That's right, I'm getting back in the bizness of including media and regular features in my posts. This is how #METASWAG got its groove back. I've just completed one of the two finals I have this week, and I'm ready to blow off steam. You know how you blow off steam? Listen to metal.
Psychedelic titans of stoner-doom Elder summoned up one of 2011's best albums. Always crushing and always gorgeous, Dead Roots Stirring never rests for a second as it snakes from one Iommi-sized riff to the next. The sound is bona fide classic. Check it out.
In the next post, I'll discuss Marvel's big Avengers v. X-Men event, The Cabin In The Woods, and the new Mount Eerie record.
all gold
It's the creed
Bemy Dress even if gods say gold
What else say if god god god
I am the trailer revolution
revolve if we revolve: I am the KISSARBITER
let's make this impossible :) ( :) HAPPY )
[TACO COCK IT]
I've stopped posting my blogs on Facebook and Twitter. I haven't invested much time or thought in my blogging, which doesn't make me feel sad.
#METASWAG used to be my favorite place to think. Now I think with friends, think with paper, think with comics, think with poetry, think with reading, think with influence, think in class and think at work.
Let me turn again to #METASWAG, in a time of minor need, to think.
[Fran and I are both typing a lot right now, and the click-clatter of the keys is filling me with comfort]
Blackout/eramthgiN
I can drink a lot. I can drink a little.
I drank a lot on Friday (with near-disastrous results, I imagine). I drank nothing at all on Saturday (with near-disastrous results as well). Danger is something I should better take into account when partying, but for the most part so far I've escaped injury and embarrassment . I can still count the days I've woken up with nothing but regret and shame.
I'd like to keep that count. I'd like to see that number stand still.
I'm not being self-policing, reactionary or melodramatic. When I say I'm profoundly happy, I mean it. Of course I have demons, ambivalences, worries. If I didn't struggle with myself, I wouldn't know myself very well.
However, for the most part, I live a deeply-felt joy. Like, surges of it. It washes over me. I'm lucky to have this. I'm lucky to feel confident in myself.
This is why I need to redefine my drinking. I've done the wilding I needed to. I don't need to unleash some underexplored facets of my identity. I don't need to flirt with the extremity of my soul. I don't need to exaggerate traits that are barely visible or just aren't there at all when I don't drink.
I've been reminded that I was sober for 21 years, so my habits are still very much unsteadily under construction. I'm comfortable with this reality, but I'd also like to get comfortable with a less drunk me.
I'm not worried about myself. I'm more excited than anything.
[I can't wait to get dinner with my family; I can't wait for the new Uncanny X-Men this week]
Too easy
This will be another post I don't publish on Twitter and Facebook. It's more superficially personal than most of my blogging. I'll start publishing my blogs in May? Later this week? I'm sure I'll have plenty to say about The Avengers. I haven't even talked about the Animal Collective Record Store Day release.
1. I haven't blogged in weeks.
2. I ate a great breakfast.
3. This paper won't write itself.
4. My iPod is charging.
5. I'm proud of how popular and well-received my latest column has been.
6. I marvel at marvels.
7. Marvel is probably my favorite word.
8. Next week I'll blog about Seaside. We made a home.
9. Andrew wrote me a letter that almost made me cry.
10. I can't wait to watch basketball.
I'm blogging late at night after a full day. While I usually take a lot of time for myself on weeknights, it's usually at the expense of schoolwork. Tonight, I managed my time wisely enough that I had nothing but free time after 5 p.m. I'd love for this to become habit.
I'm blogging late at night to tell y'all four (4) things:
1) If you walk around with your eyes open and engaged, bringing your peripheral into focus so you have a full field of vision, you enter something I like to call "IMAX mode." It comes with a corresponding appreciation for the subtler joys of the mundane.
2) Changing your Twitter name to better represent how you conceive of yourself is an affirmative move, as is re-reading old tweets that give you a sense of self. For instance: I changed @darwinonaryder (a fun portmanteau that captured my creativity and burlesque delight in colliding pop culture with academia) to @FRXXK (my articulation of queer politics/devotion to X-Men).
