abandoned

I find abandoned things from time to time. I have found phones,manuscripts, a box of jello, The Feminine Mystique. I have abandoned things: a slip, a hairbrush, a box of condoms,  self-discipline, a bicycle.

Tonight I found a single white rose by the trash chute. In perfect condition, fresh and soft, still wrapped in a plastic sheath. It made me sad to think that a fresh rose would be so unwanted. Did someone’s date go poorly tonight? Naturally, I took it in. But I wondered as I set it on the counter, what good does this do? What can I do with a single rose? I suppose I can put it in water and wait for it to die. And then once it does, I can abandon it again. It seems harsh. This is why I hate receiving flowers — there really is nothing to do with them. I wondered if the person who received it went through the same thought process, and decided to get rid of it before the misery began. Obviously, they had some sympathy for the flower, leaving it merely beside the trash chute rather than chucking the whole thing in. So I did the thing anyway, and it’s sitting in a tiki glass on my counter in some water.

A while ago I found what I consider to be a bachelor box abandoned by the trash chute. It was a cardboard box full of packages of Rice-A-Roni and cheap cans of alcohol. I imagine it was someone trying to move beyond a certain stage of life where Jeremiah Weed Sweet Tea and sodium are no longer staples. Clearly, I am not beyond that stage of life, and I thanked them for their charity.

I found a break-up box once, too. It was full of sweaters that were nice, but slightly too large for me, unopened tea-tree oil and mint shampoo, and a favorite mug. It was left by the trash chute as well and I waited a whole day to pass of it unclaimed before I took it in. I had a friend, long ago, who after a break up took a photo of his ex’s stuff that he had left behind piled up in boxes by the garbage, and texted the photo to him on his birthday. He never heard back from him.

Lately, I’ve found myself abandoned. You don’t really think you did, but it’s true you thought your life would be better elsewhere and as a result of this I am alone. The paltry words of affection you offer me do not fill the void where you once lay beside me. They do not quell the obsessive thoughts about you, wondering if you are thinking of me, wondering if you love me, wondering if we’ll have a future together. What good does this do? What can I do in an empty home? There is no one to put up my Christmas decorations for, no one to see when I roll out of bed. I suppose I can keep hollowly treading forth, waiting to see you again. Waiting for it to die? I can’t stand that thought, but the waiting feels like undeath. It isn’t living. Obviously, you have some attachment to me or you would have broken it off outright. You say this is for our future, but I cannot see beyond six months from now in my haze. And six months from now you will still be gone.

What is there to do? I have to keep going through a blank horizon before I can reach our destination.

I have to keep going…

and looking by the trash chute

to see what’s left for me…

Modern Love, Modern Life, and Post-Publication Depression.

It’s been a little over three months since I last wrote here. Not that I haven’t written at all, nor that I have had nothing happen over the last three months. I published two articles at Modern Poly, the latter …

Where the heart is; not home…

I have observed on Facebook that many of my friends are becoming comfortable in their adult lives; they might have a steady job and a steady group of friends. This is beyond just that astounding bubble of people who got married and had kids right away — you know who I’m talking about. But rather, this is the bachelors becoming Adult Bachelors, the partiers becoming professional partiers, the couples settling down.

I have a steady group of friends and a place I want to be; it isn’t here. I find myself alienated when I tell people this, they say “gee, I’ll miss you,” and act like the interim no longer matters since I’m not in it for the long run. People have commitment issues, even to friendships, while they’re in this twentysomething phase of life that runs extra committal. Who’s to say you couldn’t come along, if they wanted to?

You are, you who is decided.

You have decided what and where your life is.

In this economy it seems absurd to make a choice and settle down, you don’t have that much security… unless you do. I have friends with steady jobs they can’t leave now, and they’ve never lived away from their parents.

I don’t know; making friends is hard, isn’t it?

But so is settling for less, right?

Success is a drop in the bucket, and just as well it should be.

So, I managed to get published for the first time the other day. I felt exhausted and happy and euphoric, until I realized the world was moving on without me. As well it should. Plenty of people get published for the first time, and it ends there, every day. I should move on too. I can’t just have one victory and keep waiting for everyone to notice it, to celebrate just one step I’ve taken in my life — it’s not my first step, after all. I can’t let it collect dust, I have to build momentum.

I have to keep writing.
I have to keep getting published.
I have to keep going until that drop in the bucket turns into a big flood, and I can’t stop, and that’s real success.

Dealing With a Lack of Inspiration

Lack of momentum breeds lack of momentum.

I feel dry lately, as a writer. After that last outburst, I was overwhelmed with the grainy suffocation of ennui. I began to breathe sand.

