Notebook vomit 2

"You miss the point of missing the point".

Notebook barf

I have a pretty disorganized brain. My notebook looks pretty much like my brain does from the inside- sprawling doodles, sketches, small notes, long rambling diatribes, catchy little phrases that I liked, quotes, etc... all thrown together haphazardly, in all directions, peppered with doodles and arrows, taking no note of which side is up or where the lines on the paper are. I find it the most relaxing way to write, and the more relaxed I am, the easier it is to come up with something I like.

I had an idea for a blog post that would just be a list of the disembodied (or, "disempoemed") bits and peices that I've always meant to work into something, but I don't have the time to sift through the jumble and come up with that. At the moment, anyway, I'd rather mention something that happened with said disorganized journal today, which made me extremely happy.

I wrote a little poem by accident today. As I was daydreaming in the booth, waiting for the show to start, I found a little phrase that I liked, drifting through my brain. "I am engaged in the business of thinking".

I continued to engage in said business for a bit, until the audience came in. I like to eye the audience from my booth-nest, and size them up, and I noticed a couple of white-bearded old men sitting together. I talk with a lot of white-bearded old men at work - none of them know much about computers. They are, generally, delightful, and they all tend to have this sort of cheerful, "white bearded old man" vibe coming off them. Or maybe that's just a professor thing. Anyway, I scribbled down the thought, right under the first one, "All white bearded old men look the same".

I rested my pen inside the journal as the show started. It remained there, in my bag, for the walk home. Upon returning home, I saw that the pen had rolled around between the pages and made a couple of marks. One of them was a line through the words "I am", in the first phrase. Another was a mark after the first phrase that looked something like a comma. The effect was this:

"Engaged in the business of thinking, all white-bearded old men look the same"

Which I liked more than both peices separately. I'm calling it my "accidental poem". Chance is awesome.

So maybe sometimes it pays to have a journal that looks like you threw up into it.

Ladybird Ladybird (2)

Favorite quote of the moment:

"Everything here is a ghost of something else."

Blast from the past

I found my blog from high school! No, I will not give you the address, because it's full of embarrassing teenageriness. Reading that blog is an excruciatingly embarrassing experience. But, I did find a number of poems that I wrote. Once again, still pretty embarrassing, and I have eliminated the angstiest of them, but for the sheer nostalgia of it (and because I have like nothing creative in my brain these days), here is a pretty crappy poem I wrote when I was 17.

Untitled

Through the white noise and the static
I had to squint to see you
(Telling someone else's jokes,
and putting laughter in a box)

But what's the point of all my education
If nothing makes sense anyway?
Should I live like Hunter Thompson
Or die like Hemmingway?

And how do you obstruct my view
A thousand miles away?

It was so absurd I had to laugh.
(and laugh. and LAUGH)

It was so funny at the time
I finished off the poem with a rhyme.

Oops... kind of slacking lately

I don't have much that's creative and good. Maybe in a day or so I'll substitute in some more chunks of my play. Basically... I'm a failure.

Totally just lived vicariously through a friend making a major life choice. Yep. Enjoyed that. It was like crazy dramatic, like on TV except in real life. And man, it makes me want to swim.

And?

And bold, like wheat sifted through the long, pale fingers of a woman's name forgotten, I drew in my breath like a cloak around me and forgave.

Ladybird Ladybird

I gots nothing to post, so I'll fill some space with the opening monologue from my play, Ladybird Ladybird. See if you can make sense of it.

Sunny is mentally ill, and appears distracted, disoriented, and has a twitch and a stutter, which often breaks up the flow of her speech. Despite this, she manages to maintain an eerie sense of insight. She finds, on the ground, a charred copy of a large English textbook, and scrubs at the soot on the cover with her sleeve. She tries to read a passage but her twitch makes it difficult. Agitated, she flicks through the pages.)

SUNNY: No, no, no, no. I’m not in here. Understand? I belong, I have, I belong right here, in the, in, right here. Right here, between page three hundred sixty-two and three hundred sixty - and a half, three hundred sixty point three repeating, page, page, this page, that’s my page, right? But I’m not here. All these letters running off in all directions, like they know something I don’t, and here I am more lost than found with three hundred and sixty two pages and not a one of them more than half an ounce, half, three quarters, like they didn’t think I’d check, I’d check, I’d check?

