rope tying down a leaky
But what do you do when all you have is words and phrases and they don’t won’t make a narrative?
An anchor can hold you in place, but that place could be the bottom of the sea.
Murky, frayed, buoy, eddies, pressure. All my metaphors seem to be nautical, but I’ve never even been on a boat, so I don’t know what they mean.
Where is my mind?
There’s a kind of literature–not a genre, because it’s a part of all genres–where a woman is your leuchtturm: you probably know High Fidelity. But there’s no guarantee your woman is a lighthouse; she could be a siren. She could be your anchor. She could be your cement overshoes.
Why do these patterns only manifest when I’m just a bit too drunk to understand what they mean?
It’s not as much fun as it used to be. It used to work just fine, but now the loss of control has become unpleasant. I enjoy whiskey and beer and wine, but the switch I needed to flick has become much easier to hit, and unnecessary. Drunkenness is a revelation now, an uncomfortable state of being I can see out of through parts of self that are normally opaque, but it only seems to come after I am too muddled for it to be useful.
My left wrist hurts a lot. Typing is difficult.
Conspiracy stories are attractive, and maybe I know why, (and maybe my love for William Gibson and why I read Robert Ludlum and have been watching Welcome to the NHK are explained) because of the joy of (yes) pattern recognition. Because a pattern, any pattern, is pretty welcome. I don’t believe these conspiracies, of course: the attractiveness is not in that particular pattern, but in the fiction that patterns exist. If you’re too smart (or maybe even too compassionate (not that I am)) for religion, then maybe these stories are the only time you encounter a world that works for a reason, and a place you can slot yourself in to get an explanation.
Because you can know things about all of this without knowing them. You can feel them, rather, without being aware of them.
Maybe I’ve just spent too long doing my best to pay no attention to what I wanted and what I was feeling, but I would love love love for something to come along that would explain why I’ve been doing the things I do and made the decisions I’ve made, especially if it could somehow absolve me of responsibility for them.
I want to tell Betsy a lot of the time the thing I always try but always fail to tell myself, something that he needs to know but being told will never teach him: This is it; this is what you get. If you’re determined not to enjoy it because you can imagine something better but are also determined not to do anything to make it more enjoyable out of some strange stubbornness then it will keep on being like this forever for ever for ever.
Where did this come from? Since you can never know 100% what the right decision is, how do you know when you have enough knowledge to act? What constitutes a quorum for life change? How many precincts do I need before I can call this election?
Lisa wrote a long time ago–did I ever tell you I was supposed to profile Lisa as an assignment for my nonfiction writing class and so read her blog through a couple times?–that she was determined not to regret things but instead focus on being who she wanted to be (ok, I found it after extensive googling, and it’s even more appropriate (did I ever tell you that for the longest time I thought I had the biggest crush on Lisa’s life?)). I’ve remembered that for years since. I’ve been trying to figure out how to do it. I think it’s the best advice I’ve ever encountered. I wish I were better at action, and worse at regret. I’m too too good at regret. (Not that, as I meant to tell you last week, it is the decisions I regret; even the times my choices have ended worst feel better now than all the times I failed to choose.)
I have to stop. My wrist hurts, and I need to link things.
But but there is a story I want to tell you, made of all these pieces I can’t put together. I need to put it together. I need to show you a siren anchor and finding yourself in the strangest people and losing yourself in the closest. Give you the etymology of clue and turn Theseus into Ariadne, or Ariadne into Theseus, and each of us our own Daedalus.
So do these waters need oil, or whisky? I wish I knew how to use either.
Filed by shaun at August 17th, 2008 under indifferenthonest