Archive for June, 2005

Spending an entire week on the beach with no computer and no awareness of the internets is an interesting experience for someone who spends a lot of time working in this business. It was a well-earned break (if I do say so myself) — and I’ll be posting some more about that later, but the main things I learned on my summer vacation include:

Ok, so I didn’t disappear, it just seemed that way. Trick photography can be a powerful thing.

I’m busy working on a lot of manifestos, projects and not-so-glamorous things — as well as getting ready for my vacation next week. But I still have time for snark, and so, I will just say:

Seriously, how is this still news? Yawn.

And yet, I’m still gainfully employed. Seems pretty simple to me.

June seems like a good month to slip into a deep insanity, or dare I say it — depression. As good a month as any, I suppose. For reasons I haven’t quite pinned down yet, I find myself spending a good amount of time feeling like there’s a thick cloud around my head; my mind as Jacob Marley, dragging heavy chains twisted up with rusty locks. Dickensian, indeed … and I hate metaphor all over again, in every sense of the cliche it creates, the cowardice of it. But I do slip up every now and then, running to hide in entendre, sometimes. I guess it’s more comfortable to put off facing what you really want to say by taking the long road. What do I really want to say? Something about a journey? Something about love? Maybe just something about trying to figure out what I really want to say. I’m not even sure. What do I really want to say? Something like this, I suppose.

The pattern of my life has been largely marked by a series of fits and starts¹. Darting in one direction and then quickly away; racing up and then awkwardly backing down. Proclamation and indecision stuttering, a sequence of spilling open and slamming shut. Yes and no. These are the ands that leave me tense; waiting for the rush of release, a reversal. Fits and starts. I like to think everyone lives like this, feels like this, the way I do when I can feel a decent amount of unease building — in a space simultaneously occupied by my throat and shame. I don’t use the words anxiety or panic for this, they’re too sharp, too immediate to really fit. This is slow, longstanding, vague. I wonder if I’m making the whole thing up.

I’ll sit here for a few more minutes waiting to type what will eventually end up being printed here. Striking back through the things that are probably closer to the truth but seem too stark, too raw for me to admit in writing. Because, you know, the words aren’t right. I am, as we all are, deceived by language, the way it muffles the electrochemical pulses that we’re really trying to capture. This thing that exists, stuck in my throat, balled up in the pit of my stomach, gripping the top of my skull all at once. That’s really what I wanted to explain, but it’s come out like this. Another self-indulgent string of words posted online in a fit of vanity. But that wasn’t quite right either. Those lines all seem cliche, used. I’m thinking of throwing the entire thing out, but I won’t and they’ll stay as they are for now. Perhaps that’s the best I can do — I’ve never proclaimed to be a writer by trade. I’ve never pursued others to really accept me as such, so with that Disclaimer, I could break my own rule and dive right into the metaphor.

It would be easy to do, you know … just get right into the thick of it and describe a recent sequence of events that serves as a parallel to the underlying bigger issue. My own private parable. Ah, but a parable is usually well-crafted and staged in such a way so that by the end of the tale, you’ve already begun to receive the message. You won’t be receiving a message here. As of yet, I’m not even convinced I have a message to transmit. Maybe that’s the problem, you see … I started out with something to say and in the course of trying to figure out just what that was and how to present it, I’ve essentially uncovered that I have nothing to say. No essential truth, no lesson to offer, no revelation.

But you knew that already, didn’t you?

I mean, this is what you come to expect in an electronic transmission, a personal log that follows a long string of others, doing the exact same thing. Writing on the surface, but being betrayed by language … but words are as close as we’ll come. And that’s the thought that crushes down on me, heavy with infinity. Millions of people, opening the blinds² just to show only as much as they want to expose. Fanning open and slamming shut. The only thing you do know for sure is that, by virtue of this selective exhibition, something is kept hidden.

And that’s not even what I wanted to say.

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¹Fits and starts; the original metaphor was to parallel unfinished projects, half-hearted attempts at pursuing various goals and the on-again-off-again pattern of posting to this blog. This was never fully explored as the backstory is too involved and potentially embarrassing, with little redeeming value to the reader.
²Blinds, the unavoidable metaphor of an implied window.