Surfing Entropy and Other Partial Truths
It’s been a while since I’ve updated here, and I admit now that I am using this forum because I know it is one that people I know don’t tend to read. I’ve spent the past two years getting my MA in Lit/Creative Writing, and now after all of this training, I feel less capable than ever of being able to write a coherent word. I think this is a point of my life to experience failure. To feel not even second best, but to be chugging along at the back of the pack. Though in truth that’s rather melodramatic, considering my situation is not one of failure, simply that of lack of success. They are not the same.
I was planning to write an angsty fanfic to therapy me through both the writer’s block and the need to moan and whine about my condition (which I know is ultimately superficial in its edges–real pain was watching my grandmother die) but I keep trying to think of triangles and plot and sentence structure and the potential for storytelling dies.
I adore Placebo’s song "Flesh Mechanic" :
He tries to embrace her
she wants him to race her
he needs a laser
to get it through her skull
means and lies and hatreds
tears that fall in sequence
cold caress
imprints
conversation growing dull
It has a lovely sense of understated hysterical flat-affect mania that I can’t quite describe. Like the color hazel.
Since I’ve gotten my new glasses, I’ve learned that for the past few years I haven’t really been able to see the eye colors of other people. Like, I’ve known light, dark, medium, some kind of blue or green. But I’ve really been guessing. Now I am dazzled by the sheer nuance and variety of eye colors that have always surrounded me. I find myself looking into people’s eyes a hair too long, and I smile, and sometimes they smile back while other times they quick shift their eyes away.
He tries to impress her
Mentally undress her
It takes more to possess her
But in his pocket lies a hole
This is the story of my today life. I am filling myself and it is draining, to an extent. Some successes cling like sugar residue, and when I put my hand in my pocket, it gets under my nails and I use my thumb to flick the little granules free.
Careful not to give your favors
To your lonesome, fucked up neighbors
I had one who sent me her heart in a Tupperware container
I’m inordinately cheered by the fact that I may not have lost a friend. At the same time, I’m asking myself, was it the friendship I was concerned with or simply its possible loss. The thing is, you never really know the truth of other people. It’s because we’re always, no matter how honest we try to be, lying a little. Because there is always the issue of interpretation. We interpret our truths through the imperfect medium of the physical, and then we interpret the truths of others through our own physicality. Words, as airy-fairy as they might appear to be, are ultimately a physical medium. Sound waves agitate the air, and those vibrations whack against the eardrum and produce sound. Or the rays of light and organization thereof that is text hitting the eyes, zipping down the optic nerve to the brain. An electrical masterpiece that lights the MRI like a X-mas tree.
All the movies in my head
They flicker with my bleeding heart
A careless slipping of the tongue
On just another private part
I’ve been running. Training in my mind for longer and longer races. 5k, 10k, now thinking Half Marathon. Running has the benefit of being wholly physical. It is a matter of your body and your will and when you are done, you can at least say you’ve accomplished something. It’s easy, even in its pain. The same can be said of writing. But I’m running, and writing runs away.
He’s wasting time
because everybody is
a star in his eye.
I have let myself obsess on trivial things In spite of my own efforts to the contrary; when my mind is unoccupied it drifts to the least of my concerns as though they hold the greatest weight. This is a form of laziness. Energetic laziness, avoidance, and why? I suppose a part is hard wired. My genes are striving for immortality while my mind is begging to live in the moment. Neither succeeds.
You think this love is bone fide
You’ve been taken for a ride
Wrap your lips around your head
And slowly blow yourself away.
Life is an excerise in futile dreams pretending at reality. A fight to the death against entropy. Entropy always wins. But for that tremorous moment when we crest the wave of improbability, just before our stomach falls and we careen joyfully screaming into the future, we can pretend to be immortal.
If we’re lucky, we won’t spend so long in the aftermath coughing our last onto the sand.
__
*Italics from "Flesh Mechanic" by Placebo. New CD June 9th.