Author: Matthew Eilar

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

Interregnum

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Prelude

One of the most compelling arguments for daily journaling is that the pressure of having to decide the scope and scale of how to write your life when any amount of time has passed can be such that it seems easier to just stop. I found myself filled with a restlessness this evening, and felt compelled to try again.

Sister

My sister and my cousin are going to be coming to Portland for a visit. I am happy to have them, and it feels very grown up to have them as houseguests and staying in my house. They’re over 21 now, which is going to make it a little different of a visit than other times she’s been up here.

Computer

My computer died. If I didn’t have a smartphone, I’d be freaking out, but as it is, I don’t feel cut off from other people. The bad part is that I don’t feel cut off from internet bullshit and distraction either, so it’s kind of like having the worst of both worlds: I’m still capable of distracting my time away but it’s a little bit harder to do actually meaningful things. I’m writing this on a roommate’s computer.

Endings of things are opportunities for reflections on things, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the other computers that I’ve owned. It’s been a really long time, maybe four or five years, since my computer has felt so capable that I could use it as a creative outlet. I’ve continued to use them to write music, to write words, but the last two laptops that I’ve used were so slow that any heavy lifting, like recording or audio editing, were out of the question. That’s been true for most of the time that I’ve had computers, and I’m really looking forward to that brief feeling of having a really fast computer. I decided that if I can get myself another job that pays better than what I’m making, and clear all debts, I will allow myself to finance one. Computers have always been important to me, and I’ve been putting some thought into learning more about how to create and maintain software, because the openness of the field attracts me and there’s just so much fucking money in it right now.

I do miss a lot, though. I miss my iTunes library. I miss my saved passwords. I miss typing on a keyboard. And, ugh, I love you apple computers but holy shit you are so expensive.

Radical Acceptance

I’ve been trying to chill out and keep riding the Radical Acceptance wave. Self criticism can be like 80% of what I do with any waking day, so trying my hardest to shut that down leaves me with a lot of time that I’m not quite sure how to use. I’m trying to trust my instincts a little better, to believe that the things that are interesting to me are interesting because I’m interested in them. To eat my dessert first. To believe that I can just pursue the things I want to go after without putting myself through some remedial boot camp first.

This is not easy work for me. But, I don’t know, it’s not the worst way to live at the very least, and at the very most, if I can come to access a little more belief in myself, that can’t be a bad thing.

Tongue Tied?

I went out to Blow Pony last weekend with Luke Skywalker, Jesus Christ, and his best friend. I lost Jesus and his friend as soon as we got in the door and never saw him again the whole night, but ended up having a good time with Luke. I also wanted to facepalm several times when I tensed up and got shy with the good looking, drunk men I essentially pay money to be near. Sometimes I get so crazy and sadsacky with thoughts of isolation and loneliness, that I forget that I can also fuck things up with good old fashioned dorkery and awkwardness. There was something almost refreshing in the universal cluelessness of the mistakes I was making, and fortunately was having such a good time otherwise that I could just laugh about it the next day.

Application

Applications are starting to head out the door in earnest. I’m really excited to maybe join a blogging platform that has an office downtown in Portland. They’re scaling up and it seems like a good fit for me. I think that if I can get an interview, I can get the job. My confidence is much higher than the last time I was looking for a job. In the end, my current job only adds so much onto work history and work experience, but I understand a little better what cover letters are for, and how to speak up for myself. I think I’m shedding some of the false humility of insecurity. Humility is good, but being humble because you are afraid to value yourself ahead of others is dumb.

Dick

I went back to Southeast Grind, and I’ve begun to park on a couch and ostentatiously read Moby-Dick in public like a real asshole. There was a point where I was reading Moby-Dick and listening to some classical music and sometimes glancing around to make sure that others were noticing how hard I was braining and I was so ashamed to be That Guy, but then I was also wondering what other guy I would be, and why do I have to be ashamed when there are so many other guys to be and some of them have to be worse… Eventually I lost track of which voice was self-loathing and which was self-accepting, and which I hoped to win and which I was afraid would.

