Sunday, May 30, 2004

You were only waiting for this moment to arise...

Nothing beats a little Blog to go along with your breakfast. Got the Beatles on my mind this morning, henceforth the title. My boy Dave McDonald played a formidable set last night at Sullivan's and commenced with a acoustically riveting version of Blackbird:

"Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to be free."

Dave's sort of a cross between a pesky-fisted leprachuan and a gruff chinned, hobo, rail-riding harmonica toting itinerant Bob Dylan. He has a long, cidery Amish beard and sort of talks like Theo Huxtable, i.e., "Right ON!" He writes these fairy tale folk ballads that simply dissects my limbs with evey chord. I was thinking about his song (more of an eight minute tempo-shifting acoustic opus) "Merry-Monday Happen Stance" when my own father was on his death bed. My father's face was sickly sallow--his skin correlating very closely to the offal hue of cheap beer left over from happy hour; his eyes were an even unblinking pools of copper and he my father's mouth was just sort of wedged open like some sort of cancerous lunar crater. Anyway, the moment my father shed his garment their was a scream in the hospital (also ironically, at this particular hospital, everytime a child is born a lullabye is swayed over the intercom...so here we have the entire circle of life represented. My father dying, leaving the corporeal port of life while a child is simultaneously being lifted into the world)...while all this was happening (the initial shock--more than anything else) I had the hard chord's of Dave McDonald's "Merry-Monday Happen Stance" resonating in my head and his gruff sweet-sandpaper monotone to accompany my tears. Thank you, David, for your tunes. Your songs serve as a blanket when I was very cold as well as a breeze when I am very happy and for that I am eternally grateful and will do everything I can to ferry your music (as well as Charlie's...more on him later) to the masses.

-For I proceed I need to apologize to a friend. I said something that I think might have been offensive, so, for what it's worth,(smiles) I'm sorry-

So much loneliness in the world. Met a beautiful girl last night named Jennifer. She was sort've with a cirlce of feminine heyena's having a wicked married girls night out. She kept chewing on ice and when I told her what that signified in terms of askance Freudian logic she just looked at me and smiled. As the night wore on and the crazy carousel of bodies shifted around the room, Jennifer kept talking about how lonely she was in her marriage (something about her husband and a dress) and when I left and gave her a hug and honestly told her that she was beautiful, she told me that no one had told her that for a really long time.

This hurts because growing up things are suppose to work out they way we always envisioned that they would and sometimes when we realize that sometimes, they don't, the loneliness that accompanies this self-realization can be emotionally splintering.

My cousin Amanda, eleven-months older than I am, the relative closest to me in age and probably one of the first five human beings I was introduced to, is going through a divorce right now and it's killing everyone....Amanda's a brilliant human being who graduated high-school ten years ago salutarian, nine months pregnant. Our parents sort of conducted the music at the Lutheran Church where I grew up (when I went to ruhi I would punctuate every memorizing phrase with Luther's infamous "This is most certainly true" bromide and everyone would just sort of look at me like I was weird). Classic case, she was knocked up by the son of a preacher man and the pastor himself fled town after the child was baptized. Amanda got married to a wonderful lad named Spencer in '99 and Amanda is apparently "seeking" now, feeling that the ennui of matrimony is to still-life-with-a-bowl-of-fruit and her husband just looks like he is standing over a dead puppy everytime you see him. There was death in our family a month ago and Spencer served as a pall-bearer, he worre his wedding ring while Amanda...well....

Then there's my friend (other friend-all my friends are named) Dave whose fiance told him a month before the wedding that she likes girls. She was in grad school and Dave was in the process of transfering jobs and everything.

Loneliness. Confusion. Perhaps we live in such an accelerated and marketable commodity-riddled culture that even things that are sancrosanct and important are granted a shelf-life, which hurts.

I heard an interview with novelist Nicholas Sparks, who (even though he writes very simply SUPERFICIAL sentences and portrays human beings like stiff- retail mannequins) wrote a book about a husband who, instead of going of and quote "finding himself" in an affair decides to date his wife again and I can't help but doff my hat to that idea. Sometimes, doing the right thing to do is hard and takes courage....

