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| oh lordie, lordie, peggy sue done got married
oh, joe, oh goodness gracious, who are you?
or, maybe, how are you?
no...who are you... better start there...
cause your (sic) not that joe from waybackwhen who canoodled up north every free chance he got and misbehaved but laughed and didn't long and didn't fret and didn't do much of anything save save over his ominusha warlords 2 file and eat alot of cold ravioli out of the can.
and you're not the joe that became overwhelmed by all that mercy, by all that grace, by all that fingers-in-your-ear lifestyle of piety and perfection. keeping in mind that piety and perfection are both never actualized, and that this is somehow okay. never mind problems with the book of job (doesn't say shit!).
oh, you might get it if you could here my tone of voice.
and you're not the joe that ran down the neck of a bottle and back up the collar of a well tailored piece of clothing (thank you very much), while brushing up on ancient greek and marveling himself at his own incredulity. or whatever. keep in mind on this one that he (me) was a hurt boy, a sickly boy, an underground boy (thanks, dostoevsky; here's your cameo, filthy, filthy man)
and then...the new one. well, the almost new one. the one that wanted to be loved (let's not shit ourselves, remember?) and to love, and now, now that he's got it in his goddamn darwinfuck fingers and thumb care package he can't seem to shut up all the other joes, all the other boys, and men coming off as boys. can't shut them up, can't get to sleep, can't do nothing but take the pills they actually gave him this time. oh yeah. he's got pills, love, and a yet again over-stimulated mind.
i just don't know what to do. not in that instantaneous sense, almost categorically, almost ontologically. i'm ashamed at almost everything i've ever created. i just never feel good enough, and consequentally, i'm chasing after running water. at least, i suppose, this time it's not into a holding cell or a skinnynecked bottle.
in the words of john lennon, "let the fuckers figure this one out!"
that will be all.
 | Currently
Manhattan
By Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Michael Murphy, Mariel Hemingway, Meryl Streep
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| old old poems and new new resolutions (working the early shifts)
american haikus in ink:
this place in the sun
with blankets soaking in bronze
makes me uneasy
it's quiet and warm
kind of like six months ago
inside my stomach
the television
that escape from reality
blares the evening news
(end)
i used to be an idea. never a person, never really much of an anything. or maybe i was something, but now it's remote and worn out, and what's real is sleeping in, or sleeping inside of me. what i've found to be simply marvelous is how one can strive for years for one form of identity, then once that identity is actualized, is captured, the former must fade away. i can barely write anymore, these days.
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| Where You Gonna Go With a Head That Empty?
I'd kill for a lead player. For a Mike Mogis. For a Johnny Greenwood.
Then again, they'd kill for me to keep to a decent writing schedule. Dusty would, at least. He tries.
I'm all over these days. All over scales, songs, sounds, people. The last, as always in my life, are either exceptionally well to me or else categorically the opposite. Oh well.
I try, too. Try and try and try. In part, I do well. In part, I feel a miserable failure. Who doesn't even clean up anymore. Or get down.
But you. Stop interfering. You're a lousy scaremonger.
I said it.
love, and sorry about the long absence.
i make no promises.
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| Part Four of a Devotional
Oh, you know my life is good. I've got it made. And it's been some time now since I've been able to say as much. I mean, my life is really good. And I'm glad for it, just as I'm glad someone had the ingenuity to come up with italics. I have a happy and healthy relationship, good friends, a prospective job in reach, and am on pretty good terms with most of my family for the first time in years. I'm very much enjoying my summer.
And yet, tonight found me rather discontent. And I'm still cracking out why, but here are some conclusions.
First, I've wanted so long to be in the good relationship, to have the good friends, and to be financially sound for years now. I've never had the first, and only have sporadically had the rest. And with it all in my grasp, my life now seems to have come full circle, I feel a self-made man (who gets by with a little help from his friends), one to whom many can turn as a paradigm for just such a man. Only now I feel as if I've just, say, finalized the Louisiana Purchase, and now there's this enormous section of land that is all but uncharted. Now what do I do? Talking to Eric, I realize that what I've wanted from life seems to have been until this point the bare essentials to one's happiness. And now that the essentials (I mean no disrespect by using that term) have been had, I'm struggling to accept that I am indeed content. I don't know what to do. I don't know how to maintain a stable and wonderful relationship. I want it to last as long as it can (I've taken to call it indefinitely), yet I don't know how to do so. What I do with that aspect, and all these newfound aspects, is to take them a day at a time. I love my girlfriend. I love my friends. I love my family. There's just so much love in my life, and I'm still adjusting to it. I'm a stable person for once. Go figure.
