If i could settle down/then i would settle down.

Posted on 2013/04/19 by mindozo

“Of all the ways of forgetting
not turning the pilot on is not
the worst” –from Eileen Myles, “Choke”

i went to bed in a huff last night, and woke up to the sound of the cat pretending to be in the early stages of starvation. Slightly annoyed, i rolled out of bed and pulled on an aging, over-sized, Royal Trux t-shirt. Soft and full of holes, it is a prize. Way too cool to be wasting away in occasional rotation as an afterthought nightshirt, but it is too wide and fits like how band shirts used to fit before American Apparel made the whole enterprise a little more gender appropriate. i think about the instructions i used to have, probably from Bust magazine, for how to cut down an over-sized t-shirt to make it fit you instead of, presumably, the guy you permanently borrowed it from. Something about cutting off the sleeves and the sides and taking it in to fit your ribcage. Sew up the edges with some kind of obvious stitching that really ‘makes it yours’. Probably. Not in the cards.

Groggy from too much wine and not enough sleep, i plugged my phone into the speaker jack in the kitchen and started fumbling through coffee. i was dreaming about my ex again and there’s a song in my head. After a few tries i remember that the Make-Up is incorrectly listed as just “Make Up” on Spotify, maddening, and scroll through until i find “Center of the Earth.” Play. There we go, “You. Kicked. Me. Into my grave. You kicked me into my grave. You. Kicked. Dirt. All over me. You kicked dirt all over me.” Trademark Svenonious scream, and bam, the dream comes flooding back. The events are frozen. Frustrating. i can’t stay and i want to stay. The long lawns are brown. The sky is low and grey. i’m in a loop of hoping i’ll never get home– that i’ll sit forever hunched over on this Greyhound Bus reading Catcher in the Rye down the backroads of Georgia. Oh, right. My subconscious is…reminding me that i’ve…done this before. “Baby it hurt. Baby it hurt. I was dying. And i was lying. In the dirt.” So the dream is…less about…that memory than it is about where i am now. And how surprisingly familiar it feels. Geography is the easy target, but some other habit is probably to blame. Right, yes, i can read.

i am also reading Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! Very slowly. i am nervous of it ending. i read this paragraph yesterday on the train:

“We smoothed the scrolled things: illegible mechanical diagrams, the map and the veil. The wavy mosquito netting was made of an amazingly old and weird material that couldn’t be straightened; I tied it over my face like a surgeon and it kept crimping at my nose. I sneezed into its tiny squares. Haunted, a frantic voice in me said, haunted, but my hands disagreed with this hysterical lady: everything I touched here confirmed itself as solidly cloth or wood or rope.”

And i read on Artslant about an artist, Iris Haussler, for whom,

“Wax is a recurring material….These formerly soft and delicate fabrics are here captured in wax, held suspended in time and form, but also rendered useless, functionless. The impulse to preserve, and simultaneously to render useless, manifests itself in the creations of her various characters…”

And i think about my dream, and i think about resting my hand on your thigh as we drove away from your apartment. Eucalyptus staining my sense of the possible. i thought it was resting, but i looked down and i was holding you so tightly it might have hurt anyone else. You were real, you had confirmed yourself. Solidly. But i was about to be gone again. The airport in its obnoxious sunny patch loomed. My lips were probably still, as you called them when i was curled, finally, on your bed, “rabbity.” And you know that my hands disagree, but sometimes, it is so hard not to listen to the hysterical lady’s frantic voice.

She smells a little like a train/hauling lilacs through the rain.

