But you get an entry like this.

An entry which assures you that, in the future, I might write some of these thoughts as soon as they all develop enough. At least I am fully aware these days that my soul works like a film camera: point. shoot. develop… over time. Time, love. Time, love. (Josh Ritter)

[The girl sitting in front of me at Starbucks has skin like a powdered peach and one of those bump noses... How I love those bump noses.]

So far summer for me has been sun, friends, and a blitz of downloading music.

Here’s a thought: what does a face mean? what does a hand mean? what does skin mean? what does blood mean? why do we react to these things? Because they are part of the essence of being alive. To be alive is to be in a body. Me, you, every body. We’re all in bodies. Fascinating! 

["Nothin' like a hot beverage on a.. hot day" says the middle-aged peasant-skirted lady, well a little fancier than peasant, sitting by the window with her friend. Both printed in blunt, bright designs, one leaves on the skirt, one geometric oblongs on the blouse. Blonde and brunette. Glasses up, glasses down.

Meanwhile I'm sitting chin cupped in palm, neon yellow fingernails and fingers curled like an antique comb over my lips, an indie kid waiting for "Nico Sings Chelsea Girls in the Chelsea Hotel" to load on YouTube. It's live!]

I feel that at some point a Nico impression could be useful. I was practicing her voice while biking. Sometimes it hurts to go into the lower register, but the saving point seems to be letting it sound low without letting it drop… into my chest… cavity. I ought to have typed that more confidently. Anuzzah time. Time, love.

[Black Kids - partie trauma - 2008 has finished downloading]

I was also practicing a photograph-worthy smile, I’m practicing flipping on that light switch. I felt strange, because, I realized, it was forming an expressionwith my emotion instead of suppressing. Oh, do we have a ways to go this summer. The summer of rooting, growing, and blossoming! Charge!

I’m facing my usual problem of trying to make my character too perfect. I mean, if I could plan myself, I would make myself perfect.

Her name, as I’ve decided so far, is going to be Sylvia.

She is literate, full of caring - sometimes overcaring, intelligent, idealistic, and an activist, but she has thus far been untouched by any real problems of the world.  She grew up in an upper-middle class, comfortable way.  She is generally concerned but specifically inexperienced. 

We’re going through scenarios and describing how our character would respond.

Tell me what it’s like to be you. Each person is stuck in a person. A single person. person age

I have a drive to understand each person, and it drives me even to risk my own safety to do so. Even to risk my own reasonableness, rather. Causes me to be a turning octagon lint roller of personalities acquired from my friends and if I need advice I can consult the real you but I can also consult the you I have built thus far of predilections in ma mind, friend.

INFP?

INFJ?

INFX

Iss gonna be okay baby chile.

Dying to see you, but it shouldn’t be like this

This was unexpected… What do I do now?

Could we start again, please?

Could we start again, please?

–Jesus Christ Superstar (movie version)

YES I LIKE THAT MUSICAL

LOVE HAS COME TO TOWN”

-Talking Heads

hotdoghotdoghotdoghotdoghotdog

bell’sbellesbell’sbellesbell’sbellesbell’sbellesbell’sbellesbell’sbelles

indemnityindemnityindemnityindemnityindemnity

The struggle of this age, the early twenties, for me, is going to be identity fragmentation. It feels good to make it official. This is the something horrible that happened to the people of my mom’s family, what she described as “becoming creepy teenagers” in her diminutive version. It’s especially apparent in my Aunt Theresa and my Aunt Annette. Aunt Theresa speaks in a garbled, disconnected way. Now that my cousin Kenneth is old enough to have meta thinking skills, he talks openly about it. His graduation party was a few weeks ago, and attending it turned on a huge spotlight for me about that side of the family. Mainly hearing him say outrightly, “She doesn’t respond when I try to have a conversation like, ‘Mom, the things you say hurt me’”, and his best friend Emily: “Your mom scares me. She’s a ticking time bomb. I feel like she’s gonna explode at any second.” It’s like when my roommate had a fake leg back in Chicago and no one mentioned it. IT FREAKED ME OUT. That’s another pattern to add to the list:

Something being present and people not talking about it or addressing it winds me up in a destructive, solipsist, perseverating way. Like how no one in my family mentions how they feel unless it’s in a physical state/ailment sense. “I feel sleepy. I have a headache. I’m hungry.” I can’t remember a day when my mom came home from work, sat down at the dinner table, and said, “I felt sort of sad today when I thought of how all my kids are leaving the house. But then I felt happier at lunch when Mike and I talked about awnings.” I NEED TO KNOW HOW YOU FRICKIN FEEL. I NEED TO KNOW.

Which leads me back to the identity fragmentation. Aunt Annette has been married, what, seven times? Mom gave me that spiel when I was like thirteen, in the car, about how she wanted to divorce Rick but she knew everybody thought she should stay with him and that really mattered to her, which miffed me at that strong, visionary age. It’s impossible for these people in my family to know what they truly think or feel about something if they can’t get the lens on themselves in focus. Because it’s taught that the self is bad. But better to be too self-centered and still generous to others than too self-denying and a deprived emotional desert. It’s not even about how much you deny yourself. That rarely helps anyone else, if it’s supposed to be an altruistic act. (This I preach to myself, as always.) Reading The Screwtape Letters is helping to delineate these concepts for me currently, and it amazes me that it was written so long ago! Dispelling further the myth that each successive generation is worse than the last!

I’ve been focusing on learning from people who came before me. Inventiveness is great, and it gets high marks from me, but as part of the process of new creation I need to see what already is. Plus, there’s no situation I’ll face in my life so far that probably hasn’t been written about by someone else already. So I can lift those structures and use them in my life. It lightens me to be able to see ”Ah, this is the time when I need perseverance. Here’s the time where I need to forgive.” So easy, too. So much easier than reinventing what’s been invented.

I’ve been putting too many random operators and limiters on my creativity. That’s been stopping me. I’ve realized that my random rules are like an OCD of sorts, creating and complying strictly to these figments to hang onto a sense of control or order. It keeps me within a snowglobe of myself, turning over and over, seeing the fake plastic snow retreat and return… and no matter what happens, nothing’s happening, because it’s all safe within my fake rules that have no real consequences except a gradual shrinking and deadening of self. I long to act and the glass is cracking. WOOHOO

Anything else? My forearms are tired from weed-wacking for three hours today. This made lifting waffle fries at dinner a palpable muscular task. I love it!

So good night, readers, for the long night of the swimming soul. Till next week.