I began to recall that I’m literate and conversational in German. That was a positive thing, though. [I had an entry to write about that too, maybe later…]

It’s just that I had/have so many projects and issues on my table, you get choked up and you don’t know what to start with, and then you stop everything, and not doing anything gets easier and easier, and taking risks is more and more foreign.

A beautiful woman from high school just published an eBook. I’ll link to it sometime in a less maudlin entry, but it had an effect on me, knowing someone from my past, someone actually managed it! It’s not as wholly large as the things I handle, but perhaps that’s for the best.

I keep having horrific nightmares and sleep paralysis. Dreams of overhearing screaming refer to someone needing help. Dreams of being attacked by ticks indicate something or someone is draining you.

Those things are always hard for me to reconcile, as a writer and as a woman; I pour myself out to humans, use up all my productive energy on caring about others and have to use whatever scraps of myself I have left to work on my own things. But I’d have nothing to work for and very little to think about if there weren’t things in the world I care about. It’s hard to care about others when you don’t have anything left of yourself though…

So, isn’t it easy to see why I could run dry?

Anyway, the above video is one of the first results for “lack of inspiration” when I look that up, and it suits me aesthetically.

…

Meanwhile, who are you? I know you’re out there. You view this blog at least once daily. You seem to click through from Facebook, so I probably know you. Seriously.

how do i make you love me?

Content, Honesty, Character and Continuity in Blogs

I feel upset when other bloggers remove content from their blogs months later, or delete posts, or overall destroy their own content.

In my last NaPoWriMo entry, I didn’t remove the missing poem before I posted it. I had shown to someone before posting, whose feelings I’d ended up hurting by writing it.

It wasn’t true enough for them, even though I’m a fiction writer.

Maybe I’m just lying out my ass all the time. I wondered that today; I wondered how much people think we creative sorts actually resemble our characters. I wonder if anyone thinks I’m outgoing and self-depricating like Vic Salazar. I wonder if anyone thinks Steve Szczytko is perpetually grumpy (he is) like Professor Magnus Obsidian. I wonder if people think my relationships are borne of pity and avoidance like my characters’ are.

In reality, the stories I write are fiction. The poetry I write is fiction, too. The characters actors play are fiction.

But fiction doesn’t preclude the truth.

I’ve always said in my relationships that I care more about the potential of a person than their specific situation. The best mentor figures for me haven’t been those that held my hand all the way, but the ones who allowed me independent with the approach that they genuinely believed I could succeed. They believed in my potential. As to how this connects to fiction, a good story is written on its own — not that it doesn’t require lots of craft or an author, but rather that it makes sense in its own universe, that you could imagine the characters and the places doing anything else than the things they do in the narrative.

So, as a writer, truth is its own independence, it’s own narrative. An audience will interpret what is presented to them, and interpret it with their own internal narrative, with their own baggage and bias.

Removing bits and pieces from your narrative rather than allowing those threads to weave into the overall feels untrue to me. It means you’re forbidding your audience, in retrospect, from traversing the narrative off-screen.

I don’t party a lot. It’s true that Vic does. And she puts off doing her laundry, and so do I. I never picked up smoking, but a weedy little teen girl I knew a long time ago went hunting with me for cigarette butts on campus; it’s real and true and fictitious.

As someone writing a personal-public journal, it’s fully within one’s right to delete certain threads, certain days, certain unwanted things. But do keep in mind that by releasing your life to the public, your sudden eviction of shared experience is disruptive to those following your story.

Zoom Out, Look.

I’ve felt confident lately, despite the rough patch. I’ve recently come out of a relationship and had a friendship fall apart. I applied to the upper division of my Creative Writing program, and was rejected. The time I’ve had to wait out the consequences of these events though, has been relatively soothing, and I’d describe myself mostly as feeling “fine, if not a bit sad.” I guess more than anything, none of these collapses feel like they’re in the way of what I actually want to do. In the regard of accomplishing what matters to me and what I desire, I feel rather confident in myself, perhaps for these losses. I have breathing room, and time to work on myself. What I desire most is perspective.

“You don’t need friends for a party, just people.”

A science-wizard friend of mine made this morbid seeming statement to me a few nights ago. It hung in the air, on my shoulders, and I realized it was true. Coming out of the collapsing city whole makes me desire perspective. What I care for is intact, I know that. What I need now is to be refreshed and to gain perspective. If who I was before all this wasn’t enough to push myself to success, then I need to become something different. I need to nurture myself in new ways in order to evolve. Perhaps if friends have drained me out for a bit, I need some new people. I need to celebrate, but I need to remember what else it is out there other people celebrate; I need to bring more joy and gratitude into my world.

Just because people aren’t friends yet doesn’t mean I don’t need them too sometimes.

