Author: Matthew Eilar

Just a dude with a stereo, a computer, and a brain.

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Tuesday

I’ve been having trouble waking up in the morning for a little while. All is change, nothing stays the same way forever, but I thought I had put myself into a little groove where I was out for a late night tea then up again early in the morning. That doesn’t seem to be sticking.

Dream

I had some disturbing dreams. In one, I was driving by a field where a disturbed person that was shooting people and cars with rifles. In the dream-logic, I needed to get out of the car so that I didn’t crash. This led to a very disturbing foot chase, then finally a hand to hand confrontation, where I had to stab him in the hands repeatedly with some old school teacher’s scissors, like these:

shears[I forgot that I was writing about yesterday, these are last night’s dreams. They were disturbing]

The dream transitioned into a social function that I was throwing for friends, family, and former teachers. We were all at my house, but a squalid, transformed, dirty version of my house. It looked like nobody had cleaned, and my guests were uncomfortable in it. I was so sad that all these people showed up in order to be happy for me, and couldn’t. That was what I woke up to this morning.

Back to yesterday.

Work

I made it out of the house fine, and spent the morning working quietly. We had some people interviewing during kid hours, and I had to teach some first graders how to play BINGO (I forget that they don’t know anything sometimes), and that’s the closest I had to anything interesting during the day.

Want

04-mad-men-peggy-1.w529.h352.2x

When I got home, I watched the latest episode of Mad Men with Luke Skywalker. It was incredible, and reminded me of why I like the show so much. That led into a conversation that, while it wasn’t antagonistic, still had a lot of weird energy to it.

One of the reasons why I like Luke so much is that she is ferociously, crazily smart, and also notices and remembers everything. Everything. This makes her an interesting conversation partner, and frequent generator of insights I wouldn’t have seen, but also makes me nervous any time I am worried that I am going to step into her death ray.

Astonishing-x-men-cyclops-2 Over the last month, I’ve had a lot of internal drama about whether I am somebody that’s too hard on others. I’ve yo-yo’d pretty wildly between feeling completely unable to figure out a way to express myself in one situation to being instantly at home and nurtured in others. By happenstance (rando Facebook click, if you must know), I made my way to the corpus of Ask Polly columns in The Awl and New York Magazine. One that meant a lot to me was the letter, “Why are the guys I date so boring?” Here’s the part I can’t stop thinking about:

After digging out my journal from my first year out of college for a column a few weeks ago, I’ve been rereading it here and there, and boy, have I learned a lot about my depressing life back then. I lived with my college boyfriend and spent all of my time with his friends, and let me tell you what, those people were perfectly smart and interesting, but they were not my people. Every single page of that journal is a testament to how out of place I was. I was a radish tossed into a sack of potatoes, trying hard to imitate a potato. “Why do these potatoes act like my bitterness and zing are a pain in the ass?” I’d wonder. “Who doesn’t love the almost-too-sharp taste of a Raphanus sativus? Am I going crazy? Why do they turn their eyes away from my bright-red color, and flinch like I’m not nearly potato-y enough? Why do they roll their eyes and look at each other whenever I get a little radishy?”

Now to be fair, in some ways, I saw potatoes as the rulers of the universe back then. They could just power-down their wild brains and focus on the concrete. They kept things simple. I thought maybe they were stupid or shallow at times, but really they were making a choice, the choice of reasonably happy people with reasonably happy, privileged childhoods who were destined to lead reasonably happy lives — lives that had very little in common with the life I wanted to live. They would simply amble optimistically forward with their careers and continue to do their low-key, easygoing, Grateful Dead–loving, Teva-wearing upper-middle-class professional dude and dudette thing.

And frankly, I myself was a little allergic to radishes! I was a radish with a radish allergy! Radishes were much harder to get along with than potatoes. Even though radishes said “Yes, yes!” when I talked instead of averting their eyes at my non-potato-y ways, they also had so many radishy words coming out of their mouths that they weren’t very good listeners. And they were so oversensitive! It was so easy to piss them off, and they’d TELL you when they got pissed, unlike the potatoes! Radishes wore their hearts on their sleeves, like I did when I was feeling weak, so as a result, they seemed weak to me. I thought I was better than them! I thought it was cooler not to be myself!

But mark my words: A radish cannot pretend among the potatoes forever. As a wise man once said, a radish who chases potatoes around and moves in with potatoes is an unhappy radish.

