of dislocation & graceful unravelling

“Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.” (Thomas Szasz)

[in which I am at the (st)age where desperately trying to collect & archive remnants of my own past is the only writing that matters]

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FAILURE MAP. BY FIELDEN NELSON

womenwearingwolves:

You will move to L.A. from somewhere in the Midwest without previously obtained shelter or employment. You will be cautiously optimistic. You will have a solid short term plan. All of your childhood will be in your trunk.

You will have been moderately successful. You will stay with more successful friends. Because it is California, the land to where the more successful have already moved. You will stay with good friends. You will stay with friends of good friends. You will stay with colleagues of friends of good friends.

You will stay in extra rooms, assigned to non-extra functions. You will stay in living rooms, assigned to living functions. You will sleep on pull-out couches. You will consume limited space. You will overstay your welcome. You will walk in on intimacies. You will see nipples. You will hear what other people sound like. In the bathroom. In the bedroom. When they think they are alone or cushioned by walls.

You will sleep in hotels. You will sleep in motels. You will sleep in your car. You will sleep in a tent. You will have a graduate degree. You will turn 37.

You will look for jobs. You will send out résumés. You will do interviews for things like Bakery Counter Night Person, Part-time Intern for the Assistant Manager, and Personal Assistant to the Hostess/Host. You will not get jobs. You were bored working when you were a teenager.

You will walk other people’s dogs. You will watch other people’s homes. You will sit in other people’s chairs and use other people’s pillows. You will be surrounded by other people’s pictures, other people’s food, and their odd intimate tastes. In art. Lighting. Soap. You will be paid to do this. This will come to not feel strange.

You will walk. You will turn down random streets. You will consider collecting random things. You will consider building random things that will serve random purposes. You will consider pirates and their place in the modern world. You will lose any fear of lost.

Your cousin/friend of a friend/former classmate will get a major role. Write/direct/manage/create/invent a Hollywood Internet Silicone Valley thing. They will instant message all available social satellites: Never stop chasing your dreams. Hard work will pay off in the end. You have to fall before you phoenix. They will be 23.

You will focus too hard on the minute details of doing everyday things. You will grow to not trust spelling, grade school historical facts, the pronunciation of words, or the nerve responses returned from your fingertips.

You will at some point overhear these random phrases: fusion bicycle; going from consulting straight to banking is rare; traffic-driven website; my producer would kill me if he knew I was telling you this but. You will want to punch the people saying these things. As hard as possible. In the stomach. Until you realize they spend two hours every day with their personal stuntman/ex-marine/part-time porn star/niche martial-arts trainer who teaches them to flip off walls and obliterate boulders of low self-esteem. And to do ten reps after you’re dead. Step aside. The war is over.

Your relatives will die. Your mother will break down like you’ve never seen her break down before. Over the phone. You will not be able to attend funerals.

You will borrow money from people you’ve already borrowed money from. You will move into a broken apartment. It will cost more than your first car.

You will fall out of love. You will fall in love. You will fall out of love.

You will run out of money. You will be glad it’s always warm. You will stare at the sea. You will stare at the sun. You will stare at the birds breaking up blue. You will stare at the wind leant palms.

(via recklesschants)

sl33pcr33p:

I was talking at rgr half asleep last night about trailer goth vs subdivision goth and I think I wanna expound on it tumblr style. There’s kind of a fucked up or even sinister dynamic to subdivision goth as a sister identity to trailer goth, in that for me and I think for most of us trailer goth is about agency. (Not that i ever lived in a trailer - we always lived in houses or duplexes and that gave us false pride and more debt . Like, no we never lived in a trailer but you did spend my life savings I worked for to keep us afloat.) Because buried in apparent petty rebellion was the truth that you were never wanted by society in the first place. Trailer goth is rejecting a society that rejected you from the get-go: because you are poor.

