Camera Lucida

12 November 2006

Arsenal 3 - 0 Liverpool
Flamini 41'
Toure 56'
Gallas 80'

Ah, the good old days. When Arsenal would win huge games. Games like this were something, and look at that score-sheet, it's not even our goddamn goal-scorers. Gallas? Toure? They're defenders, for Christssake. Flamini, well, he's a midfielder; the good ones get a handful of goals a season. Wins like this, though, God, they get me going so much. They're empowering. They make you feel like you can do anything; even reading about the match and talking about it a little bit has a bit of that effect. I think my eyes just got wider, I felt a little surge of energy. Come on, let's take on the whole fucking world. Let's take them on and win. I'm hesitant to write a third entry this week: I haven't written this much here since last September. That's generally to keep the entries sparkling, so that they're fresh, interesting, thoughtful, evocative: all the things a good read should be. If you write too much though, I feel like that gets diluted, the emotion is lost somewhere, the bluster sounds hollow after hearing it for so long. If a bully came up to you everyday and said, "I'm gonna beat you up after school!" and then just ran by you laughing when school was over, after a couple weeks of that horseshit you'd wise up and stop being afraid of him. Maybe you'd get cocky enough to challenge him: just like if I keep writing this too often, you will get cocky enough to stop reading it. I feel like every entry is just spinning wheels anyhow, and someday you have to realize that, someday you'll laugh at me and walk away, because there's probably something worth just as much of your time out there. To follow up: our plan to escape the confines of our apartment landed us in a dive. We had a few beers and talked for a couple hours. We watched some sports on the big (and small) televisions. Basically, we did what we usually do. But the atmosphere was refreshing: older dudes, hanging out talking. Post-college kids, our age, hanging out talking. A few couples, talking quietly. Mid-90s rock music; terrible, hilarious, singable. The whole effect was calming. It was nice to be somewhere. We didn't care about being seen, in fact we'd rather not be, but being somewhere, hearing other people talk, it reminds you that this world is alive. Sitting in your apartment night after night is numbing. I hope we don't go to a bar every night, that would probably be a tad pathetic. But we could go to coffeehouses, book stores, and I don't know... what do 20somethings do? It's strange; my desire to write these last few days has exploded. Third entry here in five days. I'm working on Alcova again, for the first time in a week. I'm as tired as I was last week, but somehow I'm bursting with things to say. I want to talk, I want to explore. I have all these fantastic ideas in my head, these amazing stories, with absurd intricacies that only English majors would get, that I want to get down. Why couldn't I write last week? Part of it is my free time. Since Michelle and I broke up, we've sort of mutually ceased talking online. As such, I find myself finishing my work rather quickly, and then I'm stuck with a couple hours to kill every day. So I might as well write, right? But it's something beyond that, because I have that desire to write. It's a perverted desire to communicate. I want to talk to you, dear reader. That desire doesn't rear its head too often, usually I have to coax it out of its cave, dangling some kind of animal carcass (it feeds on flesh) in front of it. When I'm sad though, he comes out just fine, smiling in the bright sunshine, tromping on villages, smacking his lips, for he also feeds on my depression. I don't fault him though, for as he feeds on my depression, he removes it, excising it from my soul, until I am normal again, happy, able to move forward. My desire to communicate feeds on flesh and my sadness. Fortunately it has not eaten me yet, but I expect that day to arrive eventually. When I'm happy, comfortable, at peace, I feel much less like writing. I have less to say, because things seem right to me. My writing is driven by a wish to help the reader's understanding, of themselves and the world, evolve. Most good artist deign to hold up a mirror to the world, in order that the world may see itself truly for what it is (I worry that the world sometimes, narcissistically so, gets lost in its own reflection). I hold this mirror up for the reader, not society. Rather, I hold it up for the reader as a figment of society. I don't want to change the world, I want to change people. But people don’t think about issues when the stories are happy. If you read a book about a normal dude, happy with where he was in life &c &c, you’d be bored (I’d be bored), and it wouldn’t teach us anything about anything. When I’m sad though, when I feel depressed, I find the yucky things inside of me, the parts I’m ashamed of, and these are the things I need to bring out, to write about, to show other people. Because we’re all human, we all have similar weaknesses. I write about insecurity a lot, about doubt, fear, lack of connection, failure of communication, distance, neuroses. The novel that I was working on before Alcova, the novel I hope to return to soon, came about as picturing four siblings, four siblings who failed to talk with each other, to really connect. I write about this because it is a part of my life. I’ve discussed this before, but I worry about being distant from my family, my friends; and now, I fear, my girlfriends. But that's not what I'm hear to discuss. I write about these problems because I feel they are ubiquitous. I want people to see themselves in the characters of Kitty and Apollo, to realize that their relationship with their grandparents is similar. Kitty is one of the four siblings, and she is the granddaughter of Apollo. She takes care of him, kind of, and they share similar traits: they both smoke, but neither they nor the rest of the family know that the other smokes. It comes as a revelation. It's a metaphor, and it also isn't, for the small things we hide from each other. Even now, I fear mentioning that I smoke cigarettes, on the off chance that my mom or dad would read this. The things we hide maybe because we're ashamed of them, or because they're awkward to talk about. Somewhere along the line, discussing personal faults or awkward personal details got to be too much. I read this interesting article about a new Calvin Klein perfume the other day, and it described our generation as being physically bold but emotionally guarded. As hilarious an analysis as that is to come from a fashion company, I fear it's very close to the truth. Close to the end of our relationship, Michelle told me that she didn't trust me fully. We had been together for two months, and I felt that I trusted her. But she didn't trust me. It takes her a long time to trust people, she said. And why is that? A lot of people are like that. It takes them a long time to trust someone else. That's because of our society. Someone, in the past, has abused their trust, and therefore people like Michelle are hesitant to give it out again. Understandable, but unfortunate. Our society has developed into what CK described, but the two features are symbiotically related. We are emotionally guarded because we are physically bold. Guarding our emotions is the only way to be physically bold, otherwise you will be ruined. And because we don't reveal our emotions, all we have left is physicality. How do you show someone you like them? You kiss them, you hold them, you have sex with them. That is the language our society speaks now. I can't say whether this is bad: it is simply an evolution in dialogue. No longer is it fashionable to compose poetry for your beloved, or to court them for lengthy periods of time. You touch them, you lick their ear lobe. We stopped sharing our selves, and started sharing our bodies. Intimacy has changed. Should I change too?