Whereas I have been so committed to moving forward and making moves and have been restless with the fear of idle action as a realistic (fucking ridiculous) idea, I have not taken a step back. This month is all about taking a step back, and so I scoured my old journals and found two things that hold dear relevance to my situation, my optimism (mistaken for pessimism), my cynicism (mistaken for pessimism), my pessimism (which fuels my optimism and cynicism) and the hope that isn't bottled and marketed for it is free when I see a kid that waves at me in line at a grocery store.
(Warning: This is mad self-aggrandizing but it's my blog and I'm not getting paid for it. For those that came here to continue the serial narrative of my untitled novel project, I've stopped posting chapters after I think Ch. 6 but it doesn't mean I'm stagnant. It means if you like it you can wait and the process is too private for me to let you in just yet.)
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June 5, 2008
i think i've earned one of those stupid introspective posts after a bevy of dumb poems and cheap laugh pictures i've posted.
i check my facebook page, the section of "People You May Know" so that you can add more friends. And all I see are names and faces of people I actually "may" know. People I would never actively seek out, people I've shared time with but have never actually made time for. It's kind of funny, thinking the world as just this fleeting spinning ball with fleeting faces abruptly interrupting the infinity that spirals out your creation.
But then, Karl Marx was the dude who said that philosophy is to real life as masturbation is to sex. people discredit smart people's sense of humor sometimes to search for some value and meaning and heavy-handedness. All I'm saying is Marx probably would have been a chill dude to have a beer with inbetween his quest for utopia.
i think i'm purposefully not trying to be linear about this, making it more esoteric than necessary. some say that's awfully pretentious, but fuck it i am pretentious in my core.
i've kind of discovered that my ears are less enthusiastic about loud noises. i appreciate arrangements and melody more than noise. when i would play with the radio when my grandpa would pick me up, he would call my music "jumping music". i think i'm veering towards his visceral spectrum. he really liked the fugees version of "killing me softly". god rest his soul. but then something like the minutemen come onto my random music player and i remember how exciting noise was. maybe i should stop making statements because if you stand by your statements you're standing by your past.
i've used the process of elimination to decide what i don't want, what i don't like, who i don't like to be and now that i'm nearing the ghastly spectre of 30 i find that all that skimming and separating of chaff from the wheat has proved kind and worthwhile. i see myself finding things that i do want, actively pursuing things i do like, and seeing the person who i
do want to be like. it's like when you have a real good friend when you were six years old and now you sit back and think about how you thought they were going to be there for you all your life. it's not sad or depressing in the least. it makes what you have now all the more important.
when karl marx said that, i think he meant that people are content with complaining rather than doing something about it. finding that right balance between action and theory. the one who acts before thinking is as foolish as the one who thinks without acting. we live between fine lines, making sure to make sense. stop making sense.
in the last year, there are now two marriages and three engagements. that's a whopping ten of my friends taking that leap. for what it's worth, i am very proud of them although i'm not there yet. it's easier to say you want to get married when you find the right person. if you don't, it's kind of like saying you want a million dollars without working. i used to say i'd make a great uncle. i think i now would make a tremendous dad if given the chance, but i'm thinking too far ahead. i have to master the art of filling a class one cavity between then and now.
i think people underestimate how much of a dick i am and i kind of take advantage of that. i think people take advantage of my niceness and i let them because i am not nice to be a decent dude or because i have to. i am nice because i want to be. eliminate the martyrdom.
i picked my nose in front of a girl i liked yesterday. i think it's a nice little litmus test because c'mon like if you can pick your nose with someone after hella years why should picking your nose be a reason not to be interested in someone. i am making a statement. my name is pierre bautista and i pick my nose with reckless abandon.
i'm back in the business of getting busy, i'm letting things get to me when they should just be potholes i'd run over without a second thought, or unsuspecting detours that make my destination that much longer. i had a friend who once asked me why are things you get but don't earn so bad. i answered with a nod. i was busy eating mushrooms.
all i'm saying is that i'm a tired kind of happy right now, awaiting tumult and hard-work, awaiting the results that come afterward, but not expecting anything other what's in front of my nose. i'm in love with everything and it's better i kept it a secret.
