I awoke from my dreams to an interview with Leonard Cohen...and sunset and the faint scent of fresh summer air dying in the evening, dying in my apartment through the cigarette haze.
Cohen fills me with this sense of utter tragedy and thoughts of the sadness and pain of the world we are in. It seems self-destructive in many ways but additionally I am filled with LIFE, with a sense of wonder and romanticism. I feel the need to create, nearly panicked with this desire to produce something expressive.
Panic, panic, panic. I was having this conversation with Don about panic. Life is terribly, terribly short. There are so many paths open, and I have to navigate well enough to pick the right one for me. What I think I want is the most interesting one, the most honest one, the one with raw edges and reality slamming into me over and over so I never become numb, bored, inert. Sometimes that means I do terrible things to my worldview and who I think I am, but I don't take it back. I dont.
I want to meet Leonard Cohen, have coffee. I think we would get along quite well, and I would learn many things. He was talking in the interview about feeling ugly and plagued by beauty, and said "we all feel when we're loved that some concession has been made." (on the part of the person who loves us)
True, true...I don't generally like poetry, but now I want to buy his new book of poems, and now I want to create some sort of literary capsule like I slowly sludge away at a painting or drawing unfinished or unfinishable...perhaps needing words to help it along.
I had this dream, that I was talking to one of the girls at work, and she was stunning as usual. She stood outside a styling salon near my house, having just had a facial. As she spoke, I took a closer look at her face and it became ever more shriveled and warped, her skin oily and disformed, wrinkled in a sick manner; her chin too large and block-like, teeth reduced to rotten nubs and I wondered, wondered if she knew she was beyond reperable and wondered why or how she still did this work...I wonder if that girl was me.
I question myself about this zine, if it's just one long neurotic self-justification. *..No, no I don't think that is it's true nature, but I have to say it must be at least partly true - I must be careful to be as honest as I can with the reader, with myself. The point is to shift how the reader thinks about it, but not to glorify the job, not to make it the solution for every job woe, which, of course, it could never possibly be.
There are no solutions, right? I mean don't we just do the best we can with what we have? Oftentimes we do far less than the best we can.
It's coming, though, right? Direction, passion, commitment, love for the people, sacrfice. I'll find dedication again, won't I? I don't want to just die. I want to die on my feet, fighting, standing for something that matters...weaving my story into the millions of others that know better than I the terrible violence of greed and disinformation.
Got to get my feet dirty, my shit together.
..I suppose I am looking for this in Chiapas. What can I really know in a week? How many things will I misunderstand? Just a taste, just a glimpse to be distorted by poor memory and a screen of contextual dysfunction. A thousand unknowable stories filtered through my life; I can always go back right?
Physically, I mean.