Tyler Weaver's Blog, page 51

Borges / Compulsion

A question written and rewritten: Why am I capable of ambivalence about the response to these Informalities but am incapable of the same when it comes to tweets? 

Borges, in 1935’s, “A Theologian In Death,” offers a possible answer:

“Then he began to write something about charity; but what he wrote on the paper one day, he did not see the next; for this happens to every one there when he commits any thing to paper for the external man only, and not at the same time for the internal, this from compulsion and not from freedom; it is obliterated of itself.”

Jorge Luis Borges

The Informalities satisfy not only the external but primarily the internal, a need to express myself via the discipline of a daily challenge, a contrasting companion to the water-boil-toil-simmer of The Work that exercises another facet of writing, the churn. Tweets, though I may, in moments of wavering delusion, tell myself differently, are for the external only, for a compulsion, a falling into the addictive nature of half-thought transformed into currency for the social slot machine. 

Solution: Be mindful of this dichotomy of purpose; make Twitter its own challenge, part of the internal, the discipline of choosing result-agnosticism – readjust (read: eliminate) attachment and expectation and continue on. 

Listening: Beth Gibbons and The Polish National Symphony Orchestra, GORECKI: SYMPHONY NO.3 (SYMPHONY OF SORROWFUL SONGS) – Gibbons shines; in equal turns spectacular and surprising, a beautiful – live! – rendition.

Meditative Practices in Cat Wrangling

Yesterday, +/- 1500:

Bologna in hand to coax The Uncoaxcable from under the back porch that’s technically the front but when my parents built the house they had some weird notion of putting the front porch in the back (“For the view”); thirty years on, it still doesn’t compute.

Here Kitty, Here Kitty / Hiss, spit, claw: The Uncoaxable venturing deeper into the depths of the porch, the deck, the varmint (finally got to use that word) pagoda, trails of bologna and frisky treats and profanity ignored culminating in a doomed effort to crawl into the varmint pagoda myself where, though I failed to coax The Uncoaxable, I did find the bogarted water dish, stupid raccoon. 

Emergent, spitting straw and dirt, a flash of inspiration: go Costanza, do the opposite of what you’re doing. Remember The Uncoaxable’s fascination with your meditation practice. Use it.

Turning away, sitting and focusing on my breath (and the fallen tree atop the old shed I have yet to figure out how best to remove without damaging everything else): the padding of kitty feet over fallen leaves. 

A few minutes later, an orange and white head emergent; my quiet steps. The approach, the flop, the pickup: You’re ready to go inside, aren’t you?

Meow.

Earworm: “Because the Night,” Patti Smith Group.

The Eleventeenth Banana

At least twice a week I let myself believe that I’m capable of reading The News at breakfast, of multi-tasking, and, at least twice a week, often before the last bite of banana is complete and the morning’s eleventeenth prognostication about the Democrats’ chances in an election more than a year and half away is consumed with half-distracted though nonetheless jacked-up gusto and forgotten immediately inside the context of now and the penultimate bite of banana, I recognize my complete inability with and loathing of multi-tasking and find, unfailingly, that I prefer the banana.

Dark Mode Legal Pad, Revisited

A follow-up to my earlier effusive praise of my “dark mode legal pad,” still effusive but with more detail as both usage and purpose have solidified into two defined functions, each a version of “word-doodling”:

One, a “morning-pages” style stream of (un)conscious rambling to empty my brain and see if something, anything, sounds good. More often than not, the same phrases are repeated over days or weeks: stragglers trying to find the rhythm they need to join the rest of The Work — or the word equivalent of some jackass interjecting eleventeen, ninety-six, ninety-teen, when I’m trying to count to a hundred.

Second, a slowed-down testing ground for small revisions, seeking that right rhythm, that right turn of phrase, that might propel me to further development in the main iA Writer document. Note: I do have to make the leap back to iA Writer rather quickly thanks to my previously discussed shitty handwriting lest I become unable to read what I’ve written after a few minutes.

Amazed that this $40 piece of box-store plastic remains such an integral part of my process – and relieved that it has kept wasted scraps of legal pad paper and disposable pens (note: while I do my best to be environmentally conscious, I will never abandon my beloved Pilot V Razor Point pens; when we’re all wearing gas masks and floating about on half-inflated life rafts like an unfairly-maligned mid-90s piss-drinking Kevin Costner flop, I’ll still be clutching one of those pens) to a bare minimum. The only option I would like to see is a variety of stylus/pen tip sizes – a fine point would be most welcome (and perhaps help with control and the aforementioned shitty handwriting though I know that that’s all on me), and render my failed, screen-scratching hack involving an empty mechanical pencil and duct tape a distant memory. 

Marner to Middlemarch (Stray Thoughts)

The difference a decade makes: SILAS MARNER (1861) is an enjoyable and moving read but MIDDLEMARCH (1871) is revolutionary… seeds of the latter in the former, a sightreading, her first run, of themes and ideas – the village being its own character with its own mores and stories populated with realistic, well-drawn human beings facing interconnected tragedies of unfulfilled purpose amid the chokehold of institutionalized piety and social hierarchy – that she would develop and bring to a pinnacle of complexity and humanity in MIDDLEMARCH… in Silas, early shades of Causabon; in Eppie and Nancy and Dolly, of Dorothea; in Godfrey, of Lydgate; in The Squire, of Mr Vincy… between these works, the evidence of time’s deliverance of craft and artistic authority through persistent toil and exploration.

