Rebirth

Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.
-Victor Hugo

Moment of The Day:

Blanket statement:

I take solace in momentary happiness. In fact, to me, it represents some of the most  beautiful things in life.

Blanket statment's example/my momentary beauty of the day:

I'm serving a man with a thick french accent some sort of coffee drink I don't understand. I wing making some espresso and put in some foam and pour it over drip coffee. I hand it to him and smile. I'm not sure what he asked for, but I think this is right. 

He looks at it and says, "I asked for room for air" and takes the drink and pours some of it out on the floor in front of the espresso bar. Let me repeat this. He puts the cup out in front of him and pours out some coffee on to the floor.

I immediately think of this clip:

And begin laughing.

 I can't help it.

He then tells me he likes to smell the aroma of the coffee. Or something along those lines. His English is broken, Frank Sintra is blaring and I can barely understand him. He then says, "The smell gets me high." This is a sentence I understood completely.


He looks around very cautiously, as if what he is about to tell me is extremely secretive. "In fact," he says, "I don't need the coffee to make me high at all" and he starts laughing hysterically. He then slips me a napkin with his phone number on it, winks and walks away.

None of my coworkers saw this happen and I quietly tucked the napkin away in my apron.

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Coming soon:
The role of the photographer in the picture of a subject. Or: First World Dominance in the Representation of the Somalian Famine. 

The Things We Own.

He must of acquired it second hand, none of it looked new. But all the pieces shared a kind of sympathy, and the fact that they were suffocating under papers and books made them more attractive than less. 

-Nicole Krauss "Great House"

What does the furniture you surround yourself by say about who you are? 

I ask this because recently I have been missing things I left in my old home.  I've tried hard not to become attached to things. I live in a small efficiency apartment and most of my possessions are books and clothes. I don't like feeling attached to things.  However, despite this, I'm missing things I left back at home. 

These things, all family antique furniture  traveled with me through three different houses in college, across the state of Washington twice and were in my room all through middle and high school . They have history, not just my history, but the history of my family and where I came from.  Now, these things are sitting in my mom's basement collecting dust. 

When I moved I thought it would be cathartic and symbolic to leave the old and begin fresh by making new. Now I realize that the past shapes the future in a way that you will never escape. See: Nostalgia. idolization of a past that never existed

The things I own show you who I am now.

You find a slew of new-to-me used furniture. Each piece was either given to me or found on the side of the road and refurnished by me. I do not have ties to the furniture.  I have no history to the pieces, and in a way, it is symbolic of the life I live. Everything in my life is new.

I miss being surrounded by history, my history. My desk was my grandmother's in the 1940's when she was a substitute in an elementary school and my dresser was my great-grandfathers.  Every night before bed,  he wrote a list of tomorrow's activities and left it on the top of the desk. I have a large globe that was  made just after WWII that  sat in my Grand Uncle's living room surrounded by shelves and shelves of books. These things have meaning outside of the life I live now, but they are also connected to who I am and where I came from.

My free-to-me-table, my redone dresser, re-furnished chairs and bookshelves still have some sort of life, or history to live. However, while everything in life still feels new, I suppose it would be comforting to have a reminder of the past, a gentle reminder that who you are now is directly linked to where you came from. 

Tuesday's Two great songs of the day:

Or Perfection: Narrative Flow in Songwriting

After a long day out in the sun looking at strange plants, getting lost in the Home Depot, (hey, it happens), rummaging through thrift stores and going into rolling hills of Texan nature at sunset, I give you:

Tuesday's Two great songs of the day:

Silver Jews, "Random Rules"


Standout Lyrics
there's no guidance when random rules
and
I know that a lot of what I say has been lifted off of men's room walls.
Maybe I've crossed the wrong rivers and walked down all the wrong halls.


The Mountain Goats, "The Recognition Scene"







Regardless if you personally agree with the sound of these songs, they both represent strong, narrative songwriting. They contain beautiful symbolism with simple sentence structure. I've learned it is easy to make a complex sentence or idea sound beautiful, but constructing a simple, short sentence is much more difficult (1), but also, to me personally, much more beautiful. Ideas do not have to be expressed with complication.  Most things we experience, feel and know as humans can be said with rather simplistic tonality.

These two songs are two such examples. They both are simple in their construction, but very beautiful.


Ironic Footnote:
(1) Even in regards to artistic value of beauty, writing about what qualifies and quantifies 'beauty' or 'taste' becomes increasingly difficult in written expression. Just google Kant's Judgment of taste (universality vs. subjectivity) Interested?
 See:
Kant's aesthetic-judgment
To symbolically convolute this idea even farther, you have artistic production becoming something allows art to be mass produced, and thus seen, to many artists/consumers at the turn of the industrial revolution, and the rise of the capitalistic market,  a means of  creation for "less" beauty.  There are many of the same; the product lacks originality, and thus, craftsman ship, and thus, beauty.

See: 

Walter Benjamin The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Think print making- or in Benjamin's case, mass production of furniture.

However, while the criticism of art/music remains difficult to define, the expression of the human condition, the camera obscura of life- is not. We all live, we all die, and the moments spent between those two extremes, we all have universal experiences as humans. This in itself is quite simple.

Return of the Rabble Rouser. Part one.

I’ve been too busy living life the past 6 months to actually write about it. I know, I know. I’m sorry. For those of you who started reading my blog, clinging to vain hopes that it would be ridiculous, full of sass and most importantly, full of rabble rousing, I apologize.  The boring  stops here.