Learn to get along with men who are very smart and weird and sensitive like you are. And if you’re not already friends with radishy women, you’d better find some of them, too. Maybe do that first. Because what the fuck are you doing with all of these spuds? Why don’t you have a radish friend to tell you, “Dude, he’s a potato. What did you expect?”

It’s true that radishes can be inconvenient, with their complicated feelings and demands. Especially when you’re young. Young radishes are, nine times out of ten, super-taxing and dysfunctional. They see complications everywhere. They will get weird or talk too long about their artistic pursuits or disappear suddenly or advocate for open relationships (which is great if you also love open relationships, but personally, I prefer comfort and predictability over almost everything).

But when a radish meets another radish and they see each other clearly and support and love each other for their sharpness and their bitterness and their incomparable zing (yes, I am beating this metaphor into the ground. That’s what we radishes do!), it’s a beautiful thing. The very best of everything springs forth from that kind of primordial, aching radishy love.

Now, for a person like me, having binary categories like “radish” and “potato” and seeing people the world through that lens can be a huge emotional trap. When I read that column, I immediately thought of the radishes and potatoes in my own life. Just as quickly, I also thought of the times in my life where I had such a narrow idea of what a radish was that I thought everyone else was a potato.

The column feels empowering to me, too. One of the wonderful things my former therapist would hit me over the head with is that, in terms of human development, I’m cruising right into “decide what kind of person you want to be” territory. I really like it. One of my obsessions is the Almodovar movie Todo Sobre mi Madre, which has this monologue from the transsexual (her term) prostitute La Agrado:

They call me La Agrado because I’ve always tried to make people’s lives agreeable. As well as being agreeable, I’m very authentic! Look at this body! All made to measure! … [I]t costs a lot to be authentic, ma’am. And one can’t be stingy with these things…because you are more authentic the more you resemble what you’ve dreamed you are.

I love that: “you are more authentic the more you resemble what you’ve dreamed you are.” It gives me hope that one day I will feel pride in my sharp edges and snaggleteeth, and will one day be able to really believe fuck ’em if they don’t like it. Because what do I want to be? A radish. And wanting is the first step to being.

All of this is to say that Luke is a radish too, and I can take a little zing.

Solar

To end the day, I went to play music with Jesus Christ for what might have been the last time. I have nothing but sadness about that.

Ultron

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Sunday

I woke up on Sunday feeling in fair condition, not quite poor but not altogether good either. I had a really nice Saturday of epic sun and heroic duration, but I had also fallen asleep cranky from a small disagreement with someone near me. I try really hard to be a let not the sun go down upon your wrath person, so I just wanted a tranquil day. I got started on charliework, but then took my friends up on an offer to see the new Avengers movie.

Ultron

Before I go into my thoughts on Avengers: Age of Ultron: Brought to You by Samsung: a Production of the Marvel Superhero Universe (A:AoU:BtYbS:aPotMSU (Ultron)), there are a couple of things we need to stipulate to:

  • There’s nothing stupid about superheroes, but a culture in which only superhero movies can make any money is a stupid culture.
  • The whole cinematic scheme of the superhero movie is to bang the audience over the head with what they are supposed to feel about any given moment, because otherwise there would be no way to tell what the fuck is going on at any one time.
  • There have been so goddamn many of these movies that I no longer believe that we need to keep making them.

I feel old, because I always saw myself as the secret populist, the not a snob. I hated snobby people that wouldn’t watch Batman Begins or whatever because it was a superhero movie. But now I’m one of them and I don’t care anymore. Anyway, here are my thoughts:

  1. There was one joke I laughed at. I don’t remember what it was, but there was definitely one joke I laughed at.
  2. All of the actors are fine, but are terrible because the words they have to say for money are bad. I suspect RDJ and Luke Evens are better than average because they also had bad words but I still liked watching them.
  3. I was very happy to see Andy Serkis.
  4. The low tide drydock location was pretty cool. It was as close as the movie had to a real location. Unfortunately, there was never any time to give any sense of place or location, so nothing ever felt exotic or interesting.
  5. Tony Stark is an interesting Joss Whedon figure. What if the ultimate Gen X dude shows his contempt for institutions and the man by never wearing a suit and always wearing jeans but is also a hyperwealthy arms dealer? The anti-authoritarian stance starts to seem churlish, or at the very least Not Cute. Kind of like the scrappy Hollywood upstart that made his bones by deconstructing and spinning the tropes and banter of banal megamovies trying to use the same bag of tricks while making those movies. I like the guy just fine, but I’d rather have fewer campy jokes and more doing something interesting with the big canvas. Or, for fuck’s sake, even just funnier jokes.
  6. This wasn’t a movie so much as a giant Jenga tower. Remove a single scene and four things fall down. I would rather have watched it fall down.