And there are places like Hot Topic that are synonymous with the aesthetic that bring the differences into sharp focus: who can afford to look the part and who can’t. For a long time the only clothes from Hot Topic I had were ones my friends bought me for Christmas. And I wore those shirts to DEATH. There’s the another bit: whose clothes had holes in them because they wore them out and whose clothes had holes in them because they put them there. And even access to aesthetic was not all about being able to buy clothes (because they could be stolen) but getting there. Trailer goths were lucky if both their parents had cars (mine didn’t most of the time), subdivision goths got new cars from their parents. Going to the mall at all was entirely reliant on Who Had Cars and it definitely wasn’t us. I’ll never forget when I got too tall (and too much butt) to wear my only plaid miniskirts I found at fashion bug one time for $1. Utter devastation.

So I guess I have come to resent these kids, who have grown up to become either crust fund kids (you know exactly what I’m talking about) or the girl I caught up with at a show last weekend who was complaining about money even though she doesn’t have a job and her grandparents pay her rent, as she flipped her purple hair that she confessed to me she got done at a salon last week. AT A SALON. This same girl used to take me to the mall in her new silver bug until I got grounded for like a year when my mom found my MySpace account. She bought me my first hot topic shirt for Christmas when I was 14. I made her a mixed cd in return. You know? You outta know.

The other night I was looking through my Documents folder for an old zine excerpt I wanted to post here, and instead I accidentally found a mislabeled rough draft for a different zine that never was, something that I had written when I was 25 and it was about My Formative Years. And I realized that I had been trying to write some kind of Compendium of My Formative Years ever since I was 21 and those memories started going fuzzy — all the things about high school and hanging out in parking lots, 15 of us and that one friend who had a station wagon, and how important it was that our arms were covered in cheap plastic and metal bracelets, how important it was to find the perfect pair of head-kicking boots at the Salvation Army, and all the authentic things we wrote in black marker on our jeans and canvas shoes. But also how nowadays I mock this part of myself and wonder how what was once so important is now so superficial to me.

It was important because some girl in Catholic school stole my one fancy hair barrette, because we couldn’t have new winter coats every year, because my parents and the community helped us to afford Catholic school because my mom thought it was important and was afraid we’d never learn anything in public school; because I sweat through my blouses and wore godawful saddle shoes and came home crying from being bullied every day and sometimes bruised and because I don’t remember hardly any of that but my mom says it’s true. It was important because I dressed in baggy clothes because I hated everything because everything hated me because I fell in love with my best friend and we held hands and got matching haircuts and boys threw rocks at me because they couldn’t decide if I was a dyke or a fag.

Because buried in apparent petty rebellion was the truth that you were never wanted by society in the first place. Trailer goth is rejecting a society that rejected you from the get-go: because you are poor. (sl33pcr33p)

I mean I wanted to finally romanticize those things with the looking back of being older at 21, at 25, at 28 — having these moods labelled Getting Over Punk because as I have gotten older the mantra “if you hate your job, quit” was just never a possibility, and as I’ve gotten older I don’t care about having a ~style~ or expressing my identity via fashion because who cares?, because I can’t afford it and I can’t afford to go to jail — because I used to steal from Hot Topic and I remember the first time I went to that store I was 13 and only had a few plain black t-shirts of my own and I said, oh my god it’s a store for people like me. Because it took me so many years to understand that “a store for people like me” is exactly the point, that I can purchase my identity, acquire my authentic self-expression at the mall — ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? But then also, what does it mean that a marketed style of rebellion actually helped push me into radical thought? I mean I eventually had to research what anarchy actually is because they sold circle-A patches at Hot Topic and I had to be able to explain it to my dad, you know.

My parents never worried or got angry when I started listening to Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails and I was practically enraged over the fact that this rebelliousness didn’t phase them — the cursing and the devil and the sexuality. I once saved $30 to get floor seats to a Marilyn Manson show in 1999 and my parents probably said something about how I might as well be throwing my money in the gutter, but I defended “his work” so passionately: But he’s an ARTIST. You don’t GET IT, he is so smart and he UNDERSTANDS things. They said, he’s a good businessman, that’s for sure. File under: Times My Parents Were Right (a lot, actually).