Returning to God, finding love in one's life seems to do something to one's spirituality. Love seems something transcendent to the intellect, superior to rational thinking. The old standard is that it is temporary insanity. It is something that day-to-day cognition rejects, and yet I can feel it. It seems to have become a part of me, and as such, has opened my eyes to the possibility of something else transcendent. It seems like a lot of hippie garbage, but the idea of love seems to suggest the idea of (g)God. Not God as a stoic in the clouds, the god of the Deists, nor the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition- a God of (recalling Mad-Eye Moody) "constant vigilance" and focus; no, simply something that, despite an intellectual cop-out, is mere emotion in part, and faith in the other. Though I doubt my readers may understand full what I'm trying to describe. I simply recognize something in my life in which I put full faith that is void of any rational certainty. And if such a thing can exist in one instance, the idea of it being, or existing in another seems an idea worth seriously investigating. I feel, in summation, that my spirituality these last few months has become verifiable, not merely abstract, and that substantial progress is being made. I feel I'm no longer wasting around in the impractical, but actually living (and as a result, learning) in the physical world now, free of earlier abstractions. It's nice.
"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans"
-John Lennon
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| Part Three of a Devotional
On occasion, most notably through conversation, I seem to reach a point beyond which very little seems to be of any concern. I believe it is because concern is the topic of conversation, and when it has been defeated by that conversation, there seems little left to do logically than reflect on my success and enjoy my coffee, which I'll undoubtedly be having at the time. Then I return to the mundane life, where what little truth I feel I've found becomes equally irrelevant, save one recurring thought. I wonder if there are individuals in the world who never seek Truth (capital T), never push the limits of their values, never really "value" anything. I'm beginning to believe they exist. Like the scene in Annie Hall when Woody Allen learns that a couple he's just met continues to have a successful relationship because they (in an Allenesque sense of ironic humor, naturally) both have no independent thoughts, beliefs, or concerns of their own. What do you do with yourself all day? You must be continuously sleeping, or continuously talking. And you better hope your favorite team blew it, or hit it big. Perhaps in high school that's where all the drama arises- an inability to rest and listen to you thoughts, and to others' for that matter.
Oh, I'm fed up to death with all of you fundamentalists- of all sorts. I have to move away from the previous themes of the last two entries, and touch less on God for the moment and more on believers and nonbelievers. Theists and Atheists. I myself have been convinced with almost absolute certainty throughout my life that there is and is not a God. And, understanding the somewhat inevitable dangers of skepticism, I have to say that both theistic and atheistic fundamentalism is the greater danger. I've not entirely decided what the reconciling point is, but to be absolute on anything seems to discredit the almost naturally ambivalent state of the human intellect. It's a slap in the face to thought in all forms. For to be certain is to be without thought, and to be without thought is to be rather animalistic, in my opinion. Struggling with the broad themes of reality, or at least (as always) the reality one perceives, should be a daily exercise. I worry for those who do not. It has created war for millenia now. To openly and unquestionably embrace any philosophy seems to call into question the value of philosophy itself. The same of course applies to any religious creed. That's why I'm doing what I'm doing in these entires, or, in my life in general. That's why I seem to have gone out of my way to be unorthodox. I don't know if I'll ever find what I'm looking for, but I know it will not rely in a self-asserting creed, with the exception of course, of "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." That old maxim, you know.
What really appalls me about American life in the twenty-first century is the ease we have in never questioning, in never evaluating anything short of our dinners. We find ourselves trapped in careers, in relationships, in contracts and ordeals that never fulfill us, and we seem surprised. Why have we allowed ourselves to settle ourselves so easily into contentment and convenience? Why is it as simple as going to Church on Sundays, work on workdays, and nothing else any other day? Why do we not care about how little we will be here? Why do we make such absurd assumptions that there is something beyond all this? There may be, and I as much as the next person hopes there is, but until I'm certain, which I'll never seem to be, I'll keep focusing on trying to figure it out, and I plead that you do the same. Keep talking.
Joe
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