girl,” I sputtered.

“Talk to me.”

“She’s super young. Super healthy. Asian. Life expectancy—very high.”

“I love love,” Joshie said. “It’s great for pH, ACTH, LDL, whatever ails you. As long as it’s a good, positive love, without suspicion or hostility. Now, what you’ve got to do is make this healthy Asian girl need you the way you need me.”

“Don’t let me die, Joshie,” I said. “I need the dechronification treatments. Why isn’t my name up on the Boards?”

Joshie was silent.

Lenny Hearts Eunice by Gary Shteyngart, my favorite short story this year

1. yes 2. okay

"what you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering." -audre lorde

Signfying nothing.

"She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing." — Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17-28)

speaking on behalf of every cell in every bone and tissue in my body

if u tell me u like me as much as i like u
then i will live in poetry. i will climb
mt. tamalpais and stretch my arm away
from my shoulder and my hand away
from my arm and my index finger away
from my hand to make it more convenient
for a bird to perch
and serenade the sky for me.

if u tell me u like me as much as i like u
i would get back to work with my dreams
intact and your dreams blended in, with your
ring in mind and my heart on my sleeve
and every shitty day will have a silver lining
that is u liking me as much as i like u.

and if u did tell me u liked me as much as i like u
but u needed time or u weren't ready to do anything
more than to like me then i would say "hey, i
understand" because i would and i would do
what i have always done -- which is wait for
something that might never happen.

but if u so happen to like me less (for liking
me more seems illogical or maybe even impossible)
then i would take a day to take a breath
and then do what i have done since i have met u:
which is to like u without caring if u like me.

i had promised myself last october that the words
i wrote on your birthday would be the last words
i would write for you forever. but a funny thing
happens when u feel like i do for as long as i have.
it is no longer a feeling but an institution that is
as sacred as religion, it could possibly even be one:
"the church of wanting to make u smile".

but if u feel the way u do (whatever it is u feel)
i will reflect on the things
that i have done this year (regardless of the outcome)
for this is love, not an obsession.
i am your sucker, but i am not mine.

Summation

My ears are burning

I hope you are the culprit of this action.

 

 

'Fossils tell of long ago'- Aliki

'Fossils tell of long ago'- Aliki, originally uploaded by letslookupandsmile.

by Aliki Brandenburg. Scholastic Books 1972

No One I'd Rather Be But Now

I tend to veer from being personal in this thing. Once you've accumulated enough words in a basket, some of the words tend to fall over themselves and you're unsure what to do with too much. You're unsure who will trip into your little place that is private enough to be a keepsake for strangers but public enough to reveal your hand to those you don't want to reveal your hand to.

This past weekend I've gotten: kicked out of a bar in the most functional state of mind I've ever been in while getting kicked out of a bar, blew it with a pretty girl, almost got into a fight because of another idiot woman and was propositioned for a gay threesome by some belligerent Mexican dude who obviously has enough issues to fill a psychiatrist's notepad. I'm single, broke, doggedly trying to do the right thing, patiently killing my brain cells and fucking motivated.

I've got the balancing act down pat, I'm not looking down and I'm not looking back.

"A man's errors are portals to his discovery." James Joyce, Ulysses

I've had my heart broken, my will questioned, my conscience scrutinized and my love filled to the brim so high that you'd imagine they'd start outsourcing it to India.

When I wake up, it's a success. It's a success to have things to do, to have people to see, to know that my actions are predicated and accountable to me. It's a success to have an awareness of the world around you and that its minor little victories can make you smile and the immediate schadenfreude of cautionary tales are just that, moral lessons for a uncertain future; a future that is realistic. An awareness of caring and concern and a knowledge of what is wrong/right, but at the same time a peace of mind where not giving a fuck is idealized/realized so much you don't have to tell yourself you don't give a fuck for emphasis. Because you just know.

In less than 8 months I will be 30 years old. I look at the older days fondly and sometimes embarrasingly. I look at them with the knowledge that they were Old Testaments in a 6-billion-strong sea of chapters of old testaments and we are all in this together. I wake up, with the looming fear of "being somebody" behind my shoulder and when I look at the ceiling and hit the snooze button I know that my best days (so far) where worth every feeling in the spectrum (devastatingly depressed to cloud nine). What's more important is that my bestest days are still ahead of me, filled with everything that was there before, but with a knowledge that only suffering and love and ecstacy can temper.

Times are tough, but so am I.

mise en scene, pt. 2

You are what you wanted to be. You wanted to be nice, and be able to enjoy life and live a little a dangerously. You had no care if you got a shitty office job or not. You would meet new people and you would still talk to your friends in high school without being stuck in high school. Everything else that made you worry or upset or be sad or paralyzed you, all of that was based out of necessity. Necessity to live, necessity to survive; food, shelter, etc. You were stupid and romantic and now you're less stupid and less romantic but you're still both. The expectations of what you should be did not correlate with what you wanted to be, this is what it wrought. This is it.

Wall Street Journal Article re: The slush pile

The Death of the Slush Pile

Excerpt:

As writers try to find an agent—a feat harder than ever to accomplish in the wake of agency consolidations and layoffs—the slush pile has been transferred from the floor of the editor's office to the attaché cases of representatives who can broker introductions to publishing, TV and film executives. The result is a shift in taste-making power onto such agents, managers and attorneys. Theirs are now often the first eyes to make a call on what material will land on bookshelves, television sets and movie screen.
Still, discoveries do happen at agencies, including the biggest publishing franchise since "Harry Potter"—even though it basically took a mistake to come together. In 2003, an unknown writer named Stephenie Meyer sent a letter to the Writers House agency asking if someone might be interested in reading a 130,000-word manuscript about teenage vampires. The letter should have been thrown out: an assistant whose job, in part, was to weed through the more than 100 such letters each month, didn't realize that agents mostly expected young adult fiction to weigh in at 40,000 to 60,000 words. She contacted Ms. Meyer and ultimately asked that she send her manuscript.