A Primate's Tale

Ad-nauseam

2006-02-13T21:21:00.001-05:00

I'm having a really hard time with this blog. I censor myself so often and so well that to spill my guts in a place where anyone can read it really freaks me out. I never write the stuff that's floating around in my head because then everyone will know what a fragile nutcase I am. It was a bad day. It was the wrong day to cut me off on the highway.

Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.

The other day I was driving in bumper to bumper listening to this pop song that I like despite myself. You know it. It's super sappy and listening to it makes me feel like I'm in middle school again nursing an obscenely impossible crush. It's all crap. Anyway, the guy who was driving in front of me must have been listening to the same damn song because he was moving his head perfectly to the music, and his head was perfectly bald and I felt so strangely connected to this guy that it made me want to sob. But I was premenstrual

Anyway, this post was supposed to be about my body and in a way it has been. The part of my body that I absolutely loath is my stomach. I am always conscious of its size whether I'm walking or sitting or lying down. (and what the fuck else is there?) Years ago when I ran all the time it was flat and strong I hated it then too. In fact, I can't remember a time when I didn't hate some part of my body. The first time that I felt physically self-conscious was in fifth grade and the memory is burned into my brain. I was looked down at my calf one day while I was in school and it looked really big to me. It was big, it was muscle. I've always had a muscular body, that's just the way I'm built, but the other girls were skinny and I wondered what was wrong with me that I wasn't as well. I hate that my mind feels so disconnected from the rest of me. But I've been through therapy and I've analyzed my feelings ad-nauseum and still it's there so I'm really at a loss about what do at this point. Plus, I'm not feeling very optimistic tonight.

The part of my body that I like? Hmmm. My lips. I like my eyes too, and my forearms are pretty buff. I keep telling myself that I'd like my whole body if I just lost weight, but that's a lie. The women who look like walking skeletons tell themselves the same thing.

Challenge number dos

2006-02-03T13:43:00.000-05:00

This one nearly did me in. After entirely too much deliberation I chose the song "Perfect Blue Buildings" by Counting Crows. I suffered for some time before I realized that it would be nearly impossible to find a song that can communicate who I am essentially to anyone, unless I wrote it myself, and I don't write songs so...But, Porfiry knew this when she offered the challenge. I just have a nasty habit of over thinking absolutely everything. Anyway, if you've ever heard this song, you know that it's super melancholy but beautiful, really. It seems to convey a sort of hopelessness that I find extremely honest. The soothing visual images contradict the songs raw emotional rendering. Softly shaped blue building beside a calm green apple sea? Let's just go. For me, I suppose this song expresses a sort of coalescence between intense sadness and devastatingly vivid optimism. I think both of those extremes live inside me.

A...challenge?

2006-01-26T21:34:00.000-05:00

1.When I was 7 or 8 I spent many hours dressed up as a traveling salesman.
2.I still don't know what possessed me to do it.
3.I'm in the mood for a cigarette tonight but I am resisting.
4.I totally agree with Thoreau when he said that most men lead lives of quiet desperation.
5.I'm finding it extremely difficult to write random things down about myself.
6.I've been told that I am often too serious and intense.
7.I find it painful to discuss inane pleasantries with people I hardly know.
8.I love to get on my belly, remain very still, and look at insects.
9.I think Porfiry is one of the most intelligent and kindhearted people I've ever met.
10.I feel life so intensely sometimes that it makes me want to jump out of my skin.
11.I like to bend the rules.

I should have added to my list the fact that it's almost impossible for me to resist a challenge. Oh well, that was strangely therapeutic. Thanks :)

2006-01-24T10:42:00.001-05:00

While visiting my family in Maryland last weekend I saw the film Brokeback Mountain. We had to drive into Baltimore to see it because the good people of Harford County wouldn't allow the "gay cowboy movie" to play locally. I'd become quite familiar with the towns slightly southern homosexual anxiety after having lived there for nearly two years when I was in my late teens. I remember driving around the small town in my old Honda with the mellifluous tones of Eve Libertine shaking the windows. Screaming the words until I was sure I'd done permanent injury to my throat I'd slow my car down to absorb the sweet gaping expressions of the people on the sidewalk. Each strangely resembling the blow up doll on the album cover. The pleasure was at times was so intense that I would need to pull my car over, throw my head back, and light a cigarette.
The film, while exceptional, was not about gay cowboys. I also can't see how it was about "Love as a force of Nature," as the tag line suggests. In my opinion it was a film about starvation. I'm amazed at how deftly it depicts the way that deprivation will, after so many years, either kill you or force you to turn your teeth inward. If you've never experienced this you might very well walk out of the theatre thinking, "Jeepers, that sure was a swell gay cowboy flick. I guess love really is a force of nature!" No. Love is something that leaves you desperately alone in a cramped, dirty trailer cluching your dead lover's shirt because that is the only thing that's left of him.
One of the most powerful scenes, I thought, was when Jack and Enis part ways for the first time. They end up beating the shit out each other. It may sound crazy, but Enis punching Jack in the face seemed like such a logical response to me. Isn't that exactly what you want to do to someone who has that much power over you, someone who has taken you from a relatively safe, if passionless existence, and thrown your life into utter chaos? I felt so horrible for both men. They were raised to be silent and that's exactly the way they left each other.
Driving home from Baltimore I thought about the people who fought to keep this film out of their town, and how they deal with their own starvation. I wished that I was driving alone and that I had Eve with me to scream along with. "The public are shocked by the state of society, /Don't give me your morals, / They're filth in my eyes. /You can pack them away with the rest of your lies/Your painted mask of ugly perfection,/The ring on your finger,/ the sign of protection,/Is the rape on page 3, /it's the soldiers obsession,/How well you've been caught to support your oppression. /One god. One church. One husband. One wife."

