This is like an Oregon tribute, + weird ass shit.

in closing,

Twilight

I read it. Have you read it yet? It’s suddenly a big thing: An adolescent vampire love-saga, and about as non-Anne Rice as you can get.

My dad gave me a copy, cus he lost a night’s sleep devouring the pages. I had a similar experience, getting through the 400+ pages in less than 36 hours.

But I donno if I liked it. I mean, I kinda liked it. The writing was compelling, but I don’t really think the writing was *good*. How can that be?

The story revolves around its narrator, Isabella, a 17 year old teen who has left her newly re-married mother in sunny Phoenix to move in with her father, Charlie, on the drippy wet Olympic Peninsula in Forks, WA. Her daunting task: To face a new high-school and a life with clouds and rain.

Soon after starting her new school, ‘Bella’ begins to notice a group of kids who seem different from everybody else. They are pale, elegant, worldly and absolutely gorgeous, particularly the younger boy, Edward. Interest develops into intrigue and as their non-conventional relationships develops, intrigue evolves into love.

The thing that most irritated me about the book was that, while the thoughts and motivations of her obsession and his vampire cohorts are given central stage through-out the story, the other characters, the ‘human’ kids who welcome Bella into their midsts with open arms remain strictly one dimensional. Almost caricatures of teenagers.

Countless passages mention the color of Edward’s eyes, and the meaning of their tone in correlation to his mood, but nary a sentence is spared on the possibility that any of Isabella’s human friends might have personal motivations outside of flattering interactions with the narrator. She does not seem at all interested in the possibility that Jessica, Eric or Angela might also have inner lives.

This type of self-involvement isn’t unusual; actually pretty typical for a human teenager, but unfortunately Meyer feels the need to account Edward’s obsession with Isabella to the fact that she’s different from anyone else. His words depict her as rare, unique. He says at one point that he can never predict her reactions, while I generally knew what she was going to do several paragraphs ahead of time.

Yes, I found her self-involvement irritating. Go ahead, smirk, the irony isn’t lost on me. At least the author is able to make Bella’s perspective interesting enough to draw you in- Not because her personality is particularly gripping, but more because interesting (usually perilous) things keep happening to her.

I got the feeling that the characters and the location were extremely solid in the author, Stephenie Meyer’s mind, and she was thus able to convey a vivid sense of place and action in the story.

So what’s my beef with the writing?

I don’t know. While I don’t require big words or major complications in my literature, I was still left with the eerie sense that somehow this bank of vivid pages never got beyond the surface layers. It was all laid out there, like a large, opened package. There weren’t any dimensions. It was like…

It was very much like… watching a movie: An entertaining, appealing movie. Yes, visually intriguing, believable; but it did not reveal any truth, or provoke tangents of thought beyond an immediate interest in what would happen next.

Yup, that’s my review in a nutshell. The book ‘Twilight’ is a pretty good movie.

And strangely enough, they are filming a movie of it…

in my home town.

day end ruminations

I’m sleepy-tired. As the day comes down, I wonder if the work I did was good. And I’m thinking in the tune that’s been playing in my head, and that’s how the words go…

lilt-hum, hum.

I could drift into a sleep state, never really left it today. Even in these dark hours, when the energy came, still the feeling that I caught the time too late.

And it’s okay to go in those loops for awhile, but the problem is sometimes I’d rather stay;

in the fog in your head
be a dent in the bed
watch the rain strike my palm
till the daylight is gone

Oh well, I think- despite the gray cast, the tuesdayishness, there’s still a building motion; we did accomplish something.

and it’s going that way, a gradual incline. The dream part of lifetime goals is always really big, this like soaring vision - but the actual ‘progress’ (there’s that word again) is a lot of nit-picky shit. This bit relies on that bit, and I’m waiting on this so I can do this, to accomplish this.

Man-kind. Giggle-snort. I think we were primarily designed to make everything complicated.

…. at least The Headache went away.

Talking to a screen now
not feeling particularly alone, though.

Not even a little.

I hope tomorrow you feel like a million and two bucks. Go on. I’ll be here, being proud of you…

I promise.

Remembering a Messed-up Dream

I remembered what I dreamed last night in the bathroom. My brother broke up with his girl-friend Jamie, so I got together with her.

It was kinda like saving her for him till he came to his senses. I wouldn’t kiss her on the mouth, which caused friction in the relationship, but other than that, it wasn’t too bad. We did a lot of rock-climbing, and she was always talking on this old fashioned, rust colored telephone with a grin on her face. It was kind of nice.

I don’t remember experiencing it in the dream, but it was tacitly understood that the sex was good. There was a whole part that seemed to go on forever where I was examining fruit to put in a blender: Plums. Cherries. More plums. Maybe a pear?

There. That’s enough fodder for a legion of freudian psychoanalysts.

Why Not?

1. It might not do any good.

2. Failure is a self-enforcing momentum.

3. His wrists are shaped funny.

4. I don’t really want to be solvable. What self-respecting ego does?

5. It takes time.  I don’t know how much time. I hate promising my time to anything, even a barbecue.

6. I will flake.

7. Emotion really shoots one’s perspective to hell.

8. Privacy is my second nature.

9. Frightened.

10. I might lie. Actually, I already have.

 

Why?

1. Because.

2. In the space of half a life-time, i still don’t know.

3. My cousin will be married. I am not jealous. Merely humiliated that after protecting her through childhood, I wasn’t certain of an invitation.

4. My grandparents won’t live forever. I want to *be there* before they go.

5. The guy?

6. I lost  a decade some place. It’s not the kind of thing you just let go of.

7. Cus the restlessness gets exponentially tougher, and my insides aren’t scuff-proof.

8. I hate white.

9. Why the fuck not? What do I have to lose?

10. The basic, material conflict:  You might accept at some point that you’ll never be quite what you want to be, but that doesn’t mean you resign to a lemming’s life lived at cliff-edge.