Sitting in a coffee shop is not really first nature to me. I like spending time in them, but they’ve always been transition spaces for me: places to while away a half an hour before an appointment, or before arriving too early, or waiting for someone. I have a tendency when anxious to not be able to settle into a place. My body is not restless, I might be sitting as still as a stoner. But inside, I have a waterline slowly rising, asking “When can we leave?” The worst is sometimes when it happens during a music concert, and even if I’m really into the music, all my inside seems to want is for the concert to be over so that it can start picking it apart, indexing, pickling, storing, forgetting. When the waterline starts to reach my head, I have to flee.

Reading in the coffee shop is good practice. For what, I don’t know. But I haven’t gotten this far by knowing what I’m doing.

Synthetic

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Saturday

It took me a while to get rolling on Saturday. I went out for coffee with Luke Skywalker on Friday night, and I ended up having a lot to think about. I hadn’t realized the extent to which I’d been difficult to be around for at least a couple of months, and it seemed like time to do some reflection. I went home to have an “early night” but then stayed up until the morning hours reading and writing anyway.

The_Martian_2014

In the morning, I got through a big stretch of the novel The Martian, by Andy Weir. It’s been a while since I’ve plowed through a schlocky genre novel, and it felt relaxing to read something mindless. The way that Weir dramatizes technical and engineering problems, and weaves science vocabulary in with not too much condescension is actually pretty great. The big weakness in the book is how people dumb the writing is. The narrator constantly makes jokes without once being funny, and every single other character speaks in the same stilted, over-expository SciFi dialect. It reminded me of the scene that follows this clip from Party Down:

I had lunch with Ray Charles, who I hadn’t seen in a while. I had a good time talking to her, and we made plans to take care of the near-summer levels of beautiful weather we’ve been having to go sunbathe on the banks of the Columbia River.

I got my oil changed, which I’ve been stressing out about for a while. I didn’t need to be stressed, which made me feel stupid. I cursed the maintenance costs of Volvos, because synthetic oil is expensive.

In the evening, Luke invited me to her boyfriend’s place where he and his friends were doing a hot pot dinner. I didn’t realize until I arrived that it was going to be an elaborate lunar New Year’s celebration. I ended up having a lot of fun. It’s interesting to get a view into other people’s realities, and I enjoyed the break from being in my own head.

Sunday

Going to the river with Ray Charles and being in the sun and soaking up vitamin D and putting away my cell phone and not having any noise or being near any other people felt amazing. I’ve been doing a lot of reading about vipassana-style mindfulness, but as is typical with me, I fall into a trap of thinking that an abundance of reading will make up for practice. I drove back to the city feeling dozy and relaxed and still.

After coming home and eating, I felt an impetus to act, to do something, building. Over the last week, I had been listening to an audiobook of Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance, but found that the introspective substance of the book meant that I was constantly losing my place, wishing I could go back, and not getting the fullness of the material. I decided to head over to Powell’s to pick up a paper copy. The bookstore was deserted and perfect. I still felt like I was floating around from the afternoon, and I wandered through my favorite sections.

After buying the book, I headed back to the eastside to go to a coffee shop to read for a while. I’ve never been a do-work-at-a-coffe-shop guy, but I also didn’t want to be at the house. I decided to go to Southeast Grind for the first time, and was comfortable the second I walked in. Cheap coffee, lots of concentration, eclectic playlists, done.

I started to dig into Radical Acceptance. It had been recommended to me by my friend Kayak years and years ago, but at the time it was way beyond my personal tolerance for magpie, pluralistic spirituality. It felt like it might be the right time for it, though, because I realized that the internal narrative that I had been telling myself was that I was moving down a better path in recent months, and finally feeling like I was working up a head of steam. At the same time, in the past few days I was finally able to get out of my head and see that I had been acting like a real dick to the people around me. That suggested to me that maybe it was time to go another couple of rounds with my old enemy, perfectionism.

One of the most frustrating things about perfectionism is that it can completely hijack the growth process. I see myself in many of the anecdotes in Brach’s book, the patients and meditation students that try and use inner growth as another way to make themselves beyond imperfection.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot. I also think that perfectionism, for me, rises up more strongly when I feel like I’m about to lose something, or am about to go through a rejection experience or something. I’m not quite sure why I was carrying around so much tension and heaviness. It might be work, it might be extended illness in January. Every year I always forget that the weather just sucks too, so maybe it’s just seasonal. IDK.

