life is a huge mess

 

April sketchbook.

   Fiction shard: Driving through the badlands, windows up or down, it doesn’t matter. The traffic is boundless and forever–traipsing through a burning meadow in an unhappy dream.

Hot air sputtering in from the AC vents, troublesome tanning patterns emerging on the uncovered skin, legs and arms. You see a billboard depicting two giant lottery balls close to the highway exit: one red and one yellow–side by side, oddly fulsome and maternal…bulbous wire mother. The billboard was not enough surface area for the lottery balls–they poke out, break the rectangular continuity demarcating the space. Something is excised in favor of two square LED panels, which are there to let you know that the rubicund PowerBall is at over a billion and swelling. The jaundiced MegaMillions ball is at 48 million. The car in front of you starts and stops. On the radio, unhappy cut-off mutterings:

I wanted to–

I would have–

If only you let me–

Try something– 

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – 

    Today I meditated, started an intensive outpatient program at school, and went to Marin County Library with a new friend. I did some very overdue homework. I am supposed to become a teacher, right, and am in a preparation program for it, but was recently fired from my student teaching job after being accused of dropping hashish on the ground, like I was William S. Burroughs or some shit. So now I'm not getting the hours. 

    The situation was absurd and funny for a while. But beyond feeling interpellated as a criminal---the experience was humiliating and made me think that I should've just tried to write harder, stop dodging the spirit of excess...like, what was the point of attempting to go straight, and be professional, if all I could ever be to any administrator type is crazy chick with benadryl knuckle tattoos. This event mangled what was left of my self-concept, which was already in abeyance on account of feeling unattractive and masculine and without charm after moving up here, for reasons I can't really track or explain at the moment. 

  I guess I'm glib about graduate school because my parents didn't go, and work harder than anyone I know. But I shouldn't be glib, about it or anything else. I'm still very hurt on account of making so many personal sacrifices to come up here and then not being able to do the thing I wanted, which was teaching, in a classroom, with students whose lives could be positively affected by my attention, effort, and care.  

 

    Now, I'm not really sure if I'm cut out to do any of it. Can a messy, harsh person be a good teacher? They seem like mutually exclusive things. While my attitude towards youth feels very different than the lights I cast upon myself, children are incredibly perceptive and sensitive despite their phone addictions, so how could I be sure that the negativity that is directed inwards doesn't...like leak? 

    I have spent most of my life pathologizing inward behaviors, long before other people could, and doubting my faculties of perception wrt. events and people and most of all, signs, unsure of the things that are right in front of me. If I saw it this way, and I'm insane, and have a history of being strung out and histrionic, I must be wrong about it, right? I often ask others to confirm what I see before letting myself feel what I feel. Essentially, I put my life, as well as the burden of what I know, in the care of others. Obviously, this is a stupid way to live, a way of surfeit powerlessness, of avoiding the things in myself through the repeated hyperfixation on external phenomena, whatever it may be for the moment. And of course it also produces the effect of leaning too hard on connections until their tensility is compromised beyond repair.  I don't know how to begin rebuilding the trust I should have in myself.

2019 text from L., who died last year.

   Sometimes I go to the monastery in town, but I haven't figured out how to sit in a way where my legs don't fall asleep after an hour. I feel motivated to change everything, but I can also recall feeling this way before.

    While I don't hide in the voluptuous penumbra of perpetual victimhood, on occasion it has been quite an appealing prospect. To lie in mud and give up. I think about giving up even as I accumulate additional obligations and responsibilities and credentials and titles and attempts at meaningful work. I think about what it means to make one's life mean something, and feel so appallingly short of it all that I......

Things that are good about me: brown hair, quiet, easy to entertain, helpful, game..."down ass b****" vibes, can read and write sometimes. 

Things that are bad about me----it feels like almost everything!!!

The author at the Hat 'n' Boots in Seattle, WA — 2023.