Posted on 2013/03/20 by mindozo

We’d just come from Golden Gate Park and its blooming magnolias. From tulipy pink Asian varieties to moony Southern belles, the canopies were clustered with what looked to me like aerial lotus blossoms offering their petals to the grass–an involuntary gesture fully aware of its prettiness. i had gone into the botanical gardens to see the succulents, but magnolias were evidently on special. i was shocked to read on the park map that, "San Francisco's botanical garden is home to the most significant collection for conservation purposes outside China, where the majority of species grow … Paleobotanists consider the magnolia family to be among the earliest flowering plants, with magnolia fossils dating back nearly 100 million years. Ice Age survivors, they bloom for us now." i'd always favored the succulent garden's otherworldly stalks and fleshy textures, sky-high blooms, and strong scent of dry sage. Past the moon viewing garden, through the Redwood Grove, up on top of the sunny hill, they grow all over each other. Smug, wild, alien. i had only ever been back there alone, and felt bashful of my need to find them. i confessed to my companion that i always half-expected Allen Ginsberg to nakedly trip past me on one of the craggy paths we'd nervously avoided. This little patch was San Francisco to me: clean, strange, boats, gold. Rock n Roll and sex. Shows. Poetry. Japan. Altamont. Joan Didion. Family. The fogbank and the eucalyptus were protection spells without which i had become a different person. Shyly i walked the streets and felt, briefly, that Anton LaVey’s ghost had uncorked a few tiny Victorian fairies from a cobalt bottle so that they might sew my shadow back on. i'd never imagined that something as familiar and genteel as the magnolia also had such a huge capacity for staying power.

Real truth about it is, i had been away from San Francisco for a while. From Brooklyn, i’d made a little list of places i wanted to check in on, and had my own Captain Badass for a tour guide. Our next stop was Amoeba. Not looking for anything in particular, i wandered the vinyl, looking for some point on the alphabet to pull me in. At a random break in the aisle, i began thumbing through “S,” and the first album i paused on was Didn’t it Rain by Songs: Ohia. i tucked it under my arm, but later swapped it out for a Dead Moon reissue. i don’t think i have some kind of cosmic relationship with Jason Molina, but i hadn’t thought about his music in a long time, and then suddenly that album was in my hand, and there were all those magnolias, and even the record i swapped him out for is called up by, of all songs, “Farewell Transmission” from Magnolia Electric Company: “Mama here comes midnight/With the dead moon in its jaws.” Is it too much to include that we had lunch at the Magnolia Gastropub and Brewery? Well, we did. That was Friday afternoon; he died on Saturday.

i was hunched over in bed trying to make it through my first day back in New York when i flipped over my phone and was surprised to see that i had a Facebook message. i was further concerned by the fact that it was from an ex with whom i share a memento mori or three. The message was to let me know about Molina’s death. A few seconds online confirmed what i’d known already: he drank himself to death. The only time i ever saw Molina perform, i was with this ex in Tallahassee. They had never met, but he had reviewed several of Molina’s albums, one slightly unfavorably. That review had always stuck out to me because, in my possibly faulty memory, Molina’s publicist contacted him the day the review went to press and confirmed some very private conjectures William had intuited about the shortcomings of the album. i always take note when those of us for whom, let’s just say, the vampire metaphor doesn’t even begin to explain it–when we recognize each other. Dogs sniffing our way back home like natives unwilling to ignore wayward slaves: silently, we communicate that it is serious. Hold on, Magnolia.

I heard him and I knew he was bored.

Posted on 2013/03/05 by mindozo

Waiting for the bus today, on my way to pick my son up from pre-K, i watched a man on line in front of me drop his teeth on the ground. They were wrapped in a sheet of plastic inside a bag, which blew down the street as he leaned on his cane and rather nimbly reached down and put both sets back into the bag. i know i’m narcoleptic, but i was not sleepwalking–i immediately checked in with that possibility because of the dreamlike symbolism of what i had witnessed. Nope, a real live man dumped his mouth out. In all its dentured glory, it became two plastic red and white arches on the sidewalk in front of me. i wanted to pick them up somehow before they got dirty; i wanted to hug him. The kindest thing i could think to do was to pretend that i hadn’t noticed a thing.

i don’t believe in stock explanations of what dream images “mean,” but when i got home i googled “dreams about losing your teeth,” anyway. The short list is something like, “insecurities about a personal loss or a sexual experience; a wish or need to nurture yourself; fear of becoming older; renewal and rebirth.” Okay, but couldn’t those readings also be applied to pretty much every dream i’ve ever had? And, i understand that i’ve already established that i was indeed awake and not dreaming, but for someone who often finds it basically impossible to draw that line, i’m okay with reading daily events symbolically. In fact, even though i was worrying over this old dude, my mind immediately jumped to X and then to my parents. Two or Three subjects that generally induce every reaction in the list above.