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Saturday

If this day was an egg, and I was an egg sorter, I would call it AAA, extra large. I woke up to the familiar droning lawn mower noise of Sting, our anal retentive coke dealing neighbor (he works for a local Coca-Cola distributor). I took the time to make myself a proper breakfast, then lazed around while waiting for Luke to get ready to go to the Portland Art Museum’s Italian Style exhibit. On our way over to pick up Hunter Thompson, who was joining us, we rolled down the windows and blasted this mix CD I found while cleaning through old storage at work called “Dance Music for Old People,” a thoroughly good mix of mid-80’s to mid-2000’s indie and indie-adjacent dance pop (and William Shatner, which dates the mix to the time when it was still funny to add a random Shatner track in for the lulz).

VA_ItalianStyle_installI enjoyed the exhibit a few weeks ago when I had a cousin visiting, and going through it a second time, I was impressed by how much I got out of it that first time. People go through museums at their own pace, but I have a genuine admiration for the way that the curators tell a story of regional transition through the catalog descriptions of the garments and fabrics they presented. So many people were blowing right past all of that information. It’s easy for me to say, I guess. I read very quickly. Over the years, I’ve talked a lot to HT and LS about clothes, whether flipping through GQ, critiquing RuPaul’s Drag Race, or just bitching about expensive things we want and can’t afford, and it was nice to go with them, and see him another time before he leaves.

After leaving the museum, we came back to my house. We had a little nostalgic moment, going through old photos, confronting the transition. He offered to go out for a drink, so we went across the freeway to Roscoe’s, a sturdy beer bar in Montavilla. We had a nice chat. I’ve been a little dull recently, because I feel very rudderless right now. When I talk with others, I have to either burn a bunch of energy faking interest or talk in circles about not quite knowing what to do with myself. It’s tiring and boring to think, tiring and boring to say, and definitely tiring and boring to hear. HT did have a great recommendation, though, which is an interview with James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem talking about spending many years too afraid to release work out in the wild:

It was just what I needed to hear. I winced—winced a lot—to hear some of the way that I feel narrated out loud. It inspires me to know that other people have taken a long time to figure out their shit.

When HT and I said goodbye, for what might be the last time before he heads to New York, he tried to have a nice and sincere moment, but I couldn’t stick with it and made jokes. Making jokes sincerely, though. For what that’s worth.

For the rest of the evening, I stayed in, got stoned, and watched through an episode and a half of the documentary series The Story of Film. 

story

The Story of Film has a strong editorial point of view that can sometimes be hard to swallow. Its enthusiasm for the films and directors it profiles (very occasionally there will be an interview with a screenwriter or actress, and while there is plenty of technical description one could easily forget that film crews exist) is transmitted through a deliberate, heightened narration in various shades of purple. It has a refreshingly ecumenical and global perspective—at least until it comes to commercial film. While I agree that the story of Hollywood has been told elsewhere, I think we’re long past the point where commercial cinema poses an existential threat to independent cinema. Not making The Lord of the Rings doesn’t mean that 10 Gerrys automatically get made.

That being said, it’s astonishing how much time I spend reading and watching and listening to that don’t fundamentally stimulate my imagination, and this series does. Its dense, slow, and sometimes dull, but in its best moments it makes my mind alive to the possibilities of artists following their questions and creating their voice.

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Thursday

I spent my morning writing and reading and me-timing. I unplugged my headphones from my phone when I got to work, and when I next tried to plug them in, I realized that the headphone jack was fucked. I listen on my phone so much that it felt like a real loss of something. Everything has a workaround, and I had been thinking about ways to try and leave my ears open when I walk and I’m out in the world (if I have solitary time like that, it’s nearly impossible for me to resist listening to podcasts, and I worry that the chatty flow of interesting information, while amazing, also mitigates some of the imagination-stimulating properties of alone time). It still sucks to not have a choice. Between this and the damage to my car from a couple of weeks ago, I worry that I’m going to hit a period where it seems like Everything Is Breaking And I Have No Plans For Replacing Them.

Maybe this is why balance is overrated. Maybe this is why balance is overrated?

