Look Back, Move Forward

Because some days and nights felt longer than the past year. Cheers to life, my friend, to life.

Bubbles for 2012

Because fire crackers give me the creeps

photography by Laura Kok

The New Year

I will dive to the bottom of the hotel pool and find my mother’s hairpin.

With the mouth of a drowning woman on my lap,
I will add her breath to mine. In the dark, I will lay the thin white sheet

of the moonlight over the blue plums of my wife’s breasts.

With the new planet I discovered just when I thought I was losing my sight,
I will love another man because I will be a woman.

Everything important will never as yet have happened. Let it happen.

I will throw a lit match on the secrets my body
has kept from me and stand in the fire. The people I have sawed in half

will appear in my bedroom mirror, getting dressed.

--Jason Shinder

On to various manuals

A Drunkard's Guide to Heartache


“There is no space wider than that of grief,
there is no universe like that which bleeds.”
-Pablo Neruda


I can come to only one conclusion.
One that is pillared by starlight
and teaches me how to dance.
I can only dream of spaces that
dignify my sorrow with a view
of dawn, and sound out my loneliness
among all of yours. Let us leave
the world for a while. Turn our
minds to the span of mystery.
We are all children of feeling.
So hurt. Because what we require
is the opposite of space. A wall.
A tide of self. Whatever it is
you fill, know that you still hold.
Remember your family and breed.
Don’t waste your purpose.
And if you don’t have a purpose,
sit down and drink until
you reacquaint yourself  with need.
That delicate ache, that beautiful
cliché. I want to hear you feel.
I want to dream with you and search
for our ghosts. I want desire
to keep me away from my desires.
So that I may suffer space. So that
my hands may know the reaching.
So that tomorrow I may still be
too alive to believe in emptiness.
Let me keep my days filled with
quarrel and deceit. This is what
I know, this gravity, this life, that
pulls all light and turns it into beating,
A rhythm, a form of art, my being.

--Rafael San Diego

Online Test: Personality Disorders

Disorder	Rating
Paranoid Personality Disorder:	High
Schizoid Personality Disorder:	Moderate
Schizotypal Personality Disorder:	High
Antisocial Personality Disorder:	Moderate
Borderline Personality Disorder:	Very High
Histrionic Personality Disorder:	Moderate
Narcissistic Personality Disorder:	Moderate
Avoidant Personality Disorder:	Very High
Dependent Personality Disorder:	Very High
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder:	Moderate
-- Take the Personality Disorder Test -- -- Personality Disorder Info --

Insomnia

Sapped veins colored with penitence,

insides churning mad with frailty.

The thin of blood is thin of blood.

How do you intend to kill

these stagnant nights?

Only you could remember

how it all began: vestiges becoming

a shadow inhabiting, the restless

rising black against black walls.

Eyes drying white. The apparent

lack of signs, vital. Nights will die

engulfed in the body’s ailing.

To the Displaced

Many dread the difference time draws
in a day trying to hear careless passing
as it treats each moment like the next

just another happening no longer lasting
only a second, a minute, an hour, a life-
time behind your mind suspended inevitably

encrypted: fragments cast into the turning
tides of the sea where uncertain is recovery
grasping severed pieces being stolen away

Oh time what use have you but for us to forget
and so you are forever indifferent to all
the pining and pounding as we dare to salvage

our wants in ifs, for this is

what I mean
when I miss.

Through the Woods: An essay about an essay

I am currently digesting assigned readings for my creative non-fiction class. Out of the pile (but I've honestly only read four), an essay by American reporter Leslie Rubinkowski made me understand a little more about issues which concern truth and lies, not just in writing, but in our daily lives. The title of the piece is In the Woods, below is a brief summary and commentary about the essay. 

Summary

Leslie Rubinkowski recounted his experience as an adolescent who dealt with a grandfather who constantly told strange stories. Growing up, he always knew they were lies. He began by narrating one of his grandfather’s stories about a naked woman he saw one evening in the woods. Another unbelievable story, also set in the woods, was about some weird animal he found; it had quills like a porcupine that seemed to look more like feathers, and a duck bill. No, his grandfather didn’t think it was a platypus. He told lies with great gusto.

Rubinkowski hated it when his grandfather lied, but for some reason, he was still drawn to ask what happened next. He wrote, “That is where it all starts, doesn’t it? Then what: that lovely painful pull of the thing you need to know, whether you need to or not.” Later on, Rubinkowski became a reporter. His inquisitive nature and penchant for getting into the bottom of things definitely worked to his career’s advantage.

In one of Rubinkowski’s assignments, a woman lied to him about being cast in a hillbilly variety show back in the ‘70s. This woman even suggested she had “known” Elvis Presley, that she was in love with him. He knew the lady was lying but he did his research anyway. The lady believed so much in her dream that she came off as sincere. Although Rubinkowski knew she was a fake, deep down he still wanted to believe in her story. He realized that there are lies that try to hide, and there are those that reveal something more significant about loss and hope. He concluded that part of the essay by saying, “So maybe what I'm looking for aren't lies at all. Maybe what I'm looking for—hoping for—is a happier truth."

The final part of his essay narrated one of his grandfather’s stories about the strange animal. He saw it walking toward him from the woods. Here, he began to see the world through his grandfather's imagination. That morning, the writer was born.

Commentary

The narrative presented Rubinkowski as an adolescent who was keen on listening to the story itself, regardless of whether it was fact or fiction. At first he seemed to reason that he was just fond of good stories, which was why he didn’t mind listening to lies. While writing the essay, I believe he was trying to understand why people went through all the trouble just to tell lies, and why he actually took the time of day to even listen to them.

In an effort to understand his grandfather, he researched the kind of life he lived. From what I gather, he believes his grandfather made-up narratives that represented his ideal self. Maybe he did so to establish a connection with his grandson. The experience opened his mind to great possibilities, helping him cope with a melancholic childhood. And, I guess it worked because Rubinkowski said he thinks he did so out of love. He also acknowledged that his grandfather was a great influence in the kind of writer he has become.

In the middle of the essay, he confessed that, as a writer, writers lie all the time even when they deal with facts. Because we derive a lot of information from memory, at some point it’s likely to be inaccurate. Memories can be factual but it’s not fleshed out—it’s just imagined. I can identify with this point because more often than not, memories aren’t very reliable especially when we try to recall something so distant. They usually require proof. Personally, when I try to remember specific details from my past, I sometimes happen to confuse myself with what really happened and what I dreamed could have happened. This is why it’s so important to talk to other people and confirm events if we really want something accurate. But, what is the point? Is it simply to recover the past and arrive at some truth? I have to say the process of remembering and sorting fact from the imagined is just as important because at the end of it all, we have to make sense of it.

I appreciate how the writer was able to arrive at the conclusion that there is some significant meaning behind the kind of lies people create. He gave perspective to an essential aspect of the human condition: the kind of hopes and dreams people live with. I believe the final part of the essay described what it means to finally have a shift of perspective and to dive beyond the parameters of reality to experience life as it should be lived.

I guess it’s true that we might just find that truth we’re looking for if we hang around long enough to see it. But then, if we don’t, maybe we can move on and create new truths by living life as earnestly as we can.