This reading was probably brought on by the fact that a few days earlier i’d stopped at the library to see if there were any books on the hold shelf for me. This is generally a rewarding errand, as i am constantly making requests. i found two titles wrapped in my name and a rubber band. i picked them up, swiped them at the self-service checkout privacy island, and then, as i was shoving them into my gigantic bag, took in the incriminating juxtaposition of their titles: Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel was fastened to Lose Your Mother: a Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route by Saidiya Hartman. i allowed myself a dismissive, “Ha. Weird. Whatever.”

For the last few weeks i’ve been stumbling over something my therapist told me a while ago: “If it feels familiar, you’re probably best off running in the other direction.” We were speaking specifically about romantic attachments and how patterns of intimacy that were formed in childhood might not really need to hang on into adulthood if i want to have some sort of emotionally available relationship. At the time this felt like some kind of breakthrough, and i felt relieved. But, to be perfectly honest, i am endlessly revitalized by the fucked-up familiar. How could i ever trust someone who hasn’t had the carpet pulled out from underneath him a million times, even though i know that means i will never have the comfort of carpet? There is a break that is also a sensitivity and a bravery that i suppose i do fetishize. Maybe it simply takes that much to keep me awake at this point, or maybe i’m just dreaming?

No, i was not pushing that time.

Posted on 2013/02/20 by mindozo

There is a great backhanded compliment in Joy Williams’s (February 10, 2013) review of Karen Russell’s new book, Vampires in the Lemon Grove. (Incidentally, the title of Williams’s review is “The New Uncanny.”) This is the sentence: “The awful inconsequentiality of the real enfolds them and the unerringly knowing and mischievous planchette that unequivocally belongs to this writer, their creator, refuses to be employed.” Williams is making sense of what she reads as the duds in the new collection. As opposed to some of Russell’s earlier work, remarkably “…sure of itself in the frolic of its strangeness,” the circumstances in some of these stories fail to summon the ghostly cadre Russell is, at her best moments, capable of channeling. And yet, at a time when countless blockbusters of adolescence artlessly lean on monster metaphors as an excuse for writing about young adult desire, Russell tucks her vampires into an Italian lemon grove, making the revenant new again. Likewise, she re-animates that other (everybody wants to) go-to of difference: feudal Japan, with adolescent girls made silkworms–Rashomon-era specters whose shapes shift more esoteric than metaphoric. Williams writes, “Fiction is by definition unreal, and Russell takes this coldly awesome truth and enjoys fully the rebel freedom it confers. The more uncanny the situation, the more sensibly it is described.”

i picked up another book this week that summons the B/black arts: Ian Svenonius’s Super-Natural Strategies for making a Rock ‘n’ Roll Group. Svenonius, of Nation of Ulysses, the Make-Up, and most recently, Chain in the Gang, here follows psychedelia back into the occult, claiming to have only been able to demystify the sleight of hand required to make a truly epic rock group by conducting seances with deceased rock ‘n’ roll heroes: “They [living rockstars] don’t want us at their party. We were therefore compelled to seek the advice of the dead–rock ‘n’ roll stars no longer contaminated by the stultifying climate of competitive capitalism” (18).