(leafs through a few more pages)

As if she even noticed. As if she would appreciate my contribution. As if, as is, as if that nose on her face weren’t as long as a fucking telephone wire with all the pages she’s written. Three hundred sixty? Thirty days in September, that’s what I thought, that’s what she told me, and I said, why not? Rearrange the calendar, put her right on time, right on time, and it’ll all make sense in a language only we two understand, which was a sweet thought and everything but she doesn’t even know my goddamn name.

(She reads from a page)

‘Tyger, Tyger, burning bright.”

Poets. Feh.

(Turns a few more pages)

“It is a melancholy object to those who walk through this great town or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads, and cabin doors crowded with beggars of the female sex...”

Three hundred and sixty-three kinds of nonsense.

Duck Hilarity

How do you laugh when you have a beak?

BTW

Oh, and by the way;

To that great unfathomable nothing with the fishhook smile and the sprained angle whose adolescent anguish annoys and whose unplaceability gets caught in my throat every time, you who languishes after even the coldest of showers, you with that tired philips screwdriver tinkering in the cogs of my poetry machine, you, you, you, you --

You left your keys on my coffee table.

I am so deep

ME: I think Splenda tastes like evil.

COWORKER: Evil tastes sweet?

ME: Of course it does, man... Of course it does.

Yeah man. I have thoughts.

Months of minutes

Months of minutes in the mending

And at last the world is a kaleidoscope:

Beautiful, but in pieces.

Twee

Twee!

Words, words, words

I made a resolution to write every single day, and despite how stupid busy I am, the whim has held strong. Third entry. Since I'm almost dead, I don't have much in the way of deep thoughts or creative snippets. I did, however, learn three new words today, and since I can't think of anything else interesting, I'm going to review them here.

1: Vulpine: In the manner of foxes. Crafty. Sneaky. Trickster-figure. My director used this word today to refer to Fagan, one of the characters in the play I'm in. A tasty little word. Although I always liked foxes - I think they get a bad rap in folklore. Too many chicken farmers making up stories.

2: Platitude: A meaningless or overused statement, presented as though it held deep wisdom. I could choose trope or cliche, but "platitudes" has a nice rhythm to it. I want to use it in something. I don't know what yet.

3: Phantasmagoria (or phantasmagoric): my FAVORITE one. It means a constantly shifting, dreamlike procession of imagined or hallucinated images and ideas. Delerium. Haphazard, loosely related or unrelated stream of consciousness. It comes from a device used in a circus in the 1800s that is sometimes cited as a precursor to film - the quick succession of images used to create the illusion of reality. Don't really know how it works, just that it really, really spooked the people of the time.

Seriously. Say that word out loud. "Phantasmagoria". Mmmmm....

Kinda thinking I should have named the blog that, actually. Kind of fits. We are such stuff as phantasmagoria are made of...? Nah.

Like

I catch words like I catch a cold.

As dreams are... fuck it.

About twenty minutes ago, I felt a whim. This whim started to tickle, about three inches behind my left ear. The whim nagged me continuously for those twenty minutes, the tickling got worse and worse, and, in the end, I had to follow it. So I started a blog.

My whims are unreliable. Perhaps this one will fizzle out and die quickly. But here is the general idea:

I have a lot of thoughts. Generally they sort of drift away, or get scribbled on the back of something and then lost. With a blog (my whim said to me) maybe I could keep it all together and make something useful out of it. I'll set a goal to write every day, just little snippets, thoughts, and poems. Perhaps they will interest you. Perhaps not. You never know with whims.

I'll probably dance a dangerous dance with pretension and self-absorbtion, which is why I hope to apply a healthy dose of humor and self-deprecation. We'll see how that goes.

So this blog will contain such stuff as gets scribbled in the margins of my class notes, such stuff as gets tangled up in swirly doodles of my journal, such stuff as I forget when I can't find a pen. Such stuff as whims are made on.

God help me. I've gone pretentious already.