Passions No Less

It’s the morning of Saturday, March 26, 2011 and I am awake. This is unusual. For me to wake up early on a Saturday (particularly after a late night of drinking), naturally no less, with no excuses, no explanations – I even tried to go back to sleep because I wasn’t in the mood to get up yet – is very strange. So I walked across town. I started at my apartment and walked downtown. I always end up downtown.

Now I’m drinking coffee feeling terribly disturbed, and I have no choice but to write on my blog as though it were a diary and expose to everyone who’s ever felt the need to read my thoughts, my disturbing thoughts of Saturday, March 26, 2011.

Like usual with my writing style, I’ll cite my sources. Various words and phrases are resonating with me today and they will all naturally affect the words that are about to come out of my fingers:

The path to actualization is narrower than a razor’s edge.
-Vedas

People say friends don’t destroy one another. What do they know about friends?
-Mountain Goats

(Something a friend said to me last night, but I’m sure he would not appreciate it if I repeated it, even anonymously)

you come to comfort me / but I don't need your sympathy / and the way you look at me, well it's condescending / I feel my stomach churn / and didn't you ever learn / not to tell someone something / if you don't mean it / I gave you my heart and I tried to make you happy / you gave me nothing in return
-Every bitter love song you’ve ever heard

People spend so much time looking for the right words, but somehow fail to notice that the only thing that actually matters is the tone of your voice when you say ‘hi.’
-James

Warm, intentionally awkward silences.

My copy of Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters is 16 years older than I am.

Down in South America, the writers have an imagination you’ve never seen in the pen of a European and a sense of detached irony as well.

Bob Marley is playing and the barista is having yet another conversation about the process of roasting the coffee beans and the subtleties of a pour over - that is to say, his passion is clear, he very much loves and deserves his job...and I have zero interest in what he has to say. In fact, I have zero interest in a life spent in pursuit of a mastery of something I couldn't care less about.

All of a sudden, I love this man. All of a sudden, his life is so much stronger and richer than mine because he can focus on something like the subtleties of roasting coffee and it doesn't break his heart.

This is where I am. All around me I feel poses and languages and passions and pursuits and dreams and I appreciate the desperate force with which these mouths bite after them, but I'm lost in the eye of the storm. Too much coffee and I can feel my heart beating extra hard in my chest. The rest of the world melts away to tedium and I can only focus on whether or not I am about to enter cardiac arrest. The funny thing is that I'm indifferent to the answer to this question, only curious about it. I feel overwhelmingly fatalistic with no emotions engaged in what that inevitable fate has in store.

As Henry Miller once told me, I saw the whole world laid out before me and I had this aching sensation that anything I could possibly do I could just as easily not do and not only would nothing be lost, but a whole world gained, for to renounce my oh so soft La-Z Boy in order to actually step down to Earth and fight the current seems at the moment to be the greatest loss, the only loss, I could possible suffer.

But what the fuck, ask me again in a half hour and I'd have an entirely different story to tell.

I guess what it comes down to is I'm bored with my life and my work right now, but I somehow lack the traction to begin cultivating something else that feels more worthwhile. It’s always so easy to look to other people for some kind of gratification, but I can kill years and years going out and chatting with friends then finding myself alone again wrestling with the same feeling. I'm writing, which traditionally has always been my outlet and my aspiration, but like any life I could live, any words I could write, I could just as easily not write them and feel as though nothing has been lost, nothing is changed.

Change of pace…I’m going to participate in National Poetry Month in April. That means a poem a day for 30 days. My dear dear friend Rachel Bernstein is going to participate too. This is the venue I will be posting all 30 of those poems on, so feel free to tune in throughout April. I would also like to invite any reader out there to participate as well and send me a link to the poems you’re writing as you publish them.

With love,
T