…

I started hating all of it when the stores like JCPenney’s and Sears (or Belk or Macy’s or insert-your-regional-equivalent-here) started selling the pre-ripped jeans and the distressed t-shirts and notebooks with handwritten “love you grrl!” and “rock’n’roll” on the cover already, like this was a false signifier. I mean my pants ripped from falling down, from getting beat up in a pit at a $3 punk show and from only having the one pair of pants anyway. I mean my journals were 99-cent spiral-bound notebooks that my friends wrote notes on, my friends not the shopping mall. This was important and it was important to be angry about the commodification and argue over the validity of your punk, but now even that kind of meta/ironic-rebellious attitude is A Thing and I am sort of left signifying nothing. Some girls in my class ten years younger than me were talking dismissively about the present-day 90’s “style” “comeback” and how they saw someone wearing an actual scrunchie on their wrist and I looked down at my stupid plaid skirt over torn jeans like this shameful what even is anything.

I still hate it — punk, or punk nostalgia, or punk aesthetic, or whatever — sometimes because it is still so much about access… this thing I thought I belonged to and then felt pushed out of anyway and wanted to care but it’s not cool to care and then couldn’t care but did, a little. And it’s like I used to be jealous about when people can say, I feel tomboyish today so I’m wearing this, I feel femme today so I’m wearing this, I feel sexy today so I’m wearing this, and I would wish I had the money to buy a nice dress or the time to make a nice dress (time is money is value of course) — I wondered if my tomboyish presentation is simply a function of practicality and frugality and what I would have to sacrifice (waking up even earlier than 6:30 to fix my hair?) to have more of a choice in the matter — and I would wish I could afford to get a tattoo or piercing to commemorate important events (I used to force this to be affordable but I can’t anymore and I sometimes hate tattoos now); and I would want to dye my hair on personal whims and sometimes even want to learn how to do makeup. And I would want to be able to buy records and alcohol and place large orders to zine distros and shop at the farmers market and be able to do punk right, or whatever. And then I got angry, and then I didn’t care — or I cared but I didn’t care. Or I don’t know at all.

…

When my Friend was deep into his alcoholism that’s where all the money went. Sometimes it seemed to me like this completely fucked-up Zenlike existence/non-existence of simply accepting everything (as long as there was a drink of course). I would have nervous breakdowns about paying the bills or why does our backyard look so white trash (the importance of being able to pass as not-white-trash was deeply ingrained in my from my mother) or why can’t I find a dress that fits me properly or why am I always five years behind on music, etc.

Sometimes he was like this truly authentic creature who didn’t give two shits about expressing an identity, paying to get into shows, getting his guitars repaired. Like if his guitar strings broke, he would just stop playing, no big deal. I asked him, what would you look like if you didn’t have to spend all your money on alcohol? What would you wear? Would you get a haircut? Would you ever get a tattoo? Would you buy effects pedals or get your amp fixed? What kind of records would you buy if you could just shop around instead of asking me to download and burn albums? Would you buy art supplies? What if you had fancy paper instead of painting on cardboard boxes? & he said he didn’t know, really, maybe a pair of pants that were actually his size, a new amp, guitar strings, a set of colored pencils.

I mean this genuine disinterest was utterly fascinating to me. I only wish that I could not-care that hard sometimes.

…

in the Interest of the Blogosphere: Posts tagged “questions” are to be considered as such, works-in-progress, rough drafts, processing, etc. And especially please note that I am not intending to discredit the validity of or shit-talk individuals who utilize fashion as a form of identity expression, okay? It is interesting to me (eg feminist makeupping) but not particularly my thing, and I’m just trying to describe how I see radical and capital get so convoluted and entangled. This shit is complex, sometimes, and like, I rarely know what the hell I’m talking about anyway.

(Source: persephonette)

katydidnot:

theramptosilverspring:

“Why the Enlightenment Ideals are Still Annoyingly Relevant”

With the introduction of the bourgeoisie and the growing idea that art is in some way related to “the Spirit” and became a new form of social currency. The suffering artist became as noble and romantic as a knight of yore (though the Enlightenment was also responsible for romanticizing that). American society is based on the founding fathers’ ideals, which are in turn based on the ideals of Enlightenment philosophy. People in the modern world continue to insist that this country be informed by our founding father’s ideals, despite the obvious pretentiousness of the whole outlook, as well as that fact that it dehumanizes and alienates huge portions of the population.