Sanctuary is Where The Kaiju Waits

A massive new – FREE! – desk, The Kaiju, obtained thanks to being married to somebody who works with somebody who birthed somebody who works at a bank that’s overhauling their office decor in favor of something more modern and/or cohesive.

As The Kaiju fit through only one door in the house – and through that one door only by divorcing the door from its hinges – it, The Kaiju, has decreed that a section of the old paint shop will be my new office, my new Sanctum.

And so waits the Kaiju, stacked, not only for me to wrap my head around how to turn an 8×10 section of the shop into my new Sanctum but how to reconcile saying farewell to the little upstairs nook that has been my creative home for the last seven years, for better or for worse. But, while my brain has been inventing all sorts of fuckeries to prevent my transplantation, I’m nonetheless hopeful that it will relent as the new space becomes more concrete – it must, for The Kaiju doesn’t do stairs.

Of All The Places

In the first episode of ABSTRACT: THE ART OF DESIGN, Netflix’s design/art-version of CHEF’S TABLE (or maybe it’s the other way ’round), illustrator Christoph Niemann spoke of moving to NYC for the first time, that it was “his place” (a paraphrasing of his exact words, one that I hope leaves the beautiful idea intact) and that we all have them, that first time moving somewhere without friends, without family, to where we must build ourselves and our careers to find that home of becoming; out of all of the remarkable insight included in the documentary, it was that little idea, a tossed-off remark, that struck a nerve.

In spite of the knowledge if not the acceptance that my life is here now, 9.6 miles away where I started – almost two decades removed from my initial escape to Boston and staring down the outset of what I fear may be a midlife crisis or at least the continued growing pains of the search for that “second wind” – and experiencing it, this place of my creation, in different and wonderful and frustrating and infuriating transmutations, I feel as though a part of me is gone, as though part of me has been in an enforced exile. Compromised – or maybe synthesized. I don’t know.

While I know that the first “My Place” can only live in a pining for a past that probably never existed, I want to believe that the intrinsic spirit of becoming and being unmoored contained therein can be reignited through the combustion of what is and what was but I’m not sure that it can be; perhaps it can only exist in here, in memory.

And all I can do is press on.

(In the meantime, be sure to check out ABSTRACT. It’s quite good.)

House / Home

The other day: an empty house — nary a fur baby, nary a Katie, nary a greeting — and that surge of anxiety amidst muddy paw prints turned to dirt and scattered across floral linoleum, food bowls empty – a fish, a taco, stainless steel –  an eerie quiet, an unsettling quiet, that kind of quiet that doesn’t rejuvenate but strangles and knocks the wind out of shredded sails / Breathe: a quick phone call, At the Dollar Store, BRB / Click / Swipe / Whatever / Breathe (all good…) and soon: three sets of four legs and one set of two through the door, a boisterous greeting, the house once more a home.

On Going Quasi-Cyborg, Maybe

For the last year-plus, a persistent recommendation from my endocrinologist to upgrade my $10 blood glucose testing apparatus with its 50 for $10 testing strips and fingerprickings to a CGM, a recommendation contraindicated by learning that it would exacerbate my OCD. But, a compromise (won’t mention the name here – unless they’ll give me a free reader and free refills for life since insulin already costs enough even with insurance thankyouverymuch) not without promise: 14 days between replacement bits n bobs! Only look at it when you need to! Even better! 

Yet still I’ve spurned his songs of praise: I’m happy with Tabitha, the aforementioned $10 devourer of four-times-daily blood sacrifice who can sometimes fling a 30-point difference between two pricks in the same finger (as I write that, yes, yes, I know…); and the question of insurance coverage overshadows all…

This line of thinking, however, hasn’t survived the current arc of reality: by the blessing and the curse of being an only child, I’ve had to stay with my mother during her initial post-broken hip / femur-homecoming and have watched – for the first time since I myself was dying in the hospital from what was revealed to be T1D – commercial television and its seemingly ceaseless drum-beating for the aforementioned quasi-cybernetic CGM enhancement. 

By the fourth time through the smiling faces, I had succumbed to the advert’s sway and caught myself in the recognition of how good an idea this quasi-cybernetic enhancement (augmentation?) might be… though perhaps with some space, I’ll have a better perspective of whether or not it’s truly good for me or if it’s simply a means to generate torturous small talk (though I’m leaning towards the former – it would be nice to gather further data as to why, exactly, my levels leap one day and stay the same the next with the same dosage in the afternoons); writing this is part of gaining that perspective.

DEUS EX, here I come. Maybe. 

A Few Notes on My Shitty Handwriting

A note scrawled to myself with increasing frequency in the pages of innocent notebooks: “Slow down; you DO want to use these notes, don’t you?”

Yes, actually, I do. 

But alas, my handwriting is shit, a horrific mutant born (perhaps) of a manic cross-purpose thought exorcism and of my past life spent writing music, of drawing symbols to be translated into song and transferring that propensity for drawing instead of writing to words that read – hours, minutes later – as though uttered by a drunken lout.

Considering teaching myself to write right-handed from a kindergarten writing book; given the state of my thought-exorcism, speed-freak southpawness, it wouldn’t make much of a difference to start from scratch… 

… or, you know, I could just slow down. Whatever works.

P.S. Update: It’s 20 March and my head hasn’t exploded… yet.

Listening: TRUST IN THE LIFEFORCE OF THE DEEP MYSTERY, by The Comet is Coming. (Spectacular.)