I ran some errands in the afternoon. For my hour with the fourth graders, we played this fairly fun, but chaotic and tiring (for me, that is. The kids seem to be into it.) game, so I was running low on energy. The next hour, however, perked me back up, because I was running a computer skills program. We are working on a project where we are creating a simple game using the kids visual programming language Scratch. I love teaching this program: it puts me in a room with the kids that are actually curious and enthusiastic about something that I share, and I love helping with their problems. I love their problems. Despite all the talk of digital natives, kids don’t know shit about computers, and its fun to teach them basic thing like how to save something or reopen old projects.

I was jonesing for spaghetti for some reason, so I stopped by the grocery store to get some missing ingredients. When I got home, my roommates were out or asleep, so I made my pasta. When it was finished, I offered some to Luke Skywalker, and we ate and watched the newest episode of Mad Men. 

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The first season is so fascinated by Don Draper, such a believer in his talents and his creative vision and insights that we become believers too. We have gotten in on the ground floor for this guy who is going to sell all the sugar water, elect all the presidents, define cool. Then the show never gave him that moment. At this point, most of the show is Don-Draper-knocked-off-his-game, not the cool Don that gave the show its early heat. Last season, I had to accept that the show had moved on, and decide to just take the show as it is. For that reason, the show hasn’t been super great (except for the generally excellent writing and acting), but hasn’t disappointed either. I kind of have a 5th season of LOST feeling about it: even if the last four episodes are fantastic, the last two seasons of the show have been so mediocre that I don’t think the show is ever going to deliver on the promise of its first season.

The light goes out, cycle completes. Dreams have been cinematic for the last few nights.

Friday

I woke up early on Friday morning to get to an all day training. I usually look forward to trainings, because I like breaks from routine. By the end of the day, I usually want to murder someone. I know this, and I still look forward to training days.

I stopped for muffin and coffee at the 7-Eleven, and say hi to the woman that owns it, who always seems to smile and remember me when I come into the store. She looks at me like a mother looks at her son. I imagine that she doesn’t like selling me cigarettes. Until this very moment, I hadn’t questioned that maybe that’s a projection, or that maybe I look at her like a son does to his mother.

I arrive at our location in Sellwood. We get trained on how to use an Epi-Pen. Awkward icebreakers are mercifully fewer than usual. Over time, I have become less game for icebreakers, and less generous with my sincerity. Withholding doesn’t feel great either, but I have a lot of suppressed irritation. Nobody is proud of their work, which encourages isolation, because nobody except your co-workers will understand exactly what you do to make do given what you have to work with.

I spend most of the time during the training writing in my journal. I do a little time travel, and start to write down—in as much detail as I had the discipline for—an interaction I had with an upset boy who’s parents are going through a rough divorce. It was a good exercise, and I try and write down his dialogue, which I very rarely try and capture. It made me think about how dull my memory is for the language of conversation, and how impatient I can get when I just try and get it down and not take the time to turn the words over in my head until they seem like they could plausibly come from the boy’s mouth.

We lunched at a Vietnamese fusion bistro, and I had excellent food and a very good sesame ball.

The second half of the day was even stupider than the first, though shorter. Thank the lord. The maintenance crew did a full vehicle audit while we were doing morning training, and a lot of concerning things were found. It’s good that they were found, but I am very not shocked (look at my face to see how shocked I am) that some stupid, dumb, easy, things were really bad, like the van that was almost completely out of oil. Its a weird, broken place right now and all I want to do is leave.

When I got home, I dozed before Hunter Thompson’s going away party. Before leaving, I played a bizarre game called Frog Fractions which is a very meta indie game that I enjoyed a lot. I probably wouldn’t have played it if it had been described to me ahead of time, but I’m very glad that I did.

It was a very nice and sweet going away. There were many people there, and I had a few nice moments where it felt like I was mingling and having a good time. I realized about an hour in that my batteries were running down fast, and I needed to flee, so I hopped a ride back home and spent the rest of the evening playing games and watching tv and relaxing.

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Forgive me

but I have gotten out of the habit of writing daily. I’m very proud of the groove that I was in at the beginning of the year, but like anything else, skip too many days and the habit changes. Writing wasn’t the only thing that changed: I got out of piano practice while Jesus Christ was traveling, and I totally got away from my desire to find one Instagram-worthy shot each day. I was worried about being cut off from others while not having a computer, but because I use it to work on things for myself, I felt more cut off from myself. I feel more normal now.

