Category: Journal

Standard

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Sunday ended up being uncharacteristically fun. I woke up and finally got a chance to catch up with Luke Skywalker. We got breakfast at the Waffle Window on Alberta, which was nice and fine and served a delicious champagne-and-lambic breakfast cocktail to start the day off right.

I spent the later afternoon in the backyard, writing and listening to the new Jose Gonzales album, Vestiges & Claws. I’m not generally a fan of singer songwriter, guy with a guitar music, but I really like his voice and interesting but sturdy guitar work. That video above makes me want to punch him, though. There’s a weird religion/gospel fetishization thing going on in European music right now that is bizarre and sinister to me. I’d love for a better writer than me to connect some of those dots because it’s a trend that’s been happening for a little while now.

Later in the afternoon, Luke and I had discussed going out and getting drinks. I had been wanting to get a little drunk somewhere for a couple of weeks, and it just hadn’t felt right. I’ve become a lot more selective about when and where and with whom I get drunk with, and for various reasons, I hadn’t felt comfortable. Luke then left, and I wasn’t quite sure what her plan was but I was so into the idea of going out that I reached out to another friend to go out with.

That’s how I ended up spending like four hours at an eastside bar called The Standard. I was hanging out with my friend Hunter Thompson, and like every time we hang out, we spent most of the time bitching about work and complaining about online dating. After a couple hours, Luke and her boyfriend joined us, and we all went out to another bar for some food and shuffleboard. By that point, I was well drunk, but having a good time.

As soon as I got home, the next-day blues started to hit me. I’m very susceptible to bluesy feelings of having no more good brain chemicals left. All sorts of substances, and sometimes even just a really fun day can make me feel it. Even though I was starting to get hungover, I was able to keep presence of mind enough to remember not to replay tapes in my head about what I had done and pick everything apart until there were no good memories left, and I remember waking up around 3am and falling asleep to a lovingkindness meditation. (I started with myself, which is backwards, and (hilariously to me the next day) my “enemy” was the writer Eve Ensler, who I had heard interviewed on a podcast and who had annoyed the shit out of me.) When I woke up this morning, I had mostly shaken it all off, and was able to just get ready to meet the day. I think another time, certainly other times when I’ve been more depressed, the sheer amount of vice-y fun I had would have been enough to make me feel ashamed of myself and guilty and like I didn’t deserve the fun the next morning.

Nono

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Friday

I spent the morning working with J Lo to clean out the kitchen at our facility. We got approval to get the kitchen remodeled, and it’s been a nightmare for as long as I’ve worked there, and I didn’t want to feel guilty if there was some horrendous shit in the cabinets and there was some kind of inspection. Later in the morning, we went to Wal-Mart to pick up a furniture donation, and it was nice to get some car time to talk casually and informally.

I shared that I had had a moment this week where I was helping a kid with social skills while at the same time being so aware of how I should take my own advice and connect the dots in my own life. There is a boy named Josiah, around 9 or 10, that I work with. He has a brother that’s older than him by only around a year. These two boys bring a cloud of wild and positive energy wherever they go, bouncing off the walls but with such good spirits that you want to let them enjoy themselves. Josiah’s parents work hard and work a lot. A lot of families in Camas are really into sports and dads take a lot of time to coach their kids and work on early sports skills. I don’t think Josiah or his brother have a lot of that time, and so they rarely join in the more formal sports games on the playground, the boys that self-organize into football or soccer or basketball games.

I was working in the gym on Wednesday, and I saw Josiah hanging around the periphery of the basketball game that was in progress. Josiah wanted to join in, but was really unsure of himself. He kept calling out to some of the kids he knew that were playing, and asking for permission to join and play. These kids would look towards him, but they were mostly focused on the game and just kind of shrugged. I could see that Jacob was reading that look as rejection, and he came over to me very upset and saying that the kids playing were excluding him. I helped him see that these kids were not excluding him, that from their perspective, anybody could join and and come and play just by playing, and no one person in the game could give the permission he was looking for. I told him that the only way to join in was to go after the ball every time, to play when he got possession.

It made me think of the places in my own life where I feel on the periphery, waiting for that invitation to join in, when really the only action to take is to act. I’ve also been thinking of the kids that were already playing. None of them was particularly friendly to Josiah, and it would not have hurt them to find some way to bring him into the game. At the same time, I can’t bring myself to blame any of the kids for not knowing to take ownership of the whole game like that yet. I don’t think I have that kind of compassion yet for the people who are in the same position in relation to myself in my own life, in the things that I want to become a part of.