....can you tell I kinda struck out with Swissy-Missy? Found out what channel her commercials are on and all I can say is thank god I don't have cable anymore. Oh well, if you're going to strike out, at least strike out swinging (was I at the plate? Was I bunting when I should have hit a sacrifiece fly? Did I only grace the webbed-walls of the batting cage??????)

"You were only waiting for this moment to be free,"

On a more positive note concerning the current state of male-female relationships--my favorite movie of all times..,the movie that is perhaps the only true mediation of love I've ever seen, the movie that is merely a Gen-X talkfest; the movie that, if you've ever been in love and for some reason (space-time-identity)you find yourself unable to be with that person; the movie I first saw my senior year of highschool at 4:30 in the morning and thought about how, afterwards, in four-thousands years, if our planet is nothing more than a gigantic nuclear trash heap where commerce has destroyed culture, somehow, teh counter-archeologists of that time period will dredge up this movie through the battered nuclear detritus and understand the concept of love....the movie Linklaters BEFORE SUNRISE is making a sequel coming out in July!!!!!!

Click here to see what I mean***

http://movies.yahoo.com/shop?d=hv&id=1808547751&cf=trailer&intl=us

Yap yap yap. I know, that's all I ever do. I'd go home and watch the first Before Sunrise only I gave it as a gift to Swissy-Missy, oh well. What song are you going to whistle when you already know the color of the tune? Oh, how 'bout this one...

"Blackbird fly Blackbird fly
Into the light of the dark black night.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise
You were only waiting for this moment to arise
You were only waiting for this moment to arise."

Saturday, May 29, 2004

Other than that how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?

Green thumb my ass! The whole office is slumbering out of their swivel chairs in laughter at my expense. For the last year, I've taken a meticulous interest in watering the potted plants that flank the entrance to the cullom-Davis library. Diligently, for the past two years, I water the plants once in the morning and once very late at night. You don't understand. I love these plants! These plants are so green they could pass for minted currency. I've even gone out of my way to use words like "verdant" and "coniferous green" to describe these plants to craggily old alums with cardboard foreheads and deep pockets. The only problem being (as I just, to my chagrin, discerned in between co-workers cackels) is that the plants are plastic!!! They've been plastic for the whole time I've been watering them and (very Homer Simpson like "D'oh!" here) the carpet beneath the plants also incurred quite a bit of water damage thanks to me being so adamant. Oh well, nothing like slipping on the post-modern banana peel every once in a while.

Of course, me being the sullied romantic sap that I am can't help but corrleate the whole plastic plant incidence into a contorted metaphor about contemporary relationships. How, initially, sometimes, when you meet a person and fall in love and start doing cartwheels on the quad and take an acute interest in every facet of that person's life and the next thing you know, those succulent lips that once compelled you to write sonnets and quit smoking and take up yoga turn out to be...well... plastic.

I'm such a Hick. Been listening to Neil Young and John Michael Montgomery all morning while "gay cleaning" my apartment. The reason I say "Gay clean" is because my last roommate and best friend was very Armani dapper, globally cultured and almost Gatsby-esque impeccable in his perspective on life, i.e. healthy hedonism. We had a sweet apartment in this old mansion now infested with the ubiqutous vraimin known as the yuppie. My old roomy (His name is also David) is about fifteen years older than me and I love him very much but we found out after living together for two weeks that certain strata's of orientations have different calibers when discerning whether or not something is clean. While I often opt for the live in ESPN, open-pizza box motif and had no problem filching the occasional role of toilet paper from my present place of employment, he preferred the apartment look like Covington Gardens at all time and would often, spontaneously, bark at me from the bathroom, asking in his dulcet voice whether or not he was wiping his ass with sandpaper.

Such is the life....Such is life...

Friday, May 28, 2004

Talkin' bout my heart like its something you could break!

I should've headlined my other blog "Damnitarya" rather than "patiencearya" since I see how addictive this Blogging thing is becoming. I can see it now, five years. My marriage and finances run amok, I'm dressed all in flannel reeking of generic brand cigarettes as I wooble up from my folding chair, a tepid cup of instant coffee tucked in paw, my vision averting to my work boots as I take a deep breath, telling the circled group of internet junkies that yes, my name is David and yes, I am a blogoholic, swatting a teary stain of confession from my cheek as the gruff oval of heads immediately nod in concurrence,welcoming me with a hefty "HI DAVE!".... So I think this is how it will be... I'll blog in the "He who lives in the moment" before I start working (writing) (Ten page daily requisite--which, ever since ******* computer swallowed my Nuclear woods scene I composed on Tuesday-I've been forlorn and sulking ever since!!!!)I'll tackle the pages of the Recital after the day is done and even post crazy poems and dreams and proclivities perhaps on both....