Collideoscope

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Wednesday

I’ve had so many days recently that were hard because work was hard, that they’re boring to write about and boring to read about and I’ve come to think of them in my head as Schmuck Days. Wednesday was a Schmuck Day.

On Wednesday evening, however, I had a great experience. I was relaxing, and searching around for something to watch. Last Saturday, I had such a great time watching Frida, that it made me aware of how thirsty my spirit is for stories and myths about artists and how they exist in the world. I decided on a whim to watch The Artist is Present, the documentary about the MOMA retrospective exhibition of Marina Abramovic. From her website:

THE MOUNTING OF THE RETROSPECTIVE AND ITS THREE-MONTH EXHIBITION AT MOMA IS THE NARRATIVE SPINE OF MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ THE ARTIST IS PRESENT, AND OVER THE COURSE OF THE FILM, WE RETURN AGAIN AND AGAIN TO THE MUSEUM. THERE, AS THE “SET” IS BUILT FOR THE NEW WORK THAT WILL BE THE CENTERPIECE OF SHOW, MARINA SKETCHES HER AMBITIOUS PLANS: ALL DAY, EVERY DAY, FROM EARLY MARCH UNTIL THE END OF MAY, 2010, SHE WILL SIT AT A TABLE IN THE MUSEUM’S ATRIUM, IN WHAT SHE DESCRIBES AS A “SQUARE OF LIGHT.” MEMBERS OF THE AUDIENCE WILL BE INVITED TO JOIN HER, ONE AT A TIME, AT THE OPPOSITE END OF THE TABLE. THERE WILL BE NO TALKING, NO TOUCHING, NO OVERT COMMUNICATION OF ANY KIND. HER OBJECTIVE IS TO ACHIEVE A LUMINOUS STATE OF BEING AND THEN TRANSMIT IT­­––TO ENGAGE IN WHAT SHE CALLS “AN ENERGY DIALOGUE” WITH THE AUDIENCE.

THE PIECE, APTLY ENTITLED THE ARTIST IS PRESENT, WILL BE THE LONGEST-DURATION SOLO WORK OF MARINA’S CAREER, AND BY FAR THE MOST PHYSICALLY AND EMOTIONALLY DEMANDING SHE HAS EVER ATTEMPTED. WHEN SHE CONCEIVED IT, SHE SAYS, SHE KNEW INSTANTLY THAT IT WAS THE RIGHT PIECE BECAUSE THE MERE THOUGHT OF IT “MADE ME NAUSEOUS.” THE WORK’S SIMPLICITY AND PURITY HAS THE POTENTIAL TO CRYSTALLIZE ALL THAT IS BEST ABOUT HER ART, BUT IT ALSO DEMANDS THAT MARINA RETURN TO HER ROOTS––AND FORGO THE OVERT THEATRICALITY THAT HAS CHARACTERIZED MANY OF HER RECENT PERFORMANCE PIECES. PERHAPS MORE THAN ANY PERFORMANCE SHE HAS DONE BEFORE, THE ARTIST IS PRESENT HAS THE POWER TO FULFILL MARINA’S OWN DICTUM ABOUT LONG-DURATIONAL WORK, IN WHICH, SHE SAYS, “PERFORMANCE BECOMES LIFE ITSELF.”

I had heard about the piece, and the film, when they came out in 2010/2012, but hadn’t gotten around to seeing them. I was so blown away by her spirit, her belief in herself, her joy for life, her complete melding of performance and life. Her work also explores themes like radical vulnerability, trust in others, inner stillness, and cultivating a life presence that intersects with other things that I’ve been exploring, like mindfulness meditation and the work of the western Buddhist writer Alan Watts. I felt myself really appreciative of Marina’s work because of my own practice that I’m trying to cultivate. I’ve become comfortable with the physical actions of sitting and contemplating, of shutting out external stimuli, however it is very difficult for me to shut down the background chatter of insecurity, self-criticism, and perfectionism. One of the many geniuses of her MOMA piece, or at least the facet that connected with me, was that she created physical conditions—sitting still and blank for 12 hours at a time for three months—in which one needed cultivate that inner blankness simply to survive. I found it very inspiring.