I believe there are two ways to experience life. You can simply exist in it or you can live it. I always try to do the latter. And, I hope you do too.

Rabble Rouse away.

Let’s talk about the time I ran away from Austin on my 24^th birthday with my two friends in a yellow 2001 VW Beetle and we made it rain (dollar bills) on Bourbon Street.

(Sorry Mom. Sorry Dad. Sorry potential future career as a public figure…)

I hate birthdays, I hate expectation and most of all, I hate time. Time, will always be an all controlling factor that will eventually have its way with me. So, I ran away. I ran away from the idea of time, my new found friends, expectation of another year passing and a new city’s familiarity. We drove 10 hours through East Texas highway and swamp and arrived in New Orleans. We set our belongings down at the hostel and pulled a 20 hour day.

 I didn’t know my birthday would coincide with Mardi Gras in New Orleans. I didn’t know this was the Pre-College Mardi Gras; Mardi Gras for those tourist with both change and time to spare, Mardi Gras for a crowd in their mid30’s to late 60’s. A Mardi Gras for party animals that crawled out of America’s woodwork and did a mass Exodus to NOLA.

Fastforward 4 hours later, to public-drinking-sipping cheap beer waiting for a night parade.

My friends and I have an uncanny ability to make friends easily. Along the stretch of hot downtown street, waiting for the parade, we meet a couple from D.C. An unmarried, happy couple. The man is clearly drunk- wasted really, the woman works for the post office and is obviously the stable, rational one in the relationship. They buy us beer, ask us about our lives and in return, we ask about theirs. A simple of exchange of beverages and stories, except it seems like so much more. 

Let me tell you something- telling people you teach always ends well. Telling people you work for a nonprofit ends even better. They offer more beer and begin to tell us about both of their bitter divorces. They tell us about how they refuse to marry, and how they come to NOLA during Mardi Gras every year.  I sip on my bud light in the street. My friends and I converse about life, love and making a living.  The conversation is interrupted by a man who, at first, I mistake for Rick Ross type. Stop. I know you’re sensitive about race, but he had the body type, the face, and the unique haircut.

Rick tells us he is an author. He points to his hot girlfriend named Stacy. He pulls out a wad of Benjamin’s. He tells us how he won all this at the casino down the road, as he points. He tells us how he went to jail.  He tells us how he writes about his experiences on the street and how his girlfriend is a poet. He slaps his girlfriend on the ass and asks us how old we think she is.  The parade is going on the background, and I’m drunk. (Sorry Mom. Sorry Dad. Sorry potential future career as a public figure…) I’m afraid to answer. Turns out it is her birthday. She’s 40, but looks hardly 32. As my friend would say, “Black don’t crack, sorry you white women are screwed.”

There are more floats, more color, more noise.  But, I am fascinated by the unmarried white couple from the east coast, the black couple from New Jersey, the wad of 100 bills and the throwing of shiny beads by people dressed in voodoo costumes. In a way, I feel like a bystander to a crazy mishmash of people, stories, lives and somewhat exploited culture and tradition.

The parade ends, and Rick invites us to go to Bourbon Street with him. So we do. At this point, I realize I am the only white person between 6 people and we are buying drinks at clubs like I’ve never been too.  There are women in bras, women in booty shorts and I feel like I’m in a rap video as soon as there is an ass shaking contest on stage. Rick buys more drinks for us. 

And we dance. We dance. And we dance. I go to the bathroom where a nice black women sitting by the sink offers me soap and a hand towel in exchange for a tip. I’m in the South. Holy Shit, I am in the South.

I go back out to dance.  I look up and out of nowhere I see dollar bills fluttering their way down from the balcony onto the dance floor like oversized, overpriced confetti.

Who is making it rain? Mr. Author-Rick Ross-Baus. He is standing on the balcony pushing the money out of his hand with a swift motion; he watches the wave of green ripple its way down. I stand back and watch the flurry of people bend over to pick up the cash and stuff it into their pockets like animals.

Rabble Rousing.

Blog Plug:

http://victualsense.wordpress.com/

My friend started a food blog. She's a creative writing grad from Rhodes and her writing about food definitely contains a little bit of wit. And, she's Southern, but definitely not the Paula Dean type.

But, most importantly, she also cooks me dinner. Living alone causes me to live like a bachelor.

Take a look!

Catch that phrase! Gramma-ah freaa-kay.

 The following conversation aptly describes my new found unemployment. Luckily, I have friends who speak the same text speak and are currently without a  j-o-b. Now, I have a new found appreciation for text communication and lack-of-grammar. Remind me to thank Texas for that one.

Here is a conversation that ensued between him and I, bringing on my new favorite phrase of the summer,  "finding them sexies"

-
"Yo yo- what you doin tonight?"

"Beasting through my book. I know, I know-  I'm a regular par-tay animal."

"Ok well, we hangin later this week"


"chey-ah. Can we have  have foodstamp potlucks? And then dance it off?"

"Yeah, I'd be down. To eat. And dance." 


"Legit! You, sir, have a deal."

"And, you know, finding them sexies."


"I'd be down for finding myself one of them sexies...haha"

"Deal. Food. Dance. Finding them sexies."

Aside from the horrible grammar and spelling phonetics, I couldn't help but laugh and secretly hope this phrase catches on.

Sidenote: The last time I went dancing at this place they played footage of the KKK while playing soul music. Sober, and stunned, I had my first cigarette in a year, and discussed weaves and the proper jargon for San Antonio, which, apparently,  is Say-town, or San Antone. Weaves, are another story.