04.17.2004
crap that must've come from somewhere
What I was pissed about: it's not worth mentioning, really. Pointless, gibberish, I sometimes function because I'm pissed. Sometimes if I wasn't being pissed about something I wouldn't be being at all.
or not.
There's Diagram, which is just. They have poetry and they have schematics, and the poems are schematics and the schematics are poems. (This I say confidently after having spent ten minutes there.) I've got it on authority, without revealing sources because there are none, just authority, that they will later also have audio. I believe that everyone should go there and read something. Or view something.
I watched Masked and Anonymous this morning. It's got Bob Dylan, it's got little bits of lots of actors and actresses, it's got a severe slant toward the absurd, the alternate, the unusual. I don't know much from Bob Dylan, (my undereducated overeducation underexposure continues to tribulate my trials), and so I had to wonder often whether these conversations these people were having were just Dylan lyrics spoken, or whether it was more than that. Well it was certainly more than that, it wasn't all about these people saying vague things that would sound cool if someone was singing them, it was about some evil force towering over everyone and there's really no side you can take that makes any sense, and stop trying to make sense of it, and I think it must've been about religion and god, too. But half the time I was bored out of my fucking mind watching the thing, so I don't agree with Salon.com calling it one of 2003's Best Movies.
Last night we watched School of Rock, though, and that was excellent. Funny, and I really dug the music. So I'm probably, there's something, it's clear, there's, this, here, saying that I like some kids playing rock and roll better than I liked Bob Dylan playing folk-rock-old-time-whatever stuff, I'm saying that, it's strange to me. I did enjoy Dylan's music in the Masked and Anonymous thing, but in more of an, "eh, well, nice playing there, nice harmony here, cool line," sort of way.
(In that Dylan movie, though, Dan, Dan, what's-his-name, Dan Conner, (aren't I the whatnot...) John Goodman, that's it, he said something about "it's all bitched up," or "everything's bitched up," and I could've sworn that terminology came right out of the mouth or typing-organ of a friend of mine, so I was all, "what the..?!?" and rewound it and still heard the same thing, so I'm a little wondering about things.)
Things coallesce around me, as gradual packing progresses. Stung Eye commented that I should throw things away, things I haven't used for a year, something like. Something. i didn't respond to the comment, but briefly here: I constantly walk that line between embracing and hating my packratism. But ultimately it's a whole big chunk of who I am. While packing I alternate: sometimes it feels like it's taking willpower not to throw things away, other times it seems like it's the other way round. I've gathered this stuff intentionally, knowing sooner or later I'd have a place to put it all. Here, you see, there's no place to put anything.
The struggle will be, of course, to keep the new place from becoming a place where there's no place to put anything. So I'm tossing things, but the "older than a year" rule, which everyone I work with constantly espouses, doesn't make sense to me. Old books, for example: should I give them away, just because I haven't read them for years? Music? I have so many CDs and cassettes that if I listened to one album a day for a year I wouldn't get through it all. While there are certainly individual works I could do without, there couldn't be a significant bulk reduction without it feeling like I was jettisoning weight from a sinking ship.
Does stuff have value? Is stuff worthless? None of it was an investment, financially. Yet I spent money on it, and I spent time to make that money (hell, I've still got credit card debt from ten or more years back, how much of this am I still paying for?) I'm not arguing things should be kept because of this. I'm arguing that I'm a consumer, and I either come to grips with that or decide that it's not the way I want to be. While there's a definite pull toward that aesthetic of stufflessness, nothing's convinced me yet that it's really somehow a higher level of being than the one I occupy. Until that time, the advantage of throwing a bunch of stuff away would all be expired once I got to the new place and got unpacked. That's a small gain for what could be a big expenditure.
Enough of all that. I will continue to stare at this crap, put some of it in boxes, maybe burn some of it in a ritual cleansing when the oppurtunity next presents itself. I will label things as carefully as possible, though the labels already are losing meaning: "crap from desk," "crap from drawer," "crap from under the bed," "crap that must've come from somewhere."