I used to make fun of performance art, as our culture does. My stereotype of it was Maureen in Rent, terrible, stupid performances that were cheap, pseudo-profound, annoying. One of the biggest changes that’s happened in my life so far is that when I was a young teenager, I was obsessed with the question “What is art?,” and had such strong (and wrongheaded) opinions about what was and wasn’t art. Hint: if it made me think too hard and made me feel weird, it probably wasn’t art. I remember a seed being planted that took many years to take root: a reprint in an art book I used to look at in high school of Nan Goldin’s Nan one month after being battered. The photo is like a snapshot, the photographer gazing into the camera with old bruises in the face and an eye still red from burst blood vessels. At the time, I remember being fascinated and repulsed by the ugliness of it. I could not understand why someone would display something so ugly, especially of their own body. I owe so much to that art room, the photo books there. What I’ve come to understand is that performance art uses as its canvas human experience and human emotional reactions. It is no more complicated than that. People often do not like having their reactions manipulated, and for that reason alone the form is always going to be controversial.

Back to The Artist is Present. I found a couple of biographical points very interesting. First is that the young Marina that let the public come up and cut her with scalpels in a piece if they chose, and rode in a van for five years begging for gasoline and money for groceries is clearly not the older performer that dresses in haute couture and has a team of security people that facilitate her performances. That difference is not commented upon. I don’t think she has to answer for them, but it did make me think that any of the voices represented in the film that rejected her work as just cheap provocation would not appreciate the evolution and negotiation of her work as she’s aged.

Second, she had a long relationship with a fellow performance artist, Ulay, and it was incredible to me that these two performers that practiced radical, violent vulnerability with each other still managed to break each other’s hearts.

This movie energized me after a Schmuck Day, and I’m going to be thinking about it for a long time.

Thursday

Thursday started off weird. I was going to start work late, so I had a lazy morning. The landlord was over to do some repairs to the downstairs bathroom, but our house looks like real people live in it so that wasn’t bad or weird. I got into a tense conversation with Luke Skywalker that came out of real feelings, but was mostly caused by my sunday night attack of lonelybrain that I’m still trying to beat back.

I was in charge of taking care of four kids all day that were taking part in a performance for a big annual fundraiser at work. The kids were fine, the performance was real rough, and overall it was a long day.

Friday

Today was a work day, where we were closed for after-school programs, but all working in the building. We spent all day sorting through and reorganizing our storage and supplies, which we’ve needed to do for a long time. We got so much done, and our hoarder boss was pretty chill about it, for the most part, and only got micromanagey about keeping garbage at the end of the day when most of the stuff was gone or away.

Quiet evening at home felt like the right call tonight.

Bard

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Friday

Friday was not so bad (that’s the frame of mind that I’m in right now—not so bad). I got paid, so I started to send money out to pay bills. Paying bills is almost a nice feeling right now, because at least it feels like control.
Work was fine. Our CEO came to observe one of my sessions, which was fine—I don’t mind that kind of observation—but it meant that I lost a day to prepare for an event that’s happening later this week.
I got off work and came home to change and shake it off. I asked one of my friends to let me into a Reed practice room because I hadn’t made any evening plans, and I’ve been dying to play on a real piano for months. I had a little downtime, so I had an excellent quick meal at Laughing Planet. I don’t like their cultural whitewashing of burritos, but I appreciate that they serve real food, and I enjoyed it very much.
Sitting in a practice room and playing for myself is one of those through line experiences for me. That was middle school, high school, college. I wasn’t able to stay there as long as I was hoping, or get much “work” done, but it was just nice to play and sing and listen and take pleasure in my own art. It was also a nice reality check, because the action on the piano sucked, and it reminded me that just because some pianos look like real pianos does not always mean they’re better than what I’m practicing on.
After that, I came home and drank a bunch and binged Attack on Titan. For whatever reason, I got very into it and some of the shonen tropes—tragic back stories, commentary on strength and weakness, feelings of powerlessness—hit harder than they deserved to. Superego Brain was objecting to the unchecked sexism and fascism, but for once I didn’t let that distract me from having a primary experience with the work. After that, I slept like the dead.

Saturday/Sunday/Monday/Tuesday

I got caught in a vortex of feeling bad, and now that I’ve come out of the other side of it, I don’t have much of an appetite for revisiting it. Next time.