I've been reading, re-reading short stories this pastweek. The best advice I got last semseter was from Prof. Blouch (all you crazy BU students who stumble upon this should take her--Her rubicund pumpkin smile and affable classroom semblance is nothing short of a joy!!!!) She told me that, the only advice she could give me is to "Stick close to the writers I admire and keep thriving" I get equal accolades and certain fingers addressed towards my prose all the time, but that advice really licked my heart like a cheap stamp that was already adhesive to begin with.

....Which is what I realize about writing and art. The act is reciprocal and it bails you out by the lapels. I cried after I read George Saunders "Sea Oak" and "Civilwarland in Bad Decline". I've probably read both those stories an estimated twenty times, but every time I stumble upon them I enter this pluriverse where I'm both extremely entertained and emotionally sliced open at the same time.

Also, Anthony Doerr's shorty THE HUNTERS WIFE. He was may age when he wrote it and he can do things with language and imagery (not to mention tell a damn good stroy about rustic "Legends of the Fall"-like Montanna that involves mysticim and loneliness) that I can't do. Lorrie Moore's domestic stuff just opens my chest up like a kitchen utensil drawer where all the forks are in the wrong place; and, oh yes (sorry about this Vanessa, if you ever read this--I'm sorry about allota things) David Foster Wallace!!! He has a new book of (sucky and indulgent) short stories called Oblivion coming out later this week, but his first book (a book I keep buying and giving away to other aspiring writers only to find out it is now out of print but will be back in print later this month) BROOM OF THE SYSTEM justr arrive via interlibrary loan and I'm holding it and remembering the first time I read it and thought it was teh greatest thing in print since King James.

Here's a formative interview by Wallace with salon that sort've shaped my aesthetic perspetive about writing!

http://www.salon.com/09/features/wallace1.html

Time to clock on with the book! Maybe next entry I'll avail more about the elusive "patiencearya". Maybe.

Thursday, May 27, 2004

At least in the womb...

...my navel was still buckeled into the umbilicus. Shit, I'm sooooo Jar-Jar Binks Maladroit when it comes to modern technology (its the dyslexia, the drines, the stress, the secret-covert crushes on girls who seemingly want nothing to do with you (Swissy-Missy?) the overall sodden poetry of day-in-day out existence, the novels I flick my fingers at the keyboard, the composition of our bodies, the last girl I kissed ( i.e.,see Swissy-Missy above)our long hair forming one giant curtain outside her dorm room, one giant auburn waterfall and how I picked her up afterwards and twirled her into a vortex; a carousel of limbs, only to have her look at me afterwards, her shy eyes bridging out of her tea-cup countenance and simply smile)

so I'm a romantic whoopie-cushion, impecunious dreamer, Baha'i bastard, pack-a-day-poet whittled by overtly exhausted witticisms with chai tea bags under my eyes with enough lint up my ass to knit a Goodwill sweater; but at least I haven't lost it--I can tell you exactly what that sunset looked like at that moment when all the world seemed to be engulfed into the aquatic tinted square....

If you came to this website via Arya Bdiyans, click the grayiosh back-arrow in the top left hand corner and go read her SPIRTUAL Sojourn lectures. (Shhhh!!!!Arya doesn't know that I'm reading her grandmother's book--so don't tell her...)

This site will be flourishing in a few. I write books and poems and live like a rockstar trying to discern which mountain top the ashram is on, not realizing that the pinncale is already inside each of us....My boss is kicking me out of work. read Arya's stuff. I saw her blogging on the dancefloor and I had to join in...

Gotta motor. I'm goona go stand outside Swissy-Missy mansion tonight with a ukelele a la SAY ANYTHING and strumming the chorus of YEAH YEAH YEAh's "MAPS" bellowing, simply

Wait they don't love you like i love you

PEACE