why try?

Why try?

When I reach out I inadvertently push people away. I've pushed away a woman named Anna. I'm pushing away a woman named Eleanor.

Eleanor's is a slow-motion car crash. Pain and disappointment get heaped on with broken glass shards of chance opportunity, hell even hope, thrown in.

Why try when all I do is lose the friends I have? Is that the taboo to dating within your friend network? I'd hate to think that there's some kind of unwritten rule regarding this.

I don't know what I'm doing. I truly don't know. One hand reaches out while the other covers my face, a childish attempt at hiding myself at shielding me from my own shame at what I'm doing.

I don't know what I'm doing. I lack confidence completely when it comes to personal, intimate relations. I am a dolt. I am an idiot. I am a fool. I reveal this, and the person with whom I share this rare moment of my foolishness loses all respect for me. Hell she even hates me. That's what I sense--hate.

I set out to prove what I tell myself daily--you're a useless, youthless, toothless, bum. Every day brings me closer to my nadir, a nadir that I've set for myself as a personal goal.

This is my doing. I am an accomplished loser. Give me a job somebody. I need to take my mind of my own self pity.

An idea big enough to murder you

This idea of an Eleanor is big enough to murder me.
She's eating me up inside. I act foolish. I'm rendered stupid by the occasion. I don't know what to do.

Here I sit at five in the morning, emerging perhaps from a dream but one remembered as an unbroken feeling in heart and preoccupation in mind. I am consumed by an idea of a person. I am consumed by time. I am consumed by the various steps taken off a well-laid path for me. She had given me a sign. I continued to play along. A week goes by. I come closer, but still I keep my distance. She arrives at a show. I smile at her. She's indifferent to me. I can accept this as a norm for women who are interested. It's part of the game; it can be.

She invites me over to a little party. I arrive. I make myself a fool. She calls me out for what she notes, if I recall correctly, as my vanity, my self-absorption. I've become an ungrateful bordering on obnoxious and self-centered asshole. The night ends with me saying goodbye in my usual virtually stand-offish manner. The word alone is all I can muster with maybe an accompanying hand gesture. I can't hug her. I can't kiss her. I can't even touch her. She's always with someone. I don't stick around long enough or muster the force to speak my interest. No, I'm paralyzed by the moment's possibilities. So I wave goodbye in my all-too-mechanical manner and fade into a long tirade against myself at my car. There I sit for an hour beating myself up for my childish behavior. And that's me--no substance. I'm Fake Sinatra. It's the little joke that's spoken between us about me that has an unvarnished truth to it. And it's that kind of thing that reminds me how she's a truth, an idea of a world big enough to murder mine.

I shouldn't say that it's murder. It's me killing me. But the killing is personally painful and carried out every waking and non-waking moment. She's on my mind. She's been on my mind. And now my actions, which I feel jeopardize any opportunity in the little window she provided become the source of so much self-destruction. It's not so much that I know what I should have done. In some instances I do, but I have an intense fear and shame to present myself to her. It's destroying me. My quiet and empty world is disrupted and easily so.

Maybe I should go back to being a creep. I still am. No, there's a weight to this moment that's killing me. It's forcing me into a hastier and hastier retreat from any social reality that I've established. That I've seen her for two weeks now since she spoke to me in a drunken spell about wanting a man to take her, wanting me to do this perhaps. She recalls the event two weeks ago a few days later where I see her. The last thing she remembers is talking with Kendra, the conversation that forced me into the third person. I recall her saying, "I've embarrassed him" or "He's shy." I was kind of listening but not looking her way. Then I came in and touched her on the steps. I put my arms around her. She rubbed her face in mine. The moves were somewhat electric. She leaves soon after. I make a foolish and ill planned attempt at pursuit. The night ends. She gives me the eyes I know so well that Sunday. She's charmed. I see her two times in the week for yoga. I see her again that Friday night at a large show. I attempt to get close. She's keeping me away. She invites me over, and I turn that around to being foolish and stand-offish. I reveal my childish and utterly selfish demeanor. I'm unequipped to deal with a situation. Every moment is a make or break situation. The tension rises. I don't know how to handle myself and begin to bubble over in ways that I can't handle. At one point she hates me, commanding her dog to bite me. It's over? I don't know. I don't know what I am doing.

This idea is killing me. When I'm away she's on my mind. When we're near I try to hold my composure to the point that my lack of action is a measured attempt to hide any interest. Instead I leak an inner reflection of the demons of my desire, my fear, my absolute uncertainty in what to do next. Every second reveals either a chance or an end. I don't know what to do.