Ani owns my speakers

2006-01-08T15:25:00.000-05:00

Cassette tapes were not the antiquated beasts that they are today when I was first introduced to the music of Ani Difranco in the mid-nineties. I had just started dating Addi and we were feverishly presenting one another with gifts, artifacts, poems, food, music; any beloved thing that helped to translate the tenderness and excitement we felt for each other. She offered me a tape that had a black and white picture of a woman on it with a shaved head, and a meditative expression around her eyes. I listened to it until the ribbon curled, snapped, and jammed itself into the entrails of my car stereo. It's hard to explain why I love Ani's music as much as I do. I guess the way she’s able to translate her experiences into art just makes sense to me. I tried to pick one song, but I couldn’t so I picked two.

Angel Food
If the mattress was a table top,
and the bed sheet was a page,
we'd be written out
like a couple of question marks,
my convex to your concave.
We'd be lying here
at the end of a sentence
that asks,
"are you ready now?
are you gonna glow in the dark?
are you gonna show me how?"

Do you like to watch when water misbehaves?
Do you like waves?
As the wind shifts,
and shifts again
the sail smiles
and gently slaps around the mast
ballast
ballast
ballast.

When you come to me,
come to me with cake in your pocket.
Come to me nicely
with that soft kinda cake
that's mostly icing.
Come to me ready and rude.
Bring me angel food,
angel food.

Studying Stones
i am out here studying stones
trying to learn to be less alive
using all of my will
to keep very still
still even on the inside.
i've cut all of the pertinent wires
so my eyes can't make that connection.
i am holding my breath
i am feigning my death
when i'm looking in your direction

Of course numb is an old hat
old as my oldest memories
see that one's my mother,
and that one's my father,
and that one in the hat, that's me.
It's a skill i'd hoped to abandon
when i got out on the open road,
but any more pent up emotion,
and i think i'm gonna explode.

There's never been an endeavor so strange
as trying to slow the blood in my veins.
To keep my face blank
as a stone that just sank
until not a ripple remains.
i am high above the tree line
sitting cross legged on the ground
when all of the forbidden fruit has fallen and rotted
that's when i'm gonna come down.

'course numb is an old hat
old as my oldest memories
see that one's my mother,
and that one's my father,
and that one in the hat, that's me.
It's a skill i'd hoped to abandon
when i got out on the open road,
but any more pent up emotion,
and i think i'm gonna explode.

Watercolors

2006-01-07T00:59:00.000-05:00

A few days ago I bought a tiny watercolor kit for the cut-rate price of five bucks. Vhat a deal. I haven't painted with watercolors since high school and I don't recall having any particular aptitude or even enjoying them as a medium back then. Actually, I'm a pretty lousy painter in general. As goofy as it sounds, I think my new-found interest stems from the fact that my emotions seem so much like watercolors themselves lately. Blending and bleeding into one another, nothing solid or particularly defined but with hues so intense that my eyes fill with tears before I can comprehend why. I like the way the pictures have come out. It doesn't matter that they're not brilliant. The whole process is so enjoyable and relaxing and I'm able to focus with a singular intensity that takes the world away from me for awhile.

I'm on my second cigarette. I've been staying up late thinking, thinking, painting, smoking, writing, music all around and inside me. It's wonderful. It couldn't be better.

The bass in this song,
is so palpable,
that its grown eyelashes.

The sound of inevitability

2006-01-04T00:55:00.000-05:00

"He travelled along the path of self-denial through pain, through voluntary suffering and conquering of pain, through hunger, thirst and fatigue. He travelled the way of self-denial through meditation, through the emptying of the mind of all images. Along these and other paths did he learn to travel. He lost his Self a thousand times and for days on end he dwelt in nonbeing. But although the paths took him away from Self, in the end they always led back to it. Although Siddhartha fled from the Self a thousand times, dwelt in nothing, dwelt in animal and stone, the return was inevitable; the hour was inevitable when he would again find himself, in sunshine or in moonlight, in shadow or in rain, and was again Self and Siddhartha, again felt the torment of the onerous life cycle."

Trouvé dans la traduction, d'une certaine façon

2005-11-19T04:43:00.000-05:00

First ever post. What to write? I searched my brain. Several years ago I wrote a small poem. Climbing down from my tall fig tree the other night I whispered it to myself over and over like a mantra, gradually becoming aware that it sounds like a translation, like a poem that was written in another language and badly translated into English. Well, it may be rough but I love it, so I’ll post it, and I’ve translated it (with lots of assistance) so you can hear for yourself.

J'ai peint le ciel
Avec le sang de mon coeur,
Pompé par chaque pouce de mon corps,
Comme le ciel.

I've painted the sky
With the blood from my heart,
Pumped through every inch of my body,
Just like the sky.

There. That relieves the pressure of the first post, very good. I hope to use this as a space to share some of the things that inspire me, or that jump around inside my head and remain long enough to be captured...and translated.