3) I might like every song, particularly "Laughing" by David Crosby and "The Climb" by Miley Cyrus. I might also add "It Girl" by Jason Derulo and "Woman In Chains" by Tears For Fears. Don't forget about "Climax" by Usher or "We Belong" by Pat Benatar.
I'll be in Seaside in ten days. Until then, I'm alive and awake and well.
Thanks to Daniel Lopatin's EccoJams tape from last year, I've encountered all kinds of old jams that would've otherwise flown under my radar. "Woman in Chains" by Tears for Fears and "Too Little, Too Late" by JoJo are in almost constant rotation on my iPod. I also rediscovered "Laughing" by David Crosby recently, via Zech's expertly curated and truly funny radio show.
When work-related stress had me momentarily zoned out and preoccupied, a brief conversation with my mom opened my eyes. I usually spend too much time talking to my parents without really saying anything. I'm trying to be more honest to them and to myself lately, and in the process, get to know us all better. It was really a splendid moment that replenished what might have been a dampened evening.
I also refreshed myself by cleaning out the cat litter at my parents' house. If everything went according to plan, they'll each think the other did it, making everybody happier (of course, my secret hope is they discover I did this without any prompting and love me even more for it). I did it on a whim, remembering one of my favorite passages from the queer masterpiece The Well of Loneliness:
"She took what she gave and she gave what she took, yes, but sometimes she gave just a little bit more -- and that little bit more is the whole art of teaching, the whole art of living."
Isn't that a swell thought?
Time passes. That it's already midterms hasn't really resounded with me. That I'm feeling this ecstatic has.
When I woke up from my nightmare at 6 a.m. this morning, I knew the day wouldn't be normal.
I skipped my first class, having screwed up my alarm from the night before and failing to do the readings. I got BK breakfast with a post-radio Zech. From then on, everything proceeded to go smoothly. I carved out some time to watch cartoons. I wistfully thought to myself about memories triggered by the orange light cast on neighborhood houses by the faint strip of red just over the treeline. I ate bad food.
When I was setting my alarm for tomorrow morning, I got a call from my understandably frazzled editor-in-chief. Turns out we had entirely neglected one of the pages assigned to us. I only ran one stoplight to get back to the newsroom. From there I operated in high gear and we (infinite thanks to Michael, Aliya, Bailey, Celia, Missy and Dave) churned out the page two minutes before the fines would start rolling in.
I emerged groggy and certain the essay I was supposed to write tonight wasn't getting written. I guess it could've been, seeing how much I'm writing here. Then again, this is pouring out of me like tears, which wouldn't make for a very good paper.
Ready to go to bed, I checked the Internet one last time. Turns out, guitarist for one of my all-time favorite bands died in his sleep last night. Women's Christopher Reimer is no longer making music. When the band broke up two years ago, it left a huge rift in my psyche. Seriously: I wrote it into my novel. This news hit me harder than it should have, because I'm weary and emotional.
Even so, I'm listening to Public Strain before I fall asleep. I hope I have a nice dream.
Though tonight was wrenching stuff, I still cherish the little moments I got to myself and the exhilarating ambivalence of finishing a newspaper page in 90 minutes. We're alive in this stuff.
I can't seem to help it. It's overwhelming, almost comical at times -- walking from the IDS to my apartment I actually stopped in my tracks and watched three rabbits crouched beside one another in the moonlight. They scattered when I started walking again.
This kind of emotionality can be absorbing, but it never strikes me as a waste of time. I've spent so much time repressing, wandering without wondering, that it feels vital now, even replenishing, to take care of my emotional self. You wouldn't be wrong to think this screams of triviality or privilege, but you wouldn't be right either.