First of all, the idea of a troubled musician is hugely relevant and popular. The archetype of “neurotically antisocial” (Highest Wisdom, 255) musician, frequently of ambiguous sexuality or alternately a sexual idol, still pervades the middle-class music consciousness, with Morrissey1 being an example of the former and Conor Oberst2 of the latter. The troubled androgynous musician is always male.

The need for somewhat and simplistic and relate-able music began as a way to sell music for the expanding bourgeoisie class as amateur musicianship became a way for the middle class to gain cultural capital and a piano became a fixture in the middle class home. That ideal of amateur musicianship still persists, now with a guitar. Self-indulgent amateurs are often the audience, amateurs who have come to believe that the ultimate purpose of the universe is to create art, an idea popularized by Kant. This is a very self-centered outlook focused on the middle class perspective, in line with the idea “humanity is essentially middle class” (History of Human Nature 242), a viewpoint still reflected today. For example, just a few weeks ago, Mittens Romney said that he is “not concerned with the very poor. We have a safety net there” (Huffington Post), which mirrors the thinking that “the State represents the ultimate real interests of everyone,” (Universal in Action, 241) which ignores the glaringly obvious fact that it doesn’t. A State composed of leaders and luminaries drawn from the middle class represents the interests of the middle class, who falsely ascribe their interests to all social classes.

Enlightenment philosophy shapes our outlook, still, on what a state “should” be, as well as what is valuable in society. These values reflect the fact that middle class folks aspire to a life of luxury, leisure and eccentricity. Eccentricity implies wealth. Without wealth, it is read as mental illness instead of genius. The middle class is also in some ways required, as Beethoven did, to “love poor suffering mankind, but only from a distance,” (Highest Wisdom, 261) in order to confer their own goals upon them. Overall, this outlook is wholly misguided and relies on the device of the “white (or middle class) savior” and a failure to recognize that any of their do-gooding suggestions are wholly pointless, as only the oppressed themselves have the devices to formulate plans to help themselves, and any suggestions by do-gooders who have no lived experience in a position without privilege are pointless and self-serving.

Submitted this as a response to “3. Determine your own topic that relates the Age of Science and the Enlightenment to changes that occurred in music” this prompt for my writing class. Was met with this response from my professor: You really do not want to submit this for a grade. Although you have probed into the effects of the Enlightenment in your essay, it unfortunately missed the aim of the assignment. Reread the choices below and use the source material online for your pool of information.

So now I am rewriting the essay and I don’t know what to say I hate everything

in which louise writes an excellent essay that is not appreciated 

as she did not include the footnotes, here are the ones on conor oberst and morrissey, as retrieved from our AIM conversation: 

1. Morrissey, best known as lead signer for the Smiths, cultivates a a persona in which he performs femininity/androgyny (and pretentiousness) as a celibate, but in a queer-coded way. He also cultivates gladiolus. 

2. Conor Oberst is “emo” and is best known for the band Bright Eyes. He constantly sings about sex, in a self-conscious angst riddled way. He is “so pathetic that you like it”, a lot like a wet kitten, but more sexual.  

I like this essay and I’m sorry it was unappreciated in an academic setting. (But not too sorry because fxxk skxxl, really.)

For years I agonized over my sense of self-worth as an artist and as a person, because I aspired to exist in the image of my favorite white male tortured artistic heroes, and they always made it look so easy. Live every moment as if it were a work of art, they said. Quit your job if you don’t like it, they said. If you get bored just hitch a ride, they said, because you will have the ultimate freedom, if you are courageous enough to choose it. Write every day, they said.