The weekend wears on and we see each other again and again. The topic is sex, and I am utterly intimidated. She's the connoisseur, the sipper of a wide variety of sexual experiences. I'm the closeted hide-and-go-seek man child. My last sexual encounter, if I exclude my rather sudden and mostly missing night with her was years, years ago. That was a nagging point that led to my arrival onto the singles scene. I singled her out, and gave her my show, my Fake Sinatra show. I sang her Lady in Red and she was at least impressed. Then again, I think she prefers to be pursued in front of her exes. Most nights where I scored points with her were quite fun and quite public displays of affection toward her with her exes in view. Now, I've crossed the threshold, and I am starting to lose control of my carefree attitude. Now it's serious all the way. Too much I fear and I will lose her. I've lost myself already in a series of foolish steps. I don't even want to open my mouth. Nothing worthwhile comes out. I am consumed by my own obsession with an idea an idea that I fear is killing me but that nevertheless is doing violence to a woman for whom I have respect but who must conform to an idea in my head in order for me to push forward. As she speaks of her sexual conquests I suffer another setback. Each one either fills me with some quiet jealousy or despondency. Tonight she offers me nothing, and one of her exes, Thomas, is treating her well, feeding her, cleaning up her house. I only dirty dishes and foolishly open my mouth. She offers me nothing, for she is realizing that I have nothing to offer her. I am the fake, the phony, the thing I fear most in this world. My only authenticity is in not sustaining any social ties. Without them I have a world totally of my making, and so I mistake my own unbroken artifice for authenticity.

Eleanor is an idea big enough to murder me, but it is me who will be pulling the trigger. My only rationalization at this point for the sorry steps I've taken and perhaps her own growing distaste for me as one who disrespected her or even insulted her by ignoring her overtures is that we're not compatible. Sure, but what's that? I suspect in my case that compatibility is about them submitting to everything I desire--a totally unrealistic proposal. I don't know what I am doing, and I sense I'm doing a lot of wrong things in rapid-fire succession.

I can't sleep. My waking moments are consumed with one preoccupation--her. My sleeping moments reveal a similar preoccupation--her. I am about ready to retreat once again from society. I have made steps, but ultimately I've prepared the grave for my own social life. I am guarded and almost militantly so with the idea of letting someone in my life. But I expect the other person to be completely open with me. Yeah, my lack of compatibility is due to my discovery of another person's independence and sense of her own self. That's the real threat. I can't accept that she's a world unto herself. I can't contend with that. So, I see it as a threat. She deserves my absolute respect and admiration for being strong, independent, resourceful. She knows what she wants. She's not compatible for those same reasons. I fear that the one I will end up with is not the one that I desire. No, it will be the one that I mildly despise for having no will of her own. No, it will be the one that I mildly disrespect because she lowers her gaze and remains submissive before me. For the sake of my own mind, I either opt out of dating or choose what to me is a safe option--a person with whom I have no true affection, no consuming desire, just compatibility, plain old mechanical compatibility.

So there's my diagnosis. I've come no closer to achieving a solution to my problems. Yet the problem I pose is the lack of female companionship only to find the prospect of female companionship a more immediate problem. Eleanor's an idea that's big enough to murder me, and it will be me wielding the stick. I flirt with this ultimate erasure. The presence of another can force a materialization a spectated presence to myself that's frightening and stressful to me. My ripcord is suicide. To consider that I would kill myself than confront my demons concerning indecision and my pride is chilling. Attitudes towards situations and prevailing sentiments spawned from myself are more powerful than the real people that test their filters. Instead of throwing them out dismissively I want to wrestle them over the abyss destroying myself in the process. That's an affirming disconfirmation if you ask me. How poetic and fucking destructive that I'd rather die than to deal with a problem head on. And that's me. I'm letting a girl get the best of me.

She's a wonderful girl, a truly wonderful girl. She's a woman of the world. She's a woman in the world. I'm in my head, lost perhaps. No, I'm locked in, and I oh so rarely let anyone in. I'm a freak, a fool, a child, an obsessive person. I am not in control here, and it's causing my dismay. I am happy to consider that it's over, and perhaps it should be over. I don't know what I am doing. Besides, the ideas that make her appealing to me--her resourcefulness, her carefree attitude, her non-smoking habit are perhaps just as petty as anything else. What makes her a good fit for any reason? I am in love with her body, sure. I am in love with her mind, sure. But I can't put the two together and accept the dynamic entity before me. It saddens me that I cannot accept Eleanor, and I'd rather die than to face another defeat to my own inner demons. How petty.