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Sept. 21, 2008
i'm not sure but i think it was norman mailer who said that the closest thing a man can get to the feeling of childbirth is writing a novel. delillo and dave eggers continued to extrapolate on that, discussing writing like being your baby and you see its flaws and its beautiful grotesqueness and when you show it to other people the only thing you hope for is that they see its beauty in the manner that you see it as well. of course, i'm just kind of going on memory and excuse me if i misattributed any of these concepts to the wrong people.
career specialist melanie trunk has reasons why you should stop toying with the idea that one should even write a novel, in fact she has FIVE
. reason number four is that you make more money per hour flipping burgers that publishing a novel to which most writers i know would respond with "um of course".
david foster wallace, rest in peace, even talked about writing in a salon.com interview hella years ago:
Part of it has to do with living in an era when there's so much entertainment available, genuine entertainment, and figuring out how fiction is going to stake out its territory in that sort of era. You can try to confront what it is that makes fiction magical in a way that other kinds of art and entertainment aren't. And to figure out how fiction can engage a reader, much of whose sensibility has been formed by pop culture, without simply becoming more shit in the pop culture machine. It's unbelievably difficult and confusing and scary, but it's neat. There's so much mass commercial entertainment that's so good and so slick, this is something that I don't think any other generation has confronted. That's what it's like to be a writer now. I think it's the best time to be alive ever and it's probably the best time to be a writer. I'm not sure it's the easiest time.
i didn't leave the dying industry of journalism because it was dying, or because we are currently at an impasse where the immediacy of blogs and the concept of print media are at a crossroads that print media is losing so badly that it is making a white flag to wave while they set up their servers for the web edition of their publication.
i left because one day i would like to have a family, you know that whole wife and kids thing. i am as much of a crass consumer as anyone as well, so i'll be damned if i don't get season tickets to the niners or a hi-def plasma tv. the endless deadline, overworked, underpaid aspect of writing about the local synchronized swimmer going to the national championship seemed insufficient to what i actually wanted. i won't say that i didn't love it because i did. so i came up with a plan to find a way to be fiscally safe while continuing my passion.
dfw's passing was a big surprise to me. he was a man who i admired and looked up to, someone who can see the world in a way that is both intimidating and comfortable and write about it in a similar manner. reading his essays was like someone showing you a rubik's cube and instead of telling you how to beat the rubik's cube he tells you it's concepts, it's mathematical possibilities, it's ability to allow people to concede to it. he gave you an apple and showed you its pulp, it's seeds, it's stem, it's thin skin. he was a master mechanic, not so much in love with repairing but in determining why things need to be repaired or why things don't, why we need what we need. because life, after all, is not a car that can easily be given an oil change every 2,000 miles. i've disagreed in a civil manner to people i respect that life is not simple, and maybe i am wrong. maybe i don't want it to be simple.
sure, deciding to simplify things that don't need to be complicated is crucial in keeping your sanity. i'm not saying overly deconstruct things that are unecessary and minute and unimportant, i'm just saying that when i see a tree then i can see a random space of land obstructing my view or a plant that gives me oxygen or even see a tree that had probably seen my native people struggle or celebrate and maybe kept a little kid shelter when all he wanted was his parents to understand him. there is no wrong answer... and i'm digressing i'm sorry.
i have built a respectable ouvre of contrived poetry and prose, some i even like and am proud of (go figger!). the most widely-circulated published stuff i've written was for the money and so they were not something to hang my hat on but i'll tell you this i do not treat writing hacky shit as a chore but as a challenge. that said, i'd rather no one ever read it.
what i was trying to say about david foster wallace is that his death actually resonates with me. here is another excerpt of his essay regarding kafka that i found over at marginalia.org:
[T]he horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. … [E]nvision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That, finally, the door opens…and it opens outward — we’ve been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch.
it's actually weird to think he committed suicide because his despair was always approached at a very very analytical standpoint. it was never full-blown out there like, say, sylvia plath or kurt cobain or anyone else who were brilliant little assholes who made shit that will of course be indelible and crucial to the world at-large when they unearth our skeletons after the next ice age.
david foster wallace was a genius, the chillest dude in school that was approachable but i couldn't talk to anyways because what he said would go over my head.
but david foster wallace has given me strength now. i might not be the greatest writer ever and that doesn't matter. i always wanted to write a novel to challenge myself, document the world as i see it and share something to a world that has shared so much to me.
so thank you very much and goodbye mr. wallace. thank you very much, i'm ready to share:
i have chapter five posted up and im working on chapter six right now.
