in progress

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i spent the majority of the day at home in bed with a cup of coffee and my crochet hook.  i listened to french phonetics and repeated the words as i stitched away and wondered about myself and the life i've been creating vs. the life i want to create...

the way you (i) need to be loved...


i rounded the corner in to my 33rd year on september 3rd and seemed to instantly smack right into a new realm of self-knowledge like a fucking brick wall.  i spent the day after my birthday mildly hungover, a bit forlorn, more than a bit worse for wear, and wearing the same dress i had worn the day before to one of my french classes.  i fared well, all things considered, and had a great time in class (maybe being a bit brain dead even helped me absorb all the new information and sounds contained in this new language) but felt the closing of an era shake within me...  or at least the need to bring an era to an end.

when i first became single a year and a half ago, i needed to live brashly.  i needed to embrace my new freedom in a fiery, even outlandish, way.  it was healing to do so and provided me with so many opportunities to see the world (and myself) in a new way, in a truer light, and without the bad habit of judgement and fear that so easily pollutes us all.  it helped me shake off the expectations and hurt left over from a long-term relationship.  that strange residue of pain, of unfulfillment and goals left to die.  sometimes the death of a dream is more painful that the actual death of a loved one.  it is hard to watch a fairytale fall in to disrepair.  it is hard to watch a fairytale turn to total shit.  it's even harder to not let the experience embitter you.  i needed to be a bit wild for a time in order to heal from the effects of drudgery and heartbreak.  i needed to reclaim something about myself that i'd given up along the way.  but now, it's beginning to feel like the things that once provided me with a sense of healing are now becoming damaging.  excessive in a way that does not lead to a greater sense of freedom and independence, but to a flippant attitude...  a callous form of casualness that i absolutely do not want to adopt.  i do not want to be Charles Bukowski, waking up to 300 hangovers a year, and wading through an endless barrage of damaged human beings and semi-meaningless experiences in an effort to combat the loneliness inherent to human existence. it is true that maybe my sense of loneliness is bigger than others, but i must learn how to bare it in a new way.  i need to return to the work of devotion and exploration.  i need to attempt to learn the difference between Bravery and Excess.  both have their values and nuances but one should not be mistaken for the other.  i have clung to beliefs and images of the world and life that perhaps i've outgrown.  i crave a new sense of balance, a new expression of freedom, a new way to achieve comfort.  i return to my hooks and books and the love i feel for bigger, better things than what i've allowed myself. 

how do i need to be loved?


if i can manage to focus on that question, 33 will be a great year.

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DAY 2

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let me reiterate:  maybe it is true that i am less afraid of you than you are of me.  maybe i have far less to lose? 



as one who understands the total figment of security, i can afford an uncommon brashness when it comes to certain things.  i understand the reality that, daily, i must eat and that, in our culture, that means i must make money.  but that's where my concern for money ends.  i truly don't give a fuck about retirement plans and home-ownership.  the less cages i lock myself in to, the better.  i prefer the wild ache of artistry and philosophy.  i prefer the torture of thinking and living to scrimping and saving.  give me pardon if this apparently youthful outlook offends you.  i don't mean to attack or jibe.  it's only the case that i watched a certain someone plan for their retirement and then die 2 years in to that solitude.  i assure you, she would've much rather kept working and kept experiencing the world if she had known what was coming.  and so i expect an unexpected death as well.  i expect to work right up until that day, like ma mere, louise bourgeois, sculpting in her studio all day long and then dying in her sleep after a full day's work in the studio.  let that be me.  let that be my end.  how sublime.  how ecstatic.  how necessary!  let me move my pen right up til the end.  let me dribble one last blot of ink as i suck in that last, rattling breath.  i don't plan on letting up until that exact moment...  whenever it may find me. 

sometimes pleasure and beauty become the most important things.  i remember my mother saying in her sickness, "suck every last ounce of joy out of this experience you can, little girl" and i parrot her voice inside my heart every chance i get.

sometimes, i am thoughtless.  sometimes, i am no where near as diligent as i should be, as i am capable of being.  there was an era of such prolific artistic production in my life not too long ago and i miss it.  but today, i went running down Shattuck Ave in Oakland and it occurred to me that i was so prolific because my self-worth depended upon it.  the sad fact is that being stuck in a bad relationship has the effect of sapping one's idea of self-worth.  i made so much fucking art because i was actively warring against a life that told me i was next-to-nothing.  it had been that way for years.  and before that relationship too. 

but i'm not blaming anyone for my decisions or my mistakes.  at this point, i am glad to have walked this particular road.  it is the thing that makes me able to look at you and smile.  it is the thing that makes my gaze soften with understanding.  i look at you with such warmth, such light, such appreciation for every awkward moment, every fantastically beautiful gesture and movement.  i look at you and know that i will never have all the information.  there is an entire story, an entire life behind you, within you that i know nothing about.  there have been such beautiful moments and such horrors.  there has been poetry and atrocity all around you.  these things, whatever they are, have made you capable of certain actions.  these secrets have made you long for certain things.  i will not judge you:  the same thing is true about me. 



i come to realize that i am not a simple human being.  i am not difficult either, but i am complex.  as such, i gravitate toward complexity.  i like complex people.  i like complex art.  i like complex emotion.  i like complex thought.  why did i ever think a simple life would be the right life for me?  we are taught to pursue certain avenues.  it is after going far enough down the dictated path that i reached a primary truth about myself:  i don't want a simple life.  i never have.