The rest of the day came and went. I texted around looking for evening plans, and decided to join Jesus Christ for dinner and hanging out with some of his friends. The plan was to go dancing, but by the time they were done pregaming, it was near midnight and just too late for me to start something like that, so I called it an early night and went to sleep.

Saturday

I spent the next day lazing. After waking up, I fucked around for a little bit, then went outside to catch some of the beautiful sun and start working on my lovely summer bronze. In the evening, I headed out with Jesus Christ to a Third Angle concert at the art museum of weird and difficult experimental classical music, and I was grateful to have him along as a a friend that’s also into shit like that. After a nightcap, I dropped him off and once again just headed in to get some sleep.

Nightmares

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Yesterday morning, I woke up and caught Luke Skywalker at the end of her workday. We caught up on the latest episode of Looking, which has been pretty good this season, although its pretty incredible to have show that’s been going for a season and a half and I still don’t know how to describe it in a sentence, or whether I think its any good.

I sent in the next step of my application to website-host-not-to-be-named. They asked for a weird “video interview,” and I jumped through their hoops, although I might have fucked it up by not wearing interview clothes. I really want to hear back from them, but I’ve done all I can for now.

One of my coworkers, Jennifer Lopez, just got a promotion to underboss at my site, and I’ve been doing my best to help my homegirl out. This week, this meant catching up on some useless busywork that is part of her job to collect and manage. We had one of those staff meetings to talk about doing the paperwork where no one can even engage with the fact that it’s all dumb and useless and worthless work, because that would just bring everybody down.

Work was fine. I’ve been a little sterner with some of the kids than I usually am, but as people around me have been promoted, I’m doing a little more assistant principal-y work. My moment of bliss for the day was seeing a 7-year old boy, Michael, come into the club with Groucho Marx glasses, and looking so cute because they are so large on his face.

After work, I grabbed a burger (I’ve been trying to stop paying for prepared food, but I was going from work to work and it felt like a treat yo’ self moment) and headed over to the Lloyd center, where I had signed up to be a participant in a consumer study on tobacco usage. It turned out to be a marketing through exposure thing for Swedish snus, and was basically an hour with the crowd of the worst people in the world. I try not to categorize people, but at some point, if it walks like a scumbag, talks about women like a scumbag, and smells like a scumbag, they’re probably scumbags. It was stupid and pointless, but at the end of the day it was only an hour and I walked out with some cash for my trouble.

When I got home, I felt restless and wasn’t sure quite what to do with myself. This has been happening a lot recently. I played some piano, and came up with a complete song skeleton. It’s been so long since I’ve come up with something so structurally complete, I feel like it would be a shame to let it go without trying to put some words onto it, but holy hell does even trying to create that way push all of my vulnerability buttons. Even to myself. Even in a song that I can promise myself I won’t show to anybody else. There’s like nowhere to go from that point, nowhere useful, so I’m going to work on the song this weekend and see what I can do with those feelings. As I said, a nutritionally balanced song appearing from the aether like that is too good an opportunity to throw away without even trying.

After that, I tried to watch a little of The Master, which I’ve been watching slowly in 20 minute chunks, but I couldn’t keep my attention on the movie (I’ve been obsessed with a Zynga game called Sevens) and in the end a new PT Anderson movie is too good to waste on half-attention, so I called it a night and went to bed…

…and then was up for another three hours watching Bar Rescue and Kitchen Nightmares. My tastes in reality TV can be strange even to myself, but I love these business rescue shows a lot because, like Hoarders or Intervention, the setting may be a bar or restaurant (or house or addiction clinic), but what the real subject matter is is human insecurity, brokenness, and fear. Paraphrasing Tolstoy, every well run kitchen is similar, but every dysfunctional kitchen is dysfunctional in its own particular way. Add in the fact that many restaurants are family businesses, and the potential for drama is potent and raw. All that being said, if I was going to be watching garbage TV, I’d rather watch new garbage TV and I need to give myself permission to be a little shittier and accept that some nights I’m not going to be up for Matt’s Auto-didactic Finishing School for Promising Boys and just blow off some steam.

Interregnum

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

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.