I thought for years that there must be something pathetically lacking in me that I couldn’t always just pick up and bum around in another city, comforting myself with a notebook and casually allowing the kindness of the synchronistic universe to take care of me, writing a hundred pages a day because I just had to express my deepest thoughts and feelings above all else, and somehow magically getting the bills paid and never feeling bogged down by “a real job” because I never had to have one of course ‘cause that’s for squares and sell-outs, huh. So I was certain for many angstful years that it was my problem that I just wasn’t brave enough to throw caution (and debt collectors) to the wind, or maybe I just wasn’t committed enough to follow through on the whole “save money for a year and then you’ll be able to do whatever you want” thing. (How do you save money on minimum wage?)

Then I finally learned that so many of these tortured artist types had girlfriends and mommies and aunts and sisters and lovers and exlovers and/or trust funds but just conveniently romanticized out the part where “poverty” can only be glamorous and conducive to the artmaking process when it’s an aesthetic “poverty by choice.” Ooops so, sorry it’s been like five years since I’ve written a zine but that doesn’t mean I’m not committed to “MY WORK,” just that I’m more committed to being able to pay the rent.

One day I’ll write a better essay about how this bullshit artist mythology cultivates so much resentment, as a result of initially cultivating so much self-doubt as one who gives this particular kind of a shit, such as myself, used to struggle so hard to pass as not-working-class. (I don’t care as much about ‘passing’ as middle-classish anymore now but I wish I would’ve figured that out years ago when I spent a chunk of my tax return on an iPod so I wouldn’t feel like The Only Person in College Who Still Listens to CDs at Home, ugh.)

“Their situation was always precarious. When a month of rain interfered with street vending or a broken foot immobilized Dee, they were unable to pay rent and ended up homeless again. Or rather, ‘houseless.’ Tiny thinks ‘the homeless’ is a dehumanizing phrase that takes all people who don’t rent or own the place where they sleep and lumps them into a single group that is easy to pity, dismiss, or brutalize. She prefers ‘houseless,’ which describes a concrete situation and doesn’t carry the cultural weight of decades of philanthropic and government conversations about, but not with, ‘the homeless.’”

I must not argue on the Internet.
I must not argue on the Internet.
I must not argue on the Internet.
I must not argue on the Internet.
I must not argue on the Internet.

1 in 7 American houses are empty.

1 in 402 Americans are homeless.

24 empty houses are available for each homeless American.

Squat2Own:

How can you sell these houses for free?

“The houses have been foreclosed on: The banks owe a debt to the public due to the massive government bailouts we have given them. They are in default on this loan because they have not upheld their end of the deal. They have not resumed lending and they have not stopped foreclosing on people who cannot make mortgage payments in this crumbling economy. In order to partially recoup our investment in these banks, it’s everyone’s right to repossess vacant bank-owned houses for the benefit of the community.”

rgr-pop:

mappingthemoon:

Infighting & class warfare among the “radicals” means CAPITALISM IS WINNING.

I’m pretty sure the existence of homeless people means CAPITALISM IS WINNING, but whatever.

…

So anyway:
a) what you are doing is classist
b) and if we are not allowed to talk about how stuff is classist unless we are poor, we are certainly not allowed to talk about “class warfare” unless we are poor

Well… I am poor. I made some less-than-ideal choices in the past and ended up sleeping in alleyways for a while. Nowadays I’m supporting myself & my unemployed partner on ~8K/year. I don’t like to explain (or brag about) this as a Valid Reason to Speak about a Particular Issue, because I am not usually proud of being poor (because capitalism!), but I guess it applies in this context. Also I was raised with a stubborn belief that it is important to be able to pass as NOT-Poor-White-Trash and so as I child I got vernacular/slang criticized out of me and learned that Having an Education and knowing how to read and write eloquently are all very important in order to be taken seriously by Other People (who could potentially provide jobs, educational opportunities, and extensions on repaying past-due debts).