To paraphrase one of my friends: Whatever feels most important in your life at any given time is the most important thing in your life. For the past five semesters, I've done a good job convincing myself that school or innocuous resentments were critical. I've been selfish, neurotic, and careless. I am still these things (they are me when I least want to be them, and in rejecting them, I reject me).
But these things aren't nearly as important as selfishly spending time on my/yourself.
Let me be selfish: Another one of my dear friends has said where most people filter their thoughts before saying what they want to say, I myself just say whatever first comes to my mind.
I do.
Because of this, it's been hard to trust myself as a friend, brother, son. I rarely know where "I" is coming from. But I can't help but bring whatever this is and whatever I'm feeling to you. I'm almost always seeing you to see me. It helps me feel better.
For everything I've felt, there have been few times when I've gotten it out. Lately I've been doing better. I've confronted contradictions within myself I'd been too afraid or too ashamed to admit. I've unlocked memories I'd spent years missing. I've made myself wide awake.
This isn't self-improvement (I still make more mistakes than I know) and it's not self-enlightenment (I'm safer in the dark most of the time).
I have much to regret. I have much to look forward to. I have much to be silent about. I also have much to be vocal about. I have stories with which to alarm you, disappoint you, impress you. If we want to wake up, we should be telling stories to ourselves and each other all the time. Remembering. Representing.
Some of you know most of my stories and most of you know some of my secrets. I wish all of you knew more. I've shared my poetry and I've shared my sensitivity, much of it through this very blog. It's not a terribly new thing to do, or particularly courageous. But maybe it will help when so many of us seem to be plunging ourselves into difficult situations without remembering what can matter to us.
So I'm writing this now -- sentimentally and transparently -- to tell you to hang on. There are so many of you I care about, but only find time to see when my eyes are closed. This can't make up for all the times I'm missing you, but it's for you anyway.
I want all of us to make eye contact between classes. I want us to think about how and what we're thinking. I want us to try to learn about each other. It's how we'll survive. When it's all too easy to get caught up in homework and partying and our endless commitments, we forget how easy it is not to get caught up in it.
Our business is seductive clutter in the way of our reflections. When the mirror falls out of our view because of undue work, we have to remind ourselves what we should be looking for. We might not even like what we see, but that's no excuse not to see it.
We need not plateau or stagnate. We need not get comfortable or get bored. We need not forget what we can feel.
While it's easy for me to say we should all wake up and see what a wonderful life we're living, it's also easy for me to say this isn't an easy life to live. If we're feeling everything, and feeling each other feel everything, we've got a lot of work to do. All this on top of the thankless work we're already supposed to be doing. It's everything time.
I doubt we'll find ourselves in the coming years, but we might find something of ourselves in each other or in what we do and make and say and think. Maybe we'll find something or someone to care about.
So, the next post will probably restore #METASWAG to working order. For now, I don't feel too much like formatting. It might have to do with how much formatting I do every day at the IDS (which I've come to cherish more than I thought I could).
This past week has been quite a ride -- blurry, bumpy, buoyant.
I've felt alive just walking round. I've seen orange skies. I've spent lots of money. I've thought a lot about little things and a little about big things. I've lost my glasses.
I've taken to toothpicks. I like the look and feel of a toothpick. I usually keep one between my lips. I have one there right now. This toothpick is my friend.
It's there when I walk to class. It's there when I read. It's there when I write.
I now have a full staff under my wing at the IDS, which, with the invaluable help of Fran, I'm doing my best to manage. I never could've anticipated the toll working a full-time job and studying as a full-time student would take on my free time. It's something of a happy (privileged) dilemma, though. And here I am.
This morning I woke up emotionally numbed, despite being rocked to sleep by that extraordinary thunderstorm last night. The wind and rain threw me into an enriching sort of journey through past summer storms. It was a lovely high that felt earned. Nevertheless, I was hazy this morning...
... Until I picked up Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. It's already burrowed its sparse imagery and lyrical self-reflection into my consciousness. It's the rare sort of storytelling that makes me want to sit down and write something its equal. After I spent an hour with that masterwork I hopped in the shower feeling completely renewed. I played Julianna Barwick's The Magic Place as loud as I could and curled up under the hot water, breathing deeply and feeling out my headroom.
