I’m currently obsessed with that P!nk song, “Raise Your Glass.” I don’t know why. It’s brilliant. When I’m in my car, I blast it, and I downloaded it from iTunes so I can listen to it all the time. There’s something very, very honest about it. I think that’s what’s always been so appealing about P!nk. She’s so fucked up. But she owns it. And isn’t that what we all want to do with our fucked-upedness? Just to own it? Just to accept the nightmare and then to tell others about it as if it were a thing of beauty?
I’m in a strange space.
A friend took me to a screening of 127 Hours tonight. Great film. I guess. I so desperately wanted a break, a pan-away to Aron Ralston’s family, wringing their hands and wondering where their son is. It’s so hard to watch James Franco the whole time. No one wants to sit in that. But when it happened — when he finally freed himself — I just kept thinking that we only stumble upon the knowledge of how to make the hard decisions when they are upon us. When the pain becomes too great. When it’s do or die. When you are between a rock and a hard place and your lips are chapped and your heart is racing and your limbs are decaying and you have spent so much fucking time obsessing on what you should have, what you would have, done differently that your extremities are reduced to cellulose and gas and it’s racing toward your heart, toward your lungs and to your gut, and there is nothing left to do, nothing left in your carefully constructed artillery but the fuel to breathe it out, slowly and methodically, and to know, know in the deepest veins, what comes next. To jump and to cut and to free fall and to trust. To trust.
There is joy only in calling it.
I haven’t started on #nanowrimo yet. This is in large part because I suck, and also because I know what I want to write about but I don’t know enough to write about it. I’m looking for the right PhD program. For all the years I spent swearing that I would never go back to school, when I circle back around to my future, I keep visualizing myself in a pit of academia. Jesus God. But what I am good at — second to language — is learning. My parents spent years and countless dollars teaching me to love to learn, and at 28 I realize that I don’t know how to do anything else half as well. The problem with loving to learn, with being syntactically driven to bat about ideas like pinatas in a classroom, is that nothing ever settles. The world becomes an ever-swaying ninja, this thing that will never really exist but will always be somehow in front of you, taunting just beyond the blindfold. Everything becomes somehow improbable, improvable. Literal. The world becomes a chord progression that never settles. Never resolves itself. Never pays off.
Academia never quite orgasms.
I’m obsessed, also, with Big History, historian David Christian’s days-long lecture series about the macro-history of humanity. I listen to the language segments over and over again. I am obsessed with language, with its rhythm and with its potential and with its history. With this uniquely human capacity to share ideas, to wedge concepts into clicks, to build a God in these grunts. With everything we pull from syllables. With the way we learned this, together and facing one another; with the music of all of it. I am fascinated with the way it strikes us, this upper-cut that bleeds. This water that comes in waves, that sustains and bonds us, that divides a pool of dirty little freaks.
I never worry about this planet. Environmentalism bores me — an ego homestead that can pitch a tent without my help. This planet will evolve, will march at its own pace, will never be outsmarted by us. We will never be anything but loud.