That being said, I’m relating this discussion to what ponys brought up re: the fetishization of poverty within the punk community and how if looking “trashy” is an expression of punk/rad culture/ideals then how does one know offhand what privileges are actually in place? (eg. I own one pair of pants due to my economic situation vs. wearing the same pair of pants in defiance of consumerism OR wearing the same pair of pants as a mere “fashion statement.”) There are different routes to radical thinking/lifestyles, and some of us come into it from living in poverty and some of us come into it from the suburbs, and then because of the dress code and lifestyle choices one can’t always tell the difference. So then it’s weird, to me, to get called out for a particular assumed privilege (such as having a middle class background) when I didn’t have that privilege and when in fact I am coming from a history of Family Struggling in Various Levels of Poverty for Generations so… paralleling that with “hobo bean night” doesn’t offend me, although it may offend others with different backgrounds/identities, but they are still welcome to come and eat beans, presumably.

While gopfuzz’s response (“When you actually have to work to feed yourself…”) was snarky and aggro, IF he is also in the Poor-White-Trash economic stratum and is actually experiencing poverty and/or has been a “wandering worker,” is it still class-appropriation to align one’s own community-feeding events with a history of something similar (ie “hobo stew”)? Personally I prefer reclaiming “Poor White Trash” as a means of “owning my poverty” (as per blairellis’ response) but also when I was travelling I did work odd jobs (“hobo”) and sometimes begged for change (“crusty”…although I didn’t get drunk while travelling, and my definition of crusty has always been “drunk and obnoxious vagabond-by-choice”). I didn’t like to use “hobo” because I didn’t ride trains, though.

Also, veering somewhat off-topic but pertaining again to things ponys mentioned, there is the weird exclusion thing in punk/rad communities where as an Actual Poor Person there are a lot of rad activities I can’t participate in due to lack of time/money, as many aspects of punk culture are tied to capitalism still (shopping for vintage clothes, buying vinyl, going out to cool local restaurants, drinking fair-trade coffee, being able to afford crafting supplies to do diy things) — and also simply not having the time to participate in these community functions (in addition to not having time to read, not having time to keep up with blog discourse) because being Actually Poor takes up a lot of time going to jobs, waiting on buses, waiting at the laundromat, waiting in line for foodstamps, etc.). Then there can be exclusion on the other side when poor punx get all judgey upon finding out that other punx are sitting on trust funds or have parents who provide them with cars or groceries. And how sometimes it feels like a very thin line between Ally and Privileged Person Attempting to Speak on Behalf of an Oppressed Group Even Though they May Not Know Jack Shit about What It’s Like (even though it is not always necessary for one to personally experience an injustice to want to help others fight against it). And so when I say that “class warfare among the radicals means that capitalism is winning” I mean that there’s this divide-and-conquer thing happening where we are unable to relate and work together sometimes because “you’re being privileged” and “you don’t know what it’s really like!” (questioning “authenticity,” clinging to “identity”) and meanwhile, people are hungry and still homeless, cf. theory + action in tandem, not versus.

…

You said:

Incidentally, is this directed towards the General You, or the Original-Poster You, or me? (Since I didn’t say that stuff & Appeal to WikiPedia is still Appeal to the Dictionary/Authority anyway.) My only original response re: infighting & then reposting the Hobo Ethical Code was a hiding-behind-other-people’s-words appeal for all to maybe try to deal with Serious Relevant Issues in a not-mean-and-personally-attacking-based-in-nonpolitical-other-problems way.

Afterward I saw a useful image in the CrimethInc. Work book of a cartoon punching herself in the face, captioned “An ineffective way to deal with your privilege.”

peripatetic (ramble)

Most of my writing comes from my 1.7-mile walk home from work at night:

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I do all of these things. I’ve never been able to articulate it as well as John Cheese over there… but here’s an anecdote re: “You Develop a Taste for Shitty Food”

A couple years ago, I got a student loan refund and decided Colby & I deserved to have One Fancy Dinner Date. We went to the Porterhouse Grill and I ate steak and mashed potatoes and it was so amazingly delicious that I literally cried. For-real literally, not hyperbolic-literally. Just a few teardrops into my wineglass, you know. Later that night I got sick and puked it all up because, presumably, my stomach was so used to consuming ground beef wrapped in plastic once a month that it just didn’t know how to process actual food.

(Source: moniquill, via rgr-pop)