Death in the Early Morning

I have never come so close to death as I have in a tonsilectomy. No, even the time I fell down a cliff face at Joshua Tree and my leg split into bloody shreds I felt way less like death. That was just an inconvenience. This is a disruption of my life, you see. To attain said surgery, I had to give up all the good things in life, like all those limes I can’t hold or spicy food or booze, various salacious acts, and like I said, those limes. As it ends up, oxycodone does not delight me as I suspected. It mostly makes me unreliably energetic or drags me into her Oracle.

     Her Oracle, the Lady Percocet.

     All Oracles have been over the course of history is a woman or a few women or some old, trusted men, expected to speak unknown truths. My favorite has always been the Oracle at Delphi, Apollo’s Oracle, upon whom I wrote for a long winded report in eighth grade, right after I skipped out of seventh in hopes of advancing my career as a child. It is another one of those reports I evade today, again cursing my childhood career choices. I am doomed to be an academic, as is evidenced by the studies performed by my Oracle at Percocet.

The Oracle at Delphi, Pythia, inhaled fumes from fissures at Mount Parnassus in order to “connect to the divine” and communicate her visions. The idea of an Oracle or a Priest has always been rather romantic to me in mythology — someone who translates the divine understanding for common consumption, much like anyone bookish does if they get to leave their desk for a few minutes at all.

Tangent made, I meet the Oracle of Percocet an hour and a half after dosing. For the first hour after my dose, I can only rely upon pain relief. For the second, I will either be stuck with high functionality and low focus or high focus and near comatose state. In this state, I will attempt to sleep but think I may be too cold, but then I will forget how to use a blanket. I will, however, write entire research papers on trends in American Horror films:
     Percocet Speaks:

     Well, if I just haven’t had the most drawn out, unsettling, grotesque detailed dream about a research paper I’ll never write on a topic I’ll never look into, instead of writing a real research paper.

     The topic was about “From Unknown Horrors to Shock: Our Culture’s Fear of Unanswerable Questions.” It was about how we’ve resorted to shock horror and the overtly physically disgusting because the questions raised by previous existential-thought-provoking-unseen horror films were incompatible with our growth as a society. How to go from The Shining to the Human Centipede, essentially. And then the dream provided some examples of films that probably don’t exist that were key in this transition.

     Also I rewatched some really gruesome clips that probably don’t exist, and washed off a fetal pig.

     The lecturer, for this course, was amazing, and in the FMS department, which recently merged with the ENG department at ASU. Just so you know.

That is the most unseemly transmission the Oracle has given me. The others are too self-abasing or vulgar.
Meanwhile, I have yet to regain some human functions, like Kahlua or solid foods. :(
-Angela VS

Salutations, world.

I’m running short on holidays this year. Halloween is about all I’ve got guaranteed, and I’m pretty sure I’ve run that through, even packing an anniversary into it. I still have Veteran’s Day, of course, last of which I spent stumbling around between restaurants getting free drinks and/or chicken fingers for the veteran of my choice, and finding myself persuaded by two chaps of the highest order to quit holding onto my decency and allow myself to become a professional scandal.

After all, he said, he wouldn’t mind having a professional scandal for a girlfriend anyway, because the guys they work with tend to be douchebags and not looking to steal and settle down with their coworkers anyway. Plus, I’ve got an amazing body, or so I was told by at least two sources. I think I might be saying too much tonight, but I’m full of wine and anniversary and riding the Halloween wave. I have only barely disrobed from forms of costume.

Thanksgiving, I’ll be full of non-recreational drugs and have some obsolete organs removed. They’re called tonsils, and have brought me nothing but suffering since I was a child. I’m relieved someone else has finally decided they merit extraction from my life. This does mean, however, no Thanksgiving feed to be had, and subsequently I’ll have to surrender my habits of anything delicious for a while, such as booze, spices, and citrus.

I will become so bored. Everyone says Vicodin will delight me, but I’m pretty sure I’ll just feel like blah and want to sleep a lot and wish I could hold more limes.

After that, I’ll be stumbling around the East Coast on some kind of inappropriately thought out budget and visiting with some of my 20-something friends from the internet, and that’s not really a proper Christmas when you’ve just finally got your own place, if at all. No, a proper Christmas involves having a pre-established place to cover in excessive wrapping paper and decorations and vacuuming up trash after the ingrateful adult children of yours leave to go get drunk with their cats and ne’er-do-well significant others and whatnot.

(I have no experience with evading family holidays at all. Really.)

Fortunately, a young woman in my keep will not have to be. Her name is Victoria Adriana Salazar, and she is a fine protagonist. She lives out the sleaze that I will not admit to.

This is her story.

Or perhaps it is the story of the person telling her story.

Oh, I’m pretty sure I’ve already insinuated some awful things about my lifestyle. But I’ll assure you, I’m a writer and all that it implies, including the vices and including the unstoppable impulse to write and tell stories.

This is my story.