Tag: weekend

Standard

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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

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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.

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.

Roxy

Matthew Eilar1 Comment

Friday

I have already forgotten most of what happened on Friday in the morning and during the day. Presumably I woke up and went to work and worked and came home. The only thing that might stick is a super depressing staff meeting in which we—the lowest level staff—were being asked to “brainstorm” for ideas to solve problems that would not exist if other parts of the organization were whole and functioning. It unraveled into our boss telling us that “everyone from the top to the bottom is doing the best that they can,” and it made me feel like nothing will start to heal the patient until there is someone with some authority that can hold the people under them more accountable than that.

When I got home after work, L was up and getting ready for work. She had a weird emotional energy around her, and I felt like I had to be careful and tiptoe. We worked it out later, but situations like that make me anxious because it seems like lately I have a talent for saying the wrong thing and igniting dry tinder.

Later in the evening, I met up with Jesus Christ at his practice space in innner southeast. We had made some plans to play music and get a little weird. We ingested at around cover charge time, and spent the first hour and a half or so as it was kicking in playing music. JC has been absolutely essential in excavating my musical instincts from years of cruft and self doubt and insecurity. He has done a lot to build my confidence in my own ability to play and keep up with him, and on this night we were in a place where everything was feeling good and we could play without inhibition, surfing on our own musicality. Funky stuff.

Once it felt like time, we decided to head out:

JC: So where do you want to go? We can go get a drink at [gay bar on Morrison], or we can check out the dancing at Holocene, it’s just down the block.

me: Um, do you ever not know exactly what’s in your heart? Like, I can’t decide which one I’m resisting, and whether that means that I should do it or whether I really shouldn’t do it.

JC: All the time, man. When I’m in that situation, I always choose the most life-affirming option.

me: Awesome… I think that means that we have to go dance.

“Holocene,” by Bon Iver. A very good song named for the Portland club, but that has nothing to do with it, and a terrible music video.

We headed to Holocene, where I had never been. It was ’90’s dance party night, and within about 120 seconds of walking in, I hated it. It was filled with people that reminded me of the kids I never felt comfortable with in high school: young, moneyed, and image-conscious (but in a conforms-within-standard-tolerances kind of way, not an Oscar Wilde, my-life-is-my-art kind of way). It was weirdly bright, and the ADD DJ was changing the song every 90 seconds. I find nostalgia targeted at people my age to be distasteful, tacky, uncool, boring, saturated with death instinct, and reflective of a lack of imagination. Jesus led me to the dance floor, where he is brilliant and comfortable. I was having a little drama in my little fucked up brain:

A) I have been to other dance venues with other DJs and other crowds, and I’ve felt comfortable and have had a good time. Maybe I’m not having a good time because I’m uncomfortable and I should get out of here.

B) You always take some time to get comfortable, and you are still you. Whatever you’re on, it’s probably not powdered magic beanstalk, and you should just fake it until you make it.

Fortunately, Jesus was also not feeling it, so we went outside and bitched about the venue and walked over to the gay bar that was the other option.

While we drank, we had a really open conversation where we talked a lot about crowds, and fitting in, and making new friends, and seeking out the right kind of people. I talked a little bit about socializing, and how there are ways in which I have an outgoing personality that makes it easy for me to connect with others, yet how it can feel like what people respond to is a persona that I put up. I think a lot of that has to do with anxiety over being closeted in high school. Gay journalist Andrew Tobias described this phenomenon as the “best little boy in the world syndrome:”

young, closeted men deflect attention from their sexuality by investing in recognized markers of success: good grades, athletic achievement, elite employment and so on. Overcompensating in competitive arenas affords these men a sense of self-worth that their concealment diminishes.

Adam Chandler, a Washington lawyer, describes his best-little-boy persona:

You see, I’ve been in the closet a long time. I slipped up when I asked for a Barbie for my fifth birthday — I wanted only to practice styling her hair, I obliviously assured my parents — but I wised up fast and made a beeline for the closet’s precarious comforts.

I copied how the boys at school sat in their desks, with their knees apart. I observed how they wore their backpacks, using only one of the shoulder straps. I selected an unimpeachably staid wardrobe. And I studied. Boy, did I study.

I tore through middle and high school, craving perfect scores like a junkie in need of a fix. In college, I wrecked the curve for my straight classmates. Each semester, I petitioned the dean to overload my course schedule and sought the presidencies of student groups I had joined just days earlier. By the time I reached Yale Law School, where once-closeted academic superstars are like the hay in a haystack, coming out wouldn’t even have provoked a yawn. No matter. I built a wall of casebooks, hunkered down and ignored the growing hole in my social development.

