Gold Shovel

“Shovel your way out of the shit.” - partial quote from Twin Peaks, The Return. We all got a gold painted, metal shovel at the work Christmas party a few weeks back. It was…something.

I just lit a hopefully-ethically-sourced bundle of pine, I hear it’s good for cleansing purposes but I think it mostly reminds me of camping. I don’t have many rituals these days.

In the last week I’ve watched: Breaking the Waves, Pink Flamingos, The Decline of Western Civilization (1-3), The Green Knight, and Pink Floyd’s The Wall. This has been a lot, but I believe Waves, Knight, and Wall will require a lot more thinking. Maybe the latter two, especially, can even be considered side-by-side, as they follow a similar theme of self-preservation, self-actualisation? in the way of facing and revealing one’s truest self. Waves mostly scared me due to a sometimes recognition of the lead character, as I have found, at least in my first 28ish years so, God (whatever or whoever that looks like) as the main…abstraction… I talk to. Hopefully minus the talking back part. It’s always been quiet that way.

No resolutions, just an ongoing hope to make more art and not feel guilty about the way in which I exist. That is the ongoing trap- to want/need to make art, and feeling guilty about spending my free time making art, as it many times seems of little consequence, of little importance when weighed against genocide and the climate horrors and whatever else jumps up. I am right there between anarchist punk who wants to rage and get punched and land punches (mosh context) and say fuck it to holding down a (technically not even salaried) job, and relying on my not even salaried job to ensure I can pay for my car and food and shit. Too old to join a scene, too young to settle down.* Or something.

There was a quote in one of the “Declines” where a scene magazine editor says “Personally I’ve been through one too many youth movements” and, for one reason or another, this is relatable. I believe the conservative-white-evangelical youth movement took a nice big toll, I was bought in. I was the model, single, christian woman. Still figuring out what to do with that experience, with that lost time. And maybe sometime I’ll get over it. But for now that’s where the rage comes in, that’s what will get me into a mosh pit one of these days.

Edit: anybody want a gold painted shovel? I’ll mail it to you.

Also wish I’d said that I liked all of those films.

Also, I have found it very difficult the last couple years to engage in meaningful conversation with any woman who is overtly “in the church.” I think I see my old self and at once resent them and wish they could know better and be more free, meaning, in the instances where the conversation leads to something about hell or salvation or what is and isn’t evil. It’s very difficult for me to have compassion or empathy for them as they hold a particular position, and that is something I seriously need to work out, because compassion and empathy (and patience) is exactly what’s needed.

*New blog about this

Living room

Today I rearranged my living room. Never buy a light-colored couch, it will only lead to heartache. I also watched a film in which the protagonist knows she is stupid, and I’m not certain that was very helpful for anyone in the end. Is anyone fully self-aware, like, self-aware in-the-round? I don’t know. Sometimes I like to think I am, but then another bit of reality hits and it’s square one again. But I think that kind of “stupid”-to be aware that you don’t know what you don’t know- is different than the kind of stupid mentioned in the movie, perhaps more relating to intelligence than plain ignorance.

Is this sort of self-centered ruminating the most important thing to be thinking about right now? No. There’s Gaza. There’s the upcoming presidential election. There’s shit local governance and politics. Women can’t legally have abortions, racism can’t be safely discussed in schools. I watched an interview between Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin where Giovanni noted that she tended to be more “parochial,” that she wanted to work out the issues facing her neighbors and, specifically, Black people in the US, before she could consider the issues facing the rest of the world. This thing of choosing battles, of balancing activism and community with personal health and self-care, that’s no small feat.

Their discussion moved into white people, and the thing white people not knowing how to love their children well, of self-hate and therefore other-hate. Self-love as the foundation would surely help one focus day-to-day energy on things outside of oneself, on community movement and mutual aid, being woven into the life of another(s). I see that type of love as one that has had to be learned, it was not wholly instilled and not something that seemed to be coded into my being, which has taken up a lot of time and space in my life, personally. It is exhausting and confusing.

This is going a lot of directions, and maybe the main thing I wanted to say was that this year, more than any year previously, it did not “feel” like Christmas. I refused to go too deep into that non-feeling, I instead..rearranged my living room, something I have to say is exactly what my Grandma Jones would do: an act of avoidance. I will write about that in another thing. I started this late Monday, so some of my tenses might be confused. Maybe I will write a song today.

Character Study

Padraic and Colm and Siobhán from Banshees of Inisherin, but mostly Padraic

Lydia Tár from Tár

Bumblebee from Transformers

Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver

Diane Selwyn from Mulholland Drive

Charlie Kaufman in Adaptation

Beast Boy from Teen Titans

Spongebob and Squidward from Spongebob (which I believe is hilariously similar to the Banshees of Inisherin dynamic)

The Dude and Donny from The Big Lebowski

Annie and Peter and Charlie from Hereditary

Sherlock Holmes (uhhh the Robert Downey Jr one, ok, and mostly in his “picking up too much data” way)

Sam and Jill in Brazil

Gawain, sometimes Essel - The Green Knight

Pink - The Wall

Owen from I Saw the TV Glow

to be continued as my obsession with seeing myself in fictional characters continues

It must be difficult to live that way

Maybe everything gets easier someday. Maybe that’s what heaven is. Maybe sometimes you get to choose between watching the murmuration of starlings for hours on end or sitting silently with someone you love for days or gathering pecans for as long as you want (as long as you eat a few along the way).

The interior of a pecan’s armor is grotesque, gnarly, delicate, a cave system you can hold in your hand. Armor and flesh, every ridge and twist, the mirror image found in the other. Keep the armor as a souvenir. Rattle the pieces in your hand. Sample the sound, place it carefully in a song. Slow the fuck down (it puts less, unfair pressure on those around you). At least pretend.