Under the guise of testimonies from the other side, Svenonious employs a series of diverse characters to deliver a fantastic piece of cultural criticism and rock ‘n’ roll history. Part Dick Hebdige (the part that doesn’t strip punk of its radical possibility), part Kenneth Anger, part Guy Debord–this is a satisfying manifesto. Brian Jones, Richard Berry, Mary Wells, Paul McCartney, Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, the original recorder of “Hound Dog” (1952) who pipes in to reassure readers: “In a country alienated from national feeling such as the USA, where individualist, capitalist ideology strongly dissuades identification with the group and instead encourages sociopathic selfishness and greed, subcultural bonding is a radical act. Without rock ‘n’ roll, it is virtually impossible”–deliver a stunning history of the radical possibilities of rock ‘n’ roll. Svenonius’s potent style of roots rock unleashed disenfranchised voices of rock upon the largely white and male subculture of 90s punks, turning countless kids into unwitting Situationists and inhabitors of the makeshift detournement rock ‘n’ roll at its best can’t help becoming. i always described the Make-Up as Marxist Gospel music, but this leaves out how unironically hot they were.

For some people, rock ‘n’ roll is a stage. For others, the hard work they did when they chose permanent membership in a subculture might have left them without a map, but something about those shows left them marked–irreparably. Maybe they started bands, found other queers, decided to become academics, dropped out of school, became psychics, dancers, mechanics, waiters, writers, teachers, or acupuncturists. “Some are mathematicians, some are carpenters’ wives,” right? Maybe all of the above, maybe something else, but, if you know what i’m talking about, these books are for you.

We are the one.

Posted on 2013/02/07 by mindozo

A few weeks ago, i tagged along with a good friend to a meditation class she regularly attends. Seduced by its practitioners’ encouragements to “wake up” through meditation, i thought it might help with my narcolepsy. i understood that the suggestion is to make it a daily practice, and that some sort of collective experience is also recommended. Being in a room with other people who might have questions about how and what to do during meditation is supposed to make the process less daunting. It also suggests the possibility of building that elusive leap of faith called “community.” Having spent most of my life in school, i am no stranger to the taunt of theory vs practice and theory as practice, to the dialectic, to the deconstruction of false binaries, to the codependency of materiality and abstraction. And not to be reductive, but i am also very familiar with the relationship of practice to necessity–as in the times when practice becomes a necessity as well as the times when necessity blocks the possibility of practice.

i enjoyed the meditation, which i guess is not always how beginners respond, but it took me a day or two to realize why it had also been an unheimlich/heimlich (two terms, meaning “unhomely” and “homely” used by Freud to explain the dialectic framework of “uncanny” experiences) incident. My therapist has often warned me that in some scenarios, if something feels familiar, i might be better off heading in the other direction. In fact, learning how to tell the difference between liking something and finding it familiar has been one of the hard lessons of therapy for me. Having bounced around an abandon and then never abandon m.o. for some years now, i have become a supertaster for broken. Even this blog started as a way to pretend that i could refuse loss. i thought that archiving what was missing might keep it alive. Before that, my dissertation was in pursuit of something i called “permanent melancholy.” Giving up or moving on seemed like the ultimate sellout. Whole, safe things reeked of rotten milk and advertising. Busted, with soft scents of burnt wood and booze, i could love it. i collected cinders and tossed kindling outside.

So, realizing that i had enjoyed meditating, i felt a little panicky. What felt right, and why? The feeling was not unlike the usual bliss i experience when i am doing something most people might interpret as unquestionably “bad,” but i was just meditating, and doesn’t that count as textbook healthy? i finally sorted the recipe: i had been in a room largely made up of punks, but no one was angry. i use punks here very loosely, but i had unknowingly stumbled upon the Dharma Punx. i was in a concrete block room that doubled as a yoga studio and the speaker’s bald head was covered in tattoos. He, as well as everyone else in the room, was dressed casually, and the space was packed. i smelled bodies. And the atmosphere certainly tested positive for broken (lovingly familiar), but for something else soft and unfamiliar. Wayward Council, Wild Iris Books and even the Hardback, teaching, potlucks with my students, cramming into someone’s living room to watch a shitty old VHS copy of Surname Viet Given Name Nam, waking up in the shadow of a housefire, gardening in the middle of the night–Gainesville then–flashed up heimlich. That other feeling was something like, experience without the compulsion to make it count or blame. The possibility of having convictions that aren’t necessarily fueled by aggression or judgement. A space for a kind of permanent melancholy that had no guilt about its unwillingness to transform. The shock that mourning might be possible precisely because “adulthood” was not?