Dr. Pachankis and Dr. Hatzenbuehler would not be surprised to learn that more than half the men in my randomly assigned “small group” seminar at Yale were gay. Deriving self-worth from achievement-related domains, like Ivy League admissions, is a common strategy among closeted men seeking to maintain self-esteem while hiding their stigma. The strategy is an effort to compensate for romantic isolation and countless suppressed enthusiasms. And it requires time-consuming study and practice, which conveniently provide an excuse for not dating.

Best of all, it distracts: “What Barbie? Look at my report card!”

I was explaining to Jesus that the worst, most insidious part of the best-little-boy persona is that, while it is a persona, it is also me. A theme is going to emerge this weekend of me, not-me, and what the difference between them are. Jesus had some very nice things to say about me and what he sees in me when I am with other people. We both agreed that we wanted to find some more gay friends to hang out with.

We went back to his studio and played for another hour or so. Then, we started to be more aware of our tiredness and our hunger, so we went to the Roxy on the west side. Diners in the wee hours after a night of shenanigans are my very favorite part of late night trouble, so that felt great and very special. After eating, though, I was done. I drove home and fell asleep immediately.

Saturday

I had made plans with L to see Big Hero Six, but neither of us was up for that and it didn’t happen. I slept in until 2pm, which felt decadent and I haven’t done it in forever [but I feel like I say that a lot so ???]. I got a haircut, and went to an optometrist to look at new frames. We (L came a long) were in our old neighborhood because I’m very loyal to hair stylists, and even though it’s barely been six, seven months since we moved away it feels longer. We had dinner at Fire on the Mountain, and it was delicious.

After dinner, I took her up on the offer to hang out with her boyfriend and his friends. His crew are very tight, and have been friends since high school. When I’ve hung out with them, it’s mostly been on Mississippi. Usually both of those things are neutral to OK. Last night, though, something was off. Mississippi is a hipster Disneyland (and if you knew how much I love Disneyland, you know what an ambivalent statement that is). I vary a lot in how I respond to that ambiance and environment: sometimes I’m super into it, sometimes I’m indifferent, and sometimes I feel completely outside it. When I get in that critical frame of mind, I only see the decor as cliché pandering to a demo that exists to be led. It’s not the bar’s fault that known quantities make money.

The high school friends thing meant that there’s a male pack dynamic that emerges, and I’ve never been able to be myself in that context, was never any good at faking it, and I’m kind of allergic to that energy when I encounter it out in the world. So I spent a lot of time trying to fit myself into this thing when I really should have just left because there wasn’t enough on the table to make it worth it to me.

In hindsight, I should have been content with a nearly-perfect Friday night and spent some time just relaxing on Saturday, but it’s hard for me to turn down an offer to hang out. I also realized that I need to always drive myself, even if that means I can’t get shitfaced—which I never want to do out at a bar anyway—because I need to give myself an out when I need it. I was kind of irritated and irritable and spent more money than I wanted on an experience I didn’t even like.

Sunday

Late start, spent the day watching the super bowl and being a luftmensch.

Once I got back to my house I felt like I could start taking some control of myself and tidied up, started laundry, charliework, etc.

I finished Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother, a sequel to her memoir about her father, Fun Home. I thought it was great, and has a lot of big ideas about relationships with parents, me and not-me, the utility of therapy, and the crazy thoughts that come into play when you’re in therapy and compulsively think and write about it and do your own research. There’s enough in the book to keep me occupied and thinking for a couple of weeks.

All in all, a mixed weekend.

A brief word on January

Some closing thoughts about January, 2015:

The emergent narrative of this month has been a feeling of renewed inner purpose. I’ve decided that now is a time where it’s very important to take action and not let myself get caught up in overthinking, or get caught up in a compulsive need to seek inspiration. I published 23 posts, and had more visitors to my blog than all of 2014—visitors & views are not the point, but I think it nicely illustrates how more comfortable I am right now with attention seeking. In addition to the blog journaling, I wrote and illustrated 37 pages in my creative notebook. I practiced music for roughly 8 hours this month; I’m aiming for 12 next month, though ultimately I’d like to be playing much more than that.

I spent most of the month sick. The alone time has been good, the fatigue has been not good.

As spiritually energized as I feel, I did not finish any work.