I've been gone a while

I've been gone a while. I've had a lot on my mind. The usual pain and rejection I've felt have given way to a scary moment of potential hope. I'm taking it very slow.

It appears I have a chance.

It appears.

I have a chance.

I won't put much into the meaning of it right now other than I had a brief semi-sexual run in with a long-time acquaintance. We had it at a wonderful location--Monk's Mound.

We left, had a quiet drive home, and I had the audacity to ask for her number. She told me she had a boyfriend, and that was that.

"I understand." That's what I told her.

A few weeks later she's back in town and my friend Thomas, who is her ex-boyfriend, picked her up from the airport. We sit outside of a bar and she's expressing loudly that she's done with her boyfriend. She's going to try to set him up with this vixen little girl lithely dancing around the tables. Enough said.

I see her a few weeks later at a party, and we chat. She's getting too drunk. I'm getting drunk as well, but not too drunk. I'm trying to pace myself. Her boyfriend is there. She introduced me to him. We say hi. Everything is cordial. As the night extends on I get a little frisky with her. We dance a little. We do a little of anything. She's talking in my ear what she wants. She asks me about my mom. I tell her that my mom is a 'total gypsy.' She's comforted by this. We continue the flirting game. I'm becoming a HAM--a hard ass motherfucker. She talks to me some more. At some point I step back and wander around the room. She's having a loud conversation with a friend named Kendra. It could be about me. I'm not looking her way. I'm partly discomforted and partly flattered by the possibility. It's been a long fucking time--a really long fucking time. I want her. She wants me to pursue her. Perhaps she wants me to be a little aggressive with her. I want that as well. All seems good, maybe. I don't want to over-think or over-fantasize the situation. That will get the best of me.

So far, I've stopped masturbating if only to honor a commitment but with no possible moment when I can release. She's older. She's confident. She's also quite sardonic in how she discusses herself. She called herself 'oldilocks' one night. She's not old. She's in her late thirties. I'm 34. We're of the age range. I'd say this is a good situation. I prefer older women. She has the trappings of an older woman--confidence, some wrinkles, a great attitude, wisdom. This is perfect.

So if I've written my pain on this wall for so long, I'm having a difficult time discussing something that I don't want to blow up. I'd prefer to take this slowly. I would like to get into the habit of less negativity, less woe, and more happiness. We shall see if I reach that point.

This is what I've had to relate. I wanted to post something in May. A year ago this May I was pining over someone who lives above me. She doesn't even look at me. Yes, I miss her. Yes, I miss our friendship. Yes, I want us to be friends again. No, I'm not going to chase after her again. I've got a bigger, better, and much more realistic prize. I just have to not think about her sex life. Mine is sort of non-existent. It's time to bring it back from the dead.

Notes on war

After reading "With the Old Breed" I have come to appreciate something about war. It is a foreign experience. It places in stark relief the horrors of warfare, battle, fatigue, shelling, explosions, fear, sleeplessness, wet, hunger, dysentery, exposure, hate, sadness, resignation, sobbing, gunshots, luck, sheer luck, against a familiar world. The two placed together makes each all the more strange. And since war is the transient state its technology, machinery, and the full experience strikes one as an alien presence. Sledge points this out on Okinawa and is reminded of his grandmother's remark that a blight had settled upon the land during the Civil War. It's the same other-worldly and ultimately damaging presence of technique and knowledge in the service of annihilation. This is a sacred knowledge that is preserved in the hardened bodies of warriors who practice it in the theater of war. This knowledge has an ultimately defensive purpose. It is enlisted to secure the beliefs of a people. But warfare leaves an indelible mark on those people enlisted, drilled, and sent to war. Upon returning they find they cannot re-enter society so easily nor see the world the same again.

The point of warfare is to erase one's competitor completely. This has culminated in exploding the other to bits with bombs or shooting him fatally from afar. A body motivated to annihilate another must meet that body. This is done by so many telepresent technologies, which allow the person's motive to issue from a gun into a projectile aimed at the body to be annihilated.

Burke notes that an ideology takes up residence in a body and makes it dance in peculiar ways. The techniques of warfare quickly drilled into each soldier for that transient event are just this, ideology. The one rule of war is to kill. When this occurs the body dancing to its ideology becomes mute. With no place to hold purchase, no phenomenal accoutrement through which its rules become actions, its values become voices, the ideology fades into a mist of blood, a last breath and dances no more--dead body, dead ideology.

