Wednesday, April 25, 2007

personal curiosity cabinet




My birthday was last week and I thought of many things:

1. How memory can be organized like taxonomy or like a curiosity cabinet. Above are pictures of what would be in my personal curiosity cabinet, things which have a value only to me. I have an egg I found while I was a gardener, a bone found on a beach, a pipe-cleaner outlined heart, my cats' whiskers, some stones and pieces of glass, etc. These things evoke a memory, a meaning only accessible to me, yet valueless to the world. I used to think love was like that sometimes.

2. I'm actually quite glad that I will never have to deal with infatuation again. I wanted in life: someone smart and strange, someone who has a big heart, someone I can always trust and rely on, someone who engages my intellect, someone who is my best friend, someone who can share his life with me, someone who is comfortable being themselves with me and is comfortable letting me be myself around them. And I found that person. No matter what happens, or how life turns out, to have such an experience frees me. Even if I spend the rest of my life celibate and single, I will never feel alone.


3. There is a bitterness, though, that I must cure myself of. I felt alot for someone, then I realized that this feeling will never be reciprocated. I realized it was a shame to spend so much of life feeling this one-sided feeling. I never wanted to be a bitter person, yet I find that this bitter taste has not left me. I'm left with the bitter taste for empty feelings. It is useless.

4. About letters-something that used to give a us a window into a writer's mind- now disappeared. Then I thought about love letters. I guess it's better if your ex-lover returns your love letters than to throw it all away. If the loved can no longer feel the emotion expressed in the letter, at least you can remember the passion you felt. There is no ex-lover whose letters I can ever throw away. Those words mean alot to me. But perhaps I am alone this way.
It would be sad not to have slightest trace left. Love is never an easy thing to get over, I want to know that I felt this way once. A letter is the best gift I could ever receive. (he gave so little of himself) (MLG gave so much, more than anyone I've known, more than what I could ever expect).

5. I would like to be happy, for a change.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Easter Sunday 4-8 wanderings










We wandered down Alcatraz Ave. heading westward into Emeryville. We strolled across the newly landscaped pathways of converted live-work type spaces and passed by new-industrial buildings, housing architectural firms, graphic designs offices and other such artsy-work things.
The landscape we traveled shifted from residences to businesses. We ended at Magic Garden Nursery, which was closed, and we crossed the train tracks to get a view of Aquatic park. And always, we heard the sound of cars in the background.

"The mistake made by all urbanists is to consider the private automobile (and its by-products like the motorcycle) essentially as a means of transportation. Such a misconception is a major expression of a notion of happiness that developed capitalism tends to spread throughout society. The automobile is the centerpiece of this general propaganda, both as sovereign good of an alienated life and as essential product of the capitalist market: This year we hear that American economic prosperity is soon going to depend on the success of the slogan "two cars per family." -Guy Debord Situationist Thesis on Traffic

Sunday, April 15, 2007

word spills

Sometimes,

I wish to never speak again, let all the wasted conversations dissolve into dissipated air.

I wish to gain enough distance between me and my past that I can only view it with a dispassionate calm.

I wish to spend my Sundays reading the New Yorker.

I wish not to feel so disturbed while reading Fitzgerald's biography.

I wish I could remember the things about you that made me feel so happy and to not forget the things about you that made me feel so sad.

I wish that my mind was lucid and precise, and that thinking was as easy as breathing.

I wish I could get enough sleep.

I wish I could remember all the words I really like and I wish I could use those words in perfectly formed sentences.

~instead of spilling words...

Thumper

Friday, April 13, 2007

moveable



























RE: the painter, Pascin "He looked more like a Broadway character than the lovely painter that he was and afterwards, when he had hanged himself, I liked to remember him as he was that at that night at the Dôme. They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who makes jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure." -Ernest Hemingway A Moveable Feast


RE: F. Scott Fitzgerald "He had...a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been a mouth of a beauty. [...] The mouth worried you until you knew him then it worried you more." -Ernest Hemingway A Moveable Feast

Friday, April 06, 2007

my good-riddance friday

some thoughts during the week:

A pessimist is a man who thinks all women are bad. An optimist is one who hopes they are.
--Chauncey Depew



"…the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald The Crack Up

"…I only wanted absolute quiet to think out why I had developed a sad attitude toward sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy, and a tragic attitude toward tragedy- why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Pasting it Together



Globe-trotting bartender, what a life!


An article I read last night, how we really fucked up in Iraq and still are fucking up, too bad.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/03/26/070326fa_fact_packer/

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

another 4/4 goes by

a song that has been floating in my head-


you threaten to make me dead
and none of this will matter
or surface again

scares you to know that we won't bewatching the same sun
or brooding the same thoughts
in the same part of the world

scares me how you get older
how you forget about each other

things mean a lot at the time
don't mean nothing later

-Red House Painters

Sunday, April 01, 2007

anchoress

10. Time is a tyranny to be abolished.
-From the twelve propositions of transition magazine, Paris 1927-1938


"This being in love is great-you get a lot of compliments and begin to think you're a great guy."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald from Notebooks (The Crack-Up)

"When you get over an infatuation, to fall for someone ever again seems so inconceivable that you imagine no one, not even a bug, that is not mired in disappointment."
-E.M. Cioran Lure of Disillusion