self-titled: ^_^
dear world, dear you, dear ma
I wrote this today and when I finished, I felt infinite. Like I had swallowed the universe and it was pulsing through my body. Then I read it and I realized what a joke I am. I had cranked out something so trite and so pretentious, it made me ill. But here it is anyway.
"So what's up. I'll say this straightaway, I am writing this under the guise that it's for me only, I don't see that happening.
It's Friday afternoon and I'm sitting in a starbucks in Harvard Square hopelessly awaiting a phone call that's not coming. I'm listening to Mum and already developing a hand cramp.
I'm planning on coming back into Cambridge later tonight for Death Cab, so what circumstances brought me here early? It was a gorgeous day, I had records to buy, and then only thing I wanted to do at school was talk to Brenda and she was out cold. But I'm not here to write bout Brenda, I've done enough of that in e-mails to her.
It's funny, on the bus ride here I wasn't thinking about my upcoming purchases, nor was I thinking about Brenda, I was doing my usual pre-writing of what I was going to write when I landed at Starbucks.
And of course it was fragmented as ever, I'd work on a sentence and it'd drift into another topic altogether. There's no outline, and there is no hope of organization.
Why do people write in journals and lock them away? That might be what I'm doing here: trying to understand that. Writing with the mindset that this is for an audience of one: me. but I still don't get it. Why pour out pages and pages of internalization only to keep it internalized elsewhere. Maybe it's the act of reaching in oneself and pulling out the fragments one by one and freeing them from bumping, twisting, covering, shattering other ones. I guess that must be it, but really how much less fragmented is a cluttered page of stream of consciousness/ For each line I fill I can turn and go in a completely different direction, and then from that direction I can split more ways and for what? You can never exhaust your thoughts. You just start repeating them in slightly different structures. Nothing ever becomes clear it just becomes a mess on paper instead of your head.
So why write at all? Write to share. That's what I do. I know the things flying around my head, putting them down doesn't help me at all. So you share. Give it to the people who care about you, give it to the people who you want to understand.
Or maybe I just feel that way because I am a goddam genius and to not share my mind is doing the world harm.
That's right: I'm a goddam genius. I sit here in starbucks listening to brilliant icelandic electronica that I appreciate, writing down brilliant words like a man possessed. I have appreciation for things, understanding of things, passions for them that so few do.
Honestly, what am I? Am I just a total fucking pompous self-righteous self-important fucker? Is it wrong, is it incorrect of me to look at other people and know that I'm so much deeper than they are? Well shit, obviously I know so much of our depth is not on display to others, but can I look at someone random and for a second believe that he is a deep person with sensitivity, concerns, fears and desires? No. So many people are so damn one-dimensional. No one has my thoughts. No one can be filled by music and moved to tears by the sheer power pulsing through them like I can. And of course I know that people really can, but not enough of them. For every person that is like me, that comes close to me, there are hundreds of flat, sitcom characters.
AHHHH this is maddening! Do I Believe this?
It's hard not to believe it on some level. In our lives, how many people do we meet, who we get to know, get to see inside even the tiniest percentage of how well we know and see ourselves?
Too damn few. None as well. 1 or 2 if we're lucky that comparison is even worth it. And all of us, I think enough people that we can recognize them as having some depth.
But everyone else: sitcom characters. Voices on the radio. Sidekicks in the movies. We laugh at them, we get angry, we sometimes relate, but mainly they just exist in our life as decoration. And it's good to have the decoration, because honestly, what's a film without the comic relief, the bully, the guy on the corner selling hot dogs. It'd be a boring movie without the extras and the lesser supporting characters, but without the hero and the villain and the love interest, you have nothing but a vapid, even if busy and brightly colored, backdrop.
But then, to extend the film metaphor, you have the way I feel sometimes: Me, acting against a blue screen that's never filled in.
I'm about to start circling, so I'm going to have a smoke and gather my thoughts.
Dammit. I had one drag left and some dude asked for a light, and I didn't want to be rude and take the drag and blow the smoke in his face. SO I threw the butt got the lighter and now all I want is that last drag. I almost sparked up another. but I didn't.