The goal of war is to end it as quickly and decisively as possible as a winner. In accomplishing this goal the machines of war churn up the landscape, redirect resources, and dump raw bodies onto the war effort. War is a catalyst for change. War is a catalyst for social organization. War necessitates rapid advancement of a society. This is labeled 'mobilization.' Unstuck from its pastoral time, this society becomes the machine for war. Vast wealth and riches pour into the war effort. Careers are diverted. Lives are ended. Families are ripped apart. Children are lost. Histories and futures get blown to smithereens. Some get rich. Others become poor. The tenuous bonds of a society are destroyed in war only to be restrung according to a plan designed from without by war planners. Lives are wasted as the profits of war justify the design.

War unleashes the demons that lie within us all. War lets loose the destructive fury inside each of us.

Gestalt psychology and the fetish

Gestalt psychology is the study of the how people reconstruct the world around them. Taking in sensory data, people reconstruct into wholes the world around them.

Perhaps in the process of this reconstruction we will find the pathologies that lead people to treat others so dispassionately? Could it be a simple problem of fetishizing another that affects how we reconstruct that person into a whole.

"Are you an ass man or a tits man?"

This seems like a rather pedestrian question, but it does hint at the ways that we focus on some aspect of another person objectively. From this we reconstruct someone and perhaps this view of another on terms that are selfish, albeit visually violent can bleed into the Gestalt.

This is merely an observation. I seek to look at it more.

Marxist fetishism and Gestalt psychology are the watchwords.

To sing a prayer

Dear lord,

Grant me serenity from the things that afflict me.
Grant me the strength to shout once the truth of my affliction and eject it from my mind and my body.
Allow me the strength and prescience to find attainable goals, goals that fortify me with confidence and good manner.
Show me a righteous path toward which I could find workshop for my body.
Keep me company.
Speak to me.
Dance with me.
Kiss me.
Hold me.
Coo at me.
Cry for me when I go.
Remember me when I'm gone.
Say nice things about me when I'm not around.
Water my plants.
Take out the trash.
Answer the door.
Pet my cat.

technique

Gents,

Do you put much stock in the apparatus by which you produce your writing? I know this shit has been batted around at least as long as Sam Clemens’ admiration for the typewriter. The speed and accuracy of the typeset word was essential, so says Beninger, to contain the complexity of the emerging modern corporation in the context of a guilded age society run on horse drawn carts and very little standardized information sharing.

But I digress. I want to address the phenomenology of writing, how it’s experienced, what gives it substance, what validates the time spent ‘creating’ in words ideas that are richer and perhaps much more synesthetic as ideas before being put through the labor of communication.

I am reminded of Hunter S. Thompson’s technique for writing. He set up shop in his kitchen. He preferred to write in a high-traffic and non-private space. He also learned how to write by literally typing out, word for word, the books of authors that he admired.

I am reminded of Slavoj Zizek’s commentary upon his authorship where he basically stands at a computer and pecks with one hand as he edits the notes that he wrote down. He points to the fact that he fools himself into writing by producing complex ideas in his note taking, which then become the stuff of his books with little work in the transition. I’ve done the same. I think I’ve witnessed Michael do the same as well.

Then there’s this.

“According to Wired magazine, McCarthy's Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter was put up for auction at Christie's. The Olivetti Lettera 32 has been in his care for 46 years, since 1963. He picked up the used machine for $50 from a pawn shop in Knoxville, Tennessee. McCarthy reckons he has typed around five million words on the machine, and maintenance consisted of "blowing out the dust with a service station hose". The typewriter was auctioned on Friday, December 4, 2009 and the auction house, Christie’s, estimated it would fetch between $15,000 and $20,000; it sold for $254,500.[12] The Olivetti's replacement for McCarthy to use is another Olivetti, bought by McCarthy’s friend John Miller for $11.[13] The proceeds of the auction are to be donated to the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit interdisciplinary scientific research organization.”

What makes a creator so beholden to one’s artifacts? What makes the habits so persistent? I keep coming back to this over and over—neuroconsolidation. We build a repertoire of habits upon which we hang newer experiences. I would consider the idiosyncrasies of human behavior to be the outward signs of the brute natural limitations of neurology. One’s inability to remember some things can be a consequence of one memory’s place too close to another, creating an inhibition. I’m reminded that to remember George Orwell’s name, I’ve stored it in the shadow of another famous person’s name, Orson Wells. I rarely remember George’s name first, but I’ve grown to find ways of dealing with the limitations of how I’ve established remembering. I find it poetic that I've resorted to some newspeak workaround to recall the name of a famous writer whose very preoccupation was modern power elites' desire to control the masses through their ability to think and speak.

Enough for now. Drinking gets me thinking.