We smoked cigarettes and we stared at the moon

Posted on 2013/01/15 by mindozo

Before we went inside, Jonas asked if he could have a hot dog. My four year-old doesn’t eat much, so when he actually asks for food, i generally comply. Hot dogs remind him of his maternal grandmother, who treated him to his first city dog in Zucatti Park a few days before Occupy Wall Street began, and i had that tiny constellation blinking in the back of my mind as we walked through the grand carpeted majesty of the Armory’s entryway. Mom. Guilty pleasures. Actual stabs at the transformation of everyday life. He had a lingering cough and i’d kept him home from school, but i knew this would be my only chance to take him to see “the Swings,” so our little adventure felt like hooky. After a strange season of devastating weather, illegible violence, and a tiny personal decision to just go ahead and be disappointed about some things–which seems to be about as close as i can get to real mourning, we were in the market for a little amusement. And because in this department it truly can deliver, sometimes living in New York really gets to matter.

Ann Hamilton called her installation at the armory “the event of a thread,” taking the phrase from an Encyclopedia Brittanica entry that noticed: “all weaving traces back to ‘the event of a thread’.” An event can be an outcome, something that is happening, something that occurs in a certain place at a particular interval of time, or an occurrence sharply localized at a single point in space and instant of time. The contrast between the single event of a stitch and the massive set of events it took to produce the gigantic white curtain that moves up and down from the weight of the swings and the many concomitant events that are necessary for the action of the swings to lift and sway the curtain function both as a graceful spectacle and a provocative metaphor. Add to this the playful, serene experience of quietly moving back and forth on a single swing in a room full of other adults and children also taking part in Hamilton’s event, and you have a complicated model for (pick one, pick all) language, signification, intimacy, trust.

The wooden seats were unusually supportive–easily allowing enough room for two adults, with a surprisingly long span. The room was quiet, except for voices coming from wrinkly brown bags scattered throughout the room with little speakers packed inside. Voices reading from Plato, Emerson, Darwin, and William James, among others, mumbled out of the sacks and throughout the room. The wires and pulleys linking the swings and the curtain created a strange din that softly wrapped around the space, compacting the soaring movements inside.

From across a bar, i once ran my fingers through the air in a cutting gesture to indicate to the person on the other side that the attachment we seemed to have to each other had to stop. The motion suggested a cut, but it was really a concession. No more like this. No, no more like that. As if to enunciate the impact of our agreement, almost immediately afterward my stool slipped right out from under me, and there i was, flat on the floor. Gesture? Check. Agreement? Check. Tangible change? Check. The untying of a knot.

Sitting with Jonas on our swings, (we tried almost all of them, and the effect was largely the same, although some were faster and more easily pulled by the curtain than others), i found myself wrapped in a gigantic matrix of emotion. As usual, he held his own tiny blanket–“B”–who goes everywhere with us, and it hit me that i might actually be ready for my own transitional object. i liked swinging as much as ever, but i was about to try something new with all of this rigging. I’d recently let someone tuck me in soft and close, and as we safely rocked back and forth, i realized that i really didn’t mind.

Give me something to write on, man.

Posted on 2012/12/11 by mindozo

When my Dad, who was just here helping me move, chose my bookshelves as his zone to unpack, i braced myself. Over the years, he has often expressed to me his inability to understand why i think i need to carry so many books around. As i’d anticipated, some time on the second day of his visit, he called out to me while i was in the kitchen: “You sure do have a lot of books about sex!” i took a deep breath and called back a solid, ‘Yep,’ and walked slowly toward the bedroom, waiting for the rest. He was holding a copy of Carolyn Dinshaw’s Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre and Postmodern. “You must be some kind of expert or something?” Hard swallow. ‘i guess so. Unfortunately there’s, like, a surplus of us.’

i text the conversation highlights to someone i sleep with sometimes. Immediately channeling his inner teenage girl and reading my mind, he shoots back, “Dad!” Needless to say, a teaching moment presented itself and i totally lost it. i was sick. i had laryngitis. i wasn’t in the mood for the sex equals gender equals sexuality equals fucking lecture. i’d meant there was a surplus of academic investigations of desire, but i think i was understood to just be agreeing to a degree of proficiency in the general field, and i’m guessing that’s why Dad responded with an amused, “Ha.”

