Tag: drinking

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.

Lasagne

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

I was planning on spending my morning helping my friend A move furniture, but she cancelled on me, which was so much the better because I turned out to have a hangover after Friday night.


I got breakfast with RS at a family diner—because most of my social set is 20somethings with extremely narrow backgrounds and interests, being in a dining room with a mixture of young people, families with kids, all the way up to elderly couples getting weekend breakfast, can seem like a human kaleidoscope of overstimulation. It was nice to catch up with him, I’m behind on bills right now and it makes me feel weird to talk to him when that’s the elephant in the room. 

I honestly cannot remember what I did yesterday afternoon, which is a terrible sign of something.

I’ve been thinking more about starting an Artist’s Way group, and I decided that I wanted to have a real copy of the book, instead of the shitty pirated ebook that I’ve been reading. I went over to the Hawthorne Powell’s to buy it and use up the gift card I got from exchanging books the last time I went. It’s incredible how shame works. As I was poking around Self Help—General looking for my book, I was flashing back to trips to Barnes and Noble when I was a teenager, trying to quickly browse the Gay and Lesbian shelf (shelf!). It was in the section near the history and biography sections, a plausible interest of mine, and I figured I had about 90 seconds at a time to browse. Anyway, I couldn’t find a copy right away and I new they had them in stock, but I ended up having to ask somebody that works there to help me. I felt as nervous asking him as 18 year old me would have been to ask for The Joy of Gay Sex or something. I also picked up a copy of Vanity Fair which turns out to be a much longer novel than I thought. 

After getting back from Powells, I made some plans to have dinner with my friend RC. I was happy to have a few minutes to catch up with L, but her boyfriend was over. I was briefly overcome with such an angry irritation at his presence, so I decided to give them both a wide berth because it wasn’t really their fault and I was being petulant. 

RC’s many virtues is that she has a true lack of judgement and true unconditional acceptance, so I felt like I could share some of the new headspace I’ve been in since Wednesday. I felt comfortable enough to share some of the stuff that’s in my artistic journal, which is starting to take shape and form and growing into a real work of art. We got into a long and emotional conversation about the way that we mediate ourselves in order to conform to expectations when other people have power over our lives. It was a good talk, a real talk. 

After dinner, I was really full and a little bit sleepy. I decided that all I wanted to do was really listen to music. I listened to Sun Structures by Temples. It’s neo-psychedelic rock, kind of sipping the same juice as Tame Impala, with the gauzy veils of reverb of Fleet Foxes. I liked it fine, I love it when bands have that almost neo-classical impulse to make interesting music and not just try and distinguish themselves with production gimmicks. At the same time, it’s such a retro project that it can be hard to figure out what a good or bad song would be in context. 

After that, I listened to The Voyager by Rilo Kiley frontwoman Jenny Lewis. I enjoyed these songs a lot, to the point of not wanting to be too critical or pick them apart. The songs are really personal, and I don’t feel like I have too many experiences in common yet, but I can appreciate their artistry. I’m a huge fan of Fleetwood Mac, and I felt like I heard a lot of them in this.

Once I caught my second wind, I went on a tear, just playing piano with the kind of reckless abandon and joy at hearing my own sounds that used to keep me occupied for hours as a child. At some point, I became so focused on making sure that my practice times were productive and focused that I lost that spirit. I became a lot more focused on making sure I sounded good and wasn’t repeating myself into cliché. I don’t think that’s all wrong—I certainly want to get better and make sure that the time I am putting in is useful time!—but I think I’m coming to understand that the time when I can just sit back and enjoy the sounds I’m making are the embers that keep my fire alive. All of the time I spend trying to stoke myself up without giving those embers oxygen is a waste of time and effort.

I decided to go out and hear JP deejay at a bar at midnight. He’s been letting me into movies free at the theater he works at. It turned out to be kind of a bummer, and I left as soon as I finished my drinks.

As I fell asleep, I watched an excellent Taiwanese gay movie called Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow. It’s kind of a cross between Punch Drunk Love and Far From Heaven, a deliberately stylized and retro, with a little bit of a old Hollywood movie musical/Technicolor aesthetic. It’s a very controlled movie, never breaks into laugh out loud funny or anything, but some good performances, and a lot better than the average shitty gay movie I fall asleep to on a Saturday night. 

 

Penny

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Yesterday was a pretty strange day.

I was up late on Thursday, so I felt like shit when I had to wake up early to get to a training day at our club in Lents. 

Our training days are always terrible and useless, so I took the opportunity to get out my notebook and work on some of the exercises from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. The exercise that I was working on was to think of the events and incidents in my childhood where I felt shame as a result of sharing my creativity. By coincidence, I was just listening to an episode of the podcast Sex, Death, and Money featuring filmmaker Desiree Akhavan. She talked about the humiliating experience of discovering that she had been voted ugliest girl at her school in a poll of her classmates, and using that experience as the material for her first one-woman show in college. She talked about how shaping this raw and depersonalizing experience into a narrative that she was in control of in her art was an empowering experience. I got a little taste of that yesterday, as I discovered that living inside those painful memories of childhood—kids in my second grade class avoiding me after performing on the piano one day, having an uncle take me aside and try and explain to me the difference between a “hobby” and a “career”—was not as painful to me as a child, and the way that my adult sense of outrage and mistreatment and anger retroactively protects and shows compassion to my child self. 

The only thing that happened during the training that is worth capturing is an exchange that I had with A, one of our arts staff. I responded to a question by saying that, “I have a tendency, as a person, to be jaded.” And her response was basically, no shit. She said that she really enjoyed my sense of humor, my sarcasm and irony and cynicism. It kind of threw me for a loop, because that is a part of myself and my personality that I have a very love/hate relationship with right now. I like having a sense of humor. I like having my sense of humor. But I’ve also been working on tempering my reflexive sarcasm, because I’m starting to move towards working on things where I need to have people believe and trust in my sincerity, and that’s hard to ask of people when they think that you’re bullshitting all the time. 

After the training sessions, we walked over to the New Copper Penny to present an award of recognition to property owner and supporter Saki Tzantarmas. I used to live in Lents, and the NCP always looked like a sketchy piece of shit from the outside. It turned out to be exactly that on the inside. Saki has been in the news recently, and it was super weird to be there and a little uncomfortable because I wasn’t quite sure that we were on the right side of how to bring back life to that neighborhood (the truth is that I don’t think Lents will ever come back as long as Foster and Woodstock bring so much traffic through the district). The awards ceremony turned into a surprise new year’s banquet, but the patronizing and weirdly aggressive tone that the leadership team had taken to communicate to us that we wouldn’t be taking a lunch break was so frustrating and offputting, that it took away a lot of the fun that could have been had. 

After work, I crashed at home for a little bit. I was bone tired after that day.

I headed out to bars on Williams/Mississippi with L and her boyfriend and his friends. I’m very picky sometimes, and the whole evening I was irrationally judgey about all of the yuppie motherfuckers and their money that I saw everywhere. I’m just stressed about cashflow. 

I had a good time. Once we went back to one of the friend’s apartments to sober up a little bit, we got caught up in a philosophical argument about existence, and whether there may be something on a level of existence that we could never measure, or observe, or prove. I was arguing this to a roomful of science people, so I had fun.

Once I got back home I fell asleep almost instantly and slept as one who is dead.