On nonsense.

I wish I could write a graphic novel, something poignant and funny and dark like Lynda Barry or Alison Bechdel or Mariko & Jillian Tamaki. I like writing and reading and art, and I want to participate and make things, but I never know how. I feel like there's a perfect medium out there that just keeps eluding me and when I find it I will be home. Can you get to the point where you've read so many books that they start spilling out of you in original novels? Maybe I just haven't read enough books. Natalie Goldberg says that there is no more perfect time to write than right now this very second, and that writing is a discipline. I agree, but I am very undisciplined. I am also reading about how to like myself more, and how to think less about how I wish I were something else. I read self-help books a lot -- with Buddhist flavorings! -- and cry on the bus sometimes. It's embarrassing, like everything in life.

All I know is that I want to get away from having to see the angry and disappoitned masses every day, to walk on unforgiving concrete and the grimy artifice that comes with living in a city. I want to live in an old farmhouse, with a big wooden desk of my own, full of pens and colored pencils and watercolors, and notebooks of all shapes and sizes and textures. And I will sit in the liltingly beautiful hours of the early morning and write nonsense, and draw nonsense, and out of it will come a small worthwhile thing that will make the passing day worth finishing. Or out of it will come nothing, and I will try again the next day. And it will be my desk, and it won't be covered in clothes and homework like my current desk is now, because our apartment is too small for me to really work at my desk. And I will have chickens and vegetables, and no neighbors, a few cats and my loving partner, hodgepodge family/friend dinners, and lots of dirt but no smog. And I will feel truly alone-without-lonely for the first time and I will feel safe and full and free to do what I need to do for growth. But all these things require money and how do you find time to work for adequate amounts of money when you have to keep your soul alive, too?

I need to find a way to check out of the rat race, or I will be trampled. The pulpy remnants of violently squeezed childhood joy and wonder are something that I have to spend the rest of my life protecting inside myself. I've gotta get out of all this, for the sake of my soul, and fully inhabit my body as a world apart from this ugly dog fight of grades, the greed, minimum wage, competitive resume-writing, applications, interviews, proving yourself, proving yourself, proving yourself...I feel like a cat that has been dropped into the ocean: confused, miserable, slowly drowning, but desperately aware that there is a better place, one of comfort and acceptance and clinging to the hope that someday that place will be accessible and that place will be home.

 

 

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.