As a young adult, i was prone to missionary-like zeal–another occasional family trait. With no god to speak of, i sacrificed myself to school. In college, i was basically a straight-A student until i found literary theory. Then everything started taking a lot longer. In a class taught by Amitava Kumar ostensibly about ‘Black Britain’ i had my first experience of cultural studies. Paul Gilroy, Louis Althusser, Donna Haraway, Amiri Baraka, Dick Hebdige, Hanif Kureishi, Fredric Jameson, and Salman Rushdie dropped a boatload of former unspeakables in my lap. i was in over my head. He gave me a B. i was hooked.

The following semester, Kumar taught a class called something like “Writing Desire.” i would have enrolled regardless of the curriculum, but this was ideal. There were now more and more narratives attempting to articulate constellations of desire in ways i simply hadn’t known were possible. He was constantly bitching at us about form, about what was problematic about writing as usual, about not writing enough. “Carry around notebooks, motherfuckers,” he sneered one day in class. “You think you’re going to remember how you wanted to remember what’s happening? WRITE IT DOWN.” i wrote something fantastic for my term paper. i applied to grad school. Kumar told me to start thinking of myself as a writer. i didn’t know it yet, but he’d taught me how i would teach.

Dad, i never could have told you about it at the time. i couldn’t even explain it the other day, which was a mistake on my part. i had a teacher once who taught me how to peel right into the world. i can’t say that i don’t forget all the time how to do it, or that i don’t spend a lot of time on auto-pilot. But in those books, in all of those queer, strange, sexy, difficult books which are as much about what is wrong as they are about getting it right, i do taste the revolution.

If we get bored, we’ll move to California

Posted on 2012/11/20 by mindozo

i wish i could remember what was playing. i know there was a radio of some sort next to the beer cooler and the pile of belts and flags and Velcro. The glove compartment of the blue Honda Civic i shared with my Mom would have had an assortment of tapes — the Smiths, the Black Crowes, the Beatles, the Cure, the Sex Pistols, Ice-T, Yaz — crammed in its belly, but there’s no way i was ready to assert my tastes in that crowd. i was the baby and still in high school; they were all at least 5 years older. This was before the Red House Painters had released anything. Before Bjork’s first solo album, before Radiohead, Mazzy Star, or Low had made it to our part of Florida. Before my freshman year of college. Almost everyone i worked with had either already graduated from UF or never would. Some of them had already been junkies; some would get around to it later. Pavement was just about to happen, and Kurt Cobain was still alive. So was River Phoenix, and his family lived just outside of town. Ditto Harry Crews. Kesl’s Coney Island was still open in its original spot. i was out in the field next to the Thomas Center in late August playing football with the kitchen. Mesmerized by the restaurant and its chummy coven of employees, i had quit the cheerleading squad in favor of my job, and i was not going to have any friends my own age for a long time.

One evening, as i was ducking around in the kitchen, re-stocking clean plates and utensils, i heard a conversation that thoroughly confused me. There was a breezy waiter with a heavy French accent named Jerome who was unpopular with the kitchen. He was asking if they would make one of his tables a shrimp scampi without butter, and one of the cooks said, “You know that dish has flesh in it? We can’t make it vegan.” Yes, said Jerome. They just don’t eat dairy. Jerome walked out of the kitchen and Bill–huge Bill with his shiny bald head and long goatee and face piercings and tattoos, mumbled, “fucking hippies.” Fucking Hippies? Huh? If my new friends weren’t hippies, then what exactly were they?