So I decided outside that I'm posting this. And what's the worst, I come off as a big cynical misanthropic asshole. I've been down that road. But I don't care because I'm right. I'm right because I have it in perspective.
If you're offended by what you've read, hurt, angry, whatever, step away from the situation and look at it in reverse. How well do you know me? How much have you tried to understand me? How far out of your way have you gone to reach out and how far have you gone out of your way to me when I reach out to you? How well do I know you? How much have you reached out to me so that I can know you? I'm not writing this to anyone in particular, and I'm not writing it so it only pertains to me. I am every person, and the audience is also every person. I'm the hero writing to the villain. I'm the love interest writing to the supporting character. I'm the extra writing to another extra's extra. And in each scenario, the one writing is the hero in a whole other unrelated movie.
But, and here I go contradicting myself, I'm also the her. I'm the universe. me me me. this is the narcissism that accompanies genius. The narcissism only rivaled by the hideous hatred of oneself.
I've come under fire recently. I've been told that I'm shortsighted, that because for so long I've been looking for someone, that I think I find it at every step. Well DUH. of course. Of course of course of course. Of course this is how it fucking works. Everyone is looking, unless they've found someone, and if they've found someone they keep working it until one day the fragments have exhausted into too short a circle. There's every chance the guy who served me coffee could become my best friend. He asked what I wanted, I said small coffee, he said $1.53, I handed him $2, I got change he said thanks have a great day I said thanks, you too. And at that point, it ended, I know that it was time to move on. I had nothing left to say and neither did he. Our business was finished. I keep looking. You meet someone, you talk to them, you see what you have to talk about and you decide if there is more or if you go talk to someone else. So yeah, whatever I'm looking and I've been looking. I was looking last year. And sometimes when we're looking we look real hard and try anything. Kate last year. She created so many fragments in my jumbled head and I think I made a few in hers. And I picked them out and threw them at her for a long while. Time passes as it does, and the I like you fragments exhausted themselves into a recognizable and discardable loop. I was looking very hard and found something and went through with it and learned that this is not the love interest. And now she lives across the hall and is a wonderful supporting character.
Regrets, I've had a few. Do I regret last spring's Kate saga? Some aspects of course. I certainly regret the desperation that I give off, but I can't change the fact that I want very much to find that two-way channel of desiring to know and understand. I feel foolish for the road I traveled, but not for the trip itself and not for its destination.
What the hell am I getting at? ah yes blinding desperation, wanting something too much and for the wrong reasons. bullshit. I may be eager but I'm certainly not ignorant. I'll be damned if I'm told I'm missing the obvious because I don't... remember earlier? I'm a deep, misunderstood but amazing in-tune genius. I don't misinterpret words and actions. If Kate wants to tell me I was an idiot for holding on to hope last year, well, she can but she's wrong. For I am the universe, I see through lies and fears and hesitation and see truth, longings and curiosity. And when it's over, I can weigh them all and know that things ended up all right.
Why have I been given this curse. Is it a gift? why only me. I just realized something about that whole Kate story. It doesn't work. no, it does. Here's why I thought it didn't: because if through all that time there was reason for me to hold on, then why now that nothing came from it should I have held on at all? It seems pretty broken logic, huh? Well, I offer you this: I know now that Kate and I are friends, supporting characters to each other's hero. I know that I don't want to curl up next to her and read a book or be the last person she says goodnight to. it just took me a long time to figure it out because she didn't know, or at least wasn't 100% sure and really didn't want to find out. If she wanted to find out, we would've found out sooner.
And through that whole ordeal, I am the stupid, pitiable character because I want to find out. You take a base or you don't, don't keep hitting fouls and taking time-outs.
So this is my manifesto to the world, as well as to every individual. Know what you want to be. Don't be angry for being called someone's extra when you've cast them as the same in your own movie. And don't deny that your movie needs all 3 tiers of characters and then refuse to hold auditions. Know what you want, know what you don't - don't have bogus casting calls and don't look the other way when someone auditions. Get out of your head, don't deliver monologues on a closed set in front of a broken bluescreen. It could be the greatest story ever told, but not if no one hears it.
-bp"