ode for a pack rat
Dear Diary:
Now that I’m years past Mark and deeply seeped in another living situation I look back at the time I spent with Mark and I am dismayed. Mark is a diagnosed narcissist and as such was always in need of physical evidence of his personhood. I don’t know if I can explain this correctly but he kept everything he every did and thought and read and ingested. I’m dismayed because for a time I got caught up in his pack rat ways.
Right now, today, I find that I don’t need to have this evidence of who I am but just prefer to be….. me. I don’t collect movies or dvd’s to show how well versed I am in cinema. I don’t have cd’s or music collected anywhere as evidence of my musical acumen. Even my writing has been reduced to a couple of containers of hard copy and everything else is somewhere in cyberspace and not in my room or in my drawers or strewn about my living space as evidence of my personhood.
Having just tossed a whole bunch of books to charity I can honestly say I don’t need shelves and shelves of books to prove to the world I am well read. I know a lot of musicians (ooooh, that hurt) who have tuners and pedals and gadgets and acoustic and electric versions of their instruments of choice and really it’s just to prove they can play. But they don’t…. they just collect the equipment and occasionally look at it and noodle with it then they put it away. It doesn’t actually prove much of anything and the statement they’re making about said personhood is a little dismal, don’t you think?
“ODE: a noun
Etymology:
Middle French or Late Latin; Middle French, from Late Latin, from Greek ôidç, literally, song, from aeidein, aidein to sing; akin to Greek audç voice
Date:
1588
: a lyric poem usually marked by exaltation of feeling and style, varying length of line, and complexity of stanza forms.”
He never really proved he was smart or musically gifted or erudite in any way. He did prove he holds on to all his shit and is therefore always buried in shit and if he was so smart wouldn’t he have not buried himself under a pile of shit? For a long while, I was buried under that shit too.
Now I have a new pile of someone else’s shit to deal with. But it’s a new pile, a different kind of pile and a change is as good as a break, non? Okay, so it was more like a rant than an ode but if you get a beat going you might be able to freestyle it.
Love,
Sin