Thursday, February 26, 2009
the truth
Right now I am trying to write stories based on the truth, but from the other person's side of view. Unfortunately, they are turning out a little flat-sided.. Who said the truth was interesting? I suppose my next step should be to change reality when I feel like it, but that is going to be painful for a creative realist obsessed with getting every detail of reality down realistically.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Haunted
Is this prose too contrived?
PS. I'm moving away from Seattle, getting another masters but in something else. Hopefully New York. I have to get away so badly I'm willing to use a knife to sever a limb to get out of the restraints tying me, preventing me from moving. Too much movement, and I'll suffocate myself. So i have to be careful how I escape.
Creative Writing is the new major. I already have the references and the book and stories. Now I'm writing again. I'd stopped for a long time. So be patient. This is the opposite of the free-flowing stuff that used to betray me.
Haunted
I'd like to sustain a pristine apartment, but in truth my apartment is nothing less that trashy. Like our culture, its need was to earn the name, then discard it. Lots of 13 year old girls listen to bands called Garbage, Filth, or Smut. But when these glorified titles are directed towards the same adolescent girls that carry their band stickers on their notebooks, it's taken personally. Parents are notified, tears are stifled, and clothes, friends, crooked teeth are all carefully re-examined. These girls have been around. Oh, sure, call my place cluttered. It's no virgin. Survey it closer, and it's frayed on the edges, scattered, but at least there's no unwanted leakage. And even though the word infect creates such a potent thrill with stainless steel countertops and hygienic equipment stored away carefully, sterile antibiotic hand cleanser at your every disposal. Those houses can be a little daunting to enter. Like watching a girl so perfect you can't even daydream about her sweat. You want to measure her imperfections, the little things that make you churn at night, turning your sheets into a heap of trapped heat. Instead, you wake up with the taste of your nightmare, a dream about a guy you knew twenty years ago. His face disappears as you kick off your comforter.
My sheets are changed every so often. My laundry is clean, and the smudges of dirt on the kitchen counters is relatively new but deep. The right kind of dirt is only a storehouse of nutrients. But looking at anything as less than radioactive now is as unlikely as it is to find a clique that does not exclude. My items are not covered in dust, as they are clearly picked up and strewn across the room every once and a while, but they are not maintained properly. The proof is in the way my features slacken when I bother to chronicle my possessions.
My gaze is defiant. I'm being held inside a police station with the mirror posing as a window for the cops to study my facial expressions, and I know it. It's amazing to me how rehearsed a few equations are, while the rest is reckless, trying to make you forget that you ever could memorize anything. The place feels unfamiliar because I'm entering my own brain. I want to get out, even though I think I used to belong here. My moods change, but every time I unlock room 406 a new book is left unfinished. Note the lack of restraint, heavy air flow, an anchor pulling a leg into the sea, an ambiance making my room interfuse. There is too much stuff. None of it goes where it belongs. Efficiency is the last rule that applies to this place. It's clear there's a rare sense of an aesthetic talent having thrown back too many shots of vodka, and there is always the ghost of a child crying. "Daddy, where are you?"
Perhaps I hide my potential to keep myself safe from prospective buyers. People take advantage of me enough as it is, but I get the feeling they don't really understand the price tag put on my head.
PS. I'm moving away from Seattle, getting another masters but in something else. Hopefully New York. I have to get away so badly I'm willing to use a knife to sever a limb to get out of the restraints tying me, preventing me from moving. Too much movement, and I'll suffocate myself. So i have to be careful how I escape.
Creative Writing is the new major. I already have the references and the book and stories. Now I'm writing again. I'd stopped for a long time. So be patient. This is the opposite of the free-flowing stuff that used to betray me.
Haunted
I'd like to sustain a pristine apartment, but in truth my apartment is nothing less that trashy. Like our culture, its need was to earn the name, then discard it. Lots of 13 year old girls listen to bands called Garbage, Filth, or Smut. But when these glorified titles are directed towards the same adolescent girls that carry their band stickers on their notebooks, it's taken personally. Parents are notified, tears are stifled, and clothes, friends, crooked teeth are all carefully re-examined. These girls have been around. Oh, sure, call my place cluttered. It's no virgin. Survey it closer, and it's frayed on the edges, scattered, but at least there's no unwanted leakage. And even though the word infect creates such a potent thrill with stainless steel countertops and hygienic equipment stored away carefully, sterile antibiotic hand cleanser at your every disposal. Those houses can be a little daunting to enter. Like watching a girl so perfect you can't even daydream about her sweat. You want to measure her imperfections, the little things that make you churn at night, turning your sheets into a heap of trapped heat. Instead, you wake up with the taste of your nightmare, a dream about a guy you knew twenty years ago. His face disappears as you kick off your comforter.
My sheets are changed every so often. My laundry is clean, and the smudges of dirt on the kitchen counters is relatively new but deep. The right kind of dirt is only a storehouse of nutrients. But looking at anything as less than radioactive now is as unlikely as it is to find a clique that does not exclude. My items are not covered in dust, as they are clearly picked up and strewn across the room every once and a while, but they are not maintained properly. The proof is in the way my features slacken when I bother to chronicle my possessions.
My gaze is defiant. I'm being held inside a police station with the mirror posing as a window for the cops to study my facial expressions, and I know it. It's amazing to me how rehearsed a few equations are, while the rest is reckless, trying to make you forget that you ever could memorize anything. The place feels unfamiliar because I'm entering my own brain. I want to get out, even though I think I used to belong here. My moods change, but every time I unlock room 406 a new book is left unfinished. Note the lack of restraint, heavy air flow, an anchor pulling a leg into the sea, an ambiance making my room interfuse. There is too much stuff. None of it goes where it belongs. Efficiency is the last rule that applies to this place. It's clear there's a rare sense of an aesthetic talent having thrown back too many shots of vodka, and there is always the ghost of a child crying. "Daddy, where are you?"
Perhaps I hide my potential to keep myself safe from prospective buyers. People take advantage of me enough as it is, but I get the feeling they don't really understand the price tag put on my head.
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