If I hadn't snuck that holy moment into my morning, I doubt I could've confronted the rest of my day. It was a typically demanding run through my white, male, bourgeois commitments to journalism and academia.
Tragically, because I chose to party so rapturously over the weekend, I've suffocated my weeknights with readings - which are thankfully engaging and diverse - and thrown away any hope of relief till Thursday.
Speaking of the weekend: How about that ice? It robbed me a retreat to Andrew's home, but later provided us a deliciously difficult obstacle course to overcome. Turns out Falafels tastes best after trekking through the frozen tundra with your friends. Turns out Drive looks best from the back of an unsophisticated auditorium. Turns out the air smells best when your sinuses aren't clogged.
And it turns out reading feels better once you've taken the time to slow down and appreciate the day.
What could've been a whirlwind of commitment-juggling has instead felt like heaven. While the work has felt overwhelming at times, it's never soured my day. Rather, I have found human moments in between my hours and hours at the IDS and everything else in my life. My editorship takes the lead, but can't slow me down. I've maintained all my resolutions, figured out new things about myself and those I care about, and finally feel like I'm accomplishing something real.
The challenge of maintaining a full-time job and completing schoolwork and keeping up relationships is taking me to brand new parts of my headroom. It's amazing, really. All I feel is proud of myself.
Listen, #METASWAG readers, I know this blog is now just walls of text. It'll only last a month.
Come February, I'll spiff the place up with videos and pictures and lists and reviews and what have you. In the mean time, things will stay so simplistic in a way.
So, let's talk about the weather. Winter came and went in a single day, and what we're faced with now is the replenishing reality of springtime in January. My window is open; I breathe the air. This post is only to tell you how I feel. I feel taken care of.
I am tearing up from a combination of coughing too hard and listening to music that matters to me. It's past my bedtime. I spent the past two days in Batesville, Ind., with my dear friend Andrew Cambron. We ate buttery food and drank Budweiser, watched an IMAX movie and played Xbox, and drove for some time while listening to Slim Shady. Today I spent several hours training for my semester-long stint as an IDS editor. After the meetings, I went home to get dinner and visit with my beautiful family. After that, I cleaned my bathroom (now to be shared with Sara Jones). Then I spent a few hours writing and illustrating for Friday's paper.
I usually don't write such matter-of-fact posts, but it feels nice after writing with a deliberately colorful voice for an audience outside this blog.
Kanye has been tweeting non-stop for a few hours now. I always getting excited by his enthusiasm, his burning a fuel for my own fire. Who knows what I can accomplish with that in my engine? I have the power to get up from under me.
This is an extraordinary time in my life. Everything is changing.
More than usual, the strike of midnight this January 1st meant to me a graduation from my own liminality. I can't pretend my many bad habits will vanish with the calendar year, but I can promise to adopt more good habits. I'm ready to learn. I know this spring semester poses an academic and professional challenge, but I can't help but marvel at its promise of fun and self-enrichment. Optimism is my new religion.
In 2012, I hope I don't smother you with the rumble of my schedule. I'd rather this blog be a space in which to smuggle my momentary wonder. If I have to turn over some ideas in my head, the turning will be found here.
This doesn't exactly signal a reimagining of #METASWAG. I have trouble not writing about the music and movies I love. I'll still produce hundreds of words without much in the way of a thesis. The hopeful change is that I'll blog more regularly, about coherent subjects, and with more deliberate language. I wouldn't be surprised if during the first week of classes I write an absurdly long and recklessly unfocused 3 a.m. post. That's not what this is, is it?
I feel confident in myself. Bring on the learning!
(And remember, there's nothing to make you feel alive like Jeezy's "F.A.M.E." or Train's "Drops Of Jupiter" or Henryk Górecki's 3rd Symphony)