i was pretty sure they weren’t punks, either. Any punks left were over at the Slice making pizza. Later i would be standing in the restaurant’s lobby, which was always packed in those days before the Outback and everything else on Archer Road, and tiny, brilliant, Kelly–our manager who was at most 5’1 but commanded a gigantic presence in her combat boots, with her pale arms covered in mystical, messy tattoos, her black hair in a short bob with a few slender braids running down to her ass dyed alternately fuschia, turquoise, and chartreuse, her face full of piercings and her huge brown eyes outlined in black kohl, (the only person i’ve ever heard of having received an A+ from John Leavey [and in his Derrida class, no less]), who read Kathy Acker and Jane Gallop for fun and had an open relationship with her husband who ran Schoolkids Records, was playing Mazzy Star’s “So Tonight That I Might See.” A sandy-haired, middle-aged Gator fan grabbed her arm and demanded, “What in the world are we listening to? This is the weirdest goddamn thing i’ve ever heard!”– and something clicked into place. i had found myself right in the middle of the last pre-Hot Topic subculture before the grand and final coup of hipsterdom. A few years later i’d be wearing tan corduroys and Beatle boots and a burnt-orange cardigan every day, but for a second, riding the thin line between Generation X and the Doom Generation, i cut my hair and watched the final vestiges of the strange dissipate into the 90’s.

As for what we were listening to that day, the Pixies are my best guess, but it may have just been Rock 104. It couldn’t have possibly been Kiss 105. i feel certain that Scott Pacer and Guy Fortham were there. Was Allison? Phil Trickey definitely was, but i’m pretty sure Chris Edmondson was not. Bill Donnell. Kevin Curtin for sure and so Curtiss Venn would have been there, too. A few girls drinking beer in lawn chairs. Maybe Jen Coats. Laurie Hall could have been. And Chris Hall, too. David and Amanda would not have been. Trey Connor and Angie Childers? Walter Horton? Tammy Campanero? i remember the kitchen, but some of the floor staff came, too. The trons, as we were called. Waitrons. A gender neutral term for waiters they’d picked up somewhere. Mostly i hold onto that day because it was the first time i caught a glimpse of exotic, gorgeous Kasia, who had just returned from a hiatus in Portugal. She walked up carrying a beer and a cigarette in a single grip, so different in her little dress and Dr. Martens, with a red and turquoise tattoo on the back of her shoulder, jet-black hair and topaz eyes, from any girl i’d ever seen, that she made my heart beat too quickly. It was, most likely, the last time i ever played football, but not because i didn’t have a good time. i was just about to catch a chronic case of seriousness that i never really recovered from. i was led to art films at the Reitz Union (it’s true–it was was possible once!), and Japanese, and Dorothy Allison, and intimacy, and Cultural Studies, and Brit Pop, and actually existing punks, and everything turned again.

Baby can’t you see, there’s more to this than me?

Posted on 2012/11/13 by mindozo

“I’m tired again. I tried again.” — SPM

Collage P 23, 2009 — K8 Hardy

When words, like locusts, drummed the darkening air
And left the cobs to rattle, bitten clean.
Skies once wearing a blue, divine hauteur
Ravel above us, mistily descend,
Thickening with motes, to a marriage with the mire.
–“Ouija” Sylvia Plath

In Gainesville, i had the luxury of coralling all of my “things” in the pockets of deep apartments and old friends. In Greenpoint, with no attic for my antique velvets and pre-war kimonos, i created this blog. Having forfeited the physical space my coats, books, albums, poems on the backs of old essay assignments and lesson plans, photos, afternoons, cats, library stacks, term papers, and dramatic, life-altering intimacies seemed to require, i began the slow shift from hoarding and private thought to representation. i’m not sure any more if this blog is about holding on or letting go, but my overactive melancholia certainly fueled what i thought it might mean to be a ‘connoisseur of abandonment’.

When i decided on ‘No Vacancy’ i’d been thinking about a Morrissey song, (something i’ve spent at least as many hours doing as i have dedicated to parsing an essay by Judith Butler or skinning a poem by Sylvia Plath), and allowing myself to feel comforted by its familiar recipe of brazen condescension, poetic absurdity, and unembarrassed loneliness. He says his heart is full, even though the song tells a story about loss and separation, blending real and fantasized experience. “A whole house will need rebuilding,” he warns us, and his heart seems to be as full of absence as presence. Emptiness has a way of making us feel full, too. Being full of shit is also exhausting.