 

This week’s search terms

I’m just gonna post my favorite 1 or 2 search terms from each day this week.

my god is a rooster cartoon - I’m not making these up, I swear

rhino genetalia - Now would I order a red or a white wine with that?

how to get over a lover who keeps coming - Just be honest. Oh, and wear a poncho.

poising huge hairy bears - There’s nothing really wrong with that, but it sounds totally obscene.

weird mouth chupacabra - I think its cosmetic aspects are probably the least of your concerns.

i ate your heart - Oh yeah? Suck my cockles.

what do i do with my poisoned leg - ebay!

lol cat bra - I can haz cleavage? 

if a thousand men were not to pay their - No. No, no, no. You can’t just ask half a question and then leave! That’s the shittiest cliff-hanger of all time! If a thousand men were not to pay their what? What? Their alimony? Their phone bill? You get back here and finish the frickin’ question!

Gosh darned googlers.

Story

The sun-speckled pattern of leaves against sky has grown important. In these last years, pinned inside a routine, ignoring the world as it grows more unfamiliar, I can only draw the exactitude of my presence from this familiar change. It’s a ballet: Small, private, lovely, and when I lay awake those nights between August and August, growing almost stagnant in the small circle of my mind, this was my window out into the ever changing world.

Quick to express, always, the fact of ‘getting better’. Do you know, like the relevant nature of size, progress only exists by comparison? Distance, the measurement of space, is a manmade construct, and the word ‘progress’ is simply the information that you aren’t standing in the same place you were before. As far as foreward or backward is concerned, in a world of endless planes and dimensions, there’s really no such thing. Just a marker, ‘Look here, I’m not where I was then.’

The voice in my head is all too laconic as it remarks, “Ah. Well, that’s progress.”

Let’s talk about David. He would walk outside my window all those late hours, right under the dancing leaves. I didn’t know who he was and I was afraid. I didn’t picture ghosts, but something more malevolent. An old shape. Something I knew.

I never looked. The blinds would be open, a provision for when I wake in confusion; like all traditional runaways, I navigate by the stars. He would only pass when my back was to the window. I would freeze, silent, huddled in the dark, waiting for his shadow to cross the bedroom wall. The house is on a lower level than the road, so it gives the impression of passer-bys looming over.

Who was it? What did they mean, walking past a private road at this hour? Why here? Why now?

I could have turned and looked, but to ’see’ is the scary part. It’s never the hook, the claw, the knife sliding through your viscera that imprints horror, it’s the image itself. Not death, but living through the dying. The idea of turning to find eyes staring in at me was more than I could bear. 

So I didn’t see anything to put my fear at ease, either, until the night your falter drove me out.

I insist that your voice is the most beautiful thing I ever heard of. And that night it cracked, and ran in rivulets down my mind and over the tight knot behind my breast-bone, I thrashed around unwilling to find the same old ground beneath my feet.

I’ve imagined myself into this corner, and you made me aware- that it’s this world you live in, and this world I’ll have to engage in if ever I’m to find the person behind that voice.

Do you know the raw material of you disorients me? That you could be flesh, blood, bone. Man- raw as dirt and creek and rotted leaves? That you walk along this same earth, but in a totally separate reality. One I could reach if I could only start in the right direction.

But it would take moving from this place where I’ve grown so still. Moving from the frozen trance where shadows bind me to silence.

That’s why I so love the leaves, I think. They are a part of the real world and my imagination, both. They are an invitation to the world; to dirt and creeks and rotted leaves; to birth and death-

and Life.

So that night I went and walked down the hill after midnight. I felt such a need driving me down, down, past the shadows of trees and the darkness that is such a horror and a fascination.

And half-way down I realized he was coming up at the same time. The impetuous urge to go struck me as suddenly foolish as I walked, defenseless and alone in the dark. Blam^blam^blam^blam, my heart pounded recognizing this form from imagination: My ex looked this way coming at me out of memory; the werewolf came just this way out of childhood nightmares- a point of  blackness separating from the dark, becoming its own approaching shadow.

My hands clutched at nothing, throat working to swallow as the inevitable became unavoidable. What do you say at 1a.m. when you’re about to meet your own murderer on a deserted street?

I said nothing. He grew large and then passed by me. We nodded. It was nothing, and it fell around my ears like rain.

I continued to walk, brain pinging helplessly, and then I flipped around to call at the receding shadow, “What’s your name?”

“Da-vid?” He was startled into answering. 

“Very good!!”

I flipped back around. Maybe he paused. Maybe he went home to retrieve his murder weapon. I was lost into the darkness though, jubilant that I’d met my phantom and learned his name.

I moved on more confident, less fearful, thinking, “Well… that’s progress.”

 

Brain Zip

vzzzzzzz

zwoooosh!

I’ve been packeted up for a few. How vague should I be, in explanation? I d’no. Processing some *shit* with some help from a professional. So my writing, lately, when it comes in streaks or fart-bubbles isn’t at all intended for public consumption. 

The resultant purges have me a little surprised. Surprised quiet. Zip-locked. It’s an “interesting” experience. How’s that for self-distancing?

I’m gonna try to refrain from pscho-babble on here, but pair someone self-involved with a self-involving process and the results can be… nauseating. I’m wholly interested in piecing myself at the moment. Which isn’t to be confused with liking myself, but I’m engrossed, and when I’m not doing that I’m throwing all attention into totally non-wordy, non self-aware shit, cus there’s only so much of that even an egotist can take.

So that’s what I’m up to. I’m sure I’ll lose interest shortly, cus that’s what I do. So stay tuned, there will be more garbledy-gook here. Eventually.

relevant reads

tiempo