Wednesday

After sleeping way early on Monday night, and being up for 21 hours straight on Tuesday, I finally evened out on Wednesday morning and woke up rested and ready to face the day. Nobody was home when I was getting ready to leave. Sometimes I want to be the kind of person that wakes up and blasts Katrina and the Waves the second I get up, but on quiet, still mornings I usually quietly eat and read before leaving the house.

I had to start hustling as soon as I got to work. There was going to be a meeting at noon, and I spent the morning rushing around so that there was good news to report to the others there. I had to drop off some posters at a couple of the middle schools that are in the district I work in.

Skyridge-Middle-School-Medium

I was so struck yesterday by the strange architecture of schools here in the Northwest. Some things, like the perpetual smell of old fried food near the cafeteria or the bizarre colors that no sane adult would choose (a murky forest green that is somehow too dark, a rusty red-brown that looks like old shitstains), were familiar from my time in school. Others, like the new bank lobby approach to visitor security or the fact that the fronts of schools are engineered with autos and busses as first priority, probably have more to do with the schools being built in a post-Fortress America era than anything else. I found myself very nostalgic for the 1970’s open, outdoor campuses that I went to school in. The buildings were falling apart, but I loved the large eaves that formed giant wraparound porches, or that each teacher could prop a door open to let a cool breeze come through. I remember that my local school, Barbara Webster, (built with New Deal money to segregate away immigrant children in “Spanishtown;” to this day it serves mostly ESL and immigrant children) was a curiosity because it was an elementary school with an interior corridor. The schools here, or at least the ones that look like they were built quickly, look like bunkers, and the only thing that makes it not a sad environment to me is that the kids don’t know any different yet.

I came back for the planning meeting for an art show fundraiser coming up  in a month. It was an unusually sane meeting for that working group, and my spirits were lifted by the doyenne of the local art gallery. She’s a woman in her late 60’s that runs the local gallery, and has such a generous and enthusiastic and fun spirit, and so incredibly filled with don’t-give-a-fuck. We were talking about ways to attract teen entrants into the art show, and she made a crack about gift certificates to a local dispensary. It’s the kind of harmless, not cruel joke I might have made if I wasn’t… well, I’m not sure why exactly. She’s fascinating to me, and I wish that I could have met her at 25, because I imagine that she’s always been like this, or perhaps was once a much more buttoned up person.

After the meeting, I had a self-loathing fast food meal, then came back to find kids filling up the building. Nothing too crazy happened all day. When we were headed out to recess on the playground, I had one of those out-of-body, “is this my life?” moments where all I could see was the kids hanging off me, the cheap plastic whistle around my neck, my polo shirt and ill-fitting black pants. The moment passed, and it’s incredible that it doesn’t happen more.

By the end of the day, however, I was BURNT OUT. Toast. Nothing more to give. I came home, made myself dinner, and tried to watch a few episodes of Cowboy Bebop.

I’ve got a mixed reaction to Cowboy Bebop. But first, a digression through music:

One of the things I’ve been thinking about in the last year is learning to trust my instinctual likes and dislikes of things a little more. There are two things in balance with each other: everybody has an initial primary response to something, whether they like it or dislike it. The other side of that is the things that take time to appreciate, because you don’t understand context, or because you don’t understand the style, or because it’s unfamiliar. About every four months, I get irritated with myself for having an iPhone full of music that I’m not excited about that I feel like I have some obligation to try and like. And each time that happens, I try and remind myself to listen to myself, that I will like the extra time to bond with music I really love and won’t feel left out of the music that I’m trying to like.

Now, back to Bebop. Usually I have a much better nose for TV than for music. For whatever reason, I’m willing to try harder with an album that I think is boring than sit through a TV show that doesn’t interest me. And while I’ve liked some episodes of Cowboy Bebop, I think it’s past the point where it’s going to grip me as one of “my shows.” I think a lot of the show hinges on whether you like the character of Spike and find him charming. Now it’s probably unfortunate timing, but I’m not that interested in him. Through no fault of the show, I’ve been bombarded by snarky, dark, smoking anti-heroes on my TV for the last decade. The show’s jazz-saturated aesthetic and animation are still strong, as well as the presence of the totally winning Radical Edward (Edward is the sexist, annoyingly-voiced kawaii character that I usually hate, but something in the genderfluid self-invention of her names and identity, as well as her sunny disdain for the dark clouds that hover over her other shipmates keeps my interest).

After dinner, I headed out to my coffee shop to Nighthawks it and fill out a job application, which I completed and submitted with many knots in my stomach. After this, I go to bed and wake without remembering my dreams.