A whole house will need rebuilding–this is familiar, even comforting, territory. Leaving. Not even really wanting to, but not knowing what else to do, either. Leaving, but also tending, saving, and documenting the mess–in this way i became a connoisseur of abandonment. Like loft apartments inside of old factories–never the ground zero of a new highrise. Re-breaking a bone to mend a fracture that never stopped hurting. Franken-anything. Easier to love under the challenge of revival. Find something intact. Love that, too. Break it off. Paste it into your collage of the pieces you liked.

Dignity is valuable; but, our lives are valuable too.

Posted on 2012/10/24 by mindozo

Mothers, don’t let your daughters grow up watching Gone With the Wind unless you’re prepared to offer some very complicated voice over narratives about–and this is just a start–slavery, dialectics, unrealistic expectations, entitlement, anorexia, staying, S/M, withholding, leaving, prostitution, and the South. As someone who is curious about the formative power of cultural texts, i am interested in the books and films i was drawn to as a young person. If i was ever going to write one of those ‘everything i ever needed to know i learned from’ treatises, Gone With the Wind would be my source. To be sure, i was also given some of these lessons in a much more potent form by my surrounders, but this film seems to have gotten all of the best of the worst just about right. My conversations with Mom about it went something like this:

Me: Does Ashley love Scarlett, too?
Mom: “i don’t know.”
Me: Then why does he kiss her?
Mom: “Because he’s spineless.”

Mom doesn’t mince words, and she’s usually right, and yes, Ashley is a total weenie, but something like, “Because sometimes we’re attracted to people we don’t really like,” would have been helpful. Or even, “Why is Scarlett so attached to Ashley? He’s self-absorbed and he’s never really there for her and his mother/whore complex is out of control. Is it possible that she really loves Rhett, who is actually crazy about her?” Even better, “What do you think about the fact that Mammy is a slave in the first half of the movie, but after the war she is supposedly free?” And, very importantly: “You understand that even though Scarlett has the best dresses she’s not exactly, like, a role model, right?” Because, no–i was not yet versed in the manipulative devices granted to the antihero. Scarlett’s refrain, “I can’t think about that right now. If I do, I’ll go crazy. I’ll think about that tomorrow,” got me through more than one shit day when i was a kid. After all of the other jerks ran off to war, Scarlett was the one who got the fields planted and made sure everyone had something to eat. Scarlett shot the yankee when he tried to steal her mother’s jewels. Scarlett came up with the idea to fashion the iconic green dress with the chartreuse underskirt and the drapery cord belt out of her mother’s velvet curtains so that she could trick Rhett into thinking she wasn’t totally desperate: “I’m going to Atlanta for that three hundred dollars, and I’ve got to go looking like a queen.” Mammy has to make it, of course, but we’re supposed to gloss that detail.

Nonetheless, i hardly grew up under civil war. When i first began writing this blog, someone very close to me read it and responded, rather angrily, that i seemed to think that readers with more ramshackle childhoods than his own might be able to engage the blog better than he could. i wasn’t surprised by his response; i know that i have a habit of romanticizing the things that hurt because…because why? Because it makes me feel like i’m in control? Because it changes the narrative? Because i like to feel bad? No, no one actually enjoys feeling bad, right? Right? Right, but it’s not everyone who actually wants to feel, either. And sometimes, quite often actually, extreme discomfort feels really good (read: familiar) to me; but, surely there has to be another way to go about experiencing this? My body, my narcolepsy usually gets the upper hand in this conflict. Stress levels go up, i start really pushing myself, my body says uh-uh and gives me some kind of internal rufie. When i’m at work and this happens, i will often go and sink my hands into large buckets of ice that are meant to be chilling wine. Slowly, i come to, because i hate being cold.